Dreams of A Totalitarian Utopia

dreams of a totalitarian utopia
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preface iii
Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia

Literary Modernism and Politics
leon surette
McGill-Queen’s University Press

Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca
iv preface
© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011

isbn 978-0-7735-3811-5
Legal deposit third quarter 2011

Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100%

ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled),
processed chlorine free.
This book has been published with the help of a grant

from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and
Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publica-
tions Programme, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the

support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our
publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial
support of the Government of Canada through the
Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Quotations from The Works of Wyndham Lewis © by

kind permission of the Wyndham-Lewis Memorial Trust
(a registered charity).
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Surette, Leon, 1938–

Dreams of a totalitarian utopia : literary modernism and
politics / Leon Surette.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-7735-3811-5
1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965 – Political

and social views. 2. Pound, Ezra, 1885–1972 – Political
and social views. 3. Lewis, Wyndham, 1882–1957 – Politi-
cal and social views. 4. Politics and literature – United
States – History – 20th century. 5. Politics and literature –
England – History – 20th century. I. Title.
ps310.p6s87 2011 821'.91209358 c2011-901883-7
This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Baskerville

Acknowledgments v
For my children
Alison
&
Philip
preface vii
Contents
Preface xi
Introduction 3
i Dreams and Nightmares 19
ii A Twentieth-Century Renaissance 55
iii The War as a Symptom of Cultural Decay 83
iv The Response to Fascism 139
v “Things Fall Apart” 181
vi Looking Back 235
Conclusion 273
Appendix: An American Fascist 285
Notes 301
References 339
Index 353
preface ix
Preface
New Historicism tells us that we can only construct the past out of
our own predilections, prejudices, and desires, that there is no pos-
sibility of an objective narrative about the past. The principle of
reflexivity, which grounds this belief, cannot be denied. Certainly
our knowledge is always partial, and always inflected by our cogni-
tive make up. Fortunately, such inescapable relativity does not pre-
clude scholars from marshalling evidence, engaging in analysis,
and asserting the superiority of their version of the past over that
of others. The impossibility of absolute truth and accuracy does not
entail the impossibility of ranking versions of the past on the
grounds of relative truth and accuracy.
Literary scholars – insofar as they behave as historians, as narra-
tors of the past – are in an even more complex entanglement than
standard historians, for it is their task to reconstruct the engage-
ment of literary figures with the world contemporary with them
so as to expose or articulate their predilections, prejudices, and
desires. The evidence on which such a reconstruction must be
grounded is found in the literary figures’ accomplished works, any
abandoned or abortive creative efforts that may be accessible, and
casual remarks they have made on life and the times. All of this
should be considered in the context of contemporaneous public
events as well as the personal lives of the artists under study. In
short, the literary historian’s task is not so much to reconstruct the
past, as to reconstruct the version of the past concocted by those liv-
ing it.
Even New Historicists concede that there are some raw facts
about the past that are beyond dispute. The Italian invasion of
x Preface
Ethiopia, the German Anschluss with Austria, Germany’s invasion of

Poland, the Fall of France, the Blitz, the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the Holocaust,
Germany’s defeat, and the like are generally conceded to have
taken place much as described in standard histories. What is not
granted is the significance these events have in a grand narrative
about world history.
Niall Ferguson’s recent bbc series and accompanying book, The
War of the World, attempts to reassign some of the blame for World
War II – which he dates from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in
1931 up to the Korean war of 1950–53. Provocatively, he maintains
that the “war that broke out then [in 1939] between Germany,
France and Britain was nearly as much the fault of the Western
powers, and indeed of Poland, as of Hitler” (313). But, in the
event, this apparently outrageous judgment comes down to little
more than the standard view that appeasement encouraged Hitler.
More germane to my topic, Ferguson dismisses the involvement of
artists and writers as insignificant players alongside more funda-
mental social and cultural forces: “Nearly all the dictatorships of
the inter-war period were at root conservative, if not downright
reactionary. The social foundations of their power were what
remained of the pre-industrial ancien régime : the monarchy, the
aristocracy, the officer corps and the Church, supported to varying
degrees by industrialists fearful of socialism and by frivolous intel-
lectuals who were bored of democracy’s messy compromises”
(231). In a note he lists Yeats, Eliot, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Ignazio
Silone, and Martin Heidegger as examples of such “frivolous intel-
lectuals.” Surprisingly, Lewis and Pound escape his scorn. But there
was nothing frivolous about the engagement of Pound, Eliot, and
Lewis in the political debates of their era. It is true, however, that
their efforts were almost entirely inconsequential – except for
their impact on their own lives and careers.
It is precisely such interpretive analysis that is put under exami-
nation in the proposed study. The literary history of modernism
has often been motivated by the desire to expose a grand narrative
shared by modernist writers and at variance with that to which the
literary historian in question subscribes. Wyndham Lewis, Ezra
Pound, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence have fre-
quently been exposed as anti-democratic, Right-wing ideologues.
Although these five are scarcely of one mind, they were, indeed, all
Preface xi
suspicious of liberal democratic capitalism, and hence interested in

alternative ideologies. And it is undeniable that they tended to lean
more toward fascism than communism, the two leading alterna-
tives to liberal democratic capitalism in the mid-twentieth century.
Since Hulme died in the First War and Lawrence died early in
1930, those two did not face the choices that the other three did.
Pound, Eliot, and Lewis all lived through the Second World War,
and survived into the Cold War.
Critical commentary on these literary figures has inevitably tend-
ed to reflect the time of its composition. During the early years of
the Cold War, most scholars were preoccupied with the monstrosi-
ty of the Nazi regime, and were keen to expose any fascist taint in
canonized authors (Chace, Harrison, Heyman). As the confronta-
tion between communism and capitalism took the hotter form of
the Vietnam war, literary scholars participated in the radicalization
spawned by that unfortunate military adventure. The scholars of
this period condemned the modernist aesthetic for its elitism and
the modernists themselves for a correlative ethnocentric imperial-
ism (Dasenbrock, McDiarmud). In the post Vietnam era, the ubiq-
uitous influence of continental neo-Marxist thought led literary
historians to pillory the modernists for “logocentrism,” that is, for
holding any positive views whatsoever (Morrison, North). Others
focused on the monstrosity of the Nazi “final solution,” and pillo-
ried particular modernists and all of their works as anti-Semitic and
therefore partially responsible for that crime against humanity
(Casillo, Jameson, Julius). More recently, others have explored par-
ticular aspects of the modernists’ cultural attitudes (Chinitz, Coyle,
North, Rainey). There have also been accounts that attempt to con-
textualize the political postures of modernist writers (Perl, Red-
man, Trainer). It is in the spirit of these last that the current study
would place itself. Unlike those studies, I will pay particular atten-
tion to the shifts and changes in my subjects’ views as they respond
to new intellectual experiences and the political, economic, and
martial events that shattered the confident post-Christian Euro-
pean civilization in which they grew up.
Of course, there are other scholars who avoid the issue of politi-
cal ideology altogether. Pre-eminent among these is Hugh Kenner,
whose various studies of Pound, Eliot, and Lewis scrupulously avoid
any mention of inappropriate political or racial opinions. There
are many current scholars who follow Kenner’s New Critical
xii Preface
approach to Eliot in whose work his engagement in political dis-

course is almost entirely obscured. (Longenbach, Bush 1983, and
1991, Nichols). And many of the younger scholars, who profess to
correct the New Critical bias of their elders by contextualizing the
work of the modernists, still avoid discussion of their disreputable
interest in Right-wing political ideologies (Childs, Svarny, Tratner).
Although not principally concerned to explore the political
identities of his four authors (Yeats, Frost, Pound, and Eliot) in
Modernist Quartet, the view Frank Lentricchia articulates of their
political posture in his conclusion is one that I can endorse for
Lewis as well as for Pound and Eliot, and that can serve as a kind of
epigraph for the following study:
The major political assumption of the modernists is that people

in advanced Western societies desire, or would desire were they
sufficiently intelligent about their circumstances, the originality
and freedom of an authentic selfhood; that people should want
what they, the modernists, want; that the serious artist is, or
should be, the exemplary individual. Wanting to make the
world possible for themselves - and why shouldn’t they? – Mod-
ernist writers believe that everyone would be happier if only
they could become artists. The world would then be a decent
place. Of course, they see that all the evidence points in the
other direction. Virtually nobody wants what they wanted. In
fact, given the flow of things, the possibility of (noncommer-
cial) art and freedom, as they envision it, will simply be rubbed
out of human possibility. That is what they tend to believe.
(290)
In the following pages I examine the political engagement and

economic views of two American poets (Eliot and Pound), and a
British painter and novelist (Wyndham Lewis), all of whom regard-
ed democratic capitalism as 1) undesirable on cultural grounds, 2)
(after the Great War of 1914–18) as disastrously prone to military
conflict, and 3) (after the economic Crash of 1929) as dysfunc-
tional. In an appendix, I also consider the career of an American
former diplomat (Lawrence Dennis) who agreed with the last two
criticisms, but was little concerned with cultural issues.
All of these individuals either flirted with, or succumbed to, the
undemocratic and/or anti-capitalistic ideologies on offer in their
Preface xiii
day – whether on the Left or on the Right. On the Left they had
the fairly well articulated ideology of socialism, which, prior to the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was not sharply bifurcated into advo-
cates of violent revolution and advocates of incremental parlia-
mentary reform. In other words, to be a communist prior to 1917
did not entail either loyalty to a foreign regime, or commitment to
revolution. Indeed, the Marxist variety of socialism had not yet
completely purged the Proudhonian varieties, and the indigenous
British Fabian variety has remained politically viable (barely) to
this day. In short, to declare oneself a communist or socialist in
1912 or 1913 did not entail any disloyalty to one’s native land,
though it certainly declared one’s hostility to capitalist democracy.
Communism had been a spectre of impending revolution for
nearly half a century before any of the men under discussion here
were born. The Communist Manifesto was published during the
abortive rebellions of 1848, and Proudhon’s declaration that
“property is theft” was published eight years earlier in What Is Prop-
erty? Socialism had widespread support amongst intellectuals in
Europe, and was seen by many in the early years of the twentieth
century as the inevitable face of European governance in a not dis-
tant future. However, socialism was as demonized in the United
States of America in the early twentieth century as it is in the early
twenty-first, rendering the Americans, Pound and Eliot, essentially
immune to any flirtation with socialism, not to speak of commu-
nism. For example, in 1931 Pound boasted: “I was perfectly right
25 years ago in not bothering about socialism. It was not the affair
of my time. The job of the last 25 years was for the writer or artist
to get what there was to be got (artistically) out of the world extant”
(“Fungus, Twilight or Dry Rot,” EPPP 5: 314). As we will see, Law-
rence Dennis is an exception to the American immunity to Social-
ism, but he is rather a special case, and not an artist.
The Right-wing movements in Europe prior to World War I were
monarchist and aristocratic – in short, they represented the status
quo. While the Peace of Versailles left the British Monarchy
untouched, it closed the book on the Russian monarchy, the Hab-
sburg Empire and the German monarchy. Woodrow Wilson intend-
ed the Peace to establish liberal, capitalist democracy throughout
Europe. (Of course, it left the victors – Republican and Imperial
France, and Monarchist and Imperial England – intact; indeed
they gained new territories carved out of the defeated Ottoman
xiv Preface
Empire.) Some post-war Right-wing movements – notably the

Action Française – clung to the old aristocracies, and the old reli-
gion. But the most vigorous did not. Mussolini created a new Right,
unattached to the old religion and the old aristocracy – though
threatening neither. He called it “Fascism,” and attached it to one
of the more recent strains of socialism emanating from France –
the Syndicalism of George Sorel. In place of government owner-
ship of the means of production (the socialist and communist pre-
scription) Sorel had recommended corporativist governance,
called “syndicalism.” Syndicalism acknowledged the realities of fac-
tory production and the class solidarity of the proletariat, which
grounded socialist and communist thought, and called for “syn-
dics” or workers’ unions to be part of the structure of governance.
Mussolini’s Fascist party claimed to be Sorelian in its social and eco-
nomic policy. The party that Adolf Hitler took over in 1921 called
itself the “National Socialist Democratic Worker’s Party,” and he
self-consciously imitated Mussolini’s Fascism. (Its shortened form,
“Nazi,” occludes that putative affinity of the party to socialism.)
Prior to the economic crisis triggered by the crash of the New
York stock market in October 1929, there existed a widespread
consensus in Europe – embracing both the Right and the Left that
democratic capitalism had had its day. The Crash and ensuing
Great Depression of 1929–39 confirmed that belief. The belliger-
ence of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, and the oppression of its own
people by the Soviet Union, together with the great transformation
of capitalism undertaken in the American New Deal, and in
Europe following World War II, rescued democratic capitalism.
I completed the first draft of this study before the most recent
financial collapse that has given rise once again to assertions that
capitalism is broken. Many observers have pointed to the unravel-
ling of the structural remedies enacted in the wake of the Great
Depression as permitting predatory entrepreneurial activity to
flourish once again, with predictable results. The economic col-
lapse of the last century led to widespread calls from intellectuals
and some politicians for political as well as economic reform, but
the economic crisis of 2008–09 has not thus far led to calls for
political reform. Instead, it is assumed that improved regulation of
financial markets by government agencies is all that is required.
There is no widespread dissatisfaction with, or distrust of, the insti-
tutions of governance as there was in the 1930s. There are, no
Preface xv
doubt, many reasons for the different response today – not least
among them is the existence of a system of “safety nets” which ame-
liorate the impact of unemployment in the short term. There was
very little other than bread lines and work camps on offer in the
thirties. Equally important, I believe, is broad familiarity with the
failure of both the Right-wing and Left-wing regimes that arose in
Italy, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the wake of the
1914–18 war.
Instead of radical reform of political institutions, opinion leaders
in the democracies today look to regulation and international
cooperation as the best road to restored prosperity. Pundits point
to the success of regulation in the 1940s and after, and to the dis-
astrous consequences of international belligerence in the same
period. So far, at least, no country, and no party within a country,
is advocating military adventure as the best solution to the eco-
nomic crisis. Instead military adventurism is deplored as more like-
ly to exacerbate the crisis than to ameliorate it. Nonetheless, the
world is once again experiencing military belligerence amid the
risk of world-wide economic collapse. I cannot claim that the fol-
lowing discussion provides any insight into our present difficulties,
but perhaps our present difficulties might lead my readers to cut
my subjects some slack.
Introduction 1
dreams of a totalitarian utopia

Introduction
I think there will be a certain literary activity in London after the war. I
think that my friends Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis are the ablest lit-
erary men in London, and I hope we can do something.
T. S. Eliot, 17 November 1918. Letters, 251
One constant we will find in the cultural and political commentary

of Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot is their hostility to
the liberal democratic capitalist countries in which they were born
and in which they pursued their careers. That hostility was based
on two factors: first, their distrust of the mass man created by the
mass circulation press, photography, the phonograph, the cinema,
and ultimately the radio; second, their belief that the immense
wealth created by industrial societies was poorly and inequitably
allocated: too little went to the populace at large and to artists, and
too much to the captains of industry and the military. I will consid-
er their distrust of the mass first.
They perceived that a culture suitable for mass consumption
would have no place for men of genius like themselves, nurtured
on the great cultural achievements of the past, and devoted to the
task of adding to them. Their distrust of the common man and
woman entailed misgivings about the pieties of “government by the
people.”All three believed that governments elected by universal
suffrage would inevitably be a charade, disguising governance by a
coterie of powerful individuals and interests. In short, they
believed that popular democracies, such as Britain, France, and the
United States of America, were in fact oligarchies. Since none of
them had any particular distaste for government by the few, one
might have expected them to be well disposed to such a state of
governance by a coterie of powerful individuals. However, they all
objected to the oligarchs governing the “democracies” because
4 Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia
they were not men of education, culture, and talent like themselves
– nor even men of charm and good intentions, as were many of the
politicians whose strings the oligarchs pulled. In short, they
believed that the democracies were ruled by the wrong “few.” They
tended to contrast the Middle Ages or the Renaissance – periods
when they imagined that men of culture ruled Europe through the
mechanisms of the Church and the Crown – with their own time
when the ruling elites were industrialists, merchants, and bankers
with no pretence to, and no interest in, culture.
No doubt their picture of pre-industrial Europe was heavily
coloured by wishful thinking and imperfect knowledge of the actu-
al political and social structures prevailing then. Although all three
expressed nostalgia for pre-industrial Europe, only Eliot invoked it
as a model that might serve as a template for reform of contempo-
rary political and social structures. Indeed, all three devoted much
more energy to commenting on the unsatisfactory state of current
political and social organization than on the articulation of an
alternative. Their failure to articulate an alternative social, cultur-
al, and political structure renders the title of this study somewhat
moot. I have stuck with it on the grounds that they all believed
themselves to be on the threshold of a new age, and “utopia” is the
best term available for hopeful reformers. Nonetheless, all three
attached themselves to one or another of the proposed or actual
contemporary alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy.
The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the social and polit-
ical views of Lewis, Eliot, and Pound were not primarily motivated
by a hope to establish any particular social or political model – at
least not initially – but rather by distaste for the social and cultural
status quo in which they found themselves. They believed that his-
torical forces were combining to bring about a new political and
cultural dispensation, and that it was their destiny to play a role in
the formulation of that new dispensation. Michael North, in The
Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, distorts and then mocks
Pound and Eliot for holding such a romantic view of the role of the
artist – without acknowledging its Romantic provenance: “Histori-
cal change in Pound’s thinking, as in Eliot’s, is, it now appears,
both conscious and unconscious, willed and fated. His image of the
artist is of an isolated individual who by sheer will power ushers in
a new age of collective greatness against the opposition of the col-
Introduction 5
lectivity of the present. It is the isolated individual who really rep-

resents the race, who enacts its destiny” (158).
What I see as a distortion is the implication that Pound and Eliot
believed races to have destinies to be enacted. This is guilt by asso-
ciation. No doubt Hitler held such a belief, but there are no
grounds for thinking that Pound and Eliot did – nor for thinking
that Lewis did. From North’s tacit semi-Marxist or Hegelian pos-
ture, historical change can only be the result of impersonal forces
which impel individual human beings to behave in ways that will
fulfill the purposes of those forces. Such a belief is the true nature
of historicism – not nostalgia for the past as North argues (see
chapter 2, note 10).
However, North and I agree that Eliot and Pound, at least, saw
themselves as ushering in a new age. They saw themselves as heralds
of that anticipated new dispensation rather than the authors of it.
Hence, their role was to identify it and the champions who might
bring it to pass, rather than to formulate it, still less to establish it.
However, as events unfolded, their self- appointed role as heralds
tended to migrate towards that of propagandists for the views or
political actors they saw as fostering the social and political dispen-
sation they desired. Their notion that they could play a significant
role in shaping the future can be seen in retrospect to be Quixotic
– and certainly proved in the event to be overweening. But their
belief that artists were architects of cultural change was a legitimate
inheritance from their Romantic and Victorian forbears – even
though they were loath to acknowledge it. So far as I know only
Pound (Literary Essays, 371) cited Shelley’s extravagant assertion
that artists are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” but
they all acted as though they agreed with him. Wyndham Lewis had
an equally exalted view of the artist as an arbiter of culture, but his
bent was more negative than those of the other two, being more
inclined as he was to diagnose the age’s illness than to suggest a
therapy.
As we have seen, Eliot did come to advocate a Hobbit-like state
of agrarian bliss in which men and women are subsumed in the nat-
ural cycle of birth, copulation, and death – a rhythm that he had
portrayed with such distaste in “Sweeney Agonistes.” In the archaic
rustic scene Eliot sketches in “East Coker,” the cycle is sanctified by
religious belief. In the modern urban environment satirized in
“Sweeney Agonistes,” it has no such sanction. In Eliot’s mind

monarchy is the political corollary of the agrarian community cel-
ebrated in “East Coker.” Never as atavistic as Eliot in his political
vision, Wyndham Lewis came to recommend strongman rule, on
the models of (successively) Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler, as a kind
of prophylactic to protect society from the ills he saw in contem-
porary society. Whereas Eliot became ever more atavistic in his
political dreams as he grew older, Lewis finally saw the folly of
putting one’s faith in a tyrant and reverted to an acceptance of par-
liamentary democracy. Like the early Lewis, Pound thought a tyran-
ny on the fascist model was the best form of government for the
time. Pound was later than Lewis in hitching his wagon to fascism,
and he hung on longer – seeing the nullity and malignity of fascist
ideology only very late in life.
I will argue that their regrettable enthusiasms for disreputable or
impractical nostalgic political structures was a consequence of their
fear of the cultural consequences of popular democracy in an elec-
tronic age, more than a reflection of a reprehensible taste for regi-
mentation, oppression or bellicosity. Of course, as individuals, they
must still bear the opprobrium that attaches to those who counte-
nance brutal tyrannies even if their motivation was to avoid what
they regarded as the even worse option of cultural disintegration.
I believe that, if we are fully to understand the political choices of
the period, we must engage in an effort of historical imagination.
While it is true that Mussolini’s fascism was avowedly authoritarian
in practice and jingoistic in rhetoric, it was not clear in the 1920s
that his belligerent rhetoric would culminate in a European war.
More importantly, we need to appreciate the degree to which bol-
shevik communism was seen as a real and potent threat to the cap-
italist democracies. Fascism promised to preserve industrial capital-
ism and the benefits it had brought the European bourgeoisie. In
Zeev Sternhell’s words: “The fascist revolution sought to change the
nature of the relationships between the individual and the collec-
tivity without destroying the impetus of economic activity – the profit
motive, or its foundation – private property, or its necessary frame-
work – the market economy. This was one aspect of the novelty of
fascism; the fascist revolution was supported by an economy deter-
mined by the laws of the market” (Sternhell, 7, my emphasis).
Socialism, of course, promised to overturn precisely those features
Introduction 7
of the economic organization of capitalist democracies, while

retaining democratic, parliamentary government. Communism
offered even more to the working classes, but at the cost of some –
as it turned out, a great deal of – violence, and unexampled tyranny.
For the man in the street (if he believed the propaganda of the
two factions) it came down to which he most desired – political
clout or economic security. On this analysis it is hardly surprising
that fascism had many admirers. In hindsight it is common to see
fascism as virtually equivalent to nazism, and to regard both as
monstrous and criminal tyrannies bent on enslaving the world.
But no one – not even its most virulent opponents – saw fascism in
that light in the 1920s. On the other hand, many saw Soviet Rus-
sia and international communism in exactly that light. Indeed,
world revolution was official Comintern policy – though, of
course, enslavement was not (see Kolakowski, 738). And we need
to recall that even though Lenin endorsed violence as a political
instrument, the worst bolshevik excesses did not take place until
the 1930s – and were long denied by Western communists (see
Judt, 200–11).
In The Political Identities of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Michael North
acknowledges the appeal that fascism had for many in the twen-
ties: “Revulsion against fascism now runs so strong that it is almost
impossible to recall why it was once so seductive. Hindsight into its
internal contradictions makes it seem intellectually as well as
morally shameful. And so it was. But allowing men like Pound to
avoid contradiction was the source of its power. fascism promised
to fulfill the individual and to restrain individualism, to set free
localities and professions and to meld every group into one great
whole, to liberate the particular from iron abstractions and to find
one great abstraction to fulfill every particular” (165–6). North’s
general thesis – with which I agree – is that Marxism and fascism
both presented themselves as critiques of liberal capitalism. But
missing from his influential study is any acknowledgment that
Marxism was equally “intellectually as well as morally shameful,”
and that its promise to free the poor from their misery and the
oppressed from their bondage proved to be just as illusory as fas-
cism’s promise “to liberate the particular from iron abstractions” –
whatever that means. Of course, it is not the case that revulsion
against Marxism “runs strong” in the academy. Indeed, the case is
quite the contrary. I hope in this study somewhat to redress the

balance.
One reason that socialism/communism did not appeal to
Pound, Eliot, and Lewis is that they were initially more concerned
with cultural matters than with economic ones. They were all per-
suaded that popular democracy would inevitably destroy European
culture because the oligarchs, who they believed to be the true gov-
ernment, would cater to the tastes and aspirations of the mass in
order to retain power. They were acutely aware that the great cul-
tural and scientific advances of the nineteenth and early twentieth
century had been achieved in a period of limited franchise and
firm class structures, and before the advent of the photograph and
the cinema, technical innovations that vastly enlarged the reach of
cultural artifacts into the lower classes.1 Those technological devel-
opments, in conjunction with the popular press, created a new
entity, a new sort of consumer of cultural products – the “mass.”
Although the notion of the urban mass as a new class, with a par-
ticularly debased aesthetic taste, had been articulated in the late
nineteenth century, Ortega y Gasset defined it for the twentieth
century in his influential The Revolt of the Masses, published in1930:
“Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined
without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the
presence of one individual we can decide whether he is ‘mass’ or
not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself – good or ill –
based on specific grounds, but which feels itself ‘just like every-
body’ and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite
happy to feel itself as one with everybody else” (11–12).
As such the “mass” was thought to be peculiarly manipulable,
and therefore an uncertain foundation for a society, a culture, or a
state. With the advent of universal male suffrage, the common man
had political power, and therefore had to be appeased. Huddled
together in cities and industrial towns, the deracinated (“alienat-
ed” in Marxist argot) individuals who formed the mass were
thought not only to lack any individuality, but also to be devoid of
a shared identity such as the settled (and illiterate) peasants of the
pre-industrial era were supposed to possess. The peasant was seen
to be embedded in ancient cultural traditions and social practices,
which – together with the absence of any means of mass commu-
nication – rendered it difficult to manipulate him. The stability of
Introduction 9
Europe had rested, it was supposed, on the sturdy intransigence of

the settled peasantry. The urban proletariat, in contrast, represent-
ed a malleable mass easily manipulated by the popular press and
the cinema. Men of the pen and the brush feared – not implausi-
bly – that they had no hope of influencing the mass through their
books and paintings. And – more alarmingly – they believed that
the oligarchs controlled the press and the cinema, which could
influence the masses. Since in nations with universal suffrage who-
ever controlled the mass controlled the state, it was not a great leap
to believe that modern “democratic” states could be nothing other
than oligarchies. On this analysis, the only alternative to rule by a
secret oligarchy was either monarchy or tyranny. They apparently
believed that monarchs or tyrants would be more susceptible to the
influence of men of the pen or brush than would the masses or the
oligarchs.
Marxism offered one form of tyranny, and it represented an ever-
present menace to industrial democracies. Clearly the mass was vul-
nerable to the Marxist promise of a socialist utopia in which the
proletariat – another name for the “mass” – would rule. Marx even
called the first stage of communism, “the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat.” Of course, in Marx’s version the classes would eventually
disappear, at which time the state itself would wither away, leaving
a classless society devoid of religion, and probably art as well – for
so long the handmaiden of religion. Since the subsequent history
of communist states has revealed that the communist state resists
withering away as vigorously as do royalist or capitalist ones, per-
haps our trio can be forgiven for eschewing the Marxist solution.2
The guardians of high culture that Lewis, Eliot, and Pound saw
themselves to be, were duty bound to oppose both the capitalist oli-
garchs and the levelling Marxists, since they saw both as equally
inimical to cultural achievement. However, they feared Marxism
more because it threatened individual liberty, and they believed
individual liberty to be a sine quae non of true artistic achievement.
While the oligarchs would, in their view, debauch the masses by
appealing to the lowest common denominator, the Marxists would
be no better, for the rule of a lumpen proletariat would, they
believed, inevitably discard – or even prohibit – high culture.3 They
believed that the only way to preserve high culture was to co-opt
the political leadership. That would be impossible in a pseudo
democracy in which the oligarchs manipulated the masses through

the mass media. But it would be possible, they imagined, for men
of culture like themselves to influence a tyrant or dictator.
Eliot’s manifest interest in popular cultural practices, as exhaus-
tively documented by David Chinitz in T. S. Eliot and the Cultural
Divide, is not a counter-indication of his distrust of the masses. On
the contrary, Eliot’s effort to incorporate popular modes – notably
the burlesque style of Sweeney Agonistes, his “Choruses” for the
pageant The Rock, his late effort at popular drama, and finally Old
Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – evince a desire to “reach” a popular
audience so as to “raise” its cultural level. That is not to say that
Eliot was incapable of enjoying popular culture, for Chinitz has
demonstrated beyond doubt that he did take pleasure in the Eng-
lish music hall. But however much Eliot’s admiration for music hall
performers like Marie Lloyd and Little Tich was genuine, his prin-
cipal interest in them was to co-opt their popular modes for his
highbrow purposes. Similarly the “cracker barrel” style occasional-
ly adopted by Pound is designed to reach down to a popular audi-
ence, rather more than to co-opt popular culture for high art. That
sort of strategy had to wait for works such as Andy Warhol’s “Camp-
bell’s Soup Can.” As Chinitz points out, “a phobic response to pop-
ular culture was intellectual gospel in both Britain and the United
States ... the ‘serious and grim picture of culture under capitalism’
was held in common by thinkers on both the Left and the Right ...”
Although Eliot was “less doctrinaire on cultural matters than most
of his contemporaries” (171), he participated in the general anxi-
ety that a dumbing down of cultural products was probable if not
inevitable.
Lewis, perhaps even more than Eliot and Pound, distrusted pop-
ular culture profoundly. In The Lion and the Fox (1927), he regis-
tered his admiration for the grandees of the Renaissance, and his
contempt for his contemporaries very clearly – whether communist
or capitalist:
The thing that it should be far more difficult for us to-day to

understand, the thing that separates this time, from that so com-
pletely, is precisely the respect and worship, almost, of learning
and the powers and graces of the mind, which the renaissance
showed. ...
Introduction 11
... You would not recommend yourself to a sovietic commissar

by a display of literary talent or a seductive eloquence, quite the
contrary; you would arouse his greed and suspicion, and he
would have you under lock and key very rapidly. The contem-
porary magnifico or multimillionaire is, similarly, notorious
rather for his furious dislike of any accomplishment different
from his own – especially if it involves a hint of some disoblig-
ing superiority. (88)
Scorning the common man and woman, they dreamt of influ-

encing those who held the levers of power – much as Machiavelli
had attempted with The Prince.4 Pound, for example, believed –
quite erroneously – that he had the ear of Mussolini, and on the
strength of that delusion sailed to New York early in 1939 to meet
senators and President Roosevelt, so as to present them with his
solutions for the world’s ills. Neither Lewis nor Eliot was so naïve,
but they both produced prodigious quantities of polemical prose
in hopes of influencing political events. Though their efforts were
less grandiose – and less disastrous – than Pound’s, they were equal-
ly ineffectual. Their marked preference for monarchs or dictators
over demagogues reflects their faith in the educated intelligentsia
and their distrust of the uneducated masses, rather more than any
strong tyrannical tendencies. After all, they relied exclusively on
the art of persuasion, having neither the means nor the desire to
force their views on others.
Of course, admitting that they were dyed-in-the-wool elitists will
do their reputations no good in the egalitarian climate currently
dominant in the academy. But the fact that both Hitler and Mus-
solini were wildly popular in their respective nations should give
pause to those who place implicit trust in the wisdom of the com-
mon man and woman. Dr. Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister,
employing the public address system, radio, and cinema to great
advantage in the Third Reich, earned Hitler even greater approval
than Mussolini ever achieved. Even the manifest evil of the Final
Solution failed to damage Hitler’s popularity among non-Jewish
Germans. And the butcher, Stalin, was loved and revered by his
own populace despite murdering and imprisoning so many mil-
lions of them, and not having the insulating factor of selecting his
victims by race. Nor did Stalin have a propagandist of Goebbels’ tal-
ents. In short their distrust of universal suffrage was not entirely

misplaced, even though the alternatives proved to be even worse.
I would not want my readers to think that I accept their analysis
of political movements and systems. Clearly Pound and Lewis were
wildly wrong to place their faith in fascism/nazism as an ideology
that would preserve high culture against the ravages of the masses.
Their fear and scorn of communism, on the other hand, has
proven to be more justified. Most importantly, it must be admitted
that they were excessively pessimistic about the consequences for
high culture of the increasing influence of mass taste as the cul-
tural “market” became more and more dispersed. Even with the
advent of radio in their middle age, of television in their old age,
and of the Internet and personal audio devices after their deaths,
high culture has survived. And – more to the point – it has suffered
less in the democracies of Europe and the Americas than it has in
the tyrannies of Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Americas. And they
were not complete Luddites. Eliot – the most backward- looking of
the three – used the radio to disseminate his views, and even per-
mitted Murder in the Cathedral to be produced as a film. Pound, too,
used the radio to vent his hatred for the enemies of Italy – which
happened, unfortunately for him, to include his native land.
What I do argue in their defence is that they found themselves in
the midst of unprecedented political and military upheavals –
World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Depression, the rise of
fascism/nazism, and, finally, World War II. Given the scale and
number of the cultural, economic and political shocks experienced
by their cohort group, it is scarcely surprising that they committed
errors of judgement. At the same time, it has to be admitted that
the label of “reactionary” often applied to them does fit – if
stripped of its Marxist provenance. They did view with alarm the
prospect of the triumph of mass culture, and they did look for bul-
warks against it in undemocratic and elitist political structures.5
What they wished to preserve and to advance was the bourgeois
culture in which they were raised. Their models – at least in their
youth – were primarily the giants of nineteenth-century European
bourgeois culture, heterogeneous as they were: Rémy de Gour-
mont and Gustav Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and W. B. Yeats,
Henri Bergson and F. H. Bradley. (One should not be misled by the
fact that the artists – though not the philosophers – maligned bour-
Introduction 13
geois culture. They were all bourgeois themselves, as were Lewis,

Eliot, and Pound.) Their strategy was to capture and transform
nineteenth-century aesthetic culture, thereby creating a new class –
neither bourgeois nor aristocratic – of intellectuals who would act
as a counterforce to the masses on the one hand, and to the oli-
garchs on the other. That was the purpose of Eliot’s Criterion, of
Pound’s Cantos, and of Lewis’s multifarious prose effusions. (This
strategy was the target of Julien Benda’s 1927 La Trahison des Clercs,
a book that upset Eliot. As we will see, Benda argued that artists
should stick to their vocation of creating timeless works of art and
leave politics to others.)
A largely tacit – with the exception of Pound with whom it was
explicit – part of their program was to construct a society in which
artists like themselves could survive in a culture and society that
provided no means of support for the artist other than the mar-
ketplace. Unless some alternatives to the marketplace were found,
they believed, the poet, painter, novelist, or musician had no
option but to produce what the market – that is the mass – wanted.
Thanks to that perception, it became a foundational principle of
modernist aesthetic theory that popular success of an artwork was
proof of its triviality, closing that route to the serious artists – as was
not the case in the nineteenth century. Only Pound had any idea
what the new culture and society might look like – and that was fas-
cist Italy (with, admittedly, some improvements over the actuality).
The Christian Society of which Eliot dreamed during and after
World War II is an impossibly nostalgic fantasy and does not
address the problem of the artist’s role – unless we imagine the
artist in such a society as a pseudo-cleric, supported by a cultural
branch of the Church, a scenario that Eliot never articulated.
Oddly, Pound, who had most to say about the economic plight of
the artist, did not even pretend that fascism provided a resolution
of that problem.
Lewis was less concerned with the issue of the artist’s economic
welfare than the others. His preoccupation was the propensity of
advanced industrial nations ruled by oligarchs to engage in wars.
Everyone believed that war in the machine age was profitable for
industrialists, who sold the machines of death to governments. The
threat of war – which had been the normal condition in Europe
since 1815 – as opposed to actual combat, was sufficient for the
industrialists, since it required nations to buy armaments even if

they were not used. However, actual wars were even better, acceler-
ating the replacement of weapons far beyond what aging machin-
ery and creeping obsolescence could achieve. At least so Lewis –
and many others of all political stripes – believed.
Representative works of the period presenting such an analysis
are The Great Illusion (1909) by the British journalist Norman
Angell, and The War of Steel and Gold (1914) by another British jour-
nalist, Henry N. Brailsford. Angell’s book, which argued that wars
– as opposed to preparation for war – made no economic sense for
modern industrial societies, spawned clubs and debating societies
in Britain and attracted a grant of £30,000 from the Carnegie foun-
dation (Sheehan, 31). Brailsford was not convinced, pointing out
that although “war is a folly from the point of national self-interest;
it may nonetheless be perfectly rational from the standpoint of a
small but powerful governing class” whose military and civil service
careers were advanced by war – especially if conducted outside
Europe (84–5). Brailsford, writing from a socialist perspective just
after the outbreak of war in August 1914, accurately predicted that
the nationalist sentiments of the British, French, Italians, Germans,
and Russians would trump class solidarity (14–15). Somewhat pre-
sciently – though too optimistically – he hoped that Europeans
“may in the end come to understand that this has been as much a
civil war as the American struggle of North and South, and that it
must end in the same way, in the unity of a continent” (168). As we
now know, it took another European “civil war” before the dream
of European unity could be achieved by peaceful means.
I have not found any reference to either work by Eliot or Pound,
though both mention later works by Angell. Pound is hostile to
Angell’s analysis. I have not found any comment by Eliot on The
Great Illusion, but he dismissed Angell’s proposed cure for the
Depression in Can Government Cure Unemployment (a collaborative
work with Harold Wright) as one emanating from “Mensheviks of
the London School of Economics pattern” (“Commentary,” The
Criterion 12 (Jan. 1932): 269). Pound’s references to Angell are
invariably hostile, but give no clear indication of what it was that he
found objectionable in Angell’s analysis. Somewhat atypically,
Pound sent Angell a poison pen letter in April of 1935, challeng-
ing him to a duel. Angell reproduces the letter in his autobiogra-
Introduction 15
phy (288–89), adding: “I did not reply to Pound in any way but he
continued to send me letters at intervals, all in the same strain, and
to discuss them in an Italian fascist magazine. He continued to
describe me as a ‘bastid’ (his spelling was peculiar) and ‘louse.’”
Angell saw the award of the Bollingen Prize to Pound as evidence
of “a certain prevailing worship of incomprehensibility” (298).
Only Lewis commented directly on The Great Illusion, praising it
in The Hitler Cult (242) even though he had explicitly rejected
Angell’s arguments against war in Left Wings over Europe (1936): “I
am not on the side of the Angels (either Norman or otherwise) –
definitely” (19–20). In 1936, Angell was recommending a robust
response to German and Italian belligerence, while Lewis was rec-
ommending appeasement. Three years later, when he wrote The
Hitler Cult, war had broken out and Lewis was anxious to disassoci-
ate himself from his previous pacifist arguments. Lewis had erro-
neously concluded that arguments like Angell’s exaggerated the
belligerent intentions of Mussolini and Hitler, playing into the
hands of the armament industries. Only Hitler’s invasion of Poland
convinced Lewis of his error – so far as Mussolini and Hitler were
concerned. But he did not abandon his belief that war and indus-
try went together – a perception shared by President Eisenhower in
1961 when, in his final speech as president, he warned of the “mil-
itary industrial complex.”6 Eisenhower saw a vigilant democracy as
the best protection against the possibility of nations becoming
hostage to arms manufacturers – a view not shared by our three.
The failure of capitalist democracies to allocate resources fairly
and rationally – one factor that motivated our group’s hostility to
popular democracy – became urgent during the economic crisis of
the Great Depression of 1929–39. The failure of the democracies
to respond rationally and efficiently to the crisis added to their dis-
enchantment with capitalist democracy since it was perceived –
with some justice – that fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the com-
munist Soviet Union all responded more successfully. Though all
three of our artists were hostile toward Marxism, they tended to
agree with the Marxist perception that the Depression represented
the death throes of capitalism. Lewis, for example, in his unfortu-
nately7 titled 1939 book, The Jews, Are They Human?, judged “the
economic and political system for which we are all responsible”
to be “so absurd and so unjust that I should feel myself a very
objectionable hypocrite if I gave myself airs regarding a person who

had availed himself of some hole in the net of an oppressive chi-
canery” (73).
Pound had found a ready-made solution to the crisis in the poli-
cies of Major Douglas’s Social Credit movement. Douglas’s scheme
called for the distribution of a “national dividend” to every man,
woman, and child in the nation. The funds for the dividend would
be provided by the simple expedient of directly expanding the
money supply to match increased national production of goods
and services. The key was to bypass the banks, no longer permitting
the banks to issue loans in excess of their deposits and collect inter-
est on such “fiat money.” Such a distribution, Pound believed,
would abolish poverty and at the same time free the artist to pur-
sue his or her craft without the need to cater to popular taste. The
intransigent refusal of the democracies to adopt Social Credit poli-
cies persuaded Pound that dark conspiracies controlled them –
leading to the ruin of his life, and seriously compromising his poet-
ry. While Social Credit policies were not complete lunacy – as is
often alleged – they were based on invalid assumptions and careless
arithmetic.8
Neither Eliot nor Lewis went so far off the rails in response to the
Depression. For them it was merely another piece of evidence cor-
roborating their conviction that popular democracy could not pro-
vide competent governance of modern industrial nations. Like
Pound, Lewis looked to tyranny as a viable alternative to popular
democracy. The relatively more successful response to economic
difficulties by Italy and Germany reinforced his tendency to place
confidence in an individual rather than in institutions and proce-
dures – such as parliaments, courts, and elections. However –
unlike Pound – Lewis was sufficiently perceptive to abandon his
chosen tyrants – Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler – as they proved
unworthy of his support.
Lewis’s was less concerned with the preservation and distribution
of wealth than was Pound. His overriding motivation was fear of
another war between European nations. “We live today in the back-
wash of a great war,” he observed in The Jews, Are They Human?
“Slump has followed slump, and we none of us can see how it can
end, except in further convulsions. Germany suffered for a time
more intensely than we did, with the results that we all see today.
Introduction 17
But the whole of Europe has been crawling about like the asphyxi-
ated occupants of an ant-hill hit by a shell, for nearly a couple of
decades now” (92). Like Brailsford his preferred remedy was Euro-
pean union. In his last book, The Writer and the Absolute, Lewis allud-
ed to “Napoleon’s plan to unify Europe,” observing that many peo-
ple, himself included, “considered it perhaps a misfortune for
Europe that France did not have its way” (63). In this respect,
at least, events have taken the path he wished for. The Treaty of
Rome, beginning the long process of European unification, was
signed on 25 March 1957, the year of Lewis’s death.
But I do not wish to argue that any of these men were prescient
in their cultural and political commentary. What I would claim is
that their motivation should not be regarded as malign, nor their
analysis as completely wrong-headed. The interwar period was one
in which it was very difficult to see one’s way clearly. As already
noted, very few observers at the time considered the status quo of
liberal,9 democratic capitalism to be viable in the twentieth centu-
ry. The fact that democratic capitalist governments have prevailed
in the post-war, should not blind us to the plausibility of the inter-
war conviction that democratic capitalism could not survive unal-
tered. Between the wars the leading alternatives were social-
ism/communism, on the one hand, and fascism/nazism, on the
other. The Cold War period that followed the defeat of the Axis
powers (Germany and Italy) and Japan (which, incidentally, was a
limited monarchy, like Britain), removed fascism/nazism from the
political scene.10
During the Cold War, when an either/or opposition between the
“Free World” and “Communism” dominated the ideological scene”
scholars examining Eliot, Pound, and Lewis tended either to ig-
nore their political affinities as much as possible, or to pillory them
as fellow-travellers of fascism/nazism. The present study charts a
course between those two strategies by contextualizing their politi-
cal prose in the interwar period. Communism was not then an
external military threat – as it was during the Cold War – but an
internal threat – either of intellectual persuasion or of violent rev-
olution. Moreover the behaviour of the democracies after (and
during) the Peace of Versailles did little to encourage the hopes of
those like Angell and Brailsford for a new, peaceful Europe.
Instead democratic and capitalist Britain, France, Germany, and
Italy continued their old rivalries and competing imperial ambi-

tions – notably in the Middle East and North Africa.
The following discussion is organized chronologically. Chapter I,
“Dreams and Nightmares,” surveys the state of opinion prior to
World War I about the future of Europe and America. Chapter II,
“A Twentieth-Century Renaissance,” explores the extent to which
our trio participated in the general optimism of the day. Chapter
III, “The War as a Symptom of Cultural Decay,” details the very dif-
ferent ways in which World War I affected Lewis, Pound, and Eliot
– who first met one another at this time – and examines Eliot’s
great success following the publication of The Waste Land in 1922.
Chapter IV, “The Response to Fascism,” follows the three friends
beyond the immediate post-war as Europe begins to sort out a
response to the threat represented by the Bolshevik Revolution.
Chapter V, “Things Fall Apart,” traces their attempt to position
themselves politically and culturally as the Europe created by the
Treaty of Versailles begins to fail and Europe slides once again
toward war. Chapter VI, “Looking Back” closes the discussion of
their political engagement with an examination of how their views
altered, or failed to alter, as war broke out, and in the Cold War
period when they were in their sixties, still active and articulate –
and still in communication with one another. The Appendix pro-
vides a brief examination of a non-literary, American radical whose
analysis of the interwar period was very similar to that of Pound,
Eliot, and Lewis, but whose solution was at considerable variance to
theirs.
i
Dreams and Nightmares
As democracy and reason develop within peoples and individuals, the

need to have recourse to violence diminishes. Let universal suffrage
affirm itself; let a vigorous secular education open spirits to new ideas
and develop the habit of reflection; let the proletariat organize and
group itself according to a law ever more fair and generous; let all this
happen and the great transformation that will liberate mankind from oli-
garchic property will be accomplished without the violence that, 110
years ago, bloodied the democratic and bourgeois revolution, ...
Jean Juarès, L’Humanité 18 April 1904
Revolutions closely resemble romantic dramas: the ridiculous and the

sublime are mixed so inextricably together that we are often unsure how
to judge men who seem to be at one and the same time buffoons and
heroes.
Georges Sorel, La Revolution Dreyfusienne, 1908
The story of literary modernism in English, if viewed from the per-

spective of the two prominent American expatriates – Ezra Pound
and T. S. Eliot – can be understood as an American conquest of
English letters. Although the conquest was certainly not complete,
it has been enduring. British writers today are at least as likely to
look to American writers as models to imitate, or reputations to
challenge, as American writers were to look to British writers in the
early years of the twentieth century. No doubt, the change reflects
the reversal in relative strengths – economic, military, and cultural
– of the respective nations. Britain no longer rules the waves, nor
does it determine fashion in cultural affairs for the English-speak-
ing world as it did up until the first Great War. Although everyone
recognized that the 1914–18 war and the Peace of Versailles rep-
resented a watershed in the cultural, political, and economic life of

the North Atlantic nations, it was not so clear to contemporaries
that it represented the twilight of British global power and the
diminished status of the Continental “great powers,” in the face of
the advent of American political, economic, and cultural ascen-
dancy.1 Indeed, between the wars, Europe – in particular conti-
nental Europe – was a more potent magnet for the aspiring Amer-
ican artist than it had ever been. Admittedly the advent of
Prohibition in the United States in 1919 intensified the attraction
of Europe for Americans. That said, the great artistic reputations –
authors, painters, and composers – were still found in Europe, even
if some – like Pound and Eliot – were not themselves European.
Our trio, of course, noticed the shifts in political, economic, and
cultural power between Europe and America. Pound, however, did
not think the shift had progressed very far in the pre-war period. In
his 1912 homage to his native land, Patria Mia, Pound saw the
United States as a backwater whose time had not yet come: “Amer-
ica’s position in the world of art and letters is, relatively, about that
which Spain held in the time of the Senecas. So far as civilization is
concerned America is the great rich, Western province that has
sent one or two notable artists to the Eastern capital. And that cap-
ital is, needless to say, not Rome, but the double city of London and
Paris” (Patria Mia, 31). In 1912 those “one or two important
artists” were not himself and Eliot, but Henry James and James
Whistler, both of whom Pound invokes in the following pages, say-
ing of Whistler that he proved “being born an American does not
eternally damn a man or prevent him from the ultimate and high-
est achievement in the arts”(35).
It is important that we have in mind the dynamics of the relations
between Europe and America as perceived by Eliot and Pound if
we are to understand their careers. Since we ourselves inhabit the
post-European age2 (if I may so call it), an act of imagination is
required to reconstruct the sense of cultural inferiority that both
men felt. No doubt their own view of the relation between Ameri-
cans and Europeans was coloured by the novels of Henry James,
the greatest American literary reputation of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. His great theme was the American in
Europe. The Jamesian formula is to place an innocent and aes-
thetically deprived American in the context of “experienced,” aes-
Dreams and Nightmares 21
thetically gifted, and ethically challenged Europeans. Typically the

Jamesian American was wealthy, and the European financially
deprived, reflecting the American view that Europe was economi-
cally as well as morally decadent. In contrast to the Jamesian Amer-
ican heroes and (mostly) heroines, our poets were very self-confi-
dent about their own abilities – in Pound’s case one might say
pathologically confident. Nonetheless they could not entirely
escape the sense of cultural inferiority they had imbibed in their
youth. And, unlike the Jamesian Americans, neither was personal-
ly wealthy – though Eliot came from a wealthy background.
Any sense of inferiority they may have felt was expressed in ag-
gressive bluster. For example, within two years of arriving in Eng-
land, Pound mocked A. E. Housman (1859–1936) in “Mr. Hous-
man’s Message” (a poem in Canzoni, a slim book of poems pub-
lished in 1911 by Elkin Matthews, a premium English poetry press,
reprinted in Collected Early Poems, 163). It evinces little respect for a
great English reputation. (Housman’s reputation had been estab-
lished rather belatedly by A Shropshire Lad, privately published in
1896, fifteen years earlier):
O woe, woe,
People are born and die,
We also shall be dead pretty soon
therefore let us act is if we were
dead already.
And so forth. Here the robust American – dubbed “The Idaho

Kid” by T. E. Hulme – mocks the effete European. While the rough-
hewn Jamesian American male – Caspar Goodwood of Portrait of a
Lady, for example – had expressed much the same sort of senti-
ment about effete Europeans, the reader of a James novel is expect-
ed to be embarrassed by such crassness. Obviously Pound expects
no such response to his mocking of Housman.
Nor does his stay in London diminish Pound’s brash self-confi-
dence. In a short time he became a sort of protegé of W. B. Yeats,
then one of the greatest reputations in English letters; he had also
befriended Ford Madox Ford, Conrad’s collaborator, and married
Dorothy Shakespear, daughter of Yeats’s first lover. So, by the time
he published “Moeurs Contemporaines” in the Little Review in the
last year of the war, Pound was well placed within the London artis-
tic scene and not at all overwhelmed by it. “Moeurs Contempo-
raines” is a series of satirical portraits of the English men and
women he had met in his nine years in London. “Soirée” is typical
of the series:
Upon learning that the mother wrote verses,

And that the father wrote verses,
And that the youngest son was in a publisher’s office,
And that the friend of the second daughter was
Undergoing a novel,
The young American pilgrim
Exclaimed:
“This is a darn’d clever bunch!”
The satirical poetry of Eliot’s early years does not target the
British particularly, but bourgeois life in general. Though he
admits, in a March 1915 letter to his aunt, Eleanor Hinkle, that
“the average of culture is far higher” at Oxford and Cambridge,
Eliot doesn’t “think that there is any more brains here than at Har-
vard” (Letters, 92). On the other hand, writing to his Harvard friend
Conrad Aiken, in late December 1914, Eliot complained that his
fellow residents in the London pension where he was staying were
“not very interesting” being “mostly American” (Letters, 74). Like
Pound, he soon found his feet in England. After marrying, and
deciding not to return to Harvard to take up a teaching fellowship,
he told the graduate chair, J. H. Woods (in April 1919), that he was
already a “much more important person” in England than he
would be “at home” (Letters, 285).
In that same letter Eliot adds, that he has “acquired the habit of
a society so different that it is difficult to find common terms to
define the difference.” Eliot’s adoption of British habits and mores
– culminating in his declaration in 1928 that he was classicist in lit-
erature, Anglican in religion, and royalist in politics – is in strong
contrast to Pound’s contention in Patria Mia: “it would be about as
easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for
him to acquire an Englishness, or a Frenchness, or a European-ness
that is more than half a skin deep” (49). There is no little irony in
Pound’s remark given that despite remaining always the American
in Europe, he threw in his lot with Mussolini and fascism, thereby

earning an indictment for treason and imprisonment in his native
land. Eliot, in contrast, adopted British manners and habits, and
was honoured and fêted in America. Of course, Eliot kept his nose
reasonably clean in the political and ideological realms – though
latterly he, too, has been brought to task for his political views – of
which, more later.
Patria Mia – which expressed Pound’s belief that America was
promised a vigorous future that would eventually displace the
exhausted civilization of Europe – was written during a six-month
visit to the United States from July 1910 to February 1911. It was
his first visit home since his departure two years earlier, and was to
be his last until the brief quixotic visit in 1939 mentioned above.
Patria Mia’s declared thesis is “that America has a chance for
Renaissance” (11). The following remark, which first appeared in
November 1912,3 reflects the circumstance that he spent most of
his time in New York, a city he had not previously known well:
I see … a sign in the surging crowd on Seventh Avenue (New

York). A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, care-
less, with an animal vigour unlike that of any European crowd
that I have ever looked at. There is none of the melancholy,
the sullenness, the unhealth of the London mass, none of the
worn vivacity of Paris. I do not believe it is the temper of
Venice.
One returns from Europe and one takes note of the size and
vigour of this new strange people. They are not Anglo-Saxon;
their gods are not the gods whom one was reared to reverence.
And one wonders what they have to do with lyric measures and
the nature of “quantity.”
One knows that they are the dominant people and that they are
against all delicate things. (Patria Mia, 13–14)
Here the American who is “against all delicate things” stands in

for the mass man later identified by Ortega y Gasset, though Pound
praises his vigour, whereas Gasset fears his gullibility.
Curiously enough, Empire, a recent influential cultural and polit-
ical study by the American Michael Hardt and the Italian Commu-
nist Antonio Negri, echoes Pound’s sentiments about empire and
the crowd. Much as Pound was looking to the dawn of a new age in
1910, so Hardt and Negri look forward to the end of the old era of
“Imperialism” and its replacement by the new era of “Empire”:
The agents of the crisis of the old imperial world became foun-
dations of the new. The undifferentiated mass that by its simple
presence was able to destroy the modern tradition and its tran-
scendent power appears now as a powerful productive force
and an uncontainable source of valorization. A new vitality,
almost like the barbaric forces that buried Rome, reanimates the field
of immanence that the death of the European God left us as
our horizon. Every theory of the crisis of European Man and of
the decline of the idea of European Empire is in some way a
symptom of the new vital force of the masses, or as we prefer, of the
desire of the multitude. (Empire, 376–7, my emphasis)4
The triumphalist tone of Pound’s 1910 remarks is not main-

tained in his subsequent prose compositions. Whereas Hardt and
Negri were inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s 1980 study, A Thou-
sand Plateaus, Pound seems to have been inspired by the 1909
Futurist Manifesto where Marinetti similarly celebrated the metro-
politan crowd:
We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and

by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of
revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant
nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent
electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-
plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines
of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts,
flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steam-
ers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose
wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses
bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose pro-
pellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like
an enthusiastic crowd.5
As we will see, Pound retained neither his enthusiasm for Futur-

ism, nor his admiration for the ethnically mixed New York crowd.
But both his Pollyanna attitude toward an as yet unrealized

future and the notion that European civilization was exhausted
and needed to be renewed does stay with him. He transfers his
enthusiasm from New York and America to the darker risorgimento
emerging in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. But that is still to come. Short-
ly after the end of Great War, in the 1920 poetry sequence, “Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley,” Pound is still convinced – like Arnold a half-
century earlier – that an old world is dying and new one is waiting
to be born. In “Mauberley” he laments the human losses of that war
as an unwarranted sacrifice for a worn-out civilization. Once again
he seems to be echoing Marinetti, whose tenth principle was, “We
will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will
fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cow-
ardice.” Though Pound is not recommending the destruction of
libraries, he does appear to dismiss the European heritage as of lit-
tle importance:
There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
But the story is complicated. Pound’s evident contempt for the

state of civilization and culture in Europe evinced in these writings
is best understood as the lament of a Europhile for a perceived
decline in an admired civilization. Forty years after “Mauberley –
after the rise of fascism, after the Second World War, and his
imprisonment for treason – in the 1960 Paris Review interview with
Donald Hall, Pound reaffirmed his faith in Europe, claiming that
he was “writing to resist the view that Europe and civilisation is
going to Hell. If I am being ‘crucified for an idea’ – that is, the
coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated – it is prob-
ably the idea that European culture ought to survive that the best
qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever other cultures,
in whatever universality”(Plimpton, Writers at Work, 57). While there
is, no doubt, some special pleading in this remark, it nonetheless

rings true if we remember that Pound spent his entire life ransack-
ing the European past for nuggets of wisdom and beauty. Of
course, in 1960 Pound would have included the Americas in “Euro-
pean civilization.”
On this point, Edgar Ansel Mowrer’s 1968 comment on his 1928
book, This American World, is instructive: “In retrospect, my con-
ception of Europe as a unit and my prediction of a single Atlantic
bloc (unless communism seized Europe first) seem more timely
than my very qualified acceptance of Oswald Spengler’s theory of
history. Meanwhile, I insisted, ‘although the period be “American,”
the epoch is still “European” and Americanism is merely the form
in which Euro-American civilization will conquer the earth.’ Even
my anticipation of America (not Russia!) as the ‘new Rome,’
although previously made by others seemed new to many” (Tri-
umph and Turmoil, 190–1).
Eliot endorsed Mowrer’s assessment of American civilization as a
continuation and intensification of European civilization – both of
its good and of its bad features in his preface to the Faber edition
of This American World:
The majority of foreigners think either of Americanization as

something to be welcomed and exploited, or as a plague to be
quarantined; and either point of view is apt to be superficial.
Mr. Mowrer goes farther. He inquires into the origin, as well as
the nature, of Americanism; traces it back to Europe; and finds
that what are supposed to be the specifically American qualities
and vices, are merely the European qualities and vices given a
new growth in a different soil. Europe, therefore, in accepting
American contributions, the danger of which Mr. Mowrer cer-
tainly does not palliate, has contracted a malady the germs of
which were bred in her own system. Americanization, in short,
would probably have happened anyway; America itself has
merely accelerated the process. (This American World, x-xi)
Eliot was less supportive of Mowrer’s dependence on Spengler,

explicitly rejecting the historicist view that historical events are
determined (and therefore predictable) because they follow dis-
coverable laws:6 “It is evident that Mr. Mowrer has been affected by
his reading of Spengler;7 but he is too reasonable to commit him-

self either to the pessimistic determinism of Spengler or the opti-
mistic determinism of Wells and Shaw (but the optimism of Wells
and Shaw is taking on slowly a darker colour). He recognizes that
if one looks far enough ahead, none of these things that are hap-
pening seem either good or bad: they are merely change. Our task
is simply to see what we are, and to know what we want in the imme-
diate future, and to work towards that” (xiv).
pollyannas and c assandras
In these remarks, Eliot sets out what will be a leitmotif of this study –
the debate between the Pollyannas and the Cassandras. Clearly
Pound is a Pollyanna, as were Wells and Shaw and the Fabians gen-
erally. In 1928 the most convinced Pollyannas were the Marxists –
especially the Russian Marxists. Leszek Kolakowski in his authorita-
tive Main Currents of Marxism, describes “the naive avant-garde belief
of communists ... that all old-world institutions should be doomed to
wither away: the state, the army, the school, nationality, and the fam-
ily.” They believed “that a new world was coming into existence in
which effete institutions and traditions, sanctities and taboos, cults
and idols would collapse into dust before the triumphant power of
Reason; the world proletariat, like another Prometheus, would cre-
ate a new age of humanism” (Main Currents, 825). Although many
literary figures were drawn to communist utopianism, very few of the
generation with which we are concerned were so drawn. Kandinsky
and Picasso are the only ones that come to mind among those artists
who reached maturity before World War I.
However, both optimistic communist Pollyannas and pessimistic
Cassandras like Yeats and Spengler succumbed to a fatalistic deter-
minism. Both tended to believe that events would unfold in one
way or another regardless of human behaviour. Obviously Eliot
does not belong to the deterministic camp, observing, as he does:
“Our task is simply to see what we are, and to know what we want
in the immediate future, and to work towards that” (“Preface” to
Mowrer, This American World). Eliot, Lewis, and Pound all acted on
that advice, but despite beginning in broad agreement, they each
came to a different conclusion about what they were, what they
wanted, and how to get there.
Pound – definitely a Pollyanna – shared Mussolini’s futurist-

tinged embrace of the new and rejection of the recent past in
favour of a remote past – Imperial Rome in Mussolini’s case, the
Renaissance and Confucian China in Pound’s. Marinetti, the
founder of Futurism, was also a co-founder of fascism, which was
quite a different movement than nazism.8 Hitler copied Mussolini’s
street-fighting Blackshirts, and military-style organization, but not
his celebration of an Imperial Roman past. Instead, the Nazis cele-
brated a quasi-mystical and pagan Aryan past as the antitype of
Latin culture. Nor did Mussolini share Hitler’s obsession with Com-
munists and Jews as malignant forces putting German culture in
peril. Mussolini was a former Sorelian Communist, and his long-
standing mistress, Margherita Sarfati was Jewish. Certainly the Fas-
cists fought Communists in the streets, and imprisoned them when
in power, but fascist hostility to communism was more a naked
struggle for power than a consequence of an ideological incom-
patibility, and it had no racist component – even though Mussolini
was ultimately bullied into adopting anti-Semitic laws.
Despite his unmistakable pessimism, Wyndham Lewis initially
endorsed fascism, recommending it as a superior alternative to
communism for “the Anglo Saxon countries” in The Art of Being
Ruled, his first political book (320–1). He shortly reversed himself
on this point, dismissing fascism in Time and Western Man, pub-
lished the following year (1927), as “an adaptation, or prolonga-
tion, only, of futurism” (35). (Lewis was an early foe of Futurism,
having attacked it in the first number of Blast in 1914.) Because the
categories of Pollyannas (those who anticipate a bright future for
the world) and Cassandras (those who see the world going to Hell
in a handbasket) cross the political fault lines of Left and Right,
they are useful categories for this discussion. To dispose Pound,
Lewis, and Eliot on a simple dyadic scheme of Left and Right dis-
torts the reality of their engagement with the politics of the period.
Adding pessimism and optimism as additional parameters permits,
I believe, a more accurate graphing of their developing political
views.
Pollyannas and Cassandras agreed that European civilization
was undergoing epochal changes. The only point at issue between
them was whether those changes would be for good or ill. As is
probably always the case, there were more who regretted or
abhorred the changes than there were those who welcomed

them. One index of epochal change was the evident rise of the
United States of America as an economic juggernaut, an emerg-
ing military power, and a potent – if rather philistine – cultural
force, and the relative decline of Europe. The rise of Japan as a
military and industrial power was even more alarming, but for the
most part was not seen as impacting upon European culture and
civilization.9 However, America’s relative rise as a world power
challenging Europe was exacerbated, from the European per-
spective, by the rise of Japan as a regional power challenging
Britain’s far Eastern hegemony. Pound’s celebration of the rise of
America in Patria Mia was not particularly eccentric, except that
it was a celebration rather than a lament. No doubt there was an
element of bravado in it, reflecting his lingering sense of Ameri-
can inferiority vis à vis Europe. All the same, no one doubted that
American “civilization” was a branch – for some, the growing tip
– of a European root stock.
The idea that European civilization was degenerate was virtually
a leitmotif in cultural journalism by the turn of the century, having
been broached by the Cassandra Max Nordau’s (1849–1923)
Degeneration in 1893. Translated from the original Entartung into
English in 1895, Degeneration went through six printings in that
year and was later reprinted in 1898 and 1913.10 Nordau’s argu-
ment was that nineteenth-century developments in the arts – Aes-
theticism, Symbolism, Impressionism, and so forth – were the prod-
uct of mentally disturbed individuals. The acceptance of their
works by the aesthetic elites was an index, he believed, of the
decline of European civilization. It prompted a rebuttal from
George Bernard Shaw, published in 1895 by the American anar-
chist Benjamin Tucker, in his journal Liberty and then issued in
Britain as a book, The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Non-
sense about Artists Being Degenerate, in 1908. Shaw acknowledged the
currency of Nordau’s polemic: “In the Easter of 1895 ... Nordau
was master of the field, and the newspaper champions of modern
Literature and Art were on their knees before him, weeping and
protesting their innocence ... ” (6–7). The publisher of The Sanity
of Art was The New Age, A.R. Orage’s Fabian journal, in which
Pound’s “Patria Mia” appeared a little later. Shaw was one of the
“angels” supporting The New Age financially.
By “degenerate” writers, painters, and composers, Nordau meant

individuals with mental health issues. Although he did not draw
any political conclusions from the domination of the art scene by
the psychologically unfit, his predictions of social consequences in
the twentieth century are surpisingly accurate – among them the
increased use of recreational drugs, and the advent of homosexual
marriages. Nordau regarded both as equally reprehensible – in
contrast to twenty-first century attitudes, which see the latter as an
index of ethical and social progress, and tolerate recreational drug
use, or even celebrate it as liberating. Nordau hoped that the tri-
umph of healthy, robust, practical men over fey artists would fore-
stall such regrettable developments:
Let us imagine the drivelling Zoroaster of Nietzsche, with his

cardboard lions, eagles, and serpents, from a toyshop, or the
noctambulist Des Esseintes [hero of Huysmans’ A Rebours and
Là Bas] of the Decadents, sniffing and licking his lips, or
Ibsen’s “solitary powerful” Stockmann, and his Rosmer lusting
for suicide – let us imagine these beings in competition with
men who rise early, and are not weary before sunset, who have
clear heads, solid stomachs and hard muscles: the comparison
will provoke our laughter.
Degenerates must succumb, therefore. They can neither
adapt themselves to the conditions of Nature and civilization,
nor maintain themselves in the struggle for existence against
the healthy. (541)
Nordau’s view was not one that any artist would be likely to
endorse, and it certainly was not shared by any of the artists under
consideration here. Although Wyndham Lewis’s attack on mod-
ernist artists in The Apes of God and Time and Western Man has some
affinities with Nordau’s critique – as does later Nazi propaganda
against “Jewish” art – I have not found any mention of Nordau in
Lewis’s publications or letters. And even though Nordau antici-
pates many Nazi attitudes toward the arts, it would be unjust to por-
tray him as a proto-Nazi. He is anti-Wagner and anti-Nietzsche, the
two cultural divinities of the Nazis. Moreover, he is a non-observant
Jew, deeply offended by Wagner’s anti-Semitism and Nietzsche’s
celebration of the Aryan “blond beast,” and was co-founder, with
Theodor Herzl, of the World Zionist Organization – hardly the cv

of a proto-Nazi.
Nonetheless, Nordau is an early voice decrying a perceived gen-
eral malaise in European culture – a malaise for which the Nazis
offered a draconian solution, the purging of all who were not of
pure Aryan stock and in good physical and mental health from the
lands controlled by the Third Reich. Of course – in contrast to
both Nordau and the Nazis – modernist writers regarded Symbol-
ism, Ibsen, Impressionism and the like as the vanguard of the new
cultural awakening they represented. Where Nordau saw a falling
away from permanent standards of aesthetic clarity and health, the
modernists saw a breaking away from adherence to outworn aes-
thetic norms, and the expression of a new sensibility appropriate to
the conditions of an industrial age characterized by technical inno-
vation. Indeed, the Pollyanna Shaw in his rebuttal of Nordau, artic-
ulated a theory of the avant garde which Pound, Eliot, and Lewis
would have certainly endorsed:
to the people who would not read Liszt’s explanations and

cared nothing for his purpose, who had no taste for symphonic
poetry, and consequently insisted on judging the symphonic
poems as sound patterns, Liszt must needs appear, like Wagner,
a perverse egotist with something fundamentally disordered in
his intellect: in short, a lunatic.
The sequel was the same as in the Impressionist movement.
Wagner, Berlioz, and Liszt, in securing tolerance for their own
works, secured it for what sounded to many people absurd; and
this tolerance necessarily extended to a great deal of stuff
which was really absurd, but which the secretly-bewildered crit-
ics dared not denounce, lest it, too, should turn out to be great,
like the music of Wagner, over which they had made the most
ludicrous exhibition of their incompetence. (The Sanity of Art,
36–7)
Although stressing the continuity of novelty, rather than the dif-

ficulty of recognizing the “really new,” Eliot‘s remarks in “Tradition
and Individual Talent” (1919) belong to the same general theory
of culture as Shaw’s. His observation that “for order to persist after
the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if
ever so slightly, altered” is certainly conservative in its insistence on

the maintenance of “order,” but at the same time, it places a great
burden on the reviewers and the artistic audience who must some-
how rejig “the whole existing order.” Small wonder that – as Shaw
observes – many fail to come up to the mark. Eliot’s response to the
stylistic innovations of Ulysses is in the same avant-garde vein: “The
strange, the surprising, is of course essential to art; but art has to cre-
ate a new world, and a new world must have a new structure. Mr. Joyce
has succeeded, because he has very great constructive ability; and
it is the structure which gives his later work its unique and solitary
value” (“London Letter,” 216, my emphasis).
In contrast to Nordau’s recoil from Symbolism, Eliot was famous-
ly energized by his discovery in 1908 of Arthur Symons’ The Sym-
bolist Movement in Literature, a book that celebrated exactly those
developments in literature that Nordau deplored. In his 1930
review of Peter Quennell’s Baudelaire and the Symbolists, Eliot con-
fessed that “the Symons book is one of those which have affected
the course of my life,” adding “all English poetry that matters”
derives from the Symbolists (Criterion 10, 357). The influence of
Symbolism on Eliot’s poetry is a commonplace of critical commen-
tary, but if we recall the view Eliot expressed in 1921 that a “disso-
ciation of sensibility set in” in the seventeenth century, from which
“we have never recovered,” we must conclude that he believed Sym-
bolism to have suffered from that malaise as well (Selected Essays,
287). On those grounds, Eliot’s view of Symbolism is not so differ-
ent from Nordau’s; they both regard Symbolism as symptomatic of
a dysfunctional cultural condition.
Like Nordau, then, Eliot was more of a Cassandra than a Pollyan-
na. At least he was so in his view of the current cultural situation in
1921, 1925, and 1930, which – despite his own aesthetic avant-
gardism – had affinities with Nordau’s views of 1893. Where Nor-
dau saw the stylistic innovations and the representation of internal
psychological states in nineteenth-century art as the product of
what he called “degenerate” minds, Eliot saw similar developments
in the arts in his own day as symptomatic of a general cultural
malaise from which no one was immune. In short, they both diag-
nosed a malaise, but for Eliot the malaise was an inescapable con-
sequence of cultural disintegration, while for Nordau it was mere-
ly a regrettable vogue for the musing of pathological personalities.
More importantly, Eliot believed that the arts offered a diagnosis of

the malaise, as opposed to Nordau’s view that they were merely a
symptom of it, and therefore he offered hope for a cure.
To put it another way, Eliot’s view of art – like that of Pound and
Lewis – is primarily expressivist, whereas Nordau’s analysis rested on
a mimetic view of art. From an expressivist view the authenticity of
a work of art is dependent on its sincerity, on its faithfulness to the
intellectual and emotional state of the author. On either expressivist
or mimetic grounds it makes sense to extrapolate from a diagnosis
of a work of art to the state of the culture in which it is found. For
the expressivist, the artist is representative of the culture, whereas
for the mimeticist, it is the consumer of the art who represents cul-
tural tastes, and who needs to be corrected. Hence Nordau deni-
grates any art that did not represent the world in such a way that
l’homme moyen sensuel would recognize it. He understood expressivist
distortions found in nineteenth century art as evidence of psycho-
logical malaise in its creators, as in the following remark: “The curi-
ous style of certain recent painters –‘impressionists,’ ‘stipplers,’ or
‘mosaicists,’ ‘papilloteurs,’ or ‘quiverers,’ ‘roaring’ colourists, dyers
in gray and faded tints – becomes at once intelligible to us if we
keep in view the researches of the Charcot school into the visual
derangements in degeneration and hysteria” (Nordau, 27).
Nordau’s remark, incidentally, reveals his reliance on psycholog-
ical theories that attribute psychological pathology to genetic fac-
tors. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93) was a Parisian physician who
believed that “hysteria” was the result of a neurological disorder,
and essentially untreatable. Thus Nordau did not see artworks
manifesting traits of neurotic or psychotic states as symptomatic of
a cultural malaise – as Eliot did. For Nordau the problem was sim-
ply that society accepted the expression of deranged individuals as
admirable artworks. For him the appropriate remedy was to
denounce such artworks, and replace them with the products of
healthy individuals.
psychology and cultural theory
Charcot’s students, incidentally, included Pierre Janet and Sig-

mund Freud. Psychology – the attribution of mental phenomena
and behaviour to either biological or emotional causes – was the
new glamour science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries. It was not something that an artist could easily ignore
but, at the same time, no artist could be pleased to be told that his
or her expression was essentially a species of pathology – even if the
pathology were cultural rather than personal. Eliot’s cultural com-
mentary derives entirely from such principles – even though he
retained a faith in the power of persuasion to administer to the
pathology, as opposed to relying on a therapeutic response such as
the sexual and somatic therapy preached by D. H. Lawrence.
Freud’s psychoanalysis, placing emphasis on early childhood
development as the seedbed of mental disease, eventually dis-
placed Charcot’s neurological theories. But Freudianism – al-
though first fully articulated in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) –
was not to prevail until the 1930s. For example, Lyndall Gordon
reports an incident that suggests that Eliot’s early poetry was per-
ceived by his elders as exemplifying just the sort of mental pathol-
ogy that Nordau found in Symbolism and Impressionism: “When,
in spring 1914, Conrad Aiken took ‘Prufrock’ to a ‘poetry squash’
in London and showed it to Harold Monro, the editor of Poetry and
Drama, Monro flung it back saying it was ‘absolutely insane’ (T.S.
Eliot: An Imperfect Life, 68). And perhaps Monro’s response was not
so inappropriate, since Eliot was, indeed, attempting to portray the
“dissociated” or “disintegrated” personality, as described by the
French psychologist Pierre Janet (1854–1947).11 Monro apparent-
ly understood the poem much as its admirers do, but he saw it as
psychological pornography – the representation of a sick mind,
something unsuitable for a respectable journal.
Then, as now, a leading issue in psychology was the extent to
which mental phenomena were autonomous or merely epiphe-
nomena of physical causes. Janet disagreed with the physiological
explanations of Charcot, and – just four years earlier than Freud –
posited a subconscious in which painful experiences were “disasso-
ciated” from the consciousness – essentially equivalent to Freud’s
“suppression” theory. Janet’s term is “désagrégration” – variously
translated as “dissociation” and “disintegration” – both of which
Eliot employs at different times. It is a pathology in which the “dis-
sociated” individual experiences what contemporary psychologist
call a “fugue state.” Mr Hyde roughly exemplifies such a state in the
1886 Robert Louis Stevenson novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde. Hyde’s violent behaviour is entirely out of character for

Dr Jekyll; it was the way Dr Jekyll behaved in a “fugue state.” Of
course, the physical changes in Dr Jekyll caused by the potion are
not part of Janet’s theory.
In “The Metaphysical Poets” Eliot applies Janet’s psychological
theory to culture, describing the Victorian poets, Tennyson and
Browning, as poets all right, “and they think; but they do not feel
their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.” In other
words, their personalities were “disassociated.” It was not their
fault, for – as Eliot famously asserted: “In the 17th century, a disso-
ciation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered”
(Selected Essays, 288). The “disassociated sensibility” clearly derives
from Janet, as does Eliot’s conviction that a healthy culture must
reintegrate the psyche by attaching emotional impulses to those
things of which the conscious mind can approve – as in religious
ecstasy. Janet and William James both considered mystical experi-
ence to be phenomena involving just such integration. And Eliot
was quite familiar with both men’s psychological theories.12
Despite asserting that “we” – that is, Western culture – have never
recovered from the disaster of the disassociated sensibility, Eliot
also maintained, in a well known passage from the same early arti-
cle, that the poet is somehow exempt from this disability: “When a
poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amal-
gamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is
chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads
Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each
other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking;
in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new
wholes”(287).
Perhaps the clause “when a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for
its work” is intended to rescue Eliot from self-contradiction. The
salient point is the claim that poetry can function as a therapy for
the perceived malaise of the disassociated sensibility. The belief
that art is therapeutic to the psyche is, of course, the basis of
Romantic expressivist aesthetic theory.
In the Clark Lectures of 1926 Eliot attempted to develop what he
called a “theory of the disintegration of the intellect in modern
Europe.” Here again, he invokes Janet’s notion of désagrégation. As
with the “dissociation of sensibility,” he locates the “disintegration”
in the seventeenth century – though now he says it began as early

as the thirteenth (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, 158, 228). The
idea that the two aspect of the human psyche – emotion and intel-
lect – were once “integrated,” but have become “disintegrated” or
split apart, is much subtler than Nordau’s crude theory of degen-
eration, but tends to the similar conclusion that art serves as an
index of a society’s cultural health. Whether it holds water as a cul-
tural theory is another matter. In any case, in 1926 Eliot still
regarded such pathology as an unavoidable stage and believed it
was the artist’s role and duty to administer to it. And he was some-
what optimistic that Europe had reached such a stage of disinte-
gration in 1926 that a new cultural order would not be long to
seek. He told Herbert Read, in a letter of December 1925, while he
was still working on the lectures: “Disintegration, which, when the
world has crystallised for another moment into a new order, can be
treated as a form of generation; but which the historian at the pre-
sent time, who does not anticipate, must regard partly as the histo-
ry of corruption” (11 December 1925, Herbert Read Collection,
University of Victoria, Eliot’s emphasis).
In 1926 – only a year before his baptism as an Anglican – Eliot was
still holding out hope for cultural renewal. We can class him as a
tentative Pollyanna. For at this time – prior to the Great Depression
– he looked to a future in which the malaise of the present would
be cured, though he knew not how. Eliot’s tentative optimism is very
different from Pound’s enthusiastic welcoming of the “New Age.”
Pound seemed not to feel any anxiety at the iconoclasm of the arts
in his own generation and the one before him, believing that it was
a sort of hygiene, cleansing the world of festering cultural deposits,
and he was much more sanguine than Eliot that the world would
crystallise “for another moment into a new order.” In the 1915 New
Age series “Affirmations,” Pound struck an unqualifiedly optimistic
note: “A certain number of fairly simple and now obvious ideas
moved the renaissance; their ramifications and interactions are still
a force with the people. A certain number of simple and obvious
ideas running together and interacting, are making a new, and to
many a most obnoxious, art. I need scarcely say that there were
many people to whom the art of the quattro-cento and the pagan-
ism of the Renaissance seemed equally damnable, unimportant,
obnoxious” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 115).
Another index of Eliot’s belief that Anglo-American culture was

in the doldrums during his youth is found in his Criterion “Com-
mentary” for April 1934, where he reminisces about his time in
Paris in 1911, revealing some of his interests at the time, as well as
his sense that Paris was an intellectual centre against which London
or Boston paled: “Younger generations can hardly realize the intel-
lectual desert of England and America during the first decade and
more of this century ... The predominance of Paris was incon-
testable.” He then lists the luminaries who dominated the intellec-
tual landscape of Paris at that time, among them the literary figures
Anatole France, Remy de Gourmont, Charles Péguy, and Maurice
Barrès. Amongst the academics at the Sorbonne, he recalls,
“Faguet was an authority to be attacked violently; the sociologists,
Durkheim, Lévy Bruhl, held new doctrines; Janet was the great psy-
chologist; at the Collège de France, Loisy enjoyed his somewhat
scandalous distinction; and over all swung the spider-like figure of
Bergson. His metaphysic was said to throw some light upon the new
ways of painting, and discussion of Bergson was apt to be involved
with discussion of Matisse and Picasso” (451–2).13
The absence of Nordau from this list, even though Degeneration
was still in print, suggests that he was no longer au courant in 1911.
Oswald Spengler, the most famous of all the Cassandras of the peri-
od, had not yet appeared on the scene, the first volume of his
Decline of the West appearing only in 1918. Like Degeneration it was an
immediate best seller, selling out in six months. The original Ger-
man text was never translated into English. The English version we
have is based on a text Spengler revised under the influence of
Leo Frobenius and published in 1922, together with the second
volume.14
Like Nordau, Spengler perceived an endemic malaise in Euro-
pean culture and civilization, but he drew with an even broader
brush, not confining his diagnosis to works of art. Eliot did not find
Spengler to his taste because of Spengler’s historicist bias – that is,
his attribution of cultural processes to impersonal factors and
forces. In addition to his disparaging comments in the 1925 intro-
duction to Mowrer’s This American World cited above, Eliot com-
plained in a 1927 Criterion “Commentary” of the “Spenglerish view”
of a pamphlet under review. He objects to Spengler’s Cassandra-
like pessimism as well as to his historicism. “The Criterion,” he wrote,
“cannot assume as axiomatic the statement that tout est foutu. To

assume that everything has changed, is changing, and must
change, according to forces which are not human, and that all that
a person who cares about the future must or can do is to adapt him-
self to the change, is a fatalism which is unacceptable.” This remark
illustrates Eliot’s activist notion of cultural change as clearly as any-
thing he committed to print, and is in contrast to the standard
understanding of The Waste Land as a lament for the inescapable
cultural disintegration in post-war Europe. However, it is difficult
to see how the poem as published could serve as therapy for the
cultural disintegration it articulates.
Eliot also observed in his commentary that Spengler’s work was
“an exemplification of the modern time philosophy discussed by
Mr. Wyndham Lewis in The Enemy” (Criterion 5, June 1927, 282).
Lewis’s take on the cultural scene as represented in his distinctly
Cassandra-ish work Time and Western Man was published later in
that year (1927). (Eliot had already seen much of it in Lewis’s jour-
nal, The Enemy.) Eliot and Lewis both thought that Western culture
was in a state of crisis, and in need of treatment. In this, they were
out of step with the Pollyanna Pound, who perceived the crisis as a
turning point toward a bright future. But even though Lewis and
Eliot agreed on the need for cultural repair, their views increasing-
ly diverged on just what prescriptions to apply. Spengler’s view, in
contrast, was entirely fatalistic, and all three rejected his analysis.
Time and Western Man is a broad-based attack on what Lewis calls
“time philosophy,” represented in its most extreme form for him by
Oswald Spengler. Although Lewis’s animus spreads his net too wide
and too fine to persuade anyone today, in 1927, many thought he
had a handle on the malaise of the period. The following is a rea-
sonable example of the catch-all nature of his category “time phi-
losophy”: “Spengler’s book on the theoretic side is simply the elab-
oration (on a basis of Bergsonian, or Italian idealist philosophy) of
the widely-held belief that everything whatever – as much a scien-
tific theory as the hat you wear – is a phenomenon of fashion, a
Time-phenomenon – a “history,” and not a “truth,” whatever its
pretensions to be the latter” (266). Lewis included Einstein and
the whole of modern physics, Alfred North Whitehead, and Filip-
po Marinetti – amongst others too numerous to mention – as hated
time philosophers. But Spengler is the prize exhibit.
Quite apart from the shotgun nature of Lewis’s cultural critique,

it is distinct from both Pound and Eliot in its focus on what one
might call the “style” of the age, as opposed to its substance. He
objects to the relativism of the age – that is, the widespread pre-
sumption that absolute truth or incorrigible knowledge is unat-
tainable and we must therefore rest content with partial truths.
The corollary of such philosophical relativism is that our “ver-
sions” of the truth must be temporary and constantly changing. It
is the constant change of received “truth” that Lewis finds intoler-
able and that he denominates “time philosophy.” I think it is fair
to say that such relativism is the default position of virtually all
Western intellectuals in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
century with the exception of religious believers and Marxists.
Despite his endorsation of Lewis’s critique, Eliot did not really sub-
scribe to it at that date. Indeed, he described himself as a relativist
in a January 1916 exchange of letters with Norbert Wiener (Letters,
81).
While most literary modernists were hostile toward Spengler,
William Butler Yeats admired The Decline of the West as a corrobora-
tion of his own theory of historical phases and his belief that the
world currently occupied a degenerate phase in the cycle. Despite
being Yeats’ protegé, Ezra Pound found little to admire in Spen-
gler: “To understand Spengler’s writing one must begin by recog-
nizing that Spengler has never seen a picture, has never heard any
music, and that the sum total of his acquaintance with literature
might, for all evidence to the contrary, be confined to Goethe and
a few sagas (“Correspondence,” letter to the editor, Criterion 10,
July 1931, 730). Pound makes no objection to Spengler’s histori-
cism, merely to his aesthetic taste. Spengler’s error, in Pound’s view,
is to perceive the contemporary cultural scene as decadent in con-
trast to Pound’s belief that the West was experiencing a renais-
sance. He makes no objection to the general hypothesis of histori-
cal cycles, just to Spengler’s conclusion that the European
“Faustian” cycle is coming to an end. When Pound later comes to
champion Frobenius’ cultural theories, he gives no indication that
he recognized Frobenius’ influence on Spengler – whose cultural
theory, like that of Frobenius and Pound, takes stylistic features as
revelatory of deep-seated cultural forces – what Frobenius called
the paideuma of a culture.
The rejection of Spengler by our trio reflects their adherence to

the Enlightenment conviction that human beings create their own
destiny, a conviction which Eliot, Pound, and Lewis share – howev-
er much they may diverge on just whither society is headed or
toward what it should strive. Pound, above all, believed in the per-
fectibility of man and waxed apoplectic at mankind’s failure to fol-
low his lead toward such perfection. In this respect he is in agree-
ment with Marx, who envisaged a utopian future from which
economic want and war would be abolished. Eliot, Lewis, and –
most particularly – T. E. Hulme (who died before Spengler’s work
appeared) were more realistic. Hulme’s insistence on the reality of
original sin is an explicit rejection of Enlightenment optimism and
profoundly influenced Eliot. While they all believed that mankind
creates its own destiny, Hulme, Lewis, and Eliot also believed that
the faults and weaknesses inherent in humankind preclude the
possibility that such a destiny would be entirely benign. Pound said
nothing directly about human fallibility, but he certainly believed
in human greed and gullibility. For those reasons alone it is inap-
propriate to classify any of them with the utopians like Marx, who
believed that a perfectly just and prosperous society is possible if
only men and women would follow their lead.
Of course no one in 1928 – whether Cassandras or Pollyannas –
foresaw the horrors that lay ahead for the world. Yeats’ prediction
of a “rough beast” slouching “towards Bethlehem to be born” eight
years earlier did not have the resonance it has since acquired. And,
in any case, Yeats was reacting to local violence in Ireland – the
“troubles” that eventually led to the independence of Eire – rather
than broad developments in Euro-American civilization. Closer to
1928, Yeats’ contribution to apocalyptic literature, A Vision (1926),
first published in an edition “for subscribers only,” received only
one review, and that by his friend George Russell. The revised trade
edition, published by MacMillan in 1937 fared a little better, but
most of Yeats’ admirers found it an embarrassment. Despite a fair
number of comments on Yeats from Eliot’s pen, including a desig-
nation of him as “the greatest poet of his time” (“A Commentary,”
Criterion 14, July 1935, 612), so far as I can discover Eliot never
mentions that embarrassing work, and I have never seen any com-
ment by him on “The Second Coming.”
managing the future
Though they belonged to the nineteenth century, the historical

predictions of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were probably the
most influential – certainly the most powerful – prognostications
available to observers of the social and political scene in the early
twentieth century. Although our writers were not admirers of Marx
(Lewis and Pound both flirted a little with Marxist theories), they
were all quite aware of the influence of his political and economic
theories. I will consider their reaction to Marxism and communism
in later chapters. Here I want to invoke an influential Marxist
analysis of the cultural state of Europe in the mid-twentieth centu-
ry. Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, written and
published in the usa (in German) in 1944, blamed “the indefati-
gable self-destructiveness of [the] enlightenment” for the rise of
fascism. As Marxists they adopted a thoroughly historicist posture –
directly in contradiction to the Enlightenment faith that mankind
is the master of its own destiny. They regarded fascism and human-
ism as equivalent products of Enlightenment beliefs, which, in
their words, “the brazen fascists hypocritically laud and pliable
humanist experts naïvely put into practice ...” (Dialectic of Enlight-
enment, xi.).
The American cultural domination that Pound and Eliot both
thought likely to come to pass was regarded by Horkheimer and
Adorno as a triumph of humanism and a dire fate – one on which
they looked with horror.15 Eliot was not particularly happy at the
prospect either, though for quite different reasons. As is well
known, Eliot became a diligent opponent of humanism, but – as we
will see – only a lukewarm opponent of fascism. To illustrate Eliot’s
views on the issue of Americanism we must return to his preface to
Edgar Ansel Mowrer’s This American World, published in 1928, the
year before the stock market crash on “Black Thursday,” 24 Octo-
ber 1929. The Great Depression was a disaster no one saw coming,
certainly neither Eliot nor Mowrer, who predicted (accurately
enough) that the United States of America would come to domi-
nate the world. The recent destruction of European capital stock
in the Great War had accelerated the arrival of that dominance, but
Mowrer did not believe that it had caused it.
Though an American, Mowrer was not particularly happy at the

prospect of American world hegemony: “Unhampered by much
cultural tradition or by the finer scruples, mighty in the increment
of a continent tamed by a science he [the American] understands
supremely to exploit, fresh with the faith of unbroken successes,
directed by mass motives inherited from pioneer fellowship in a
primeval waste, sole beneficiary of the most destructive of all wars,
drawn by spiritual vacuum and capital scarcity elsewhere, our citi-
zen goes forth blithely to reap the profits (and incidentally, spread
the benefits) he has learned most to cherish. Mental democracy
and machine organization triumph, and in the process Babbitt16
buys the world” (This American World, 47–8). In many ways, Mowrer
is spelling out the “new world order” that many expected the appli-
cation of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” in the 1919 Peace
of Versailles to inaugurate. (It is striking that President George
Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev used the same phrase, “New World
Order” – whether consciously or not, I do not know – to describe
the state of world relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991. In neither case did the new order prove to be as benign as its
proponents had hoped.17)
Now largely forgotten, Mowrer was a journalist of considerable
reputation between the wars.18 As an American in France, he did
not consider enlisting on the outbreak of war. In this respect he was
just like the Americans in Britain. In contrast to their British
friends – Lewis, Hulme, and even the much older Ford Madox
Ford – neither Pound, nor Eliot, nor Jacob Epstein considered
enlisting in the British forces. However both Eliot and Pound made
some moves toward signing up with the American forces after the
usa entered the war, but they came to nothing.
Eliot’s introduction begins by placing This American World in the
context of the “literature of Bolshevism” and the “literature of fas-
cism” as parallels to the “literature of Americanism,” thus catego-
rizing Americanism as a distinct ideology like the other two (ix).
He described Mowrer’s book as “a study in the philosophy of his-
tory, in the same sense as the work of Spengler,” though not as doc-
trinaire. It is, he said, “written with a lighter hand,” and is an ambi-
tious “study of the future of Americanism both within and outside
of America” (x). As we have seen, Eliot endorsed Mowrer’s view
that “Americanism” is “merely the European qualities and vices
given a new growth in a different soil,” something that, he says,

“would probably have happened anyway; America itself has merely
accelerated the process”(xii).
He cited with approval Mowrer’s characterization of America as
divided between “later arrivals” and “the older stocks,” qualifying
that opinion only by noting that the new arrivals are not exclusive-
ly concentrated in the cities as Mowrer claims. The result, in Mowr-
er’s view, is that “New York often seems to an old stock American as
alien as Vienna or Amsterdam” (xii, quoted from Mowrer, 61).
Where in Patria Mia Pound had seen a burgeoning energy in the
cosmopolitan crowds of New York, Eliot and Mowrer saw a threat
to the integrity of American culture. It is the presence of the Irish,
Southern, and Eastern Europeans (code for Jews) that troubled
Eliot and Mowrer. They maintained silence on the issue of Black
and Native Americans, and seem oblivious to the irony of asserting
continuity between European and American “civilization,” while
bemoaning its adulteration by European immigration. The unstat-
ed opinion is that the Irish, Italians, Poles, Russians, and Jews are
uncivilized – or (still more bizarre) not “European.”
Agreeing with Mowrer’s worry about such adulteration, Eliot
took the trouble to assert his own pure Anglo-Saxon provenance as
one that “Mr. Mowrer would recognize.” “I am,” he wrote proudly,
“myself a descendant of pioneers somewhat like Mr. Mowrer.” But
Eliot added that his personal experience was “different from that
of the native European and from that of many Americans” (xiii).
The difference he identifies is one that highlights the fact that
American culture is not homogeneous even among pure Anglo-
Saxons like himself and Mowrer. Eliot claimed to be a sort of Amer-
ican hybrid in that he had one foot in the Midwest of St. Louis, his
home city, and another in Massachusetts where he spent summers
from an early age and where he was educated – both in boarding
school and in university. In this way he drew attention to the cul-
tural divide between the Southwest and New England. Interesting-
ly, he did not allude to his status as an American expatriate in Eng-
land of a full decade’s duration at the time of writing.
As Americans, Eliot and Mowrer naturally have a different per-
spective on American culture and civilization than do Europeans
like Spengler, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Even though they both
might fairly be described as Europhiles, they retain the optimism
characteristic of Americans. All the same – much like Henry James

– they look with some trepidation upon the triumph of the culture
of their native land over older, richer, and subtler cultures, as many
American intellectuals do today (2011), when Mowrer’s prediction
of American cultural hegemony over the entire globe has largely
come to pass: “Americanism as understood by Europe is therefore
not only probable but practically inevitable. But not Europe alone
is to be asked to submit to it ... the entire civilized world is destined
to be thus Americanized ... For there nowhere exists a living, non-
American culture capable of offering any serious resistance to the
new forces” (205–6). Forty years before Marshall McLuhan coined
the phrase, “global village,” Mowrer anticipated that condition:
“Furthermore, the world of wireless telephony and broadcasting,
picture transmission and airplanes, is, under present conditions,
too small for more than one civilization to exist at once” (206). It
is striking that similar predictions have been made more recently –
notably Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992). But while
cultural diversity is being relentlessly ground down, resistance to
cultural homogenization remains stubborn and often violent.
Eliot’s introduction to This American World was written just
months after his baptism – on 29 June 1927. Given his commit-
ment to Anglo Catholicism (as he preferred to call his Anglican
faith) he must have been struck by Mowrer’s prediction that resis-
tance to American cultural hegemony would take the form of a
return to religion, especially to Roman Catholicism: “Enthusiasm
for quantity [a leading characteristic of American culture in Mowr-
er’s view as well as Horkheimer’s] is so essentially childish,” Mowr-
er wrote, “that to share it requires a deliberate puerilizing of the
adult mind. And though the age is not without its adequate prob-
lems and rewards, the new type of successful leader is often so nau-
seous to the developed character that entire renunciation seems
preferable. Therefore many spirits are already taking refuge in that
Gibraltar of consolation, the Roman Catholic Church, and more
will do so. But the moment of the faltering spirit that would mark
that Church’s triumph, is still immensely remote” (208). Eliot did
not respond to this observation in his “Introduction,” but it must
have struck a responsive chord. Of course, he did not regard his
adoption of the Anglican faith as a withdrawal – as Mowrer did,
who characterized the anticipated renewal of faith as a rush to
“refuge” in the Church – but rather as commitment to a set of val-

ues that could save the world from itself.
Despite this negative characterization of American culture – one
that can still be found in American and European academic com-
mentaries and in American journals with pretensions to intellectual
sophistication – Mowrer remained an admirer of American culture,
even while seeing it as ineluctably European: “In the broader frame
of history, America and Europe are parts of the same system” But he
added: “At present European civilization has to be re-baptized Euro-
American simply because at this period the qualities America pos-
sesses supremely further the general development more successful-
ly than those of the mother countries”(220–1).
Mowrer rejected the socialist vision of the future of the “Atlantic
Community,” dominant in Europe at that time, on grounds – some-
what surprisingly – of its egalitarianism and atheism:
Natural Equality is the credo of the European socialist, but the

majority of non-socialist Europeans both scoff at it and fear it. It
runs counter to tradition and human experience and bluntly stat-
ed as a fact, provokes the derision of the adult mind. To under-
stand it mystically, as the American understands it, there must be
added some such words as “before God.” These words European
rationalism has progressed too far to accept, and only a spiritual
renewal could subdue mature rationalism. The Old Country
moreover has far too large a bump of accumulated experience
ever to believe that men are born “neutral protoplasm” whose
shaping is a matter of environment and chance (210–11).
Eliot does not comment on these remarks, but he would cer-

tainly have approved of them.
Mowrer’s remarks remind us that the threat of socialism –
whether of the revolutionary Marxist variety or the non-violent
Fabian or Revisionist variety – had been for many decades the dom-
inant political issue in Europe. Despite the Bolshevik Revolution,
the First War had in some ways lessened that threat to the capital-
ist world. The international character of socialism was dealt a
severe blow at the outbreak of the war when socialists of all stripes
put national loyalty ahead of socialist solidarity. After the war, the
Spartacus revolt of January 1919 in Germany failed to attract the
support of the German proletariat, and was brutally suppressed –

largely by the irregular Freikorps who arrested and summarily exe-
cuted Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebnecht, two of the Spartacus
movement’s leaders. A Frenchman who objected to his efforts to
forestall a war had assassinated Jean Jaurès, another prominent
socialist, on the eve of the war (31 July 1914). Although the suc-
cessful revolution of October 1917 in Russia no doubt made the
liberal democracies nervous, it also tended to damage communism
within the capitalist countries by eroding its international charac-
ter. Communism came to be identified with the Soviet Union, and
for good reason. The International was controlled by the Kremlin
– at least by 1920.
Mowrer thought that, given all of this, there was hope that
Europe could be brought to its senses, and return to the robust ways
of free market capitalism from which it had threatened to stray.
Eliot had no interest in Mowrer’s choice of a new “path,” which was
essentially the same as the global free market economy that was
once again in vogue until the great hollowing out of 2008–09 (nor,
indeed, did any of the world’s governments after the crash of 1929).
Even though it was clear that the status quo ante could not survive
after the terrible and senseless slaughter of the Great War, and the
Bolshevik Revolution – which many thought inaugurated the Com-
munist Era19 – there was no consensus on what the future held. The
Peace of Versailles was widely regarded in Britain as an unwise
experiment imposed upon Europe by a naïve and idealistic Ameri-
can President and a vindictive France. Both Eliot and Wyndham
Lewis accepted that view, most influentially articulated by J. M.
Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).20
Of course, opinion differed widely on what sort of future was
desirable or probable. Despite his Anglicanism and purported Roy-
alism, Eliot remained on the “liberal” Enlightenment side of the
issue, believing that individuals and institutions could shape and
mould the future of societies and cultures. Indeed, his founding of
The Criterion in 1921 was a conscious effort to play a role in the for-
mation of the future of Europe, a motivation clearly indicated in
the “Manifesto” he printed in the last number of Criterion’s first
year: “A literary review should maintain the application, in litera-
ture, of principles which have their consequences also in politics
and in private conduct.” (Criterion 1, July 1923, 421). In pursuit of
this project he invited articles from prominent Continental writers

on politics, among them conservatives like Henri Massis
(1860–1970) and Julien Benda (1867–1956, author of La Trahison
des clercs, 1927).21
Eliot published the translation of an excerpt from Massis’ Defence
de l’occident as “Defence of the West” in Criterion 4. Like Nordau and
Spengler, Massis believed that the “future of western civilisation,
indeed the future of mankind, is to-day in jeopardy” (224). But
unlike them, he located the threat in the East, in particular in what
he regarded as the mystical and orientalizing influence of bolshe-
vik Russia and Weimar Germany. In later years Massis was a princi-
pal author and signator of the 1935 Manifeste des intellectuels français
pour la défense de l’Occident et la paix en Europe, which was in support
of Mussolini’s adventure in Ethiopia.22 He had begun his career as
a Bergsonian, but later attached himself to Maurras and L’Action
Française, and still later served in Pétain’s Vichy government.
Throughout his long career Massis sounded the alarm at the
encroaching influence of Slavs and Teutons in Western Europe,
warnings that appear hysterical and paranoid today, but are very
similar to Eliot and Mowrer’s fear that Irish, Italians, Poles, Rus-
sians, and Jews would dilute or damage American “civilisation.”
Such fears as Massis expressed must have resonated in the period
1933–45 when Germany did succumb to the quasi-mystical racism
of the Nazis, and the Soviet Union had succumbed to the “orien-
tal” tyranny of Joseph Stalin. In any event, Massis was forgiven his
political errors by the French, and was elected to the Académie
Française in 1960.
Eliot’s association with these conservative French figures was per-
sonal as well as professional. According to his friend, Montgomery
Belgion23 – himself a conservative, and controversial figure – “Eliot
had little more than a nodding acquaintance, [with Maurras, but]
with both Massis and Maritain he became friends, and his friend-
ship with them is still close to-day [1948] (Montgomery Belgion,
57). Seymour-Jones cites a letter (10 March 1926) from Vivien to
Mary Hutchinson reporting that Eliot has “another marvellous
Frenchman” coming to visit. It was Henri Massis, editor of the La
Revue Universelle, who was lecturing in London. But she makes no
further mention of him (Painted Shadow, 431). Eliot eventually
came to regard Massis as unsound, telling Montgomery Belgion in
1945 that he found Massis’ quick book on the French defeat, Les
Idées restent (Ideas Remain, 1940), “not very nourishing,” adding that
he now found Massis’ “Occident and Orient” “rather boring” (let-
ter of 17 April 1945, Herbert Read Collection, University of Victo-
ria). That Eliot should have dismissed Massis’s ideas on the eve of
the Cold War – which, in dividing the world into East and West,
seemed to confirm Massis’s fears – is a little ironic, but no more so
than the standard inclusion of Japan in the “West” during the Cold
War. Despite his later disaffection with Massis, Eliot obviously
thought his views deserved a hearing in 1926. And apparently
Eliot’s lowered opinion of Massis’s political thought did not inter-
fere with their friendship.
Certainly Eliot shared Massis’s anxiety about the threat to “Latin”
civilization, as his Criterion “Commentary” for August 1927 indi-
cates. In that article Eliot rejected “the Idea of Nationality” as an
appropriate principle by which to organize the world. “Like most
of Woodrow Wilson’s ideas,” he said, nationalism “was agèd when
he [Wilson] discovered it; it will not explain fascism any more than
it will explain bolshevism. Not how Europe can be ‘freed’; but how Europe
can be organized, is the question of the day” (my emphasis). In place of
Nationalism, Eliot proposed “The European Idea,” which may be
found in such diverse places as Valéry’s “meditation on the decay
of European civilization” (presumably Le Cimetière Marin), Spen-
gler’s philosophy of history, or “the intense nationalism as in the
work of Henri Massis.” Although these men share very little, none
of them – to their credit, in Eliot’s opinion – have an “obligation ...
to nineteenth-century socialism or to the humanitarian sentiments
out of which the League of Nations arose.” The European Idea aris-
es, Eliot believed, from “a new feeling of insecurity and danger”
stemming from “the most important event of the War ... the Russ-
ian Revolution.” More than the War itself, that revolution, he
wrote, “has made men conscious of the position of Western Europe
as (in Valéry’s words) a small and isolated cape on the western side
of the Asiatic Continent. And this awareness seems to be giving rise
to a new European consciousness.”
The new consciousness Eliot had in mind is not new in the sense
that both Pound and Marinetti thought of a new consciousness or
that the Marxists did. They imagined a New Man who would dis-
place the modern rational man as he had displaced the medieval
man of faith. Eliot, in contrast, was thinking of some sort of pan-

European accommodation of the major cultures of Britain, France,
Germany, and Italy, mentioning the Italian journalist and novelist
G. B. Angioletti and the German medievalist E. R. Curtius as others
working toward such an accommodation along with himself and
Massis (Criterion 6:97–8). For their part, Pound and Marinetti
never succeeded in providing their New Man with the required
novel attributes beyond a love of speed for Marinetti, and a parat-
actic cast of mind for Pound. Eliot’s New Man was simply a pan-
European Christian, that is, the medieval man of faith.
Although in these remarks Eliot seemed to be sliding toward the
Cassandra posture that dominates Wyndham Lewis’s writing, he
did not despair at the state of affairs, but took heart: “It is a hope-
ful sign,” he continued, “that a small number of intelligent persons
are aware of the necessity to harmonize the interests, and therefore
to harmonize first the ideas, of the civilized countries of Western
Europe.” He is hopeful that this harmonization will lead to the
“reaffirmation of the European tradition,” a reaffirmation that may
arise from an analysis of “its constituents in the various nations of
Europe; and proceed finally to the further formation of such a tra-
dition” (“A Commentary,” Criterion 6, August 1927, 97–100). These
optimistic sentiments are from the pen of the author of The Waste
Land, a work written less than six years earlier, and widely received
as bemoaning the disintegration of European civilization. Perhaps
it would be more in the spirit of the author to regard The Waste
Land as providing an inventory of the components of European civ-
ilization, now in a state of dis-integration, but awaiting a re-integration.
Massis’s comment in his Criterion piece on the state of civilization
in the wake of the war is very much in the spirit of The Waste Land.
The “inhuman and hideous division” to which Massis referred is
the Reformation, which he regarded as a German breach in Euro-
pean unity culminating in World War I: “We are confronted to-day
with the tragic epilogue to this inhuman and hideous division. It is
civilisation, the idea even of civilisation, of which Europe claimed
to be the holder, that is most deeply wounded. In the eyes of that
part of the world, which lived in the illusion of our homogeneity,
civilisation seems vanquished. The war has made it unrecognis-
able” (“Defence of the West,” 228–9). Massis saw “the soul of the
West” as under attack by the “East,” by which he means Germany
and the Slavic countries, not China, India, or the Islamic countries
of the Middle East. Massis’s article borders on the hysterical. He
believed the West was vulnerable because its “soul” was “divided,
uncertain of its principles, confusedly eager for spiritual liberation,
and all the more ready to destroy itself, to allow itself to be broken
up by Oriental anarchy.” The “root-ideas of the West,” which are
allegedly being abandoned are “personality, unity, stability, author-
ity, [and] continuity.” Eliot and Lewis would not disagree with that
list. Nor did they recoil from Massis’s lament: “We are asked to
break these to pieces for the sake of a doubtful Asiaticism in which
all the forces of the human personality dissolve and return to noth-
ingness” (231). Even though Massis’s analysis is shamelessly Fran-
co-centric and special-pleading, the events of 1939 to 1945 could
only have reinforced his view of European decline and German
barbarity.
It is not clear – in what I have read of Massis’s work – whether
Britain would count as German or Latin for him. (Hitler consid-
ered both the French and the English to be Aryans.) But there is
no doubt that Eliot believed that Britain belonged within the Euro-
pean community of nations. As early as “Tradition and Individual
Talent” (1917) Eliot had expressed his belief in a single European
culture, asserting there that “the whole of the literature of Europe
from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own
country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultane-
ous order” (Selected Essays, 14). He never strayed from that view –
which is free of nationalist prejudice so far as Europe is concerned.
Toward the conclusion of Paleface: The Philosophy of the “Melting
Pot,” published early in 1929, just two years after Eliot’s remarks in
the Criterion, Lewis also comments on Massis’ Défense de l’occident.
Like Eliot, Lewis drew the cultural divide further east than Massis’s
Latin Europe so as to include Germany – still excluding Poland
and Russia: “If you tried to make of gaelic chivalry and Italian sci-
ence, german music and norse practical enterprise, one thing, that
would be a strange monster. Which is demonstrated by Mr. Massis
in his Défense de l’Occident, where his “west” is confined to the latin
soil.” However, Lewis saw Massis’s strategy as “an evasion only of the
problem it is just against that separatism as between the different
segments of the West that we have most to contend. We should
have – should we not? – our local Melting-pot” (256). Indeed,
although nostalgic for the old cultural dispensation, Lewis accepts

the need for a European “melting pot.” Paleface is largely motivat-
ed by Lewis’s fear of another great war – a fear that most did not
share in 1929. Lewis saw the choice as lying between armed sepa-
ration of distinct European societies (and the inevitability of armed
conflict) and the blurring of national distinctions. He prefers the
latter: “Of these two attitudes – the melting and the non-melting –
the American appears to me by far the better: I am heart and soul
upon the side of the Melting-pot, not upon that of the Barbed
Wire” (275–6). Like Eliot, he desired a united Europe, pointing
out that Europe was once unified as Christendom: “If it is objected
that there is no unifying principle in Europe to compare with amer-
icanization, it is necessary to recall that only five centuries ago the
whole of Europe possessed one soul in a more fundamental way
than America can be said to at this moment” (277–8).
Unhappily, the only unifying factor that Europe possessed in
1929, according to Lewis, was race – hence his title, Paleface. (As
noted above, Lewis’s dream of a United States of Europe has pret-
ty well come to pass, and for much the same reason he gave – the
avoidance of war.)
Like his friends, Lewis believed himself to be “a man of the ‘tran-
sition,’ we none of us can help being that.” Although he disclaimed
any “desire to walk into the Past,” he still felt that “what we have lost
was not absolutely to be despised, and should be bitterly regretted
if nothing is put in its place as good as it” (83). He feared that “no
one will have the genius or the bonne volonté even to do anything
but batten upon the ruins and call that the ‘New World’” (84).
Lewis, then, was far more apprehensive of the future, ten years
after the war than was Eliot, who seldom commented on the dan-
ger of a new European war, and never – even after the fact – con-
demned the terror bombing tactics of both sides.
Pound’s assessment of the state of civilization in the immediate
post-war period was angrily dismissive, and his comments are large-
ly devoid of any comprehensible analysis of the state of European
civilization. He seemed to have been irritated at his failure and that
of his friends to capture the attention of a broad public. Lewis may
well have had Pound in mind when he spoke of those who would
“batten upon the ruins and call that the ‘New World’.” In a letter
of 1920 to Harry Turner, the editor of Much Ado, Pound declared
“an itch for founding a wholly new sort of university.” Such an insti-
tution was needed because, Pound believed, “It is absolutely neces-
sary to start the new civilization whether one builds it inside the
decaying cortex of the present one or on the scraps doesn’t seem
to me much to matter. The present one will go to pot all quickly
enough without one’s pushing ... It is foolish to scrap all the past
(as it is foolish to carry corpses): European civilization is too rich,
really rich, to chuck altogether. But the good apples damn well
want to be taken out of the barrel, and they want a bit of hunting
for in the muck” (“Here’s Your Chance,” EPPP, 116).
It is, of course, impossible to discover from these remarks just
what it was about the state of cultural affairs in 1920 that Pound
characterized as a “decaying cortex.” A contemporaneous letter to
the New York Evening Post suggests that it was pique at the public
neglect of himself and his friends: “I think you will make a fright-
ful ... mistake if you don’t realize at once how utterly gone to pot
England is, vie intellectuel et littéraire, at this moment, after the five
years of war and two of muddle. The manner in which any vital
idea, any idea which really hits anything, is excluded from the
whole press is amazing ...” (“A Letter from Ezra Pound,” EPPP,
4:126). Unlike Eliot and Lewis, Pound’s perspective in the imme-
diate post-war remained focused on cultural politics pretty well to
the exclusion of national and international affairs. What he shared
with his friends was discontent with the way things were.
Although they differ on much, it is clear that Eliot, Lewis, Massis,
and Pound are on the same page in their rejection of socialism and
communism, on the one hand, and of President Wilson’s “human-
itarian sentiments” on the other. In short, they rejected both the
Left and the Liberal middle. As a consequence they inevitably
found themselves in the neighbourhood of fascism when it mani-
fested itself in 1922. Certainly fascism purported to address the
same issues as those that concerned our artists – most particularly
the alleged moral and intellectual bankruptcy of liberal democrat-
ic capitalism and its attendant nationalism and imperialism. But it
does them a great injustice to read their comments in the twenties
in the context of the Italian and German belligerence in the thir-
ties, and still more in the context of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”24
We can see from this brief survey of their post-war remarks prior
to the Depression and to the outbreak of hostilities in the thirties
that all three assumed that the political and economic status quo
was unsustainable, and that they therefore lived in an age of tran-
sition. In this they were not alone. But the politicians in the democ-
racies were carrying on business as usual. The attention of political
actors was focused on the threat of communism. Communism was
not seen as a military threat – as was the case during the Cold War
– but rather as an internal threat through subversion. Entrepre-
neurs were carrying on as usual, brokering deals, exploiting new
protectorates and old colonies, and keeping wages low. Pound,
Eliot, and Lewis all suffered from the hubris of supposing that their
credentials as artists permitted them to offer solutions to the chal-
lenges facing Europe in the post war. They were in intellectual
waters that ran too deep and too fast for them. Eliot swam against
the current and managed to survive. Lewis decided to swim with
the current, all the while protesting that a cataract lay ahead, which
eventually engulfed him and Europe. Pound thought that in Social
Credit he had found a barque that would see him safely to the far-
ther shore, but it became mired in a fascist bog.
The intellectual, political, and military milieu in which the polit-
ical postures of Eliot, Lewis, and Pound were formulated has
received a great deal of attention, but very little of it is non-parti-
san. In some ways this study is a response to Vincent Sherry, who
asks at the end of his 1993 study, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and
Radical Modernism, “May one admire the artistic achievement of
Lewis and Pound, then, by detaching it from the social value it dis-
covers so stubbornly in their work?” I am not here concerned with
the greatness of their artistic achievement, but rather with the
degree to which their “social values” are egregiously reprehensible.
On the other hand, my argument would tend to support Sherry’s
fear that “One may argue that the aesthetic of authority immanent
in the work of the Anglo-Americans develops, through the twen-
ties, into the imminent apocalypse of dictatorial fascism” (187). I
do not support the causal relationship between aesthetics and
political action that Sherry’s comment implies. What I do support
is a claim that Lewis’s and Pound’s aesthetic views informed their
political postures – which is perhaps what Sherry meant.
Perhaps we are now far enough from that era to consider it dis-
passionately. The fact that our own global political landscape is just
as troubling and puzzling in the early years of the twenty-first cen-
tury as theirs was in the early years of the twentieth should instill a
little humility in us as we attempt to understand their behaviour. It
must have been just as difficult to see one’s way to the desirable
future of a world relatively free of war, deprivation, disease, and
political dysfunction in the 1920s as it is today. Then, as now, pun-
dits proclaimed a “New World Order.” But then, as now, an inter-
ested observer would see that the widespread disorder and violence
reported daily in the media failed to match pious nostrums about
the new world order. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the
Spartacus uprising in Germany in1919, Japanese expansion in the
Far East, old-fashioned European imperialism in the Near East and
Africa, the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians in Turkey in 1922,
the failure of democracy in Italy with Mussolini’s seizure of power
in the same year, the British General Strike of May 1926, Stalin’s
massacre of the Ukrainian Kulaks beginning in the Fall of 1929,
and the Stock Market crash in the same year, all bespoke a danger-
ous, uncertain, and frightening future. And, of course, the Great
War itself provided an alarming example of how badly things could
go wrong.
The Great War was the disaster that dominated the thinking of
all those who addressed political, cultural, and economic issues as
well as international relations. As Margaret MacMillan puts it in
Paris 1919: “For four years the most advanced nations in the world
had poured out their men, their wealth, the fruits of their industry,
science and technology, on a war that may have started by accident
but was impossible to stop ... Four years of war shook forever the
supreme self-confidence that had carried Europe to world domi-
nance. After the Western Front, Europeans could no longer talk of
a civilizing mission to the world” (xxvi). The Europeans – in our
case, Wyndham Lewis – perhaps could not, but our two Americans
persisted, quixotically, in agitating for a renewed transatlantic
European civilization.
ii
A Twentieth-Century Renaissance
We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new

beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with
great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems
to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! ... Why should we
look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of
the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the
absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism, 4 and 9, 1909
culture wars
Ezra Pound sailed from New York for Europe in early February
1908. He was leaving a teaching post at Wabash College in Indiana,
having been bought out by the administration for reasons that
remain somewhat obscure, but which involved a female member of
a travelling acting troupe.1 He landed at Gibraltar; then trained to
Venice, where he published a slim volume of poetry, A Lume Spento
(“With Taper’s Quenched”). That volume was marked by his
admiration for William Butler Yeats and the style of the British
“Nineties.”2 At this stage Pound was just a skilful imitator of current
European fashions, leavened with some late Medieval Spanish and
Italian spice. His poetry was far from representing the fresh breeze
from the “Idaho kid” – as T. E. Hulme later dubbed him. By Sep-
tember he had found his way to London, where he quickly estab-
lished himself as a minor literary figure. Except for an extended
visit home, Pound remained in London until 1920, when he left
for Paris, unhappy, as we have seen, with the London literary estab-
lishment, despite having had considerable success in carving out a
place for himself on its fringes.
A few months before Pound made his way to London, a wealthy

Italian poet, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, published the “Futurist
Manifesto” in the influential Paris journal Le Figaro (20 February
1909). It was prefaced by the account of an automobile accident
that had befallen Marinetti as he raced his powerful car on the
streets of Paris. The preface set the tone for his celebration of the
machine and speed in the Manifesto itself – as in the fourth prin-
ciple: “a roaring car ... is more beautiful than the Victory of Samoth-
race.” The eighth principle expressed what we have seen to be a
widespread perception, that Europe – or mankind – was at the end
of an era, and the beginning of a new one: “We stand on the last
promontory of the centuries! ... Why should we look back, when
what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impos-
sible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the
absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed”
(Marinetti: Selected Writings, 42).
Marinetti’s celebration of machinery and speed was accompa-
nied by a more portentous celebration of machismo, violence,
and war in “principle” number nine: “We will glorify war – the
world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive ges-
ture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and
scorn for woman” (43). Such remarks may have seemed harmless
in 1909, but after 1914 they took on a serious colouring, and the
last remark will raise everyone’s hackles these days. However,
Marinetti remained an enthusiast of machines and violence even
in the face of machine guns slaughtering the youth of Europe in
France, Belgium, Russia, and the Tyrol. In the preface to his
1915 volume of poems, belligerently titled, War: The World’s Only
Hygiene, he called for Italy to join the war. (Uncertain whether to
back Germany and Austria or France, England, and Russia in the
war, Italy delayed – in the end declaring war on Austria on 23
May 1915, almost a year after the beginning of hostilities in
August 1914.) Early in 1918 – even before the end of the war,
Marinetti founded the Futurist Political party in Italy and estab-
lished fasci throughout Italy. Although Mussolini’s new Fascist
party absorbed Marinetti’s Futurist party within a year, Mussoli-
ni’s economic policies were too conservative for Marinetti, and
he later opposed Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany, as well as the
A Twentieth-Century Renaissance 57
anti-Semitic laws that Mussolini introduced in 1938 (Clark, Mod-

ern Italy 1871–1982, 214 ff).
Although Eliot never showed much interest in Futurism, Pound
and Wyndham Lewis were intrigued by it. So much so that, prompt-
ed by the London exhibitions of Italian futurists in 1912 and 1913,
they concocted their own movement, called Vorticism, as a
response. In the latter year (on 18 November) Lewis and others
organized a dinner to welcome Marinetti, charging three shillings
per person. Marinetti was back in London the following year and
published yet another manifesto in the Sunday Observer on 7 June
1914. A few days later (12 June) he gave a lecture at the Doré gal-
leries on Bond Street (delivered in French), which Lewis attended
with accomplices, intending to make a scene (Meyers, 60–1). His
objective, of course, was to advertise Vorticism.
Lewis’s account in Blasting and Bombardiering provides a good
sense of the combative high spirits within the artistic community,
scarce months before the declaration of war:
the excitement was intense. Putsches took place every month or

so. Marinetti for instance, you may have heard of him! It was he
who put Mussolini up to fascism. Mussolini admits it. They ran
neck and neck for a bit, but Mussolini was the better politician.
Well, Marinetti brought off a futurist Putsch about this time.
It started in Bond Street. I counter-putsched. I assembled in
Greek Street a determined band of miscellaneous anti-futurists.
Mr. Epstein was there: Gaudier Brzeska, T. E. Hulme ... There
were about ten of us. After a hearty meal we shuffled bellicosely
round to the Doré gallery.
Marinetti had entrenched himself upon a high lecture plat-
form and he put down a tremendous barrage in French as we
entered. Gaudier went into action at once. He was very good at
the parlez-vous, in fact he was a Frenchman. He was sniping him
without intermission, standing up in his place in the audience
all the while. The remainder of our party maintained a con-
fused uproar. (Blasting, 36)
The facetious nature of the account – though it was written

post-war, and long after Mussolini’s successful putsch of 28 Octo-
ber 1922 – catches the spirit of gamesmanship that characterized

the aesthetic politics of the pre-war period, when anything
seemed possible, and most things were permissible. As Lewis put
it: “Life was one big bloodless brawl, prior to the Great Bloodlet-
ting” (Blasting, 39).
Vorticism was launched in a new magazine two months after the
Doré Gallery kerfuffle. Given that it first appeared on 4 August
1914, three days after Germany declared war on Russia, and eight
days before Britain declared war on Germany and Austria, Blast was
a somewhat unfortunate title. However, the aesthetic conflict was
not grounded on a fundamental aesthetic, philosophical – or
indeed, political – conflict. It was initially just a contest for atten-
tion. Pound’s description of it as “a new futurist, Cubist, Imagist
Quarterly,” when telling Joyce about Lewis’s project for a journal in
April of 1914, implies an extremely eclectic program (Read, 26).
Looking back on these early “culture wars” in Blasting and Bom-
bardiering, Lewis wondered if they were as innocent as he had
thought: “Really all this organized disturbance was Art behaving as
if it were Politics. But I swear I did not know it. It may in fact have
been politics. I see that now. Indeed it must have been but I was unaware of
the fact: I believed that this was the way artists were always received;
a somewhat tumultuous reception, perhaps, but after all why not? I
mistook the agitation in the audience for the sign of an awakening
of the emotions of artistic sensibility. And then I assumed too that
artists always formed militant groups” (my emphasis. 35). This com-
ment reveals the assumption by Lewis that artist always formed an
avant-garde – an assumption clearly shared by Pound and Eliot.
Blasting and Bombardiering was written after Time and Western Man,
Lewis’s attempt to sort through the ideological confusion that pre-
vailed among artists in the pre-war period, a confusion that was not
alleviated by the war, nor by the Peace of Versailles. Sadly, the war
did remove some of the participants in the pre-war cultural con-
flicts. Within a year or so, T. E. Hulme and Henri Gaudier had both
perished in the trenches with hundreds of thousands of less
renowned combatants. Lewis (who saw combat), Marinetti, Pound,
and Eliot (who did not) survived the war to carry on the pre-war
cultural conflicts under new conditions.
A brief digression on the aesthetics of Pound, Eliot, and Lewis
will help, I think, to clarify the complex interaction between the
three men, who regarded themselves as allies in the struggle to

reconstruct the tired cultural and political world they had inherit-
ed – at least for a time. Lewis was the first to break ranks, attacking
Pound as a “revolutionary simpleton” in Time and Western Man. But
he was careful not to alienate Eliot, and Eliot continued to praise
both Lewis and Pound in the pages of the Criterion, as well as pub-
lishing both of them in Criterion. Although Pound and Eliot cer-
tainly went separate ways on the political front, they maintained
their friendship – even through Pound’s indictment for treason
and incarceration at St. Elizabeths in Washington. Clearly they
shared more than personal friendship. Part of what they shared was
an aesthetic that underpinned their art and informed their politi-
cal and cultural outlook, and that aesthetic was primarily expres-
sivist, with perforce, a formalist component.
Pound and Lewis were the principal figures in the Vorticist
“movement” – if it deserves so grand a designation. Although it
did develop an identity less scattered than the eclectic “Futurist,
Cubist, Imagist” movement of Pound’s description, it remained a
public relations venture more than a new direction in art. Pound’s
principal attempt to define Vorticism in a talk given early in 1914
is not very helpful: “We are all futurists to the extent of believing
with Guillaume Apollinaire that “On ne peut pas porter partout avec
soi le cadavre de son père.” [“A man cannot carry the corpse of his
father everywhere with him.”] But ‘futurism,’ when it gets into art,
is, for the most part, a descendant of impressionism. It is a sort of
accelerated impressionism” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 82). Pound under-
stood Futurism, then, to be focused on the relation between the
artist and the world, as is the case with Impressionism. Impres-
sionism expects artworks to represent accurately the artist’s percep-
tion of the world at a particular time and place, or in a particular
mood – as opposed to representing the world, as it is known (or
believed) to be.
But Pound misrepresents Futurism, whose focus is very differ-
ent than Impressionism’s. Marinetti’s point of departure was the
observation that the nature of the man-made world has changed
through technological developments. In order to represent accu-
rately that altered world, he believed that art must also change.
The principal feature of the modern world for Marinetti was its
speed, therefore futurist art must somehow represent rapid
motion. (Hence Pound’s characterization of Futurism as “accel-

erated impressionism.”) Impressionist art, in contrast, aspires to
represent the artist’s perception of the observed world, and, while
Impressionist painting does represent the human environment,
in contrast to futurist painting it shuns machines and architec-
ture, and is contemplative rather than kinetic in mode. However,
Pound is right that both movements justify their style on mimetic
grounds.
Pound, Lewis, and Eliot shared the futurist perception that the
man-made world had changed profoundly and, indeed, was con-
stantly changing. And they agreed that the new human environ-
ment required a new artistic style. But, adhering to an expressive,
rather than a mimetic, aesthetic they believed that it is the artist’s
task to assimilate the “new reality” creatively and imaginatively,
rather than merely mimicking some of its more superficial aspects
– such as speed and mechanical movement. And, since the assimi-
lating imagination of the artist ineluctably incorporates the cultur-
al past, they were not willing to chuck it out as the futurists were.
Their aesthetic strategy – as undergraduate lecturers have stressed
for generations – was to juxtapose the past with the present. An
early articulation of this strategy is found in Eliot’s well known Dial
review of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps: “The spirit of the music was
modern, and the spirit of the ballet was primitive ceremony ...
Whether Strawinsky’s [sic] music be permanent or ephemeral I do
not know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes
into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the
grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the
underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modem life;
and to transform these despairing noises into music” (“London
Letter,” 453).
Two years later, Eliot claimed the method for himself and his
cohort of artists, in the famous Dial review of Ulysses: “In using the
myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contempo-
raneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others
must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than
the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his
own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of con-
trolling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary

history” (Selected Prose, 177). Although commonly cited to illustrate
the formalist tendency of the modernists, the remark is even more
clearly expressivist. The “mythological method” is a means of
expressing the modern world, which Eliot sees as lacking purpose
and order.3
More than thirty years after the event Lewis protested Partisan
Review’s claim that Pound was a prime mover in Vorticism: “That
Blast was my idea, that I was the editor, that in short the whole show
was mine, finally that vorticism was purely a painters’ affair (as
imagism was a purely literary movement, having no relation what-
ever to vorticism, nor anything in common with it) need not worry
you.” He also maintained that “It was with regret I included the
poems of my friend Ezra Pound: they ‘let down,’ I felt, the radical
purism of the visual contents, or the propaganda of same.” (April
1949, Letters of Wyndham Lewis, 491–2).
It is understandable that Lewis wanted to correct Pound’s version
of the history of Vorticism, for Pound’s aesthetic is at odds with
Lewis’s. We have seen that Pound described Vorticism as “expres-
sionism, neo-cubism, and imagism gathered together in one
camp.” And he stressed the polemical nature of Vorticism as a reac-
tion to Futurism, comparing their conflict to the nineteenth cen-
tury clash between Symbolism and Impressionism – that is to say,
between a quasi-mystical expressivist movement and a quasi-scien-
tific mimetic one. Pound contrasted the futurist’s “curious tic for
destroying past glories” with Vorticism’s lack of a “desire to evade
comparison with the past.” The Vorticist’s are, he said, “wholly
opposed to his [Marinetti’s] aesthetic principles” (Gaudier-Brzeska,
90).
Pound invoked Kandinsky, the founder of abstract expression-
ism, as a fellow traveller with Vorticism, and also recruited James
Whistler as a proto-Vorticist. Pound claimed for himself and his
friends – Lewis, Eliot, Gaudier-Brzeska – the Romantic capacity to
see into the heart of things, revealing the permanent and universal
where others saw only the fleeting and local: “Every concept, every
emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary
form. It belongs to the art of this form. If sound, to music; if
formed words, to literature; the image, to poetry; form, to design;
colour in position, to painting; form or design in three planes, to

sculpture; movement, to the dance or to the rhythm of music or
verses” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 18). He compared art to algebra, which he
called “analytics:” “The statements of ‘analytics,’” he says, “are
‘lords’ over fact. They are the thrones and dominations that rule
over form and recurrence. And in like manner are great works of
art lords over fact, over race-long recurrent moods, and over to-
morrow” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 91–2). Although neither Eliot nor Lewis
commented directly on these remarks of Pound’s, it is unlikely that
they would have endorsed his aesthetic, which has more in com-
mon with Swedenborgian inspired Symbolism than with their more
secular expressivism.
Even though Pound’s notion of “primary form” sounds rather
like archetypalism, it is distinct from archetypalism on two
grounds: 1) he is not claiming that the artist has special access to a
World Soul or Collective Unconscious – as his mentor, Yeats,
believed; 2) Pound’s “primary form” is an empty vessel akin, as he
argues, to algebraic symbols. Just as one can assign any value to the
symbols on one side of an algebraic equation, so the insights con-
tained in great works of art can be re-expressed in a manner appro-
priate to a different time and place. The general point is that while
artistic revelation is permanent, artistic styles and modes can and
do change.
Instead of observing a noumenal realm in a Swedenborgian
manner, Pound imagined the artist seeing into the soul of
mankind, itself permanent and unalterable in its fundamentals,
though – because it is responsive to external circumstances – infi-
nitely malleable in externals. Art expresses/reveals those funda-
mentals – albeit encumbered with inessential details that require
constant re-expression in each new “age.” Pound articulated this
view most clearly in a part of “Affirmations: Analysis of the
Decade,” not reprinted in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir:
The vorticist is expressing his complex consciousness ... One, as

a human being, cannot pretend fully to express oneself unless
one express instinct and intellect together. The softness and the ulti-
mate failure of interest in automatic painting are caused by a
complete lack of conscious intellect. Where does this bring us?
It brings us to this: Vorticism is a legitimate expression of life.

... To be civilised is to have swift apperception of the complicated life
of today; it is to have a subtle and instantaneous perception of it,
such as savages and wild animals have of the necessities and
dangers of the forest. It is to be no less alive or vital than the
savage. It is a different kind of aliveness. (“Affirmations II,”
EPPP 2 5)
In this remark we have Pound’s version of the unified or “inte-

grated” sensibility that Eliot believed was lost in the seventeenth
century. Pound found that unified sensibility to be exemplified in
the Italian Renaissance and believed it was now manifest once
again in some few exceptional souls in the early twentieth century.
Recognizing that Modernists all adhered to a formalist and
expressivist view of art explains how there could be fundamental
disagreement about the content of the message without destroying
their commonalty of purpose. Since they agreed on very little, they
had to emphasize the formal aspect of art to the exclusion of con-
tent in their mutually supportive polemics.4 Moreover they really
did agree that the transformation of the human environment that
their cohort group had experienced required a transformation of
artistic form. It was no longer possible, they believed, to pour new
wine into old bottles. Even though they had divergent religious,
political, social, and economic views, and dissimilar predilections,
prejudices, and convictions – which were by no means incidental to
their poetry or fiction – they could ignore those differences in their
mutual self-promotion.
So when Lewis spoke of “art behaving as politics,” he put his fin-
ger on an aspect of the cultural dynamics of the period prior to
the Great War. As already noted, the avant-garde was persuaded
that they stood on the threshold of a new age, a world in which
everything was up for revision or rejection – not just aesthetic
styles, but also scientific theories, political practices, and social
and economic relations – all of which had been relatively stable in
Europe since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 put an end to
the momentum of the French Revolution. As a consequence every-
one was jockeying for position – either to be on the right side
when the “change” came about, or to play a role in determining
its nature.
real and virtual politics
A remarkable feature of the “revolutionary” sentiments and atti-

tudes of the aesthetic modernists is that none of them were much
interested in communism, the pre-eminent revolutionary move-
ment of their day. Not only were they not attracted to commu-
nism, prior to the Great War, they did not seem to regard it as
likely to determine the future state of affairs in Europe or Amer-
ica. As we have seen, Eliot and Pound were inclined to see Amer-
ican popular democratic capitalism as the wave of the future – a
future Eliot contemplated with alarm and which Pound wel-
comed with enthusiastic anticipation. Their neglect of commu-
nism – and their hostility toward it when they bothered to think
about it – has earned them the label “reactionary.” That “reac-
tionary” is a label from the communist lexicon, which makes very
little sense outside of communist discourse, has not prevented lit-
erary scholars from applying it to our trio.5 From a communist
perspective, a reactionary is one who seeks to retard the advent of
the dictatorship of the proletariat and the eventual withering
away of the state. Any who resist that inevitability are ipso facto
“reactionary.” Given that we are now a century and a half beyond
the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and that Marx’s apocalyptic view
of history still awaits fulfillment, it might be time to cease catego-
rizing all political postures as either reactionary or progressive as
Marxists have long done.
Even though Marxism is alive and well in the American and
European academy, academic Marxists no longer adopt the label,
nor do they seek fundamental political, economic, and social
change but only cultural and psychological “consciousness raising.”
And the term, “reactionary” has indeed been set aside in favour of
versions of “politically incorrect,” a term of Marxist polemic from
the fifties, when it was coined to replace “revisionist.” Revisionists
were those Marxists who renounced violent revolution in favour of
incremental reform by means of the ballot.6 The “politically incor-
rect” were any Marxists who failed to adhere to the party line pro-
mulgated by the Kremlin. In academic and journalistic usage today,
it is applied to anyone who supports the status quo – which is vari-
ously characterized as “logocentrism,” “phallocentrism,” “Eurocen-
trism,” etc. Those who employ such terms often do not recognize
the Marxist provenance of the term “politically incorrect,” but have

fully embraced the ad hominem and accusatory style of paleo-
Marxist polemic.
Much of the older critical assessment of the literary modernists
has been from a cold-war perspective of a mutually hostile world
duopoly of democratic capitalism confronting dictatorial Soviet
communism; or – alternatively described – of egalitarian, socially
conscious Marxism confronting elitist and exploitative capitalism.
Michael North takes much the same view as mine in “Eliot, Lukács,
and the Politics of Modernism,” arguing that the opposition of the
political right and left in the interwar period tends to occlude their
shared opposition to liberal democracy: “the convergence of right
and left should suggest a theoretical realignment in which left and
right join against a common enemy: the liberalism behind modern
democracy and laissez-faire economics. For both conservative and
socialist proponents of romantic anti-capitalism see humankind in
collective terms rather than as individuals, both stress historical val-
ues over ahistorical principles, and both decry the effects of the
capitalist economy” (174).
The reactionary/progressive dyad, then, is no longer in-
escapable, and was always inappropriate for men and women born
in the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century, as were Eliot
(1888), Pound (1885), Lewis (1884), Hulme (1883), and Joyce
(1882). While that cohort group of individuals born in the 1880s
included many communist activists, the leading Marxist theorists
and activists were of the previous cohort group or older – Sorel was
born in 1847, Jaurès, 1859, Lenin, 1870, Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 –
moreover none of them wrote in English. The most prominent
political actors of our subjects’ cohort group were Benito Mussoli-
ni (1883), Josef Stalin (1879), F. D. Roosevelt (1884), Adolf Hitler
(1889), and Charles De Gaulle (1890). To look at other historical
figures whose birth lies within or just outside the decade we have:
Bertrand Russell (1872), Winston Churchill (1874), Albert Ein-
stein (1879), Martin Heidegger (1889), and Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889). Even this mere catalogue of names gives one some sense of
the profound cultural, political, and intellectual turmoil in which
our subjects found themselves.7
One could go on listing the birth dates of prominent players in
the thirties and forties, but my point is not to propose some sort of
astrological determinism based on time of birth. Obviously the

place and circumstances of an individual’s birth determine his or
her future prospects, conduct, and attitudes far more than birth
date. But all of the literary artists under consideration here were
males, born in middle class circumstances in Britain, the usa, or
Canada.8 And, since we are concerned with intellectuals, it is
important that the books to which they were exposed – at least the
new ones – were necessarily drawn from the same stock. Obviously
the world events that impinged on their lives were the same, as
were the technological and social developments to which they were
exposed.
It might be helpful to have in mind what some of the technolog-
ical developments were. Among those that came about either
shortly before 1880, or shortly thereafter, are the electric light
bulb, the phonograph and the typewriter (1878); the internal com-
bustion engine (1879); motion pictures (1895); Marconi’s first
radio broadcast – Morse code only – (1901); the Wright brothers’
powered flight (1903). The first audio broadcast, by Fessenden,
was in 1906, but commercial broadcasting did not begin until
1920, being delayed by the war – just as commercial television,
which was first achieved in the thirties, was delayed until after
World War II.
All of these technological innovations transformed a world dom-
inated by steam and rail, into which our subjects were born and
raised. They came to maturity in an electric world – for it was elec-
tricity that made possible telephones, telegraphs, motion pictures,
the radio, and – with the electrically ignited internal combustion
engine – the airplane and the automobile.9 The futurists, of course,
explicitly celebrated these developments – in particular the speed
of the automobile. Oddly Marinetti does not seem to have been
impressed by the twentieth century’s harnessing of electricity, the
sine qua non for all of the other developments – perhaps because he
was not technically competent.
The preface to the first Futurist Manifesto relates a wild drive
through Paris streets in a powerful car, ending with an upset in a
deep ditch from which the locals retrieve the automobile.
Undaunted, Marinetti and his friends remount his mechanical
steed, and with a lover’s ardour: “They thought it was dead, my
beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to revive it; and
there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins! And so, faces
smeared with good factory muck – plastered with metallic waste,
with senseless sweat, with celestial soot – we, bruised, our arms in
slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living
of the earth”(Selected Writings, 41). So far as I know, neither Pound
nor Lewis ever learned to drive an automobile. Eliot did drive, at
least occasionally. T.S. Matthews reports: “In August 1932 Eliot
and his wife went in their tiny Morris, an uncertain performer,
which Eliot drove uncertainly, from London to the Frank Morley’s
farm for the christening of his goddaughter Susanna” (Great Tom,
108). In the years of their young manhood, automobiles were the
toys of the wealthy, like Marinetti. On the other hand, Pound and
Eliot were among the first major poets in English to compose on
the typewriter (first commercially produced in the 1870s), and
both exploited the new medium of radio – Pound, with disastrous
results.
Pound and his circle all agreed that it was the role of the artist
to articulate a sensibility appropriate to this electric age – though,
as we shall see, they did not agree on what the characteristics of
that new sensibility would be. Pound was an early and uncompro-
mising Pollyanna, articulating the role of the artist as an avatar of
the twentieth century “renaissance” – or risorgimento – as he often
labelled the advent of the new cultural dispensation. His early –
indeed, premature – articulation of that view is due in consider-
able part to the fact that he was paying the rent through literary
journalism. His principal outlet was Alfred Orage’s journal, signif-
icantly titled The New Age.10 He published a series of articles in that
journal after the United States had entered the war, when it was
clear that the allies would soon declare victory. In that series,
“What America has to Live Down,” he addressed the politi-
cal/cultural situation that he thought would prevail in the post
war. He is no longer quite so confident as he was in “Affirmations,”
written on the eve of the war. “at present,” he wrote in capitals,
“the intellectual sees himself threatened by bolshevism on one
side and the y.m.c.a. on the other, while the raging three-headed
Kultur-bitch devastates things in the middle.”
It is typical of Pound’s eccentric cultural commentary that he
chose the Young Men’s Christian Association as a representative of
the Christian status quo. It is not so clear just what he means by “the
three-headed Kultur-bitch,” but his use of the German term and

the triple headedness of the monster, suggests that he may have in
mind the dominance of Hegelian philosophy in Germany, Britain,
and the United States.11 This supposition is supported by his refer-
ence to “the speeches and essays of Missouri professors” to which
he is indifferent. The intellectual’s task, he feels, is to attempt
“computations for the salvage of some scraps of civilisation.” He
goes on to list other things the intellectual does not want – “labour-
ing men and their families mowed down by the machine-guns of
militia subsidized by the capitalist;” he does not want “labour to
bull-doze civilisation;” “he does not want bolshevism;” and he “does
not want reactions into outworn superstitions” – by which he meant
religious belief, in particular, Christianity (The New Age 23, 12 Sept.
1918, 314).
Since he was hostile to Christianity, Pound was not attracted to
Charles Maurras’ Action Française, a movement founded during
the Dreyfus affair by self-appointed defenders of the Catholic
faith and the honour of the French army. Maurras turned it into
a Royalist movement, attaching the slogan, classique, catholique,
monarchique to the Journal de l’Action Française. Although Pound
does not name the movement, he denounces “French neo-
catholicism” in “What America Has to Live Down” as “a deca-
dence, a decay; French modern mysticism, the poorest of mysti-
cisms yet a ready trap for the transatlantic reader who is not
forewarned for the menace behind it” (314). (The “transatlantic
reader” he had in mind was no doubt his friend T. S. Eliot, who
found much merit in Maurras, echoing his slogan in the 1928
preface to For Lancelot Andrewes where he declared himself to be
“classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in
religion.”) Pound was militantly anti-Christian, uninterested in
monarchy – though drawn to strong men – and indifferent to the
fixed standards that classicism entails. Lewis falls between the two,
often characterizing his views as classical but shying away from
both Christianity and monarchy – though very much in favour of
fixed standards.
Although Pound is clear in rejecting both capitalism and the
leading candidates in Britain to replace it at that date – Fabianism,
Marxism, and Chestertonian Distributism – he does not articulate
just what he thinks the politics of the new civilization should be. To
get some idea of that, we have to return to the double series he

wrote for the New Age in1912, during a lengthy visit to his native
land after three years abroad (subsequently published as Patria
Mia). There he rejected all “the fine dreams of empire, of a uni-
versal empire,” because “it came to no sort of civic reality, either in
the high sheriffage of Charles the Great [Charlemagne], or in its
atavistic parody under Napoleon”(49). If one remembers that
World War I was essentially a war between the old imperial powers
of Britain, France, and Russia on the one side and the even older
imperial power of Austria and the rising imperial German state on
the other, Pound’s rejection of “the dreams of empire” seems wise.
(Italy’s ambivalence and lateness in entering the First World War
reflects in part its non-imperial status – a lack Mussolini would later
attempt to repair.)
“On the other hand,” Pound observed, “the free cities now here,
now there, contrived to hold out against the feudal system and are
become the model for our present constitutional governments.”
The principal virtue of the free city, in Pound’s view, seems to be
that it is small enough to permit participatory democracy: “In
principle it would seem that any scheme which demands the
agreement of an infinite multitude of people before it can become
effective is little likely to achieve itself” (49). Of course, Pound’s
thoughts on the matter are informed by the example of the Italian
Renaissance, which was, indeed, fostered by independent cities.
He makes the parallel explicit: “if one will study the cinquecento
minutely, one will perhaps conclude that the earlier renaissance
had two things requisite, the first, indiscriminate enthusiasm; the
second, a propaganda. I mean that and just that. There was behind
the awakening a body of men, determined, patient, bound together infor-
mally by kindred ambitions, from which they knew that they person-
ally could reap but little” (53–4, my emphasis). Pound’s political
thought never really rises above this unsophisticated belief that
coteries of like-minded, enlightened, and public-spirited individu-
als make history.
For a time Eliot and Lewis shared Pound’s Pollyanna belief that
a determined cadre of like-minded, enlightened men could
reform society. All three of them devoted enormous effort to
assemble the ideas and policies that would bring about a culture
and civilization successor to the one in which they found them-
selves. Unlike Marx, Engels, and Lenin, they did not contemplate
any direct political action themselves. Nor, of course, did they con-
template the destruction of “bourgeois” culture. On the contrary,
they hoped to renew it, and conducted themselves as heralds of
the new dispensation, pointing out the new ideas and practices
that would bring about the renewal. Despite their early coopera-
tion in the culture wars, they were far from acting in concert on
the political front. Pound and Lewis kept abreast of Eliot’s politi-
cal and cultural theorizing, but neither of them endorsed it. After
dismissing Pound’s political ideas in Time and Western Man, Lewis
largely ignored Pound in his polemical publications. Eliot, for his
part, remained respectful of Lewis’s views – though he did not
share them. So far as Pound is concerned, Eliot was indulgent,
finding Pound’s enthusiasm for Mussolini’s ideas and practices
more embarrassing than anything else. And both Eliot and Lewis
flirted somewhat with the Social Credit economic critique to
which Pound exposed them, but they otherwise disregarded or
mocked his political agitation.
But even though our poets and novelist were not men of action
like Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler, when those political actors came
on the scene they employed rhetoric very similar to that of our lit-
erary figures. They, too, maintained that new social, cultural, and
technological conditions called for a new political structure.
Indeed, as already noted, Mussolini’s fascist party absorbed the
futurist political organization that Marinetti had established in Italy
after 1918. On the other hand, the “German Worker’s Party,”
which Hitler turned into the Nazi party, had no similar literary or
aesthetic antecedents. The rhetorical similarity and shared political
opponents between himself and the fascists did not deceive Eliot,
but Lewis was seduced by those aspects of fascism into endorsing
Mussolini briefly – soon dumping him in favour of Hitler. Pound,
as is well known, succumbed completely to Mussolini’s rhetoric and
never seemed to perceive the mismatch between Mussolini’s
speeches and his actions.
a modern renaissance
Pound’s hope for an American renaissance – or “awakening” as he

sometimes called it – was not just a passing phase. His three-part
series in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago magazine, Poetry, entitled

“Renaissance,” (February and March 1915) is essentially a quixot-
ic program for an American renaissance, complete with analogies
to the Italian renaissance of the quattro- and cinquecento: “The
first step of a renaissance, or awakening, is the importation of
models for painting, sculpture or writing. We have had many
‘movements’ movements stimulated by ‘comparison.’ Flaminius
and Amaltheus and the latinists of the quattrocento and the
cinquecento began a movement for enrichment which culminat-
ed in the Elizabethan stage, and which produced the French
Pléïade ... The romantic awakening dates from the production of
Ossian. The last century rediscovered the middle ages. It is possible
that this century may find a new Greece in China. In the meantime we
have come upon a new table of values” (“The Renaissance I: The
Palette,” 5, my emphasis).
The choice of China as the twentieth century equivalent of the
quattrocento’s Byzantium reflects Pound’s reception of the notes
of the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa from Fenollosa’s
widow in March 1914. Those notes set him on a life-long explo-
ration of the poetic power of the Chinese ideogram and of Confu-
cian political thought. (Fenollosa’s theory of the ideogram influ-
enced Pound’s political thought as well as his rhetoric, but that is
another story.) Confucius provided Pound with a philosophical
model compatible with totalitarianism. What we need to notice is
that Pound assigned to Fenollosa’s notes on China the same role as
that played by the rediscovery of Greek philosophy for the Italian
Renaissance, of Ossian (an idiosyncratic choice) for British roman-
ticism, and of the rediscovery of the Middle Ages for the Victorians.
The point to take is that Pound early on saw history as a cyclical
story involving cultural degeneration, followed by a renewal trig-
gered by the reception of alien or forgotten cultural values and
practices. Pound believed that the role of the artist was to “discov-
er” and then to facilitate reception of those renovative values and
practices.
Pound may well have picked up his notion of a new renaissance
arising from the cross–fertilization of Western and Eastern culture
from Fenollosa’s widow, whom he had met in 1910 at the flat of
the Bengali poet Sarojini Naidu.12 Certainly Fenollosa held such a
view. He had written in the Atlantic Monthly that the fusion of East
and West “shall create in both hemispheres a far more rounded

civilization than either has ever known.” Fenollosa thought that
Japan, not Europe and America, would be the beneficiary of that
transformation. “Through her temperament, her individuality,
her deeper insight into the secrets of the East, her ready divining
of the powers of the West, ... it may be decreed in the secret coun-
cil chambers of Destiny that on her shores shall be first created
that new latter-day type of civilized man which shall prevail
throughout the world for the next thousand years” (quoted in
Chisholm, 96). Painful as this assessment by an American is in the
light of Pearl Harbor and Japanese excesses in China, Japan has
nonetheless proven to be adept at adopting Western ways to its
own culture and besting Europe and America in many commer-
cial/industrial areas.
Pound believed that he, Eliot, Lewis, Gaudier, Epstein, and
Hulme, among others, represented just such “a body of men” as
those – Valla, Ficino, Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Pico de la Miran-
dola – who ostensibly generated the Italian Renaissance. His 1914
talk on Vorticism invoked such a “body of men”: “It cannot be
made too clear that the work of the vorticists and the ‘feeling of
inner need’ existed before the general noise about vorticism. We
worked separately, we found an underlying agreement; we decided
to stand together” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 93–4). In other words, Pound
and his collaborators were responding to a Zeitgeist that embraced
them all – the spirit of modernity. However, Pound was not a revo-
lutionary in the sense that he wished to destroy or abandon the
residue of the past: “There need be little actual change even in the
existing machinery” (58). One of Pound’s recurrent slogans is
“Make It New,” by which he does not mean that one should discard
the artifacts and ideas of the past – as the slogan is often interpret-
ed – but rather that they should be renovated in the light of new con-
ditions and new possibilities.
In the New Age piece “Affirmations VI: Analysis of the Decade,”
also published in 1915, Pound listed the features of the “renais-
sance” of which he was herald and instigator. The first is “le mot
juste” which he attributed to Flaubert via Ford Madox Ford. The
second is his own idea of “the image,” a prototypical element of art-
works that is permanent and transferrable between times and cul-
tures. The third is an echo of Futurism, which he called a “sense of
dynamics” and attributed to Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier, and

Edward Wadsworth – all Vorticists (115–16). He expanded on this
last element, drawing rather strained parallels between the Italian
renaissance and the anticipated twentieth-century Anglo-American
one, with clear echoes of futurist worship of the machine:
I consider this one of the age-tendencies, springing up natural-

ly in many places and coming into the arts quite naturally and
spontaneously in England, in America, and in Italy. [The omis-
sion of Russia, France and Germany is worthy of note.] We all
know the small boy’s delight in machines ... This enjoyment of
machinery is just as natural and just as significant a phase of
this age as was the Renaissance “enjoyment of nature for its
own sake,” and not merely as an illustration of dogmatic ideas.
The modern sense of the value of the “creative, constructive
individual” ... is just as definite a doctrine as the Renaissance
attitude “De Dignitate,” humanism. As for external stimulus, new
discoveries, new lands, new languages gradually opened to us;
we have great advantage over the quattro- or cinque-cento.
(116)
Pound went on, once again, to allude to his discovery of the Chi-
nese ideogram through the Fenollosa manuscripts and offered it as
equivalent to Crisolara’s recovery of the Greek Hermetic manu-
scripts in the service of Cosimo Medici – who then had the young
Marsilio Ficino taught Greek so that he could translate them.
It is painfully obvious that Pound’s list of the features of the new
cultural dispensation is rather pathetic when placed against the
cornucopia of achievement in art and science of the Italian quat-
trocento and cinquecento. Had he been more literate in philosophy
and the social and physical sciences, and more alert to technolog-
ical achievements, he could have generated a much more impres-
sive list to support his thesis. The mention of such names such as
Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the
Lumière brothers (movies), and the Wright brothers in technolo-
gy; Henri Bergson, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred
North Whitehead in philosophy; Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and
Max Planck in physics; Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile
Durkheim in sociology: J.M. Charcot and Sigmund Freud in psy-
chology; Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in painting; Igor

Stravinsky and Arnold Schönberg in music – all of whom had
already achieved breakthroughs in their respective fields by 1915
– is sufficient to highlight the eccentricity and shallowness of
Pound’s cultural perceptions. However, had he been better
informed, he would simply have had more reason to believe that
his culture and civilization was on the cusp of a new age.
Clearly Pound’s enthusiasms in the early years of the century
were marginal to the intellectual revolution that was taking place
in the first decades of the twentieth century. And his relative
neglect of the First World War, raging as he wrote, is striking.
Though, it must be admitted, the appalling casualties of the
Somme and Verdun had not yet taken place. Despite the inconsis-
tency and eccentricity of Pound’s cultural thinking in the immedi-
ate pre-war years, his expectation of changes in the culture and civ-
ilization of Europe and America were entirely justified – even
though the changes did not conform to his predictions, and the
forces he identified proved to be marginal at best.
Pound’s choice of Confucius as his social and ethical guide is cer-
tainly more idiosyncratic than Eliot’s choice of Anglicanism as his
guide. And Pound’s decision to adopt Mussolini’s putatively benev-
olent tyranny as a political institution is less acceptable than Eliot’s
choice of Royalism. But it is difficult to find much good to be said
about either man’s choices as likely solutions to the evident stress-
es and strains that produced the unprecedented violence of the
twentieth century. Wyndham Lewis’s choices were hardly more suc-
cessful. Although he shared a sense of a cultural crisis with his two
friends, his enthusiasms only occasionally overlapped with theirs.
An endemic inconsistency in Pound’s cultural speculation is that,
despite his belief that the modern rebirth, like the Italian renais-
sance, would be engineered by a coterie of exceptional individuals,
he exhibited a strong strain of historical determinism in his analy-
sis of current events: “And this force of external stimuli is certainly
not limited by ‘what we do;’ these new masses of unexplored arts
and facts are pouring into the vortex of London. They cannot help
bringing about changes as great as the Renaissance changes, even
if we set ourselves blindly against it” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 116).
Pound seems to waffle between confidence in the inevitability of
the new civilization as a consequence of the current Zeitgeist and
the belief that there must be an organized elite if the new order is
to come about. An instance of this inconsistency is that, in contrast
to the programmatic recommendations in “Renaissance,” his earli-
er series in Poetry, he drew back from a programmatic approach to
reform in “Affirmations” and insisted on the necessity of “the indi-
vidual impulse”: “The Renaissance sought for a lost reality, a lost
freedom. We seek for a lost reality and a lost intensity. We believe
that the Renaissance was in part the result of a programme. We
believe in the value of a programme in contra-distinction to, but
not in contradiction of, the individual impulse. Without such
vagrant impulse there is no art, and the impulse is not subject to
programme” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 117).
That he identifies the Modernist’s program as the search for a
“lost reality and a lost intensity,” despite his gestures toward the
novelty of the human condition in the twentieth century suggests
some confusion on Pound’s part. But the renaissance also saw its
innovations as the revival of lost wisdom – hence the label (admit-
tedly applied by eighteenth-century French historians). Pound’s
Modernism was, in fact, a backward-looking enterprise – or, per-
haps more accurately, a palingenetic one. It was, in short, a sort of
cult of “rebirth.” Just as the Italians in the cinquecento looked back
beyond the Middle Ages and Rome to rediscover Greek learning,
the Europeans of the twentieth century would, Pound believed,
look back beyond Socrates and Plato to the pre-Socratics and the
Chinese. Nor was Pound particularly idiosyncratic in this respect.
Nietzsche had begun the vogue for the pre-Socratics in The Birth of
Tragedy; the Cambridge anthropologists, Jane Harrison and F. M.
Cornford perpetuated it in England, and later Heidegger, a
younger contemporary of our trio, reinvented Nietzsche in Ger-
many. All of these thinkers saw their program as a rejection of the
mainstream empirical tradition, which separates knower and
known, in favour of a more intimate or participatory model of
knowledge.
The balance of Pound’s poetic career plays out this program.
Where the Renaissance Italians had found new inspiration in Plato,
Plotinus, and the whole range of neoplatonic thinkers, Pound casts
his net more widely. To be sure, the Renaissance neoplatonists are
retained in his new cultural dispensation, but he adds Confucius,
Fenollosa, and the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius. Armed
with this somewhat polyglot collection of new wisdom, Pound set

out to articulate the new civilization in his untitled epic poem – still
known today simply as The Cantos. Its first portions were published
in the third year of the war, appearing in Poetry as “Three Cantos.”
Although this particular start proved to be abortive, Pound persist-
ed in his ambition to write an epic of the New Age, until he was no
longer able to write. The last fragments of his monumental poem
were published in 1968, four years before his death (in his eighty-
seventh year) in 1972, when the future of which he had dreamt was
perhaps further away than ever.
Pound’s ambition to write an epic dates from his youth. As a Mas-
ters candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, the twenty-year-old
Pound wrote a poem while studying at the British Museum. He
dedicated it to Katherine Ruth Heyman (identified only as K.R.H.),
a pianist fifteen years his senior whom he had known since his
undergraduate days at Hamilton College. The speaker is supposed
to be looking down from the heavens on his inamorata. Its interest
for this discussion is the persona’s reference to “that great forty-
year epic ... yet unwrit”:
When I see thee as some poor song-bird

Battering its wings against this cage we call Today,
Then would I speak comfort unto thee,
From out the heights I dwell in, when
That great sense of power is upon me
And I see my greater soul-self bending
Sibylwise with that great forty-year epic
That you know of, yet unwrit.13
Although these are the sentiments of a still-crass American youth

writing in an archaic style that the mature Pound dismissed in a
foreword to the 1964 reprint as “stale creampuffs,” he did, in fact,
spend – not forty but fifty-three – years writing his epic of the new
age waiting to be born.
There is little in “Three Cantos” to indicate that they were writ-
ten during the darkest days of the First World War. The disastrous
Anglo-French Somme offensive was launched on 1 July 1916 and
continued until 18 November. Despite the stubborn persistence of
the British command, it succeeded in little more than slaughtering
tens of thousands of men. Casualties – about half fatalities – were

520,000 for the British, 200,000 for the French, and 500,000 for
the Germans. At the same time the German offensive at Verdun –
which had begun earlier (on 21 February) – continued into
December, claiming 550,000 French and 434,000 German casual-
ties. The German Verdun offensive was no more successful than
the Anglo-French Somme offensive. Such fruitless slaughter trau-
matized the European public, but seems to have had little effect on
the expatriate Americans.
“Three Cantos” begins with an address to Robert Browning, as
the author of Sordello, a poem whose meditative narrative set in late
medieval Italy Pound proposes to emulate in his epic. It was to
jump about from the present to the distant pasts of Egypt, China,
and Europe. Pound invokes those people, times, and places that he
had already appealed to in the optimistic prose effusions we have
examined:
How shall we start hence, how begin the progress?

Pace naif Ficinus, say when Hotep-Hotep
Was a king in Egypt –
................
Say it was Moses’ birth year”
Exult with Shang in squatness?
There is not the slightest gesture toward the current horrors in

Europe in the first of “Three Cantos,” and no more is there in the
second and third. “Canto II” does turn to the martial theme prop-
er to epic, but it is to the Spanish epic of resistance to the Moors,
El Cid, and Lope da Vega’s play Las Almenas de Toro, rather than to
the contemporary battles in France and Flanders. The third canto
invokes the Elizabethan astrologer John Heydon and Marsilio Fici-
no before closing with a translation of part of Book IX of the
Odyssey.14 No one reading the poem could guess that it was written
in the midst of the greatest slaughter in history. Instead of the con-
temporary horrors, it reflects Pound’s pre-war preoccupation with
an “awakening” of European civilization renovated by the co-opta-
tion of alien or forgotten cultural values.
Despite the absence of the war from the poetry he wrote during
the war, Pound was not indifferent to it. In the 1918 New Age series
of articles, “What America Has to Live Down,” he castigated his

countrymen for having been so slow to come to the aid of the
British: “England is our noble ally, she has saved civilisation (along
with France, Italy, Portugal, Japan, Serbia, Montenegro, Belgium)
[all allies against Germany and Austria]. She has been perhaps
more splendid, in so far as she could have kept out. So could we
have kept out, to the eternal loss of our position, as England to the
ultimate loss of her Empire” (“What America Has to Live Down,”
The New Age 23, 5 Sept. 1918, 297). Such a call to arms is rare in
Pound’s wartime prose. He was primarily concerned with the cul-
tural consequences of the war, with how it would affect his project
for a renovated civilization along the lines he had outlined in the
prose works we have examined.
As we saw in the first chapter, Pound’s post-war reaction was
ambivalent to say the least. His lament in “Mauberley” V that so
many died “For an old bitch gone in the teeth/ For a botched civ-
ilization” is more a “farewell and good riddance” to that “botched
civilization,” than an elegy for the dead. And the preceding poem
IV similarly focuses on the duplicity of national leaders who con-
ducted the war, as much as on the suffering of the combatants:
Died some, pro patria

Non “dulce” non “et decor”
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
The reference to “usury” reflects Pound’s recent discovery of the

radical economic theories of Major Douglas, the engineer founder
of Social Credit. We will return to that topic in a later chapter. Here
the point I want to make is that the Great War did not represent for
Pound – nor for Eliot – the great watershed in European civiliza-
tion that it did for Lewis and many other Europeans. It was a regret-
table incident in the march of events toward a glorious future, but
not a turning point.
The turmoil that followed the war was not confined to the brutal
civil war unleashed in Russia by the Bolshevik revolution of Octo-
ber 1917. There were unsuccessful revolutions and uprisings else-
where as well: the Spartacus revolt in Germany, Bela Cohen’s upris-
ing in Hungary, and D’Annunzio’s freelance seizure of Fiume15 on
behalf of Italy. All – except the Bolshevik Revolution – ended in
failure for the insurgents. Pound does not react to the first two, but
does take note of the last in another of his series of commentaries
on current affairs, “The Revolt of Intelligence,” which purported to
show the way to a better future. (The series extended to ten parts
– appearing between 13 Nov. 1919 and 18 March 1920 in The New
Age.)
One would have expected Pound to endorse the adventure of a
fellow artist acting in the political arena. (Gabriele D’Annunzio was
a well-known Italian poet and playwright.) But in the first number
of the series Pound disapproved of the adventure. He did, howev-
er, contrast D’Annunzio favourably to Woodrow Wilson, the Amer-
ican president whose “Fourteen Points” called for a post-imperial
Europe made up of independent states based on the principle of
self-determination and the removal of trade barriers. Pound ex-
hibited some disapproval of D’Annunzio’s habit of haranguing
crowds from balconies, but saw the Fiume incident as a paradigm
of coming conflicts between free spirits and stifling bureaucracy:
“The D’Annunzio matter is almost wholly a duel between the type
D’Annunzio and the type Woodrow Wilson. D’Annunzio is, unfor-
tunately for our little demonstration, not a pure type, but in the
main he represents art and literature (with rhetorical detriments,
mais passons). He represents the individual human being, the per-
sonality as against the official card-index and official Globe Wer-
nicke system. And this being so, Fiume represents and precedes
more important, if less melodramatic, conflicts between art, litera-
ture, intelligence, and card-index and officialdom” (The New Age
26, 13 Nov, 1919, 21, my emphasis).16 D’Annunzio’s “impurity” was
specified in the third entry of the series (18 Dec. 1919) as his
nationalism: “It is a misfortune that D’Annunzio has followed the
same error, yelling ‘Italia’ in Fiume, instead of standing simply for
civilisation, by the contention, perfectly sustainable, that Italy rep-
resents a finer stage of civilisation than Jugo-Slavia [sic]” (“Revolt of
Intelligence III,” The New Age, 18 Dec 1919, 107).
Pound will hold consistently to this preference for imperialism

over nationalism throughout his troubled career. In Pound’s case it
derives from a species of “internationalism” that foresaw the tri-
umph of a transatlantic civilization in which the United States of
America will inevitably play a leading role. As we have seen, this was
also Edgar Ansell Mowrer’s view in This American World. The French
sociologist André Siegfried was another who predicted the triumph
of the American style of civilization in his 1927 book, America Comes
of Age: A French Analysis. Siegfried’s assessment of American civi-
lization in 1926 is remarkably similar to Pound’s in 1912 and 1914
– even to labelling it a “re-awakening”: “Having first cleared away
all hampering traditions and political obstacles, the American peo-
ple are now creating on a vast scale an entirely original social struc-
ture which bears only a superficial resemblance to the European.
It may even be a new age, an age in which Europe is to be relegated to a
niche in the history of mankind; for Europe is no longer the driving
force of the world. The old European civilization did not really
cross the Atlantic, for the American re-awakening is not, as is gen-
erally supposed, simply a matter of degrees and dimensions; it is
the creation of new conceptions” (Siegfried, 347, my emphasis).
Even though Eliot is the only one of our subjects who is known
to have read Siegfried, the French sociologist is worth some atten-
tion, for he offers a fascinating witness on the inter-war period. His
remarks on the anticipated future hegemony of America in the
wake of the European nations having bankrupted themselves in
the war uncannily anticipated the state of affairs in the twenty-first
century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the only rival to
American world dominance after World War II:
In this [American financial dominance] lies the danger that

America may feel she can do as she likes without consideration
for any one else, she can act as arbitrarily as she pleases. She
can strangle whole peoples and governments, or she can assist
them on her own terms. She can control them and indulge in
the pleasant sensation of judging them from her superior
moral height, and then impose her verdict. This is bad not only
for Europeans, who are humiliated, but also for Americans; for
their sovereign independence makes them less and less willing
to accept international obligations. Always being sought after as
the rich are by the poor, and always giving without receiving,
tends to destroy any consideration for the borrower, such as
arises from free exchange on an equal footing. They are gradu-
ally and surreptitiously assuming the role of a missionary bailiff
or of an ambitious man in search of power, and from this may
arise a new and subtle imperialism unlike anything we have
known before. (227)
That these remarks fit the current state of world affairs (in 2010)
so well, should give us pause.17 It is very easy to judge the errors of
the men of 1914 in the light of what we know, nearly a century
later, about subsequent political, military, social, and technological
developments. Although we cannot put ourselves in their shoes,
the shoes we are fated to wear in the first decades of the twenty-first
century are not much more comfortable than those they wore in
the first decades of the twentieth. Between the First and Second
World Wars observers were no more able to foresee what the future
would hold than we are today between the Cold War and whatever
future conflict awaits us – Islamic terrorism, a resurgent China, or
perhaps a “rogue state” triggering a world conflict.
Like Pound in 1920, Hardt and Negri in 2000 professed to know
what the future holds, predicting that “Empire” and “multitude”
will replace nations and citizens: “The twentieth century theorists
of crisis [they cite Weber and Wittgenstein] teach us, however, that
in this deterritorialized and untimely space where the new Empire
is constructed and in this desert of meaning, the testimony of the
crisis can pass toward the realization of a singular and collective
subject, toward the powers of the multitude. The multitude has
internalized the lack of place and fixed time; it is mobile and flex-
ible, and it conceives the future only as a totality of possibilities that
branch out in every direction. The coming imperial universe, blind
to meaning, is filled by the multifarious totality of the production
of subjectivity. The decline is no longer a future destiny but the pre-
sent reality of Europe” (380).
The stock market crash of October 1929 and the subsequent
world-wide depression, which persisted for most of the following
decade, forced everyone – optimists and pessimists alike – to
rethink their predictions, and perhaps their hopes as well. But
before we consider the sorts of revisions of opinion in which our
principals engaged during the Depression, we need to look at how

English – and some French – observers viewed developments. The
most important of these, for our purposes is Wyndham Lewis, but
T. E. Hulme and Julien Benda are also important witnesses for our
story on the war and the inter-war period. Their response to events
does not follow quite the same curve as that of the Americans
expatriates.
iii
The War as a Symptom of Cultural Decay
He is representative of the present generation, sick with its own knowl-

edge of history, with the dissolving outlines of liberal thought, with
humanitarianism. He longs for a narrow, intolerant, creative society with
sharp divisions. He longs for the pessimistic, classical view. And this long-
ing is healthy.
T. S. Eliot, from his 1917 review of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence
When the war broke out, all the reactionaries in England and France
began to speak of the danger to democracy, although until that moment
they had opposed democracy with all their strength. They were not insin-
cere in so speaking: the impulse of resistance to Germany made them
value whatever was endangered by the German attack. They loved
democracy because they hated Germany; but they thought they hated
Germany because they loved democracy.
Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction, 1916
Of the men under consideration here who collaborated in the cul-

tural wars of 1912 to 1914, only British and French nationals
served in the war. Two of them – T.E. Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska
– were killed. Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth (both Vor-
ticist), Richard Aldington (who married Pound’s undergraduate
sweetheart, Hilda Doolittle) and Herbert Read (who later collabo-
rated with Eliot on The Criterion) – even Ford Madox Ford, despite
his age – all served and survived. Pound memorialized those of his
friends who served in the war in canto XVI (published in 1925 and
modelled on the Purgatorial section of Dante’s Commedia). The
preceding canto is generally called the “Hell canto,” hence Pound’s
portrayal of the war in his epic poem is commonly read as a painful
purgation of a damned civilization:
And because that son of a bitch,

Franz Josef of Austria ...
And because that son of a bitch Napoléon Barbiche ...1
They put Aldington on Hill 70, in a trench
dug through corpses
With a lot of kids of sixteen,
Howling and crying for their mama,
.............................
And Henri Gaudier went to it,
and they killed him, And killed a good deal of sculpture,
And ole T.E.H. he went to it,
With a lot of books from the library,
.............................
And Wyndham Lewis went to it,
With a heavy bit of artillery,
The canto goes on to list several more of Pound’s acquaintances

who served in the war, including Ernest Hemingway, before tran-
scribing a letter in French, written at the front by the sculptor,
Henri Gaudier. Gaudier, writing from Verdun, complains of the
stench, filth, incompetence, and death – citing the (exaggerated)
figure of five million dead – and also expressing empathy for the
German troops who, he says, attack to get food. Pound closes the
canto with an anecdotal account of the October Revolution in Rus-
sia (he based his account on a lecture he heard the American jour-
nalist, Lincoln Steffens, give in Paris in 1924.)
That Pound placed his only extended poetic attention to the
1914–18 war in a canto he identified as a Purgatorio strongly sup-
ports the notion that he regarded the war as a turning point – as
the last convulsion of the old regime. Of course, he was not alone
in that belief. As we have seen, the term “New World Order” was
widely applied to the immediate post-war world – though what
ensued was very little like order, and not very new. Just as the col-
lapse of the Soviet Union was trumpeted as the vindication of cap-
italism in the 1990s, in the 1920s the democracies regarded their
victory as vindication of their political and economic structures,
making social and economic reform even more difficult to achieve
than it had been before the war. The Wilsonian principle of self
determination was selectively applied, as Niall Ferguson notes:
The War as a Symptom of Cultural Decay 85
“none of the peacemakers saw it as applying to their own empires

– only to the empires they had defeated” (161). Nor was the peace
a triumph for economic equality. Many states instituted repressive
measures against labour unions, which they justified by the bolshe-
vik threat. And the victors continued in their old colonial ways,
carving up the Ottoman Empire – primarily to the advantage of
Britain and France, and much to the irritation of the Italians. As
Ferguson puts it, though the Peace of Versailles “spelt the end of
four dynasties and the creation of ten new independent nation
states, the end of the war did not mean the end of empire. The
British and French empires grew fatter on the remains of their
foes’ domains” (184). (We are still, in 2010, reaping the conse-
quences of the victor’s cavalier disposition of the Turkish posses-
sions in the Middle East.)
But the failure of the New World Order belongs properly to a
later chapter, where the challenge of fascism and nazism to the
democracies and to the Soviet Union will provide the context for
the developing ideological postures of our principals. The com-
munist revolutions in Germany and Hungary of 1919 were quickly
put down. And, although D’Annunzio’s proto-fascist seizure of Fiume
of the same year lasted a little longer, by and large, by 1920 Europe
seemed safe from any radical change of political structure. But that
calm was brief. Mussolini’s overthrow of the fragile Italian democ-
racy in 1922 forced everyone to re-examine the status quo. As a
symbol of the epochal change that fascism purportedly represent-
ed, Mussolini introduced a new calendar, taking 1922 as year one
of the Era fascista.
Although no one had any illusions about the dictatorial nature
of Mussolini’s regime, many in the democracies admired in for its
supposed efficiency – “making the trains run on time,” as S.S.
McClure famously claimed in his 1928 New York debate with Vin-
cenzo Nitti on the merits of fascism (Nitti took the negative posi-
tion). The lack of democracy in Italy was tolerated in the democ-
racies on the grounds that the tyrannical nature of fascism was
essentially a domestic Italian matter. However that attitude did not
last as fascism gained admirers – Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound
among them – and similar militant conservative movements arose
in the democracies: Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in
Britain, and Howard Scott’s Technocracy movement in the usa.
Action Française in France long predated fascism, but it shared its

authoritarian nature and gained some credibility from Mussolini’s
early successes.
In the 1920s intellectuals looked back to the pre war in search of
the causes of the debâcle of World War I, and forward apprehen-
sively toward an uncertain future. Lewis described the mood, look-
ing back from 1952: “Then came World War I, etc. ... Python-like
the world required some time – a few years – to digest what had
somehow got into it. When it had, there was a great change. There
was a very steep plunge indeed from that deceptive [pre-war] free-
dom to speculate, to criticize, to create, down to what amounted to
the beginnings of dictation. We plunged from a social vacuum into
a scene packed with partisans, where everyone was saying the same
thing in the same tone of voice, like a chorus of parrots ...” (The
Writer and the Absolute, 37–8). For Lewis, far more than for Eliot or
Pound, the Great War represented a watershed; on either side of
which the world was completely different. He spent the rest of his
life attempting to come to terms with that new world, which he
mostly disliked and sought to amend.
julien benda
Probably the first book-length assessment of the consequences of

the war to appear was Julien Benda’s Belphégor, mostly written
before 1914, but not published until late in 1918. Pound admired
it and recommended it to Eliot, who was “much pleased with it”
(Letters, 392, 13 July 1920). A month later (10 Aug. 1920) Eliot
wrote to his Harvard friend Scofield Thayer, editor of The Dial,
telling him that “Benda’s book is ripping ... I hope you can print it
in full” (Letters, 401). (Thayer did print a translation – in four
monthly instalments from September to December 1920.) Wynd-
ham Lewis also read it, and in Time and Western Man opined that
Benda described “exactly the same process” of decay as Spengler
did in Decline of the West, but “with as much disgust as in the case of
Spengler it is pointed to with gusto” (283). Benda nowhere
explains his title, but Belphegor is a malign Assyrian divinity, con-
sidered a devil by the Hebrews. He seduces people by promising
them ingenious inventions which will make them rich and is said to
have been the Devil’s ambassador to France. His name means
“Lord of the Opening.” The title alone, then, tells us that Belphégor
belongs with Nordau’s Degeneration as a Cassandra-like prophecy of
coming disaster if nothing is done to reverse current trends.
Pound reviewed both Belphégor and Benda’s 1912 polemic Berg-
sonisme, ou une Philosophie de la Mobilité, in the Athenaeum. He
approved of Benda’s dismissal of Bergson and William James,
whom he lumped together as men who hold “the belief than any
wheeze that works is God’s verity.” (Of course, that is a caricature
of their views.) He endorsed Benda’s complaint that American
pragmatism (that is, the philosophy of C.S. Peirce and William
James) offers “great solace to democracy and a great convenience
to democratic governments as we know them” – a feature of prag-
matism that was sufficient ground for Pound to dismiss it. He
found Benda’s “analysis of the kindred diseases of journalism, mys-
ticism, subjectivity, in their various somewhat inflated exponents –
Barrès, Bourget, Claudel, the later Maeterlinck, Corlette” to be
accurate. And he endorsed Benda’s hostility to democracy and reli-
gion (“Foreign Literature,” 62). Pound also praised Benda in The
Dial: “if Benda is not the rich loam in which a new literature may
germinate he is at any rate a fine disinfectant ... if one has had any
sort of Faith in France one can but be refreshed and delighted
when in the midst of a rather depressing jungle one finds this clear-
ing of common sense, this place open to wind and light” (“The
Island of Paris: A Letter,” 106).
Eliot, too, approved of Benda’s analysis of the decadence of West-
ern civilization, writing to Bonamy Dobrée (12 Nov. 1927): “Oh I
suppose the only thing to be done about W[estern] Civilisation is to
think as clearly as one can. The first thing is to understand the dis-
ease, if there is a disease. Benda is rather sound in this way” (qtd in
Tate, 75). At least one contemporary observer thought that Benda
and Eliot were on the same page. Ramon Fernandez (whom Eliot
later published in Criterion) aligned Eliot’s early social commentary
with Benda’s in his assessment of Eliot’s career: “Nothing seems to
have distinguished Eliot’s thought from that of M. Lasserre and of
M. Benda – the same horror of minor mysticism, the same care for
rational argument and focus.”2 Fernandez was writing in 1925 – two
years before Eliot’s baptism in the Anglican faith – hence he was
speaking of Eliot’s early, pre-Anglican commentary – in particular,
the essays in The Sacred Wood, where Eliot cites Belphégor with
approval, remarking: “Much of his analysis of the decadence of con-

temporary French society could be applied to London, although
differences are observable from his diagnosis” (“Imperfect Critics:
The French Intelligence,” The Sacred Wood, 44–5).
Benda deplored the adherence of contemporary French art to
the doctrine of what he called “mystic participation with the
essence of things,” a property he attributed to the influence of
Bergson (Belphégor, 3). That attribution would have rung true with
Eliot, who had long since exchanged his early enthusiasm for Berg-
son’s vitalism for a deep-seated hostility towards it. According to
Benda the doctrine of “mystic participation” required artists to
avoid the distortion that the intellect allegedly imposes on every-
thing it touches. Benda agreed with Descartes that such “deforma-
tion” is the glory of the intellect, rather than a mark of its inau-
thenticity (16–17).3
Anticipating Eliot’s argument in “Tradition and Individual Tal-
ent,”4 Benda complained in Belphégor that French writers are pre-
occupied with “internal,” psychological matters (he said matters of
the “soul”), which lead to a focus on the personality and emotions
of the artist to the exclusion of his ideas and his technical facility –
a tendency that Benda claimed also penetrated philosophy and sci-
ence (48–58). Unsurprisingly, he found such a tendency to be
exemplified by Symbolist works, targeting in particular Maeter-
linck’s symbolic drama (63). This internalization of art leads,
Benda complained, to a focus on style and manner to the exclusion
of substance and sense, an attribute that he believed reflects a
dependence on emotion to the exclusion of intellect (68–75).
These themes and attitudes are the same as those that occupied
Eliot in the immediate post-war years. Clearly Eliot’s reading of
Benda helped him to formulate his own social criticism and aes-
thetic priorities. Of course, Eliot did not concede that his own
focus on style and manner represented the triumph of emotion
over intellect, having argued in “Tradition and Individual Talent” –
written the year before he read Benda – that for him such a focus
represented an escape from emotion and personality, rather than a
submission to it.
There are other aspects of Benda’s case that did not please Eliot.
An example is Benda’s mocking of Bergson’s contention that art-
works can expand (“dilater”) the consciousness, independently of
their intellectual content, through emotional uplift. Despite his

apostasy from Bergson, in his 1929 “Dante” essay Eliot articulated
a view of aesthetic appreciation very similar to that which Benda
attributes to Bergson. Eliot famously declared there “that genuine
poetry can communicate before it is understood” (Dante, 8). And
this was no casual remark, for he repeated it four years later in The
Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: “If poetry is a form of ‘commu-
nication,’ yet that which is to be communicated is the poem itself,
and only incidentally the experience and the thought which have
gone into it” (30).
Another disagreement between Benda and Eliot was the for-
mer’s hostility toward Charles Maurras. Even though both Benda
and Maurras championed classicism over romanticism, Benda has
nothing good to say about Maurras and the Action Française. Eliot
did not overlook Benda’s hostility to one of his heroes, remarking
to Herbert Read: “At the end of Belphegor [sic] an appendix has
some acid words about the romanticism of the anti-romantics,
which is palpably aimed at Maurras” (Letter of 11 Dec. 1925, Her-
bert Read Collection, University of Victoria).
No doubt Benda’s hostility toward Maurras has as much to do
with the latter’s anti-Semitism as with his aesthetic principles. In
any case, that seems to have been Eliot’s view, for in the same let-
ter, he draws attention to Benda’s Jewishness: “As for religion, I
should say he was very much the Jew, no doubt a very emancipated
Jew, but perhaps still responsive to le mysticisme juif.” Eliot’s remark
is very odd, given that the whole of Belphégor is an attack on mysti-
cal tendencies in contemporary letters. It reflects the casual bigotry
toward Jews that was widespread amongst middle-class Christians
early in the century – whether Protestant or Catholic, English or
American, French or German.
Not surprisingly, Eliot’s enthusiasm for Benda’s analysis of the cul-
tural malaise did not survive his conversion. Just months after his
baptism (on 23 Feb. 1928), Eliot published a review of Benda’s next
book, La Trahison des Clercs, in the Times Literary Supplement.5 La
Trahison des clercs is an attack on French intellectuals (les clercs) for
having entered into partisan politics, where Benda believed they
have no proper place. It is quite a different book than Belphégor’s
assault on contemporary art in France. Eliot gave his review the title
“Culture and Anarchy,” invoking Matthew Arnold’s famous 1882
work of the same title in which Arnold called for abandonment of

religion in favour of humanistic culture in advanced societies.
Eliot’s review articulates his new Anglican perspective, one hostile
to the humanist perspective shared by Arnold and Benda. Nonethe-
less, Eliot still endorsed the negative aspects of Benda’s analysis – in
particular his focus on the unfortunate dominance of emotion in
European culture. Here is Eliot’s summary of Benda’s criticism,
with which he agreed: “These passions and the passions of nations,
have much more to do with pride than with interest. War, whatever
economic or practical interests may tend to bring it about, is sus-
tained by the pretence of a war of cultures, by the pretence that one form of
civilization is being maintained against another. The national emotion,
cause of so much hatred between nations as well as the class emo-
tion and the race emotion, has become a kind of mysticism (there
is no English equivalent for la mystique)” (my emphasis).6
Eliot’s review reveals something about the motives of his conver-
sion that is not often remarked upon – that Christianity offered a
pan-European perspective as a counterforce to the triple threats to
European peace and prosperity: nationalism, class-hatred, and
race-hatred.7 Arnoldian humanism had offered the same thing, but
Eliot was persuaded of its inadequacy in the face of the challenges
of the post war. In Eliot’s view Anglican Christianity offered a
means of blending intellect and emotion that the Arnoldian reli-
gion of art did not, since the latter’s strategy of preserving the trap-
pings of religion in the absence of belief is, not unreasonably, seen
by Eliot as a suppression of intellect.
Lewis’s criticism of current cultural trends in his early studies
of cultural decay, The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man,
was heavily influenced by Belphégor, which he cited at length. In
The Art of Being Ruled he said of Benda: “No one has explored the
regions of post-war decay so brilliantly, if superficially, as Julien
Benda. And the pages in his Belphégor, where he describes the
organized hatred of the intellect existing everywhere today in our
society, are so just that I can do no better than quote from them.”
He then cites Belphégor: “One of the most curious traits of this
society [is] its hatred of the intelligence ... This violent dislike,
conscious and organized ... constitutes something entirely new in
French society ... [It] will be the mark of our time in the history
of French civilization” (221). In order to explain this phenome-
non, Benda distinguished two broad types of sensibility. The first,

friendly to the intellect, is the “plastic” and “musical.” It is
grounded in touch and sight (which Lewis regarded as the defi-
nite and clear senses respectively). The second, friendly to the
emotions, is grounded in hearing, smell, and taste (the indefinite
and indistinct senses).8 The distinction Lewis drew in Time and
Western Man between Bergsonian “time philosophy” and the sta-
ble world of spatial dimensions is essentially the same.9
Benda directly confronted the accusation – not uncommon at the
time – that the cultural degeneration he deplored arises from the
influence of Jewish mysticism and irrationality on Christian Europe.
Benda admitted that the cultural tendencies he attacked could be
found in Jewish thinkers – Bergson among them. He called such
tendencies “Alexandrian” – a thirst for the indistinct, the indefinite,
and the mysterious, which he said, collapses the distinction between
subject and object. So far as Jewish thinkers are concerned, Benda
divided them into two camps – Hebrews and Carthaginians, that is,
devotees of Jahweh and of Belphégor respectively. He illustrated the
Hebrew tendency by Spinoza, and the Carthaginian by Bergson. In
this way Benda argued that the European Jew does not represent a
particular kind of intellectual attitude and influence, but rather a
range of attitudes and influences, much like any cultural or ethnic
group. Moreover, he pointed out that even if one attributes the
unwelcome “Alexandrian” influence to particular Jews – such as
Bergson (as he does himself) – one must admit that the nominally
Christian French society would not have accepted such an “alien”
doctrine if it were not predisposed to it (Belphégor, 155–8).
Despite his disagreements with Benda, Eliot quoted and en-
dorsed a passage from Belphégor in The Sacred Wood (1920): “As for
society itself, one could foresee that the care which society takes to
experience emotion through art, will in its turn render the thirst
for this pleasure more and more intense, the attempt to satisfy it
more and more covetous and more perfected. The day can be fore-
seen when French high society will once more repudiate the little
support that it gives today to ideas and organisations in the arts,
and will no longer be interested in anything but the high jinks of
actors, the representations of women or children, the howling of
poetry, the ecstasies of fanatics ...” 10 Given that some reviewers
characterized The Waste Land as just such meaningless “howling”
when it appeared less than two years later, Eliot’s approval of

Benda’s remarks is a little ironic. In addition, Lady Rothermere’s
bankrolling of The Criterion would give the lie to Benda’s prediction
that high society will repudiate the support it has given to “ideas
and organisations in the arts.” Those ironies aside, the point to
take from Eliot’s and Lewis’s reading of Benda in1920 is their
agreement that European culture was in decline as a consequence
of a privileging of emotion over intellect. Clearly Eliot believed that
the critical and aesthetic activities of himself and his friends, Pound
and Lewis, offered a potential therapy for that cultural pathology.
war
Of course, all stripes of political opinion – from communism

through liberalism to fascism – regarded the war as the result of
pre-existing political, socio-economic, and cultural conditions. But
they differed on what the relevant conditions were. Eliot, Lewis,
and Benda were in agreement that the causes were cultural and
intellectual, almost to the exclusion of social and economic condi-
tions. Left-wing thinkers – even moderate ones like Angell and
Brailsford – believed that the principal cause of the late war – as of
all recent wars – was to be found in the socio-economic conditions
created by unfettered capitalism. Liberal thought – as represented
by Woodrow Wilson and J. M. Keynes – believed wars were primar-
ily caused by nationalism – either by the rivalry of sovereign states
like Britain, France, and Germany (Keynes) – or by the frustration
of the national aspirations of subjected peoples (Wilson). On such
an analysis, no radical social, economic, or cultural changes were
required to secure a permanent peace, only the abandonment of
nationalist rivalries and the recognition of legitimate national aspi-
rations – conditions more difficult to realize than either man rec-
ognized. Extreme conservatives – like Maurras, Mussolini, and
Hitler – were prone to exacerbate national rivalries on grounds of
the putative superiority of their own society and culture, and
hence, to celebrate the glories of armed conflict – either in heroic
defence of sacred soil (Maurras) or in glorious conquest of “inferi-
or” people and societies (Mussolini and Hitler).
In contrast to the attribution of bellicosity to capitalist competi-
tion for markets and resources of leftists such as Angell and Brails-
ford, the liberal-democratic view was that the late war was caused by
a failure of capitalist values in those nations held responsible for
instigating the war – the sclerotic Austro-Hungarian and Turkish
Empires and the belligerent Prussian Reich. H. G. Wells famously
expressed such a view in his 1914 book The War That Will End War
and returned to the topic in the 1916 autobiographical novel Mr.
Britling Sees It Through – though the latter book criticized the allies
as well. Wells’ solution was much the same as that proposed by
Angell and Brailsford – an international body dedicated to the
preservation of peace. Of course, such a body was established after
the war as the League of Nations. The liberal democratic strategy
hoped to preserve the status quo and preserve the peace by means
of this new, trans-national democratic institution, avoiding the
wholesale reorganization of society proposed by communism. Fas-
cism also presented itself as the defender of the status quo so far as
the economy and society were concerned. It required only a
replacement of allegedly inefficient democratic government with
supposedly efficient dictatorial government. However Italian fas-
cism also glorified war and conquest.
The Wilsonian view that wars were caused by imperial frustration
of nationalist sentiment – as manifest in the assassination of the
Archduke Ferdinand by the Serbian nationalist Gavril Principe –
was, of course, influential, but few Europeans shared Wilson’s view.
After all, they had experienced centuries of national rivalries, not
infrequently erupting into armed conflict, so they tended to regard
nationalism itself, rather than the imperialist frustration of nation-
alist aspirations as the principle cause of war. The lack of public
protest in response to the eager expansion of the empires of
Britain and France into the territories of the former Ottoman
Empire, emphatically illustrates the prevalence of that attitude. As
Ferguson puts it in The War of the World, “The British and French
empires grew fatter on the remains of their foes’ domains” (184).
Despite Wilson’s support for the idea of an international body as a
guarantor of peace advanced by Angell, Brailsford, and Wells, the
American Senate refused to ratify American participation in the
League of Nations.
Eliot was not hostile to such institutional solutions, but he had
very little faith in them, regarding them as band-aid solutions for
what was, in his view, a cultural, not a political, crisis. He had found-
ed The Criterion in hopes of administrating to the cultural malaise

he saw afflicting Western civilization – as well as of advancing his
career. “It is the function of a literary review,” he wrote in a sort of
manifesto in the last issue of the journal’s first year (1922–23), “to
maintain the autonomy and disinterestedness of literature and at
the same time to exhibit the relations of literature – not to ‘life,’ as
something contrasted to literature, but to all the other activities,
which, together with literature, are the components of life”
(“Notes,” Criterion 1, July 1923, 421).
As we have seen, Eliot took a long view on the political scene in
his August1927 “Commentary,” where he unequivocally expressed
the view that “a new European consciousness” was required to meet
the current malaise. He invoked “the European idea,” and rejected
both socialism/communism and liberal humanism – as represent-
ed by the League of Nations – as solutions. This European idea, he
claimed, arises from “a new feeling of insecurity and anger” occa-
sioned by the Russian Revolution, which made Europeans realize
that Western Europe is “(in Valéry’s words) a small and isolated
cape on the western side of the Asiatic Continent” (“A Commen-
tary,” The Criterion 6, Aug. 1927, 97–8). Although neither Benda
nor Maurras are among the analysts invoked by Eliot, he retains
Benda’s perception that the problem facing Europe is that its poli-
cies and speculation are governed by emotion more than by rea-
son. He does not specify what the cultural awakening will be, but
given that he wrote this “Commentary” shortly after his baptism as
an Anglican, one can guess what it would be. In this respect he is
on the same page as Pound and Lewis, though the nature of his
“awakening” is unlike theirs. Nonetheless, Eliot’s posture here is
still hopeful – more Pollyanna than Cassandra.
The enthusiasm for Belphégor that Pound, Eliot, and Lewis
expressed was based on Benda’s concern with the place of the arts
in modern society. Eliot drew attention to that feature of Benda in
his 1926 review of La Trahison des clercs “The Idealism of Julien
Benda”: “he puts a problem which confronts every man of letters;
the same problem which Mr Wyndham Lewis has solved for himself
in his own way by writing his recent books; the problem of the scope
and direction which the activities of the artist and the man of letters
should take to-day” (485). Benda’s “solution” that the man of letters
(his clercs) should refrain from entering into political debate was not
the route chosen by our three. Lewis published a steady stream of

political commentary – often ill considered; Eliot pontificated from
his Criterion pulpit, and Pound published political books like Jeffer-
son and/or Mussolini, and maintained a steady stream of articles and
“letters to the editor” on political and economic themes.
In La Trahison Benda lamented the situation in Europe in the
twenties when there was hardly anyone who was not touched, or
believed himself to be touched, by racial, class, or nationalist pas-
sion, passions that had been elevated to a level never before seen.
He does not turn to the role of intellectuals until Part II, where he
defines the clercs as those men who do not seek practical ends, but
who confine themselves to art or science, or metaphysical specula-
tion. Although Benda appears to mock them for acting as if their
“kingdom is not of this world,” he identifies their “treason” as hav-
ing abandoned that disinterest by adopting political passions them-
selves. In his review of La Trahison, Eliot rejected Benda’s claim that
the intellectual ought to remain au dessus de la mêlée. While con-
ceding his point about race, class, and nationalism, Eliot believes
that “no one is sure what class is; every one is conscious of nation-
ality and race ... but no one is sure who or which or what is what or
which race; or whether race is divided north and south or east and
west or horizontally; or whether any of us is anything but a mon-
grel” (“The Idealism of Julien Benda,” 486). His general point is
that confusion and uncertainty of identity, of belief, and of loyalty
– rather than political passion – is the hallmark of the contempo-
rary European. Thus, Eliot adds, “the meddling of men of letters in
practical affairs, to which M. Benda objects, is only one phenome-
non of a general confusion” (487). Moreover, he points out that
even the most disinterested of philosophers, such as Henri Berg-
son, can excite political passions in his readers, citing Charles
Péguy as an example of such influence (488). In the end, Eliot
rejects Benda’s plea that intellectuals avoid taking sides in contem-
porary political conflict: “The only moral to be drawn, therefore, is
that you cannot lay down any hard and fast rule of what interests
the clerc, the intellectual, should or should not have. All you can
have is a standard of intellect, reason and critical ability which is
applicable to the whole of a writer’s work” (488).
Lewis was less hostile to La Trahison than was Eliot, though his
comments came decades later, in his intellectual autobiography,
Rude Assignment, and are perhaps modulated by his own unhappy

experience as a social and political commentator. Lewis noted that
Eliot was inclined to “complete assent” with Benda’s “general criti-
cism of the political passions of the present time” (“The Idealism
of Julien Benda,” 485). Lewis agreed, remarking that Benda’s
“denunciation was, and is, fully justified” (32). But he denied that
Benda was hostile to intellectual activism in general – as Eliot
believed – claiming that his (Benda’s) target was “the false intellec-
tuals” alone, “the bellicose professors and bloodthirsty men of let-
ters who were such a novel feature of the years immediately pre-
ceding world war I” (34), men Benda discussed in the first two
parts of the book. But Eliot was not so forgiving, returning again
and again in his “Commentaries” to the issue of the role of the man
of letters – always with Benda’s apostasy in mind. A typical example
is the following from his “Commentary” for April 1929 in which he
dismisses the Fabians: “Meanwhile, in spite of Monsieur Benda,
men of letters will go on worrying about the principles of politics.
They are in fact the only men who do worry about its principles.
Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, though birds of the same
nest, do not always agree; and the pair of them seem to have little
in common with Mr. Wyndham Lewis ... Yet they are all worried
about politics, and they all incline in the direction of some kind of
fascism ... The aging Fabians, like the solitary artist, are more and
more sympathetic towards some kind of autocracy.” This is a rare
instance of Eliot bending the truth to aid a friend. Wells certainly
never endorsed fascism – as Lewis did – and it is hard to believe
that Shaw had much good to say about Mussolini.11
Of course, Eliot’s characterization of fascism as an “autocracy” is
not an egregious slur. Mussolini himself stressed the authoritarian
nature of his regime, even while insisting that it was democratic:
“In rejecting democracy fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie
of political equalitarianism [sic], the habit of collective irresponsi-
bility, the myth of felicity and indefinite progress. But if democracy
be understood as meaning a régime in which the masses are not
driven back to the margin of the State, then the writer of these
pages has already defined fascism as an organised, centralised,
authoritarian democracy.” (“Political and Social Doctrine” in
Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions 23). Presumably an “authoritarian
democracy” is one in which citizens are periodically invited to
endorse the leadership but are not offered the choice of an alterna-
tive leadership – as was the practice in Nazi Germany and the Sovi-
et Union.
Despite his unabashed authoritarianism, Mussolini was still well
regarded in the democracies in 1929 – especially in the United
States, where he had been running a series of ghost-written12 per-
sonal bylines for United Press since January 1927. (Mussolini’s first
career was as a journalist, but he had no English). His (also ghost-
written) autobiography appeared in eight instalments in The Satur-
day Evening Post beginning in May 1928, coming out as a book later
in the year (Scribner’s). S. S. McClure (1857–1949), the aging edi-
tor of the famous muckraking journal McClure’s Magazine, brokered
the autobiography. As noted above, McClure, a fan of Mussolini,
debated Vincenzo Nitti on the merits of fascism on 11 March 1928
in New York, coining the maxim that Mussolini made the trains run
on time. The onset of the Depression after the Stock Market crash
of October 1929 did not diminish the admiration of some Ameri-
cans for Mussolini’s fascism. Hearst, who had been running the
United Press pieces in his papers, decided in 1931 to buy directly
from Mussolini, signing an agreement with him on 24 April of that
year (Cannistraro, 359–61).
These details help to give some perspective on how fascism was
perceived in the democracies before Hitler’s election in 1933,
before the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, before the out-
break of the Spanish Civil War in1936, and before the infamous
Munich appeasement of September 1938. In short, fascism was not
perceived in the 1920s as the face of evil – either by the man in the
street, by the media, or by the leaders of democratic nations. The
ideological bogeyman most feared by the citizens and governments
of capitalist democracies in those years was bolshevism. fascism
offered a more palatable alternative to captains of industry than
bolshevism, if the capitalist, democratic status quo in Britain,
France, and the usa could not be maintained – as many feared it
could not.
Niall Ferguson claims that the public at large in Britain (he
ignores French public opinion, probably because it was pacifist)
were supportive of collective security through the League, and
were neither pacifist nor supporters of appeasement. According to
Ferguson, the appeasers were principally men of power and influ-
ence, though their motives were mixed. Sir Montagu Norman, the
governor of the Bank of England, for example, was in regular com-
munication with his German opposite number, Hjalmar Shacht,
and was inclined to believe that moderate opinion in Germany
would hold Hitler in check (337). Ferguson goes on for several
pages to list English men and women who warmed to Hitler. He
eventually concedes that there were presentable reasons for such
sentiments: “Among the many arguments for appeasement per-
haps the best was this: that even as late as 1939 Hitler had done
nothing to compare with the mass murder that Stalin had
unleashed against the people of the Soviet Union ... Such was the
Establishment consensus” (344). Lewis fits neatly within that
“Establishment consensus.” Ferguson’s comparison of British right-
wing sentiment with that of the left also tends to palliate Lewis’s
error: “Many a Tory grandee may have knowingly shut one eye to
the realities of Nazi rule, but an even larger number of people on
the British Left had shut both eyes to the horrors of Stalinism – and
they took much longer to open their eyes” (Ferguson, 344).
Ferguson is little interested in Mussolini, but the Italian dicta-
tor was in power a decade before Hitler, and certainly had attract-
ed more favourable attention in the democracies. For its admir-
ers, Italian fascism represented discipline – among other less
attractive elements. Eliot and Lewis both regarded discipline as
desirable on philosophical grounds, understanding it as the reg-
ulation and control of the emotions by the intellect. (Pound was
far less enamoured of discipline.) Of course, the critics of fascism
were repelled by its appeal to men and women’s baser motives –
class envy, xenophobia, belligerence, and so forth – as well as by
its authoritarian nature, and its resort to violence as a political
tactic. Its admirers were willing to overlook those shortcomings in
the name of order – as indicated by the title of Jean Cocteau’s
1926 book Rappel à l’ordre.
Eliot’s most perspicuous expression of this aspect of his political
conservatism is found very early – in his 1916 review of Aristocracy
and Justice by the American humanist Paul Elmer More. Although
they later became epistolary friends, neither man knew the other
at this date, when Eliot was committed neither to conservatism nor
to Anglicanism. Nonetheless Eliot’s characterization of More’s con-
servatism fits perfectly Eliot’s later views: “The fundamental beliefs
of an intellectual conservatism, that man requires an askesis, a for-

mula to be imposed upon him from above; that society must devel-
op out of itself a class of leaders who shall discipline it; distrust of
the promises of the future and conviction that the future, if there
is to be any, must be built upon the wisdom of the past – this is what
we find in all of Mr. More’s writings” (“An American Critic,” 234).
In 1916 these are More’s views, not Eliot’s, but that he came to
approve of them is amply demonstrated by his later correspon-
dence with More (between 1928 and 1937).13
More’s brand of conservatism is based on the perception that
self-discipline (“askesis”) founded on a code of conduct to which
civilized men and women adhere, can properly be extended to the
political sphere. Such a political creed is unsympathetic to a liber-
alism founded on laissez-faire economics, in which the “discipline”
of the market and “enlightened self-interest” replace both govern-
mental regulation of private behaviour and ethical constraints. The
lack of an autonomous ethical component in liberalism was a com-
ponent in all three of our subjects’ hostility to it. And the failure of
laissez-faire economics to deliver general prosperity, or even a tol-
erable sufficiency in the 1930s offered an opportunity to gain pop-
ular support for a disavowal of liberal, capitalist democratic politi-
cal structures in favour of one based on ethical principles instead
of economic ones.
The ethical version of governance that Eliot and Lewis recom-
mended was collectivist. Collectivism assumes that the welfare of
the community is often at odds with the desires and self-interest of
the individual, and therefore restraints on individuals are required.
Socialism, communism, and fascism are all collectivist ideologies,
as is British Toryism. While collectivism does not entail authoritar-
ian government, it tends in that direction. Of course, all models of
government – even anarchism – include some constraints on indi-
vidual behaviour – as in criminal codes and commercial regula-
tions. Communism proposed to replace both enlightened self-
interest and ethics with the class-consciousness of the proletariat –
at least after the disappearance of classes permitted the withering
away of the state. Fascism for its part relied on nationalist sentiment
and the Führer Prinzip – that is, blind obedience to the leader who
was supposed to embody the spirit of the nation, the Volk. Eliot and
Lewis dreamt of government by an enlightened and ethically supe-
rior elite (such as themselves). In Eliot’s case, his vision of the ideal
state was one in which a “Company of Christians” would be the
arbiter of ethical standards to which the governing classes would
adhere – a theocratic system not unlike that currently prevailing in
Iran, but without a formal institutional embodiment of the Com-
pany of Christians.
Pound’s motives were much the same as those of Eliot and Lewis,
but he was far less cautious, and much more given to simplistic solu-
tions. The kindest thing that can be said about his political thought
is that it was – at least in the beginning – well meant. He naïvely sup-
posed that if men of intelligence and good will were heeded, good
governance would result, largely confining his energy to the denun-
ciation of the fools and knaves who currently ruled the world. An
instance is the following remark appearing in William Carlos
Williams’ journal, Contact: “In a world politically governed by imbe-
ciles and knaves, there remain two classes of people responsible; the
financial powers and the men who can think with some clarity” (1
Summer 1921). His political journalism is addressed to those “who
can think with some clarity.” Unfortunately, Pound was not such a
person – so far as politics and economics are concerned.
Although wiser and more perspicuous in his political observa-
tions than Pound, Lewis was no more able to devise a plausible
model of governance than were Pound and Eliot. A typical com-
ment from him is the following absurd recommendation from The
Art of Being Ruled (1926): “For the sake of the ruled – that is my
argument – the ruler should be forced to rule by force, ostensibly,
responsibly, as does (to the great disgust of our western liberals)
the soviet or fascist government” (94). The agency that is to force
the ruler to rule wisely is left unidentified, but the “force” Lewis no
doubt had in mind was a moral imperative – perhaps exerted by a
mandarin class of intellectuals like himself or Eliot’s Company of
Christians. Such a government by the wise and virtuous is techni-
cally an aristocracy, and is what all three supposed was the best
form of government. Of course, they had no use for existing hered-
itary aristocracies, but neither would they have favoured a “meri-
tocracy,” unless one could inject an ethical component into
“merit.” Unlike Eliot, Pound and Lewis did without any appeal to
divine sanctions, and held true to Enlightenment principles, rely-
ing solely on the light of reason.
revolution
Eliot and Lewis had met through Pound’s agency sometime in

1914 or 1915. Lewis and Pound, for their part, had met through
the agency of Ford Madox Ford, probably in 1910 or 1911 (Mey-
ers, 31–3). Since Lewis enlisted shortly after he met Eliot, their
friendship did not develop until after the war. As for Pound,
despite their collaboration on Blast, their friendship was never as
warm as that between Eliot and Lewis – or between Eliot and
Pound. Writing from France while on tour with Lewis in 1920, Eliot
told Sydney Schiff that he had “enjoyed Lewis’s company very
much, and have had a great many conversations with him. I do not
know anyone more profitable to talk to” (Eliot to Lewis on 31 Jan.
1925 in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, 150). Although they dis-
agreed on many points, a shared distrust of popular democracy
remained the foundation of their political analysis, and Eliot con-
tinued to respect Lewis’s political acumen.
An index of Eliot’s respect for Lewis is his toleration of the lat-
ter’s recurrent tantrums. When Lewis complained – in a typically
combative letter of January 1925 – of Eliot’s failure to print some-
thing Lewis had submitted to The Criterion, Eliot tried to mollify
him, declaring that he wanted Lewis to appear in “every number of
The Criterion” (The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, 150–1). But their
diverging political and religious views eventually drove them apart.
In 1928 Eliot confessed to Herbert Read: “I could only work with
Lewis to a very limited extent, as the things he wants (if I have any
notion of what he does want) are probably quite different from
mine [sic]” (Letter of 14 Jan. 1928, Herbert Read Collection, Uni-
versity of Victoria).
But just two months earlier, Eliot had given Lewis’s rambling
attack on contemporary philosophical and aesthetic trends in Time
and Western Man favourable notice in Criterion, remarking that his
own views were “given a greater precision by the appearance of Mr.
Wyndham Lewis’s book, Time and Western Man,” and adding: “Mr
Lewis is the most remarkable example in England of the actual
mutation of the artist into a philosopher of a type hitherto
unknown.” (“Commentary,” Criterion, November 1927, 387). Eliot
cited Lewis’s attack on “Time Philosophy” with approval in several
places during 1927 (the year of publication of Time and Western
Man) and in 1928. He did the same for Lewis’s Shakespeare study,
The Lion and the Fox – also published in 1927. Although they drew
apart philosophically, Eliot and Lewis remained on good terms
right up to the latter’s death in 1957. Indeed, all three – Pound,
Eliot, and Lewis – remained on good terms throughout the ups
and downs of their very different careers, conflicting political loy-
alties. and divergent beliefs.
As already noted, World War I was a personal watershed for Lewis
as well as for world history. That was not the case for his American
friends, neither of whom served in the war – although Eliot did try
to enlist after the United States entered the war on 6 April 1917.
In Rude Assignment Lewis looked back at those years, emphasizing
the technological changes that coincided with the War: “Why
1914–18 is so dense and towering an obstacle for anyone whose life
it traverses admits of no simple answer, for this wall was as complex
in its composition, as in its origins. To take the least of the innova-
tions coeval with it first, the very aspect of everyday life was radical-
ly altered. The internal combustion engine alone was a great revo-
lution. It changed the streets of our cities into roaring machine-age
gullies, literally from one day to the next, and broke into the
remotest beauty-spot with a bang. Then the great development of
the radio, the cinematograph, and the telephone all can be inte-
grated in this almost mystical barrier” (38). Of course, those tech-
nological innovations mostly preceded 1914. Nonetheless Lewis
and his contemporaries moved from a world of horses, steam, and
telegraph to one of automobiles, airplanes, and radios. Philip
Larkin catches the sense of that watershed in his nostalgic poem of
1960, “mcmxiv”:
Never such innocence,

Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
(Collected Poems 127–8)
As we have seen, Marinetti and Pound (to a lesser extent) wel-

comed the change Larkin characterizes as a loss of “innocence.”
Eliot and Lewis deeply regretted it. They would have spoken of an
optimism betrayed, rather than an innocence lost, but all perceived
the “Great War” as a watershed.
The technical and social changes alone would have been enough
to create deep societal disruption, but Lewis thought the war
brought even more pressing disturbances: “such novelties as these
could not alone have produced this Great Divide. Europe was
turned upside down politically as well as physically, and these revo-
lutions were simultaneous. First, there was the collapse and disap-
pearance of the Central Empires [Austria and Germany], while the
great German state became a chronically embittered slum. Great
Britain was fatally shaken, economically and morally. The French
people deeply demoralized and resentful: lastly – and above all –
the Russian Empire of the Czars had gone up in smoke and out of
its ashes a new religion had been born at once hard-boiled and
puritanic, savagely militant and proselytizing” (Rude Assignment,
38–9).
Lewis is the only one of the three to articulate so clearly and dra-
matically the profound disruption that he and other Europeans felt
in the immediate post-war years. Perhaps Pound and Eliot did not
feel it so keenly because they were expatriate Americans. In many
ways, pre-war America had already accommodated itself to the tele-
phone, the cinema, and the automobile (Henry Ford’s “Model T”
went into production in 1909), and in any case, Americans tend to
assume that change is inevitable, and usually benign. Eliot was a
typical American in accepting the inevitability of change, but idio-
syncratic in his conviction that some change was for the worse.
Lewis – though born in Canada and raised to the age of seven in
the United States – was culturally and emotionally thoroughly
British.
The personality and predilections of the eponymous character in
Lewis’s first novel, Tarr, fit Lewis himself admirably: “If you really
want to saddle me with that Swiss [Rousseau], I will help you. My
enthusiasm for art has made me fond of chaos. It is the artist’s fate
almost always to be exiled among the slaves. The artist who takes his job
seriously gets his sensibility blunted. He is less squeamish than
other people and less discriminating” (Tarr, 237). Like Tarr, Lewis
was the reverse of squeamish in his cultural commentary, and in his
personal relationships; he struck out at any and all who displeased
him by their opinions or their tardiness in recognizing and reward-
ing his genius. He was also always anxious to be the first to endorse
or condemn any particular cultural or political trend, rushing into
print with extended commentaries on every twist and turn in the
political and cultural roadway.
Although Tarr’s remark sounds very Nietzschean, Lewis was vehe-
mently opposed to Nietzschean proclivities, as he makes clear in
the preface to Tarr (1918 version):
In Europe Nietzsche’s gospel of desperation, the beyond-law-

man, etc. has deeply influenced the Paris apache, the Italian
Futurist “litterateur,” the Russian revolutionary. Nietzsche’s
books are full of seductions and sugar-plums. They have made
“aristocrats” of people who would otherwise have been only mild
snobs or meddlesome prigs; as much as, if no more than, other
writings, they have made “expropriators” of what they have
made an Over-man of every vulgarly energetic grocer in Europe.
The commercial and military success of Prussia has deeply influ-
enced the French, as it is gradually winning the imagination of
the English. The fascination of material power is, for the irreli-
gious modern man, almost impossible to resist. (13)
(The preface is dated 1915, though the novel was not published
until 1918, and was mostly written prior to the war.) The novel
itself – though set in Paris – has several German characters – all
portrayed very negatively, reflecting the distaste for German society
and culture Lewis had developed during his years on the continent
(1902–08, mostly in Paris). Despite that bias, he later welcomed
the Nazi regime as a viable alternative to “bankrupt” democratic
capitalism – an approval he had briefly granted to Mussolini’s fas-
cism in The Art of Being Ruled, but soon withdrew.
Lewis began an analysis of what he regarded as the twentieth-
century’s dominant ideology in 1923, projecting a massive book
with the working title The Man of the World. It was to be a polemic
against modern tendencies. However it grew like Topsy, and he was
obliged to break it up into four works: two discursive books – The
Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927); and two
novels – The Childermass (1928) and The Apes of God (1930) (Letters,
editor’s note 137). These four works represent his major effort to
identify the “spirit of the age”– and to propose an alternative to it.
According to his biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, they were well
received by British reviewers who apparently approved of Lewis’s
views, which Meyers describes as those of “a determined authori-
tarian who disliked liberal, pacifist democracy, and advocated mili-
tary efficiency and a stable society” (133–4). I would demur from
the allegation that Lewis advocated military efficiency, but the rest
of Meyer’s assessment seems just to me.
The American political scientist Lyford P. Edwards panned The
Art of Being Ruled in The American Journal of Sociology. Edwards had
just published his own analysis of the current state of affairs, The
Natural History of Revolution (1927), a work that is still well regard-
ed. His brief review was dismissive:
Anything that Wyndham Lewis writes is likely to prove fantastic

and bizarre to the verge of lunacy. But his mind is as keen as it
is cranky, and as capacious as capricious. The Art of Being Ruled
is a type of book, which has become fairly numerous of late. It
belongs to the failure-of-democracy series. It is not “An analysis
of the structure of modern society,” as its jacket alleges, though
it shows the impact of industrialism on political thought. It is a
passionate potpourri, a bundle of brief and vehement little
essays on all sorts of subjects: Rousseau and Nietzsche, Proud-
hon and Sorel, Chesterton and Shaw, arctic shamanism and the
Roman exoletos, fascism and the matriarchate, hypnotism and
the city-state of antiquity. All these topics and very many more
are to be found in the chapter headings. It is a bit like old
Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. These excurses are the
book. Lewis becomes stimulating when he wanders away from
his subject and roams at will through the modern intellectual
woods. His defense of fascism is vitiated by his inability to discriminate
between temporary post-war reaction and the long-time trend toward
democracy. His ten pages on Chukchee shamans prove that he
can popularize ethnology as well as Dr. Will Durant popularizes
philosophy. The title of the book is the best indication of the
peculiar intellectual flair of its author. (858, my emphasis)
Edwards’ assessment of the book as one of the “failure-of-democ-

racy” type, which had “become fairly numerous of late,” supports
my contention that the end-of-an-era posture adopted by Pound,
Eliot, and Lewis was common between the wars. And Edwards’ view
that all these “failure-of-democracy” studies were short-sighted
reactions to the shock of the First War is in accordance with my
reading of Eliot and Lewis – though Pound seems to have been less
discouraged by that catastrophe. Despite the currency of such views
in the popular press, Edwards is representative of contemporary
academic opinion in regarding them as cranky and ill-informed.
However, it is clear in hindsight that Edwards underestimated
the threat to democracy represented by fascism and communism,
and that Lewis’s Cassandra-like apprehension was more justified
than Edwards’ Pollyanna optimism. And like everyone else,
Edwards failed to foresee the world-wide economic depression of
1929–39, and the great world conflict of 1939–45 that was – at least
in part – a consequence of it. Nor, of course, did he or anyone else
foresee the ensuing Cold War. Indeed, no one in the 1920s wanted
to think about the possibility of war, or of economic depression. If
one takes a longer view, the eventual defeat of the Axis powers and
the much later collapse of the Soviet Union tends to support
Edward’s opinion that “a long-time trend toward democracy”
would prevail – even though much of the world still awaits its
arrival eighty years – and counting – later. Despite Edward’s nega-
tive review, Jeffrey Myers says that The Art of Being Ruled “had an
excellent press,” being admired by Aldington and Osbert Sitwell
among others (The Enemy, 133).
In The Art of Being Ruled (1926) Lewis is very supportive of both
Lenin’s bolshevik rule in Russia and Mussolini’s fascist regime, infa-
mously concluding that “some form of fascism would probably be
best” – that is, better than communism – for “anglo-saxon countries
as they are constituted today”(320). A little later he describes Mus-
solini’s fascism as an improved version of Marxism, and repeats his
recommendation that it be adopted by Anglo-Saxon countries: “fas-
cismo is merely a spectacular marinettian flourish put on to the tail,
or, if you like, the head of marxism: that is, of course, fascism as
interpreted by its founder, Mussolini. And that is the sort of social-
ism that this essay would indicate as the most suitable for anglo-
saxon countries or colonies with as much of sovietic proletarian
sentiment as could be got into it without impairing its discipline,

and as little coercion as is compatible with good sense” (320–1).14
Lewis soon dropped Mussolini in favour of the far more “efficient”
Adolf Hitler, but at this date he found Mussolini’s rhetoric very
much to his taste. It is worth noting that Lewis was well in front of
Pound in his enthusiasm for Mussolini. Pound’s first pro-fascist
work is Jefferson and/or Mussolini, written early in 1933 but not pub-
lished until 1935. By the time Pound adopted Mussolini, Lewis had
dropped him in favour of Hitler.
It is worth noting that Lewis and Pound were not nearly so far
out of step with opinion in Britain in these early post-war years as
is commonly assumed. According to Niall Ferguson, “Aristocratic
grandees, colonial press barons and society hostesses alike found
that they genuinely sympathized with aspects of Hitler’s policy,
including even its anti-Semitism ... Lord Londonderry, Secretary of
State for Air from 1931 to June 1935, who also happened to be
Churchill’s cousin, was so keen on Hitler that he wrote an entire
book [Ourselves and Germany 1938] defending the Nazi regime,
including its anti-Semitic policies.” Another was Viscount Halifax
who visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and “liked all the nazi leaders,
even Goebbels.” Still another was the Duke of Westminster, who
“inveighed against the Jews and ... said that after all Hitler knew
that we were his best friends” (Ferguson, 338). Ferguson could
have added the Duke of Bedford, later Marquis of Tavistock, who
was a Social Crediter, a Nazi sympathizer, and author of The Fate of
a Peace Effort, which recounts his effort to broker a peace with
Hitler in early 1940. (Tavistock is the model for Lord Darlington
whose butler, Stevens, is the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989
novel Remains of the Day.) Ferguson goes on to detail Nazi sympa-
thizers at Oxford, in the bbc, Parliament, and London society
(339).
In The Art of Being Ruled Lewis first articulated the opposition
between permanence and clarity in human affairs (of which Lewis
approved) on the one hand, and fluidity and obscurity on the
other (of which he disapproved). This tendency to an either/or
opposition dominates the political thought of all three artists. Prior
to the post–World War II vogue of Existentialism and the Cold War
vogue of Derridean Deconstruction, few intellectuals would have
disagreed with Lewis’s preference for permanence and clarity. For
Lewis – as for Cocteau – authority is the corollary of permanence

and clarity in human affairs – both intellectual and political – as
opposed to Eliot’s less totalitarian “self-discipline.” Fewer were will-
ing to follow Lewis there.
No doubt Lewis’s qualified admiration of Mussolini derived in
part from a shared Sorelian component in their political thought.
But despite a penchant for rhetorical violence, Lewis objected to
the real thing: “The tearing of men’s hearts out of their bowels, or
the stamping on the pulp of their entrails ... is not the type of
action that appeals to me ... I found myself in the blood-bath of the
Great War, and in that situation reflected on the vanity of violence.
So that side of Sorel seems to me too literary” (Art of Being Ruled,
122). But, like Eliot, he shared Sorel’s antipathy toward the roman-
tic celebration of emotion.
Sorel’s most read work, Reflections on Violence, appeared in 1908. It
was extremely influential – and controversial – for its endorsement
of violence as an appropriate tool in political struggles. Eliot
reviewed the 1916 English translation (by T. E. Hulme) in The
Monist and endorsed Sorel’s negative assessment of current political
action. He warmed especially to Sorel’s hostility to romanticism.
The substance of the book, Eliot wrote, “is a very acute and disillu-
sioned commentary upon nineteenth-century socialism, and upon
the politics of the French democracy for the last twenty five years.”
Eliot noted “the influence of Renan and Bergson” on Sorel, and
endorsed his (Sorel’s) “violent and bitter reaction against romanti-
cism which is one of the most interesting phenomena of our time”
(review of Reflections on Violence, 478). Eliot did not comment direct-
ly on the matter of violence as a political tool. Instead he bemoaned
Sorel’s “scepticism”: “But the scepticism of the present, the scepti-
cism of Sorel, is a torturing vacuity which has developed the craving
for belief” (478). Rather perceptively, Eliot identified an elitist com-
ponent in Sorel that foreshadows Sorel’s influence on such conser-
vative actors as Mussolini and the Nazis: “He hates the middle class-
es, he hates middle-class democracy and middle-class socialism; but
he does not hate these things as a champion of the rights of the people, he
hates them as a middle-class intellectual hates. And the proletarian gen-
eral strike is merely the instrument with which he hopes to destroy
these abominations, not a weapon by which the lower classes are to
obtain political or economic advantages” (478, my emphasis).
Looking back to The Art of Being Ruled in Rude Assignment, Lewis

described his state of mind in 1925 as just that which I claim pos-
sessed Pound and Eliot: “I had recognised that a great revolution
was under way; that an entirely new epoch had begun, for England
and for the world.” While the new epoch was certainly occasioned
by technological change and marked by political ferment, Lewis
still, in 1950, believed that revolution “had its roots in those fer-
ments of which Cubism, Futurism, and Vorticism were intellectual
expressions” (184–5). The roots of the revolution, then, in Lewis’s
view, were neither technological innovations nor the collapse of
established social practices but the “ferments” of new styles of
works of art. That he viewed the arts as causes rather than symptoms
of social ferment is in conformity with postmodern views, even
though Lewis shares little else with postmodernism.
Nothing expresses the “liberal” – that is individualistic – cast of
Lewis’s thinking more starkly than the preface to The Art of Being
Ruled, where he quoted Proudhon (via Sorel) to the effect that only
“a few dozen” readers are necessary to make “the theoretic convic-
tion of socialism pass into the general consciousness.” Along the
same line, he told his prospective readers that his book “is not writ-
ten for an audience already there, prepared to receive it, and
whose minds it will fit like a glove. There must be a good deal of
stretching of the receptacle, it is to be expected. It must of neces-
sity make its own audience” (13). In this respect Lewis belongs to a
tradition of political literature that stretches back to the Puritan
partisan John Milton, whose Paradise Lost was addressed to “fit audi-
ence, though few.” Of course, Milton had in mind an audience of
like-minded Puritan regicides, whereas Lewis hoped to create his
audience.
Despite what he said in Rude Assignment, the principle target of
Lewis’s polemic in The Art of Being Ruled is what he called the “spir-
it of revolution.” (In Time and Western Man he broadened his target
to include philosophy and science as well as politics. In that work
he labelled his bête noir “time philosophy,” but the target is really
the same: the modern privileging of change, perceived as progress,
over the persistence of achieved wisdom.) His task was to discover
something permanent that will serve the admittedly altered cir-
cumstances of the twentieth century. In this respect, he, Pound,
and Eliot are on the same page – though they chose different com-
ponents of achieved wisdom from the past. And Pound was not
alarmed by rapid superficial change, as Lewis was.
In The Art of Being Ruled Lewis rather idiosyncratically sees the
leading antagonists in the post-war struggle for men’s minds and
hearts as the competing communist schools – the Mensheviks
(gradualists) led by Karl Johan Kautsky and the bolsheviks (revolu-
tionaries) led by Vladimir Ilych Lenin. Lewis’s opposition of these
two is in accordance with the Marxist scholar Leszek Kolakowski’s
characterization of their relationship: “Kautsky’s basic conviction
that socialism could not prevail until economic conditions were
right for it, and his belief that socialism entailed democracy com-
bined to make him firmly opposed to the October Revolution and
the Leninist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat”
(Kolakowski, Main Currents, 394).
Lewis got his knowledge of Kautsky from an article in the Labour
Weekly (25 April 1925), entitled “Kautsky vs Lenin” in which Kaut-
sky is reviled for his petit-bourgeois opportunism. Kautsky’s gradu-
alist views are expressed most forcefully in his 1918 work,
Demokratie oder Diktatur. In Kolakowski’s words, it was Kautsky’s pre-
scient view in that work that if “the Leninists were able to keep their
‘Tartar socialism’ going long enough, it would infallibly result in
the bureaucratization and militarization of society and finally in
the autocratic rule of a single individual” (Main Currents, 5).
A more common view of the ideological competition at the time
was to see it as three-sided: between 1) the status quo of capitalist
liberal democracy, 2) fascism (the authoritarian version of capital-
ism) and 3) socialism/communism. Lewis considered Mussolini’s
fascism to be “an extreme form of Leninist politics” (The Art of
Being Ruled, 71), rather than its contrary, as both the fascists and
the communists publicly maintained. Given Lewis’s later hostility to
communism, it is worth underlining the equivalence he saw be-
tween Leninist communism and Mussolini’s fascism in1926. What
he found attractive in these regimes is their authoritarianism, their
claim to be committed to nurturing the welfare of their popula-
tions, and their hostility to liberal democracy.
Lewis returned again and again to the theme of authoritarian-
ism. The issue of the day, he believed, was the opposition between
democracy, which he characterized as “rule by a show of hands,”
and dictatorship, which he characterized as “rule by the most vig-
orous and intelligent” (The Art of Being Ruled, 72–3). His enthusi-
asm for authority blinded him to the facts on the ground, permit-
ting him to declare that “the present rulers of Russia or Italy ... are
imbued with a ‘creative,’ compassionate emotion for the human
being.” He believed that such a compassionate concern expressed
itself in a benign paternalism: “the wise ruler ... would see quite
well – if I am correct, has seen – that there must be a master. Some
one or other has to assume responsibility for the ignorant millions”
(89). He went still further, arguing that individual freedom is
something that no one actually wants: “People ask nothing better
than to be types – occupational types, social types, functional types
of any sort. If you force them not to be, they are miserable ...” (The
Art of Being Ruled, 151). These views are compatible with Sorel’s
and are likely derived from him. Zeev Sternhell points out,
“Already in Sorel, the idea of class embraced not all of the indus-
trial proletariat, but only an activist elite ready for every sacrifice”
(The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 252). Kolakowski points out that this
Sorelian elitism is also found in Lenin’s version of communism, in
which the elite is identified with the Nomenclatura of the party
(Main Currents, 758–9).
In this remark on elites and “types,” Lewis echoed the principal
political innovation of fascism, derived from Sorel’s syndicalism –
the replacement of territorial or geographic representation with
representation by trade and profession, called “corporatism.”
Though Mussolini never acted on the corporatist agenda – nor
did any other fascist regime – it remained a rallying point of the
right. Instead of a voter’s constituency being determined by where
he or she lives, trade or profession would determine it. D’Annun-
zio promulgated a constitution for Fiume, which outlined ten cor-
porations based on the occupations of citizens – from wage earners
through salaried employees to entrepreneurs as well as distinct sec-
tors, such as agricultural workers, sailors, and so forth (“The Con-
stitution of Fiume” promulgated on 8 Sept. 1920. Found in Griffin,
35–7).
Corporatism was an innovation that its proponents thought
might cure the ills of current democracies, all of whose con-
stituencies were based on geographical representation. Though it
was seldom stated, the fault of geography-based democracy in the
view of its opponents was that it enshrined representation by pop-
ulation, that is, majority rule. The occupation-based system could

give – for example – doctors the same representation as farm
labourers, and professors the same as factory workers, even though
doctors were far less numerous than farm labourers, and professors
than factory workers.
Although he does not mention electoral practices, Lewis explic-
itly endorsed the corporatist idea that a man or woman is defined
by his or her occupation. He saw that “fact” as a justification for
tyranny, admitting that he was extrapolating from Sorel: “The
majority of men should, and indeed must, be screwed down and
locked up in their functions. They must be functional specialists –
the doctor smelling of drugs, the professor blue-spectacled, bent,
and powdered with snuff, the miner covered with coal-dust, the sol-
dier stiff and martial, etc., etc. The only person who can be an “all-
round” man, eclair, full of scepticism, wide general knowledge, and
“lights” is the ruler: and he must be that – that is his specialization.
That is naturally not the way that the syndicalist puts it. But it is
what is implied in the political system of Sorel and the other syndi-
calists” (The Art of Being Ruled, 31).
Lewis’s remarks on the nature and role of the leader are remi-
niscent of the lecture that Mustapha Mond delivers to the Savage
in Huxley’s Brave New World, published six years later than The Art
of Being Ruled:
An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he

had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work – go mad, or start smashing
things up. Alphas can be completely socialized – but only on con-
dition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can
be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that
for him they aren’t sacrifices; they’re the line of least resistance.
His conditioning has laid down rails along which he’s got to run.
He can’t help himself; he’s foredoomed. Even after decanting,
he‘s still inside a bottle – an invisible bottle of infantile and
embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course,” the Controller
meditatively continued, “goes through life inside a bottle. But if
we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking,
enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a nar-
rower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate
into lower-caste bottles ... (Brave New World, 179)
Of course, Huxley is satirizing the totalitarian utopia ruled by

Mustapha Mond, in which all conceptions and births are per-
formed in the laboratory and all individuals are pre-designed for
their occupational role. However, the alternative of the Savage’s
emotionally intense, but demented, life that Huxley gives his read-
ers is hardly more attractive. The central theme in Huxley’s novel
of test-tube babies was inspired by the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane’s
1924 novel Daedalus, which prophesied that by 1951 we would have
achieved “ectogenesis,” that is, test-tube babies. Haldane, a distin-
guished geneticist, was affiliated with the Communist Party of
Britain. Lewis was aware of Deadalus, but gives no indication that he
knew of Haldane’s communist sympathies. He merely mocks the
substitution of a clinical mode of reproduction for the messy and
passionate standard method as an instance of scientific prudery
(The Art of Being Ruled, 187–9).
I have found only two mentions of Brave New World by Lewis. The
first is in a 1934 letter to The Times in which he complained that he
(Lewis) was being vilified by the “the strong Leftish political col-
oration of ... the majority of intelligent periodicals” and men-
tioned, as a fellow sufferer, “Mr. Aldous Huxley, whose “Brave New
World” was an unforgivable offence to Progress and to political
uplift of every description” (Letters, 226). Though Lewis allied him-
self with Huxley here, he was not sympathetic to the liberal senti-
ments of Brave New World. In The Writer and the Absolute, speaking of
contemporaries who were or were not drawn to Marxism, Lewis
remarked: “Aldous Huxley, liberal of course, when he came to give
expression to his views upon such matters in Brave New World,
turned out to be an uncompromising sceptic” (42). It is not entire-
ly clear to me just what Lewis means by this remark; perhaps he was
disappointed that Huxley predicted a dual dystopic world of anti-
septic and passionless comfort on the one hand and superstitious
passion on the other hand rather than a utopia.
The futuristic fictions of Haldane and Huxley clearly participate
in the general opinion at the time that human society was on the
verge of unprecedented alterations in the manner of life of ordi-
nary people, changes that would require radical transformations of
political and social practices. Eliot, Pound, and Lewis all share that
sentiment. As already noted, they initially thought principally in
terms of cultural and aesthetic transformations, but all three soon

came to realize that everything might well change. And they all rec-
ognized that technology was a principal engine of change –
although, rather quixotically, they also supposed that the arts
would be the ultimate determinant of the form those changes
would take.
Lewis was more explicit in his comments on the consequences of
those technological developments than the other two:
revolution, as we understand it today, is in origin a purely tech-

nical process. It is because our lives are so attached to and
involved with the evolution of our machines that we have grown
to see and feel everything in revolutionary terms, just as once
the natural mood was conservative. We instinctively repose on
the future rather than the past, though this may not yet be gen-
erally realized. Instead of the static circle of the rotation of the
crops, of the infinitely slow progress of handiwork, we are in
the midst of the frenzied evolutionary war of the machines.
This affects our view of everything; our life, its objects and uses,
love, health, friendship, politics: even art to a certain extent,
but with less conviction. (The Art of Being Ruled, 23)
Instead of embracing these changes as corollaries of their own

aesthetic revolution – as Pound and the early Eliot did – Lewis
opposed them from the very beginning – much as Ruskin and Mor-
ris had done before him, and Lewis’s older contemporaries G. K.
Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were currently doing – though Lewis
bristled at comparisons with these backward-looking reformers.
There is one anticipated change that Lewis did welcome. Like
Angell, Brailsford, Siegfried, and Mowrer, he thought that inde-
pendent nations would increasingly succumb to some sort of world
order. The fundamental “new reality,” he wrote, is “the fact of polit-
ical world-control.” He welcomes it because it would bring an end
to war: “With a world-state and a recognized central world-control,
argument about the ethics of war would become absurd” (367).
Less benignly, he regarded the inevitability of such a global “state”
as further justification for some sort of authoritarian rule. Given
the enormous power of such a global state he believed it would be
necessary to replace messy and unpredictable parliamentary rule
with the rule of “the best intelligences of the race” – much like the
future Huxley imagined in Brave New World – though Huxley
viewed that future with alarm. The penultimate paragraph of The
Art of Being Ruled leaves no doubt about Lewis’s faith in rule by a
benign caste of intelligentsia: “It is easy to see how the passing of
democracy and its accompanying vulgarities, owing to which any
valuable discovery has to fight its way in the market-place – and the
better it is, the bitterer the opposition – must facilitate this putting
of the intelligence on a new basis. The annihilation of industrial
competition and the sweeping the board of the Small Man, com-
mercially and socially, should have as its brilliant and beneficent
corollary the freeing for its great and difficult tasks of intelligence
of the first order” (375). Lewis’s belief that the ignorant masses will
always resist benign innovations is a constant leitmotif in his writing,
reiterated as late as Rude Assignment and obviously is a leading fac-
tor motivating his preference for benevolent tyranny over democ-
racy, which he, Eliot, and Pound all regarded as rule by dema-
gogues and/or oligarchs.
The Art of Being Ruled restricts itself to a discussion of political the-
orists – primarily Sorel and Proudhon but also Marx, Kautsky, and
Lenin. His target is revolution, by which he means any radical
change, not just political revolution. He believed that the spirit of
revolution underlies all the leading cultural, aesthetic, economic,
and political tendencies of industrial democracies. “In such a fluid
world,” he said, “we should by all rights be building boats rather
than houses.” The Art of Being Ruled is offered as “a sort of ark, or
dwelling for the mind, designed to float and navigate” in the com-
ing deluge. Such a lifeboat is needed since we cannot, he believes,
“rely on any conservative structures” (26). It is because he believed
that the status quo was not sustainable that he endorsed the
regimes of both Lenin and Mussolini, despite the fact that both
were self-declared revolutionaries.
But that approval was short-lived. A year later, in Time and West-
ern Man, Lewis rejected both communism and fascism, a posture he
maintained for the rest of his life. The change of emphasis seems
not to have been motivated by any action of Lenin’s (who had died
in 1924), or of the Soviet communists in the ensuing years. As for
Mussolini, the infamous murder of Giacomo Matteotti in June of
1924 for having criticized the fascist regime preceded the publica-
tion of The Art of Being Ruled. The closest Lewis came to explaining
his change of view was the remark in Time and Western Man that he
had “modified” his views of democracy toward greater tolerance.
Now he lumps democracy and communism together as govern-
ment by appeal to the masses: “no artist can ever love democracy or
its doctrinaire and more primitive relative, communism.”
Whereas Pound, the futurists, and, to a lesser extent, Eliot saw
the ferment of new thinking and new technological developments
as the harbinger of a new age, and a new civilization, Lewis recoiled
from that ferment with much the same distaste as Wordsworth had
from the early stages of the industrial revolution. Both men regard-
ed the new ideas and social forces as threats to cultural and mental
health. Wordsworth famously articulated that distaste in the 1800
preface to Lyrical Ballads: “A multitude of causes unknown to for-
mer times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the dis-
criminating powers of the mind and unfitting it for all voluntary
exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most
effective of these causes are the great national events which are
daily taking place and the increasing accumulation of men in cities
where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for
extraordinary incidents which the rapid communication of intelli-
gence hourly gratifies” (1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads in The Poeti-
cal Works of Wordsworth, 735). Wordsworth had in mind the French
Revolution and the subsequent counter-revolutionary European
wars that were being excitedly reported in the “rapid communica-
tion” of the daily press as well as pell-mell industrialization and
urbanization more advanced in Britain than elsewhere.
As we have seen, the impetus for Lewis’s complaints was also war
and social change. The spirit of his complaint is substantially the
same as Wordsworth’s a century and a quarter earlier. However,
there is a salient difference: while Wordsworth feared that the con-
sequences of the accelerated pace of change would be to induce an
intellectual and emotional torpor, Lewis thought the consequence
would be universal conformity in “a trance of action”: “Everything
in our life to-day conspires to thrust most people into prescribed
tracks, in what can be called a sort of trance of action ... His life
thrusts new problems upon him in profusion and simultaneously
withdraws all possibility of his getting the time to grasp them, it
would seem. This is the inherent difficulty that the modern man
must in some way overcome” (Time and Western Man, vii). But there
is not much difference in the end between “a trance of action” and
“a savage torpor.”
Today we have become accustomed to the notion that constant
and rapid change in our social environment is an ineluctable con-
dition to which we must adapt. But even in the late twentieth cen-
tury, Alvin Toffler worried, in Future Shock (1970), about human
societies’ ability to adapt to rapid and incessant change. Despite
conceding that technological developments had irretrievably
altered the human environment, Lewis clung to the rationalist
belief that ideas can and should determine human behaviour.
Technological and social developments are, in his view, the effects,
not the causes of ideas. No doubt it was in part this belief that led
him to abandon the materialistic determinism of Marxism and
motivated his hostility to a grab-bag of targets – American Pragma-
tism, Bergsonian vitalism, gestalt and behavioural psychology, and
Einsteinian physics – all invoked in the following prefatory remark
from Time and Western Man: “The metaphysics of Relativity, the doc-
trine of “Behaviour,” of “Gestalt,” of “emergent Evolution,” and so
forth, have an even more intimate, and a more insidious effect
[than technological innovations such as “wireless, the petrol-
engine, and the cinema”] ... Ideas, or systems of ideas, possess no
doubt an organism, as much as a motor-car or wireless set: but their
techne, or application, and their components, the stuff out of
which they are manufactured, are facts that are in a sense too vague
to be readily accessible” (viii). It was his intention in this work, and
in several subsequent ones to lay bare “stuff out of which they
[ideas] are manufactured.”
cultural studies
In effect Lewis was engaged in cultural studies before that mode of

research was institutionalized. Of course the axiom of contempo-
rary cultural studies – that cultural practices and values are context
dependent, contingent, and multi-valent – is not one that Lewis
would have endorsed. Nonetheless, like the cultural studies folks,
he believed that people’s beliefs and their behaviour are governed
by impersonal and supra-personal factors such as technological
developments and commonly held beliefs (“ideology” or “false con-
sciousness” in Marxist cultural theory). Where Lewis’s analysis

departs from cultural studies is that he assumes that those com-
monly held beliefs are neither autonomous “ideas” – as they are for
Hegel and those who follow him, nor the corollary of forms of life
– as they are for Marx, but simply fashion – attitudes and practices
adopted by the masses in imitation of fashion leaders such as
Hegel, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Bergson, etc. In this respect his
cultural theory is essentially the same as Nordau’s and Benda’s, and
his targets are very similar.
Lewis, of course, does not subscribe to the Marxist theory of false
consciousness. For him ideas are the product of autonomous
human cogitation – as indicated by his invariable practice of iden-
tifying ideas with individuals. Where his methodology and cultural
studies overlap is in the shared belief that ideas – once concocted
– take on a life of their own: “The ‘ideas’ of Plato can be shown at
work. The philosophy of Hegel can be shown at work in Herzen,
Bakunin and Lenin. The theories of Darwin can be shown at work
all over the world. Nietzsche trumpets from the balconies of the
Chigi Palace [where Mussolini addressed crowds]. I could show
you many Bergsonians. Both Bonnot,15 the famous French chauf-
feur-gunman, and T. E. Hulme, the philosopher, were Sorelists, dis-
ciples of Georges Sorel, the roman catholic, pragmatist Marxian”
(Time, x).
From Lewis’s perspective there is nothing to choose between the
divergent historicist views of conservative Cassandras like Spengler
and revolutionary Pollyanna prophets like Marx and Engels, since
they all saw human behaviour as guided, if not absolutely deter-
mined, by impersonal forces. Marx, of course, famously “turned
Hegel on his head” in The German Ideology: “The phantoms formed
in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their mater-
ial life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to mater-
ial premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology
and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer
retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no
development; but men, developing their material production and
their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real exis-
tence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not
determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (The Ger-
man Ideology, 8). Marx believed (at least at the date of The German
Ideology) that the industrial form of life would necessarily generate

a new consciousness in the proletariat suitable to factory produc-
tion and urban life, which would in turn produce a communist
form of governance. However, in the interim, the proletariat was
unable to see its own self-interest because it was oppressed by a
“false consciousness” imposed by its bourgeois masters.
Since The German Ideology was not published until 1932 (though
written in 1845–46), Pound, Lewis, and Eliot could not have been
influenced by Marx’s theory of ideology in their own early cultural
theorizing. Nonetheless, their presumption that the new technolo-
gies and scientific theories of the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth century called for a new cultural accommodation has affinities
with early Marxism. Although they did not assume that technolog-
ical change produced a new cultural mode, they did believe that it
required a new mode as a response to those changes – or perhaps,
more weakly – that it permitted a new cultural mode. (It is perhaps
worth reminding ourselves that Marx died in 1883, before any of
the modernists were born. He did not see the hugely disruptive
technological changes to which men and women born in the 1880s
were exposed.)
In contrast to Marx, Pound, Lewis, and Eliot all believed that life
is determined by consciousness – that ideas govern human behav-
iour and generate cultures and societies rather than the other way
around. A corollary of that belief is that ideas have a life of their
own, independent of the men and women who generate them.
Pound and Eliot believed that conscious and thoughtful individu-
als could adopt or reject any idea they encountered according to
their own estimate of its worth. They also rejected the pre-Marxist
notion of a Zeitgeist determining the actions and beliefs of indi-
viduals. For example, writing from America in his Criterion “Com-
mentary” for January 1933 (12), Eliot contrasts his own view of the
autonomy of thought to the reflexive, Zeitgeist perspective he
found in Trostky’s Literature and Revolution and Calverton’s Libera-
tion of American Literature: “There are also people who, while recog-
nizing the interest of the work of literature as a document upon the
ideas and the sensibility of its epoch, ... yet cannot help valuing lit-
erary work, like philosophical work, in the end by its transcendence of
the limits of its age; by its breaking through the categories of thought and
sensibility of its age; by its speaking, in the language of its time and in
the imagery of its own tradition, the work which belongs to no time. Art,
we feel, aspires to the condition of the timeless; and communist art,
according to the sentence of those who would foretell what it is to
be, is bound to the temporal”(248, my emphasis).
Similarly, in Guide to Kulchur, written a few years later than Eliot’s
remark, Pound explicitly contrasted his notion of “paideuma,” “the
gristly roots of ideas that are in action,” to the Zeitgeist, which he
characterized as including “the atmospheres, the tints of mental air
and the idées reçues, the notions that a great mass of people still hold
or half hold from habit, from waning custom (Guide to Kulchur, 59).
Like Eliot, Pound believed that it is the artist’s function to – in
Jacob Burckhardt’s metaphor – “break the cake of custom.” All
three men sought to collect and disseminate those ideas they
thought would foster a better culture and a more just or ethical
society. They were willing to sacrifice the freedom of ordinary citi-
zens in order to impose their superior notions of culture and ethics
on them for their own good. Distrusting the masses, they were com-
mitted to a paternalistic view of social and political organization,
which they believed necessary if the artist was to have sufficient
freedom to perform his or her function as a bearer and creator of
culture. Clearly such views are anathema to believers in democracy,
but they have a long history amongst deep thinkers, going back to
Plato’s Republic and continued by such divergent thinkers as Aris-
totle, Hegel, and Nietzsche. It was the misfortune of our subjects
that monsters such as Hitler and Stalin exemplified the rule of the
exceptional man in their era. Earlier famous tyrants, like Cosimo
Medici, Elizabeth of England, Peter the Great of Russia, and
Napoleon, similarly attracted the praise of contemporary artists,
but are generally conceded to have been less villainous and to have
left a beneficial legacy.
As early as 1915, Pound had articulated the view that democracy
was inimical to the role of the artist: “If you endow enough men,
individuals of vivid and different personality, and make the endow-
ment perpetual, to be handed down from artist to artist, you will
have put the arts in a position to defy the subversive pressure of
commercial advantage, and of the mediocre spirit which is the bane and
hidden terror of democracy.” He believed democracies were inherent-
ly unstable: “Democracies have fallen, they have always fallen,
because humanity craves the outstanding personality. And hitherto
no democracy has provided sufficient place for such an individual-

ity” (“The Renaissance: III,” in EPPP 2: 84, my emphasis). With
such a naïve view of political realities coupled with a supreme (and
misplaced) confidence in his own wisdom, it is small wonder that
Pound would later succumb to the charms of Mussolini.
While it is possible to plot Pound’s political career as a straight
line from overweening self-confidence to disastrous misjudgment,
Lewis’s career is more tortuous. They shared a prejudice against
the common man, and an overweening self-confidence, but Lewis’s
career is characterized by a serial adoption of one or another
“movement” as he searched for one that would foster the cultural
and intellectual trends he cherished and suppress those he feared.
Both men were essentially autodidacts. As such they were obliged
to educate themselves as they went along.16 Like the proverbial
homme moyen sensuel, they knew what they liked and what they dis-
liked, but had to put themselves to school to discover what ideas,
theories, and political movements would support their likes and
dislikes. Lewis was far less eccentric in his choice of guides and tar-
gets than was Pound. But Lewis’s political tracts are organized
around a commentary on works that it is obvious he had read for
the first time in preparation for his sweeping analysis of contem-
porary culture. Pound also enjoyed serial enthusiasms, but, unlike
Lewis, he relied on a few eccentric and little known writers as his
guides – Ernest Fenollosa, Major Douglas, Leo Frobenius, and Sil-
vio Gesell, among others – and dismissed everything that disagreed
with them. Unfortunately, his guides did not always agree with one
another.
Also in contrast to Pound, who had a lot of difficulty finding pub-
lishers for his polemical effusions, Lewis had the mixed blessing of
a supportive, indeed indulgent, editor in Charles Prentice at Chat-
to and Windus, who seemingly would publish virtually anything
Lewis wrote.17 As a consequence Lewis was able to rush into print
with his latest enthusiasms or dislikes without being obliged to con-
front referees and copy editors who might have induced him to
reconsider some of his judgments. The quality of his analysis also
suffers from his ability to publish whatever he liked in his journal,
The Enemy. Often his articles amount to little more than notes on
his reading. He was then able to collect these hasty productions in
a book, which Chatto and Windus would then publish with mini-
mal revision. The result is disorganized, repetitive discourses, lack-

ing balance and consistency. He surveys philosophical, scientific,
political, and sociological ideas, and dismisses them from the per-
spective of an already formulated all-purpose hypothesis, which
can be paraphrased as follows: “time philosophy dominates con-
temporary European thought and culture, suppressing individual
freedom in favour of a herd mentality.” Many of the early reviewers
ignored these faults because they were friendly to Lewis’s general
argument that Europe was going to Hell in a handbasket. As we
have seen, Lyford Edwards’ review of The Art of Being Ruled drew
attention to the ubiquity of such a view, though Edwards did not
share it, and he quite properly pilloried the book for its disorgani-
zation and tendentiousness.
Lewis lashed out wildly at virtually everyone and every movement
of which he was aware. But his general target was revolution itself,
whether represented as a rebirth of some earlier cultural and polit-
ical condition (as with Pound, Mussolini, and Hitler), or as the
championing of a new cultural and political condition never
before seen on earth (as with Futurism and Marxist or Proudhon-
ian communism). “It is clear,” he said, “that we cannot go on for
ever making revolutions which return merely to some former peri-
od of history. Yet that is what most ‘revolutions’ resolve themselves
into ... .” He illustrated this generalization by reference to fascism’s
origin in Futurism, followed by a degeneration into a pale imita-
tion of ancient Roman glory. Then, with typical over-kill, Lewis
segued to Freud’s focus on infant experience as another instance
of a return to the past, and concluded: “So what we generally name
‘the new’ is the very old, or the fairly old. It is as well to point this
out, and even to stress it, since it is an impressive fact not suffi-
ciently recognized” (Time, 35–6). Consistency is not to be sought in
Lewis’s arguments – except for his hostility to any political arrange-
ment that privileges the “masses.”
When he comes to discuss communism in Time and Western Man,
in the same spirit as Pound, Lewis accused it of being democratic:
“no artist can ever love democracy or its doctrinaire and more primitive
relative, communism. The emotionally-excited, closely-packed,
heavily-standardized mass units, acting in a blind, ecstatic unison,
as though in response to the throbbing of some unseen music – of
the soviets or fourierist18 fancy – would be the last thing, according
to me, for the free democratic West to aim at, if it were free, and if
its democracy were of an intelligent order. Let us behave as if the
West were free, and as if we were in the full enjoyment of an ideal
democracy” (Time, 26, my emphasis). Despite their shared distaste
for democracy, Lewis chose to associate Pound – his old friend, and
collaborator in Vorticism – with revolution, characterizing him as
“a revolutionary simpleton” (38) and “a man in love with the past”
(69). In this way Lewis tarred Pound with both communist and fas-
cist attributes (79). He lumps together the past-loving Pound and
the future-loving Marinetti: “Marinetti is rehabilitated by Ezra –
music, provençal airs and ballads of Villon, as far as he personally
is concerned, taking him paradoxically right to the great throb-
bing, singing heart of the great god, Industry. I should be tempted
to think it had taken Ezra a decade to catch up Marinetti, if I were
not sure that, from the start, the histrionics of the milanese prefas-
cist were secretly much to his sensation-loving taste. I observe
rather that he has not moved from where he was” (41).
Lewis’s perception that, despite his Vorticist credentials, Pound
was not truly hostile to Futurism is, as we have seen, well founded.
Pound’s jousting with Futurism had more to do with creating space
for his own clique within the pre-1914 cultural wars than with any
fundamental disagreement. Marinetti’s basic idea that twentieth-cen-
tury technology required a new and unexampled aesthetic was one
with which both Pound and Eliot agreed – though they disagreed
about what that aesthetic would look like. But their optimism in a
fundamental cultural regeneration faded as the peace brokered at
Versailles began to unravel and America joined Europe’s economic
malaise and deepened after 1929. As they entered the second post-
war decade, a radical resurvey of the political landscape was clearly
required. But in 1927 Lewis was the only one of the three seeing only
unwelcome trends. He underlined his solitary state by characterizing
Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein as artists besotted by time
philosophy – though he left Eliot alone. He concluded Book I by tar-
geting Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West as the prototypical time-
book (Time, 116).
Time and Western Man is primarily concerned with artists, art-
works, and art movements, but Lewis appended a discussion of the
impact of technological innovation in an appendix to Book I. He
there cited Marx on the revolutionary impact of technology (with-
out identifying the particular text), and endorsed his materialistic

analysis of cultural change: “The technical basis of production, the
technique of industry, then, the engineer and his machine, is the
true source of the inevitably ‘revolutionary’ conditions subsisting
to-day, apart from any political creed.” Lewis demurred, claiming
that instead those technical innovations merely provide “the
opportunistic political mind” with an opportunity “to launch and
to sustain a creed of political change, backfiring in a series of pas-
sionate revolts” (122). In this respect Lewis agreed with Eliot and
Pound that the contemporary cultural, political, and social scene
represented an interregnum between a dying past and a future yet
to be born. It was the task of the artist, they all (rather quixotical-
ly) believed, to formulate the future.
Lewis made that point quite explicit. After invoking the revolu-
tionary role of science, and pointing out that a “very small number
of men [are] responsible for this immense ferment,” he added:
“What I am trying to show by these remarks is that what we call Rev-
olution, whose form is spectacular change of the technique of life,
of ideas, is not the work of the majority of people, indeed is noth-
ing at all to do with them; and, further, is even alien to their
instincts, which are entirely conservative” (123). His analysis of cul-
tural change, then, is the inverse of Marx’s in The German Ideology.
Where Marx saw technology (“the means of production”) as deter-
mining men’s beliefs and attitudes (their ideology), Lewis believed
that “the entire spectacular ferment of the modern world,” is the
product of the minds of “a very small number of inventive, creative
men.” Far from the proletariat internalizing those changes in a new
consciousness, Lewis believed that “in the course of democratic vul-
garization” the “spectacular changes” were “watered-down and
adapted to herd-consumption” (124). While it makes sense to
describe popular art as a “watered-down” version of high art, it
makes no sense to describe film, autos, iPods, etc. – the technolog-
ical output of science, which generates the culture of the “herd” –
as “watered down.”
Lewis’s critique of cultural trends focused on those individual
thinkers he held responsible for the ideas that he believed gov-
erned current cultural and political developments. His rogues’
gallery includes Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein,
Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, John
Watson, Sigmund Freud, and Oswald Spengler – among other less

prominent figures. Of course, this is a very mixed set. Russell, it is
true, admired Watson, and adopted behaviourist ideas for a while.
But he had little use for Bergson, and Bergson had no interest in
Behaviourism. It is true that Bergson and James built their respec-
tive philosophies on the foundation of Darwinian evolution. But in
their seminal work, Principia Mathematica (1910–13), Russell and
Whitehead did not; moreover, they followed very different philo-
sophical paths in their subsequent careers. Bergson, James, and
Whitehead all attempted to reconcile modern science and philos-
ophy with religious belief, while Russell and Freud were militantly
atheistic. Spengler – essentially a pessimistic German idealist – has
little in common with any of the others.
In sum, in his polemic against “time philosophy” Lewis was tilt-
ing at windmills taken for threatening giants. Disliking the advance
of popular democracy, which he believed would cause a cultural
levelling, Lewis engages in an amateurish analysis of cultural and
intellectual trends designed to ratify his fears. Once those trends
are identified, the remedy is at hand – opposition to them. It is as
pure a case of reactionary thinking as one is likely to find. In spite
of its failings – perhaps because of them – Lewis’s polemic stands as
witness to the impact that the philosophical, scientific, political,
and social turmoil of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
tury had on an intelligent and passionate – though unschooled –
observer.
Twenty-five years later, after reading William Barrett’s 1947 book,
What Is Existentialism, Lewis was startled to discover that Heideg-
ger’s Sein und Zeit – like Time and Western Man, also published in
1927 – would have served as one of his “most valuable exhibits”
had he been aware of it. In 1952 he saw the current vogue of Exis-
tentialism – largely derived from Heidegger – as corroborating the
analysis offered in Time and Western Man, and was heartened to see
that, despite the rejection of his analysis in 1927, “today I am very
far from being the only person who rejects existentialism as nihilis-
tic and a symptom not of our health and sanity, but of the reverse.
I even, at last, am almost upon the side of the majority” (The Writer
and the Absolute, 125–6). It is true that he was not alone, but in
1952, as in 1927, his was a minority opinion amongst Western intel-
lectuals, most of whom warmly embraced Existentialism as articu-
lated by the French – especially the Marxist fellow-travellers J.-P.

Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Had he lived long enough,
Lewis would no doubt have entered the lists against Jacques Derri-
da and his “deconstructive” followers, and would have been just as
much a maverick intellectual then as he was in the thirties. Ironi-
cally, in his rejection of Existentialism in his old age Lewis found
himself in agreement with the masses – though still opposed to the
Left.
The dominant attitude in the ‘twenties was that the spread of
“Western” culture throughout the globe was inevitable. Siegfried’s
America Comes of Age, published in the same year as Time and Western
Man, Mowrer’s This American World, published the year after, and
Pound’s Patria Mia of 1912 all agreed with Lewis on that point:
“‘Western’ does respond to something that the European is respon-
sible for, for good or ill; but of course there is every sign that before
long the great asiatic populations will have been turned into ‘West-
erners’ pur sang, and the factory hand of Wigan [a British industri-
al town] and Hangchow ‘meet’ long before the Trump of Doom, in
a way that would have been quite inconceivable to Mr. Kipling”19
(Time, 138–9). Even though, in contrast to Pound’s enthusiastic
embrace of the new world generated by Western science and tech-
nology, Lewis regretted its advent, all observers agreed that a pro-
found change in social and cultural practices was underway and
was inescapable.
No one with an interest in literature in the English-speaking
world in the early twentieth century could escape the influence of
Matthew Arnold. His two most influential works were “The Func-
tion of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864) and the series of
essays Culture and Anarchy (1867–68). The first essay assigned the
artist a diminished role as the disseminator of “the best that has
been thought and said,” which “thought” was to be found in works
of philosophers and scientists – including the newly emerging
social sciences. The Arnoldian artist’s role is to re-package those
ideas in a form palatable to a general public. Culture and Anarchy
was a response to the 1867 extension of the franchise in Britain to
all adult males – in effect introducing popular democracy in
Britain. Arnold addressed the middle-class fear that universal
(male only in 1867) suffrage would lead to rule by demagogues –
especially since the restraint that religious belief had previously
placed on the behaviour of men was waning. He argued that “cul-

ture” – particularly literature – could fill the role of religion and
the church. Artists would become the new clergy, and “the best that
has been thought and said” would replace the Bible. The way, then,
to guard against demagoguery was the dissemination of the “best
ideas” by a well educated class of poets, thereby creating a culture
of “sweetness and light.” Once again the poets are not seen as cre-
ators of culture but primarily as disseminators of it. It is clear, I think,
that Lewis, Eliot, and Pound accepted the Arnoldian perception
that “culture” must replace religion, but saw the artist as a creator,
not merely a disseminator, of “culture.”
Lewis explicitly rejected the rather passive role Arnold assigned
the artist: “My conception of the role of the creative artist is not
merely to be a medium for ideas supplied him wholesale from else-
where, which he incarnates automatically in a technique which
(alone) it is his business to perfect. It is equally his business to
know enough of the sources of his ideas, and ideology, to take steps
to keep these ideas out, except such as he may require for his work.
When the idea-monger comes to his door he should be able to tell
what kind of notion he is buying, and know something of the
process and rationale of its manufacture and distribution” (Time,
140). Lewis’s artist is the arbiter who determines which of the ideas
of philosophers and scientists deserve dissemination. Arnold’s
focus, in contrast, was on the need to disseminate new ideas to a
newly enfranchised electorate. Lewis’s focus was on preventing new
ideas from commanding the field to the exclusion of old ones. He
believed that new ideas are most often either bogus or harmful.
Once again, Lewis is out of step with Pound, who saw himself as a
propagandist for a new – or at least renovated – culture and civiliza-
tion. Pound tended to find “the best that has been thought and said”
in intellectual corners and byways that Arnold would certainly have
shunned. Nonetheless, his project was compatible with Arnold’s. So,
too, was Eliot’s journalistic project to make available the best mod-
ern thought in The Criterion – as we have seen. Even though Eliot’s
Anglicanism seems inconsistent with a project of cultural renovation,
he did not see it that way. In “Last Words,” Eliot’s account of his rea-
sons for ceasing publication of Criterion in the January 1939 number,
he reminded his readers of the hopes he had for cultural renewal in
1921, when he founded the journal, but sadly conceded that they
have proven to be illusory: “The period immediately following the

war of 1914 is often spoken of as a time of disillusionment: in some
ways and for some people it was rather a period of illusions. Only from
about the year 1926 did the features of the post-war world begin
clearly to emerge – and not only in the sphere of politics. From
about that date one began slowly to realize that the intellectual and
artistic output of the previous seven years had been rather the last
efforts of an old world, than the first struggles of a new” (271, my empha-
sis). This remark would place Eliot in the Pollyanna camp until
1926, when he reluctantly despaired of the advent of a new age.
In contrast to Eliot, Pound was unwilling or unable to give up on
his Pollyanna hopes – perhaps because he had incorporated his
propaganda for the new age in his epic poem, The Cantos. To aban-
don those hopes would mean abandonment of the poem, fifty can-
tos long in 1939, when everyone had to take sides. Eliot’s poetry up
to the twenties at least, had not evinced any of the optimism for cul-
tural renewal that motivated the project of the Criterion. Most of
Eliot’s poetry of the period could be characterized as satirical –
either social satire like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Mr.
Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” and the Sweeney poems or Jere-
miads like The Waste Land, “Gerontion,” and “The Hollow Men.”
But none of it outlined an alternative to the flawed present state of
culture and civilization portrayed in his poems. Lewis, too, satirized
in his fiction those trends he attacked in his polemical prose –
notably in Apes of God (parts of which Eliot published in The Criteri-
on). But, as with Eliot – and in contrast to Pound – Lewis’s imagi-
native work made no gesture toward adumbrating a better cultural
dispensation. For the most part Apes of God ridiculed London liter-
ary society. For example, Zagreus (one of the names of Dionysus)
and Lewis’s spokesman in Apes of God, describes society as a mech-
anism designed to prevent change: “Society is a defensive organi-
zation against the incalculable. It is so constituted as to exclude
and to banish anything, or any person, likely to disturb its repose,
to rout its pretences, wound its vanity, or to demand energy or a
new effort, which it is determined not to make. ‘The small’ is mere-
ly that constant and stable, almost dead thing, which can be mea-
sured and abstracted. ‘The small’ is the abstract. ‘The great’ is the
concrete. What we call ‘great’– what we call ‘great’– that is the reality”
(274, original emphasis).
These sentiments accord poorly with Lewis’s critique of current

intellectual trends from an avowedly conservative position that at
the end of the day there is nothing new under the sun, and that all
pretensions to novelty are either cant or deliberate deception.
Viewed from this sort of conservatism, Pound is, indeed, a “revolu-
tionary” – and in many ways also a “simpleton”– as Lewis alleged.
Astonishingly, Lewis admitted that he was not concerned with
whether or not “the great time-philosophy that overshadows all con-
temporary thought is viable as a system of abstract truth,” but only
“if in its application it helps or destroys our human arts” (Time,
112). It is hard to credit the parochial anti-intellectualism of this
remark – especially coming from a champion of eternal truths like
Lewis.
The “very fundamental question,” he said, is “whether we should
set out to transcend our human condition (as formerly Nietzsche
and then Bergson claimed that we should); or whether we should
translate into human terms the whole of our datum” (Time, 112).
Nietzsche and Bergson have little in common beyond the belief
that some supra-personal factors must be acknowledged as opera-
tive in human behaviour, and that their suppression can be harm-
ful.20 It is a perception that Freud adopted as a basis for his thera-
py for mental disease. But Lewis will have none of it: “My
standpoint is that we are creatures of a certain kind, with no indi-
cation that a radical change is imminent; and that the most pre-
tentious of our present prophets is unable to do more than
promise ‘an eternity of intoxication’ to those who follow him into
less physical, more ‘cosmic’ regions; proposals made with at least
equal eloquence by the contemporaries of Plato. On the other
hand, politically, it is urged that a-thousand-men is a better man
than one, because he is less ‘conscious’ and is bigger” (Time, 112).
Lewis’s argument here is peculiarly tangled. He conceded that the
theories of his antagonists may be correct, but rejects them anyway
because they are harmful. Then he adds that they are not even new
– Plato’s contemporaries held similar views. I share Lewis’s distrust
of anti-intellectual and quasi-mystical arguments, but one could
wish for a better champion of rationality.
Lewis’s insistence that “we are creatures of a certain kind” aligns
him with T. E. Hulme, who insisted on the reality of original sin –
though Lewis did not put it that way – and with the Anglican Eliot.
For example, in his 1929 article, “Second Thoughts about Human-

ism,” Eliot praised Hulme’s “discovery” of original sin: “It is to the
immense credit of Hulme that he found out for himself that there
is an absolute to which Man can never attain.” Eliot then cited the
relevant comment by Hulme: “What is important, is what nobody
seems to realize – the dogmas like that of Original Sin, which are
the closest expression of the categories of the religious attitude.
That man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature, who can
yet apprehend perfection. It is not, then, that I put up with the
dogma for the sake of the sentiment, but that I may possibly swal-
low the sentiment for the sake of the dogma” (Selected Essays,
481–91. The Hulme citation is from “Humanism and the Religious
Attitude,” Speculations, 70–1). Except for the reference to religion
and original sin, Lewis’s comment and Hulme’s are equivalent.
And all three – Hulme, Lewis and Eliot – associate the denial of the
fundamentally limited nature of the human condition with Roman-
ticism and the recognition of its limited nature with classicism. In
this respect they are aping Charles Maurras and the Action
Française. Lewis put the point quite succinctly: “The ‘classical’ is the
rational, aloof and aristocratical; the ‘romantic’ is the popular, sen-
sational and ‘cosmically’ confused. That is the permanent political
reference in these terms” (Time, 9).
Although he did not speak of original sin in Time and Western
Man, Lewis invoked Hulme’s “discovery” – with characteristic hy-
perbole – ten years later in Blasting and Bombardiering (1937):
“Hulme is mainly distinguished as a ‘thinker,’ for having heard of
the theological doctrine of Original Sin. No one else in England at
the time had ever heard of it, or would, I am persuaded, have done
so since, had it not been for him.” Lewis went on to draw the polit-
ical corollary: “The notion of ‘progress’ is also involved, in this
advertisement of Original Sin. And our world, of 1937, is greatly
agitated by the warfare of those who believe in ‘progress,’ and
those who do not. It is the principle of ‘humanism’ versus that of
discipline and ‘authority.’ The doctrine of Original Sin has its uses
quite outside of Christian dogma” (Blasting, 107, 108). Like Eliot
and Hulme, Lewis believed that if we are to have peace, order, and
good government, discipline is required in human societies. This is
so because of the fallibility of human nature. “Discipline” is a word
that appears often in the Eliot’s prose as well as in Lewis’s, but
rarely in Pound’s. To be fair, Eliot is often speaking of self-disci-

pline. Nonetheless, the conviction that men and women cannot
trust their impulses and instincts is the firmest ground on which
one can justify authoritarian regimes.
For example, in a Criterion “Commentary” of 1926, Eliot praised
“the impulse of Rome” which he said persists to “the present day,”
and which “suggests Authority and Tradition.” The former and
future Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s address to
the Classical Association, in which he spoke of the Roman Empire
in the context of Mussolini’s fascism, prompted the remark. Eliot
was unwilling to grant Mussolini the distinction of being heir to
that tradition, preferring such figures as Hooker, Laud, St.
Ignatius, and Cardinal Newman. But Eliot was very much in favour
of the Roman tradition of authority, which, he said, is “in fact the
European idea – the idea of a common culture of western Europe”
(Criterion 4, April 1926, 222). Six years later, in “Thoughts After
Lambeth,” Eliot once again spoke of discipline, but in the context
of asceticism rather than authority: “For some, the intellectual way
of approach must be emphasized; there is need of a more intellec-
tual laity. For them and for others, the way of discipline and asceti-
cism must be emphasized; for even the humblest Christian layman
can and must live what, in the modern world, is comparatively an
ascetic life ... . Thought, mortification, sacrifice: it is such notions
as these that should be impressed upon the young” (Selected Essays,
363). The notion of a pan-European Christian culture based on
authority, discipline, and tradition was a constant theme of Eliot’s
political thought through the vagaries of the political, economic,
and military ferment of the ensuing decades. Its unsuitability to the
times hardly needs to be stressed.
Lewis had a very different view of the role of Christianity. Despite
endorsing Hulme’s “discovery” of original sin, Lewis saw Christian-
ity as fundamentally flawed because it harbours in its bosom two
incompatible ethical and religious value systems: the “realistic” Old
Testament ethic and the “idealistic” New Testament ethic. “The
habits induced by the pious necessity of assimilating two such
opposed things, the irrational gymnastic of this peculiar feat,” he
said “installed a squint, as it were, on his [the European’s] central
vision of his universe.” That squint led Europeans to behave in a
“realistic” – that is, brutal – fashion toward foreigners, after which,
Lewis claimed, “to the stupefaction of the survivors, or of his abject

‘native’ subjects, he began wiping away a tear from the corner of
his eye ... exhorting the creature beneath his heel to gentleness
and brotherly love.” Lewis finds the same sort of cognitive disso-
nance in European science, which brought about the horrors of
industrialism, while at the same time prompting socialist dreams of
future utopias (Time, 302–3). Lewis’s critique of industrialism and
European imperialism fits very well with the criticism from the new
left perspective prominent later in the century, even though it is
based on a diametrically opposed philosophical perspective.
Another “school” which criticized industrialism and imperialism
in very similar terms was that of the Catholic converts and social
reformers – G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in England, and
Jacques Maritain in France. One would have expected Lewis to
have regarded these men as allies because, on the grounds that the
Catholic Church privileges reason over emotion, and intellect over
passion, he considered it as an ally in his battle with time philoso-
phy (Time, 373). However, Lewis did not embrace them. He dis-
missed Maritain as a “frantic, hallucinated, ‘soul’-drugged individ-
ual,” and Chesterton, as “a ferocious and foaming romantic.”
“Were their orthodoxy rampant,” he thought, “they would be worse
than the disciples of ‘Time’” (Time, 373). As we have seen, Lewis
also attacked potential allies amongst his fellow artists, ridiculing
Marinetti, Pound, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Eliot alone escapes
his venom, being invoked only as an ally and fellow “credit crank,”
that is, as a booster of Social Credit (170–3). Pound gets no points
from Lewis for being a far more committed Social Crediter than
either Lewis or Eliot.21
Among the targets of Lewis’s critique are the philosophers
Samuel Alexander and Alfred North Whitehead.22 Both men had
endeavoured to explain the philosophical and theological implica-
tions of the new physics for the general reader, which was sufficient
cause for Lewis to attack them as “time philosophers.” He con-
demns Alexander’s conception of the divine as “a something that
is nothing but a person, secure in its absolute egoism,” as a cult of
personality – in contrast to what Lewis regards as the healthier
“impersonal” God of pantheism (446). But both Alexander and
Whitehead participate in what Lewis regards as a more serious
error – their relativism, the claim that (in Lewis’s words) “there is
no absolute truth ... but only a majority-judgment or belief” – a

gross distortion of philosophical relativism. Lewis is offended at
such an apparent democratization of truth and sets against it his
conviction that: “our experience shows us that it is always a ‘hereti-
cal’ minority that imposes its truth upon the majority” (449).
As noted above, Lewis is not very clear about just what he means
by “time philosophy” – beyond the tendency to welcome the new
and to disparage the status quo. But most of his targets subscribe
to one or another variety of philosophical relativism, which – pace
Lewis – is not equivalent to scepticism. Philosophical relativism
merely asserts that human knowledge is ineluctably partial and
incomplete. Philosophical scepticism, in contrast, denies that
human beliefs have any truth value at all. Whereas the corollary of
philosophical scepticism is that all claims to knowledge are equally
bogus, the corollary of philosophical relativism is that competing
views cannot be dismissed just because they appear to be incom-
patible. An example would be the persistence in physics of the cor-
puscular and wave theories of the propagation of light, each of
which explains some phenomena, but not others.
If we take philosophical relativism to be Lewis’s target, it must be
conceded that he is correct to see it as the hallmark of twentieth-
century thought, but it has been a long-standing option within the
Western philosophical tradition. Its contrary is orthodoxy – literal-
ly, “correct teaching.” Catholic Europe had a millennium or so of
strict adherence to such an orthodoxy, before it was fragmented by
the Protestant Reformation and – more or less contemporaneous-
ly – undermined by the challenge of the physical sciences from
Galileo on. Although our cohort group, born in the 1880s, was far
from the first to confront the challenge of a disintegrating Euro-
pean orthodoxy, the disintegration it faced took place on a much
wider front than any previous generation had faced.
Whitehead addressed this very issue in Science and the Modern
World, a book Lewis criticizes in Time and Western Man: “The note of
the present epoch is that so many complexities have developed
regarding material, space, time, and energy, that the simple securi-
ty of the old orthodox assumptions have vanished. ... The new situ-
ation in the thought of to-day arises from the fact that scientific the-
ory is outrunning common sense ... Heaven knows what seeming
nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth. We have
recaptured some of the tone of the early nineteenth century, only

on a higher imaginative level” (142–3). A distinguished philoso-
pher, a generation older than Lewis and company, Whitehead was,
like them, concerned with the modern dilemma of a world without
faith. In his later works he attempted to articulate a philosophical
position that would permit what he called a “rational religion,” but
Lewis sees him only as a “Time Philosopher,” that is, a relativist.
There were scarcely any traditional certainties that survived the
first decades of the twentieth century. The Victorians had faced the
challenge to Christian faith of Darwinian evolution and the
palaeontological discoveries that underpinned it, but the social
and political structures of their day held firm. Indeed, Herbert
Spencer argued that the European class structure and European
imperial exploitation of “inferior” races was justified by the Dar-
winian principle of “survival of the fittest.” And, of course, New-
tonian physics still held for them. They did not have to deal with
the challenge to a stable physical environment that Einsteinian rel-
ativity was seen to be. Nor were they faced with the challenge to
human rationality that Freudian psychoanalysis represented. Cer-
tainly Marxist communism was a real and present political chal-
lenge in the nineteenth century, but the European’s confidence in
the moral rectitude and practical efficiency of existing political and
economic institutions still held, as well as their confidence in the
viability – indeed the inescapability – of their class structure. That
confidence permitted them to be comfortable with Europe’s dom-
inant position in the world, and with European exploitation of
“inferior” peoples. Although the First World War shook European
confidence it did not break it. As we have already noted, the polit-
ical elites assumed that things would go on post-war much as
before.
The aesthetic elites, however, took quite a different view – at least
our gang did. They saw European culture, society, and civilization
as disintegrating before their eyes. In Time and Western Man Lewis
satirically portrays Pound, Joyce, et al. as enjoying the slide into
philosophical chaos and anarchy. Pound does applaud the disinte-
gration, regarding it as an interim stage between the old cultural
accommodation and an emerging one, of which he and the other
modernists are the harbingers. However, by the thirties, he too is
becoming anxious. He registered that anxiety in a 1931 Hound and
Horn article, critical of Eliot’s campaign of cultural reformation: “I

am against stopping to argue about free will and the immortality of
the soul in the midst of an explosion or a shipwreck. With Euro-
pean civilization going to Hell and America not getting on with the
work fast enough to have a bearable civilization ready to take on
when Europe collapses, I am against frittering away so much time”
(“Criterionism,” 116).
Although published in 1937, Blasting and Bombardiering was writ-
ten over quite a long period, and therefore is roughly contempo-
raneous with Time and Western Man. Lewis told Pound in a letter of
July 1930 that he had begun it two years earlier, but had set it aside
(Pound/Lewis, 171). It was one of several war reminiscences
prompted by the phenomenal success of Eric Maria Remarque’s All
Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1928. English war memoirs
quickly followed: Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That and Siegfried
Sassoon’s Memoirs were both published in 1929. Lewis was slower
off the mark, but he benefited from his tardiness since in 1937 it
was clear that Europe was headed for another cataclysm. Although
published outside the period under consideration here, Blasting
and Bombardiering addresses the state of mind of Lewis himself and
others at the time of the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. Lewis por-
trayed the impact of the war with the parable of a bridge: “Upon
one side of this bridge is a quite different landscape to what meets
the eye upon the other side ... And the principal figure among
those crossing this little bridge – that is me – does not know that he
is crossing anything, from one world into another. Indeed, every-
body else seems to know it except him” (2). In contrast to The Art
of Being Ruled, Lewis now believed that neither communism nor fas-
cism – about which “everybody’s talking” – were solutions to any-
thing. “They are,” he says, merely purgatives that “shake out or
shake off a lot of dead matter.” And he mocks the current political
actors, comparing Karl Marx to the Marx brothers and Anthony
Eden to Trilby O’Ferrel, the eponymous heroine of George du
Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby: “The function of Karl Marx ... is that
of the Marx Brothers; to disrupt – but comically, of course, since
human life could not be serious if it tried. Mussolini is a most
resourceful entertainer, who was obviously born to make a fool of
John Bull. And obviously Haile Selassie was born for the same pur-
pose. Mr. Eden is Trilby. What he sings when diplomatically
entranced, enrages Herr Hitler; and as to Stalin he unquestionably

was thought up to cover with ridicule my Highbrow colleagues.
Trotsky manifestly is especially created to be a thorn in the side of
Stalin. And Mexico was tacked on to the bottom of the United
States to be an asylum for Trotsky” (17).23 Lewis maintained this
flippant, mocking style throughout Blasting and Bombardiering
despite the deadly serious nature of international affairs in 1937.
No doubt he was hoping (in vain) to reach a wide audience as
Remarque had done.
Looking back to the immediate post-war, Lewis told his readers:
“The War bled the world white. It had to recover.” During that peri-
od of recovery, “a sort of weed-world sprang up and flourished. All
that was real was in eclipse, so all that was unreal came into its
own.” What “came into its own” was the “time philosophy” he had
so vigorously attacked in Time and Western Man. He seems to wel-
come the coming intellectual conflict: “now the real is recovering
its strength. Beneath the pressure of this convalescent vitality our
cardboard make-believe is beginning to crack and to tumble down.
You see how damned interesting all that is going to be?” We can
now “look back at the War with fresh eyes,” revealing it as a “silly”
enterprise. On the eve of the Second World War he cautioned his
readers against supporting British involvement in another war –
which, counting the Boer war, would be Britain’s third “silly” war.
With this brief preparation, he could now “start my story of the
Great War, which has made possible, nay, inevitable, all the odd
things we see going on to-day” (18–19).
Lewis revealed that – rather uncharacteristically – he was drawn
to some variety of conspiracy theory by his war experience. Read-
ing Proudhon while at Ypres with his artillery battery, Lewis
attempted a calculation of the costs of the enormous artillery bom-
bardments in which both sides engaged. He was forced to give it
up, not being “enough of an economist to fathom the depth of
ruin this spelled for European society. But I did see that the mere-
ly military outcome was by this time meaningless. It was perfectly
clear that we should all be ruined, and that some people meant us
to be” (152). He does not say who those “people” were, but in Time
and Western Man he had fingered the banks: “The decade that has
elapsed since the termination of the War has been blackened in
every country by the shadow of the colossal loan-finances involved
in that event. And the shadow grows deeper as we recede from it”
(Time, 156). Though Lewis never sank as deep into conspiracy the-
ory as Pound, like Eliot, he assumed that democratic governments
were in fact the tools of oligarchs operating behind the scenes.
Lewis had a work (unspecified) of Karl Marx with him at Ypres,
but he said that the pertinacity of mosquitoes prevented him from
reading it (159). He claimed that he did not read Marx until after
the war, and was favourably impressed at that time. But it was the
experience of the war quite apart from anything he read that
changed him: “I started the war a different man to what I ended it.
More than anything, it was a political education” (185). Asking
himself what the purpose of the war was, he had no ready answer.
His search for an answer led him into the political, social and philo-
sophical commentary that preoccupied him for the rest of his life
(185–6).
If we take Lewis at his word – and I see no reason not to – his rad-
icalization is differently motivated than either Pound’s or Eliot’s.
The principal factor in Pound’s radicalization was his acceptance
of the heretical economic ideas of Major Douglas, which he hap-
pened to encounter during World War I. For Pound, the crucial
world event was the Great Depression, not the war. Eliot’s conver-
sion to Anglicanism determined his political stance as thoroughly
as Pound’s conversion to Social Credit did his. In Eliot’s case, it is
arguable that his political views led him to Anglicanism, rather
than the other way around. After all, his enthusiasm for Maurras
precedes his conversion by more than a decade. What I hope to
have shown in these first chapters is that the three men began from
a very similar cultural and political posture – one that can be
summed up as revolutionary in aesthetics, but conservative – that
is, anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and anti-communist – in politics.
That the war did not represent a life-changing experience for
Eliot is evident from a letter to Herbert Read in which Eliot com-
ments on Read’s1919 war book, Naked Warriors: “Not having had
that experience myself – I speak not from extreme age but from
the advantage or disadvantage of a G rating which kept me out of
the army – I have been a disinterested spectator of the struggles of
others with war and peace” (Letters, 386). Much the same can be
said of Pound. Although he was a vocal supporter of the Allies in
published articles, Pound remarks on the war very little in his cor-
respondence. In a long letter to John Quinn, dated three days after

the Armistice, Pound devoted most of his attention to Yeats’ friend,
Maude Gonne, who had been arrested as a suspected dissident. He
has little to say on the war or the armistice: “Thank God the war is
mostly over. Am suffering from cold contracted on Monday, wan-
dering about for hours, mostly in drizzle, to observe effect of
armistice on the populace. The Allies will have to sit on the head
of each individual German for the next eighty years and take their
indemnity a pfennig at a time” (Letters of Ezra Pound, 201). Then he
returns to criticism of Maude Gonne and the Irish independence
movement.
The dilemma faced by these artists, who thought of themselves as
avant-gardistes, was their awareness that the future they had confi-
dently imagined prior to 1914 was probably rendered impossible
by the war. Of course, they had not articulated in any detail just
what that world would have looked like, but everyone in the post-
war – except perhaps Ezra Pound – was painfully aware that his or
her expectations had to be revised drastically. Moreover, the war
had fundamentally changed the balance of power in the world.
Western Europe was in disarray and in decline relative to its rivals.
The Bolshevik revolution frightened not only those supportive of
the status quo but also democratic socialists fearful of violent revo-
lution. For the first time since the Islamic expansion, European
power was eclipsed by a foreign power, the United States. America
largely dictated the terms of the Peace of Versailles and displaced
Britain as the world’s dominant financial power. In the Far East,
Japan – which, as an ally of Britain and France, was a participant in
the Peace of Versailles – was a rising industrial power and had
already begun its aggressive imperial expansion (MacMillan, Paris
1919, 310–11). These political and international pressure points
were now laid on top of the philosophical, scientific, and techno-
logical transformations that immediately preceded the War, and
were greatly accelerated by it.
iv
The Response to Fascism
The avant-garde did not know they were running their heads not against
walls but against open doors, that a unanimous success would belie their
claim to being a revolutionary minority, and would prove that they were
about to express a new mass spirit or the spirit of the time.
Hanna Arendt, Totalitarianism, 33
The scholarly understanding of fascism has undergone consider-

able revision in the last few decades. Principal figures in that reval-
uation are the Israeli scholar, Zeev Sternhell, and the British schol-
ar, Roger Griffin. While these two students of fascism disagree on
some aspects of its nature and origin, both see it as a broad ideo-
logical movement within European – or Atlantic, to be more inclu-
sive – culture and society. The understanding of fascism articulated
by those two scholars is foundational for the following discussion.
Griffin focuses on those aspects of fascism that we have already
found to be characteristic of the attitudes that Pound, Lewis, and
Eliot formulated even before the First Great War:
fascism was no freak display of anti-modernism or of social

pathological processes in the special paths of development fol-
lowed by a few nation-states. Its raw materials were such forces
as militarism, racism, charismatic leadership, populist national-
ism, fears that the nation or civilization as a whole was being
undermined by the forces of decadence, deep anxiety about the
modern age, and longings for a new era to begin, all of which are
active ingredients in contemporary history. What made it possi-
ble for these ingredients to be forged together into popular,
and even mass movements in the inter-war period and for two
of them, fascism and Nazism, eventually to erect a new type of
single party state, was an extraordinary conjuncture of acute

socio-political tensions resulting directly or indirectly from the
First World War and the Russian Revolution. fascism is thus very
much a child of the twentieth century. (The Nature of Fascism,
viii, my emphasis)
Of course, the “deep anxiety about the modern age” was not felt
by any of our principals until the disaster of the Great War. But they
certainly felt “longings for a new era to begin,” an era of which they
would be the harbingers and heralds, and they were alert to “the
forces of decadence.”
Griffin’s account leaves out the widespread distrust of democrat-
ic governments in the pre-war period. The Left was persuaded that
democracies were merely cover for oligarchies or plutocracies. As
we have seen, our conservative authors, rather surprisingly, agreed
with the Left on this point. The Right, of course, feared popular
democracy as tantamount to mob rule. And – again surprisingly –
Pound, Eliot, and Lewis shared that fear. Fascism offered an alter-
native model of governance, which promised to resolve both Left
scepticism and Right paranoia – what Griffin calls “the single party
state,” and which its critics (more accurately) called dictatorship,
or tyranny, and Mussolini called “totalitarianism.”
Griffin’s term for the “longing for a new era” is “palingenesis,”
that is a rebirth, or second birth. Christian baptism, for example, is
a palingenetic rite. The term catches the Janus-like characteristic of
fascism and nazism, both of which considered themselves to be rev-
olutionary, but at the same time, to represent the restoration of an
earlier state of affairs. Communism, in contrast, stressed rejection
of the past, and it is utopian in the sense that it imagines, in Leszek
Kolakowski’s definition, a “perfect and everlasting human fraterni-
ty” (Modernity on Endless Trial, 138). I am not aware that any of the
literature labels the contrasting nature of fascism/nazism in this
way, but to call the former “palingenetic” and the latter “utopian”
catches the difference quite neatly. My title, Dreams of a Totalitarian
Utopia, attempts to catch the antinomial nature of the hopes of the
three artists under discussion. They regarded themselves as looking
forward to a new cultural and political dispensation, rather than
backward to a former state – as, for example, Chesterton and Bel-
loc did. It is true that Eliot came to offer cultural and political nos-
The Response to Fascism 141
trums entirely compatible those of the “Chester-Belloc” – as Pound

called the two Catholic cultural critics – but we have seen that Eliot
began in a different ideological place.
Sternhell’s focus on fascism is quite different from Griffin’s –
though compatible with it. He takes a longer view; he is primarily
concerned to challenge what he perceives to be the prevailing schol-
arly opinion – that fascism was an aberration within European cul-
ture and society – and to demonstrate its origins in a resistance to the
Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of man: “The apologetic
interpretation of events consciously disregards the cultural history of
Europe in the last hundred years, the fact that toward the end of the
nineteenth century the opposition to optimism, universalism, and
humanism developed into a general struggle that affected all areas
of intellectual activity. At that time, an alternative political culture
came into being; it sought to rescue Europe from the heritage of the
Enlightenment, and naturally, when the crisis reached its peak at the
beginning of the twentieth century, the attack was directed first
against rationalism and humanism” (249–50).
The late nineteenth-century’s opposition to “optimism, univer-
salism and humanism” is identified by Sternhell with French social-
ist thought – in particular Proudhon and Sorel (24). Proudhon, of
course, was a member of the Communist International. But that
organization was taken over by Marx and Engels, leaving Proudho-
nians out in the cold. The Proudhonian legacy is anarchism, rather
than communism. The Spanish Civil War exemplifies the difficulty
of discriminating between the various “revolutionary” movements
of the period. It was fomented by General Franco’s rebellion in
February 1936 against the duly elected Popular Front government
made up of Anarchists, Communists and a few Syndicalists. Anar-
chists, socialists, Communists, and anti-fascists from Europe and
the Americas formed the famed International Brigade to support
the elected government. The Russian Communists also sent aid to
the Republicans, as the legitimate government was called. The
democracies stood aside and watched as Hitler and Mussolini
(ironically, a self-declared Syndicalist) sent substantial aid to Fran-
co, who eventually prevailed, the last resistance to his forces capit-
ulating on 1 April 1939.
The Spanish Civil War has gone down in history as a prelude to
World War II, which broke out only a few months later with Hitler’s
invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. It is often regarded as a

clear case of the failure of the democracies to respond to the threat
of fascism/nazism – as, indeed, it was. However, it is better under-
stood as an index of the confused state of power politics in the
inter-war period, for it reveals that the capitalist democracies
feared socialism/communism as much as they feared fas-
cism/nazism. They wished for neither side to triumph, conse-
quently democratic governments offered support to neither side,
and even took measures to prevent their nationals from volunteer-
ing for the International Brigade.
The point of mentioning the Spanish Civil War is to take note
that Proudhonians and Sorelians were on opposite sides of the
struggle in that conflict, even though Sternhell sees Proudhon and
Sorel as joint progenitors of fascism. Here is how Sternhell resolves
the apparent incoherence of his position: “When these leftists of all
shapes and colours come to the conclusion that the working class
had definitely beaten a retreat, they did not follow it into this atti-
tude. Their socialism remained revolutionary when that of the pro-
letariat had ceased to be so. Having to choose between the prole-
tariat and revolution, they chose revolution: having to choose
between a proletarian but moderate socialism and a non-proletari-
an but revolutionary and national socialism, they opted for the
non-proletarian revolution, the national revolution” (27). The fas-
cist revolution on the Sorelian model, Sternhell contends, would
“eradicate the liberal democratic regime and its moral and intel-
lectual norms without destroying all the structures of the capitalist
economy” (27). So we have come back to the point I have pressed
in previous chapters: the common feature of Left and the Right is
a shared opposition to liberal democracy, which for the Right rep-
resented materialism – as did communism – and for the Left rep-
resented exploitation of the masses.
The materialism – by which the Right meant atheism, not con-
sumerism, which the term is often used to mean today – of liberal
capitalism was not something that troubled any of our three poets
(prior to Eliot’s conversion). They were somewhat distressed at the
way in which capitalism maldistributed wealth, but, as we have
seen, their primary concerns were cultural, and neither economic
nor religious. Pound and Lewis were incensed that democracies
valued artists too little and paid insufficient attention to their
advice. Eliot tended to agree, though less stridently. Lewis’s prima-

ry concern was the tendency of capitalist democracies to wage war.
All three supposed that more “personal governance” (that is, tyran-
ny or dictatorship) would be more amenable to the advice of wise
men like themselves. Finally, they all agreed that European culture
had become moribund and needed renewal – akin to the notion of
palingenesis (rebirth) that Griffin attributes to fascism.
I cannot improve on Terry Eagleton’s characterization of the
relation of the Modernists with fascism in “Nudge-Winking,” his
review of Jason Harding’s excellent, The “Criterion”: Cultural Politics
and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain – despite Eagleton’s use of
the much-abused term “reactionary”:
In fact, Eliot was not a fascist but a reactionary, a distinction lost

on those of his critics who, in the words of Edmund Burke,
know nothing of politics but the passions they incite. Ideologi-
cally speaking, fascism is as double-visaged as the Modernism
with which it was sometimes involved, casting a backward
glance to the primitive and primordial while steaming dynami-
cally ahead into the gleaming technological future. Like Mod-
ernism, it is both archaic and avant-garde, sifting pre-modern
mythologies for precious seeds of the post-modern future. Polit-
ically speaking, however, fascism, like all nationalism, is a thor-
oughly modern invention. Its aim is to crush beneath its boot
the traditions of high civility that Eliot revered, placing an out-
sized granite model of a spade and Sten gun in the spaces
where Virgil and Milton once stood. (6)
Harding, himself, it should be noted, also dismisses careless

characterizations of Eliot’s political posture as fascist (“The Criteri-
on,” 184).
lewis and fascism
We have seen that Lewis was the first of the three to respond posi-
tively – in The Art of Being Ruled (1926) – to Mussolini’s fascist rev-
olution, declaring that “some modified form of fascism should
probably be best” for “anglo-saxon countries” (320–1). However,
that remark should be placed in the context of Lewis’s preceding,
and stronger, endorsation of Soviet communism: “I have already

said that in the abstract I believe the sovietic system to be the best.
It has spectacularly broken with all the past of Europe; it looks to the East,
which is spiritually so much greater and intellectually so much
finer than Europe, for inspiration. It springs ostensibly from a
desire to alleviate the lot of the poor and outcast, and not merely
to set up a cast-iron, militarist-looking state” (Art of Being Ruled,
320, my emphasis). Here Lewis sounds like the most star-struck of
Western fellow travellers. However, despite such high praise for bol-
shevik communism, Lewis believed it had no prospect of succeed-
ing in “anglo-saxon countries” (by which he presumably meant
Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States of
America). Fascism, he thought, was more compatible with the
political culture of Britain.
The career of Oswald Mosley illustrates the permeability of polit-
ical boundaries in the inter-war period. He had begun his political
career as a Conservative Member of Parliament, elected in the
1918 election in which he ran as a returned soldier. He left the
Tories for the Labour party in March 1924, and then left Labour in
February 1931. After some uncertainty, Mosley founded his own
party, the British Union of fascists, in October of 1932. Like Pound
he was “converted” by an interview with Mussolini during his 1932
fact-finding visit to Italy (Skidelsky, Mosley, 295). On returning to
Britain Mosley wrote an enthusiastic article for the Daily Mail prais-
ing the Duce’s machismo: “The great Italian represents the first
emergence of the modern man to power; it is an interesting and
instructive phenomenon. Englishmen who have long suffered
from statesmanship in skirts can pay him no less, and need pay him
no more, tribute than to say, ‘Here at least is a man.’” (Quoted in
Skidelsky, 285). Skidelsky adds that in Mosley’s view “the great con-
structive achievements of fascism ... far outweighed the loss of the
‘right to blather,’ which [loss] English liberals so deplored.” Unlike
Lewis, Mosley stuck with his fascist beliefs, and was interred after
the outbreak of hostilities. Fearing the same fate, Lewis fled to
Canada. As Jeffrey Meyers puts it: “Lewis’s support of Hitler in 1930
led, indirectly but inexorably, to his exile in 1939” (247).
Fascism, then, represented itself as a solution to the problems of
“modernism” – perceived as atheism, internationalism, rational-
ism, and rule by the ignorant masses. None of these attributes were
perceived as a threat in the United States where Christian beliefs,

American exceptionalism, and egalitarianism were still strong, and
where rationalism had not been a political force since the early
days of the Revolution. No doubt for those reasons, there never was
a political movement in the United States of America that could
fairly be called “fascist.” The only serious candidate for that label is
the Technocracy movement as modified by Howard Scott.1
Howard Scott and Thorstein Veblen founded Technocracy in
1919. Veblen articulated its principles in The Engineers and the Price
System, a collection of essays first published in the Dial in 1921 – the
year in which Eliot’s Waste Land appeared in the same journal!
Veblen argued, in Henry Elsner’s summary, that “A violent revolu-
tion by the oppressed and exploited is neither probable nor, if it
occurred, could it succeed.” In America, not only would a success-
ful revolution not follow the Russian example, but it would “neces-
sarily also be of a kind which has no close parallel in the history of
revolutionary movements.” Previous revolutions were military and
political, but a twentieth-century American revolution would be
industrial, technological” (Elsner, 20). On the evidence of Patria
Mia, Pound would have found Veblen’s technocratic arguments
sympathetic, but I have found no indication that he ever read the
articles – even though Pound appeared fairly regularly in The Dial
between 1921 and 1923.2
By the mid-twenties the original Technocratic movement had
been disbanded, but with the help of Walter Rautenstrauch, chair-
man of Industrial Engineering at Columbia University, Scott
revived it in 1932 – in the depths of the Depression. They turned
what had been primarily an academic theory of industrial organi-
zation into a political movement. Scott was prone to bluster and
threats – as in the following remark of 1932: “It is their ship of state
and if they cannot find a solution, the force majeur of continental
conditions in the next few years, will bring forth those who can.
These problems transcend all social theories and partisan politics –
even government. It is civilization itself. Technology has written
‘mene mene tekel upharsin’ across the face of the price system”
(quoted by Elsner, 5). Elsner concedes that “Most commentators
on the technocratic movement have assigned it, especially in the
Technocracy Inc. phase, to the category of fascism,” but he chal-
lenges that assessment on the grounds that it was not anti-commu-
nist or anti-labour (208). However, it did adopt some of the trap-

pings of Mussolini’s fascism such as uniforms, emblems (the
Monad symbol), and mass rallies.
Although Pound took no note of the early Technocratic move-
ment he did comment on Scott’s version in Jefferson and/or Mussoli-
ni, dismissing it on the rather whimsical grounds that its association
with Columbia University discredited it (48, 88). Pound seems to
have regarded Technocracy as a rival to Social Credit and was
unwilling to share the glory of having discovered the fact that mod-
ern power production altered economic realities. Although Tech-
nocracy did attract a number of intellectuals – most notably Harold
Loeb, Stuart Chase, and the historian Charles Beard, I have not
found any evidence that either Lewis or Eliot ever evinced any
interest in Technocracy.
As we have seen, Lewis was not alone in admiring Mussolini’s fas-
cism, but he was eccentric in his endorsation of both fascism and
Soviet communism: “The sovietic or the fascist chiefs, like other
people, have to do the best they can with the material to their
hand: and they are not perfect themselves. What they have done in
a short time in the way of organization must be the admiration of
the world” (The Art of Being Ruled, 75). (Pound, too, praised Lenin
in Jefferson and/or Mussolini; the American radical, Lawrence Den-
nis, rather idiosyncratically regarded fascism, nazism, and commu-
nism as interchangeable.) Lewis was aware that Mussolini had been
a member of the Italian Socialist party – Partito Socialista Italiano
(psi) – before he concocted fascism out of a combination of Sorel’s
syndicalism (with its legitimation of violence), Marinetti’s Futur-
ism, and Italian nationalism. Hitler followed much the same for-
mula – though without the worship of technology characteristic of
Futurism. Both fascism/nazism and communism represented
themselves as revolutionary, and both claimed to represent the
common man against the interests of commerce and industry, but
communism was formally an international movement, rejecting
nationalism as one of the chains with which the bourgeoisie
restrained the proletariat.3
In the Art of Being Ruled Lewis had given roughly equal promi-
nence to Proudhon, Sorel, and other communist and fascist
thinkers, regarding all of them as sharing a revolutionary program
– a posture he sees as an inevitable consequence of the mecha-
nization of society. In a pseudo Marxist argument, we have seen

Lewis in The Art of Being Ruled attributing the taste for innovation
and revolution to the ubiquity of machines, replacing the “static
circle of the rotation of the crops” (23). Those sentiments antici-
pate Eliot’s celebration of the natural cycle in “East Coker I”:
Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death. (ll. 41–7)
Lewis also lamented the advent of the modern condition that

Eliot had evoked so powerfully in his early poetry. Quite uncontro-
versially Lewis saw mechanization to be a consequence of scientific
advances and hence deplored the scientific temperament that had
brought it about, and which he believed would inevitably infect the
entire population: “Science makes us strangers to ourselves. Sci-
ence destroys our personally useful self-love. It installs a principle
of impersonality in the heart of our life that is anti-vital. In its pre-
sent vulgarized condition science represents simply the principle of destruc-
tion: it is more deadly than a thousand plagues, and every day we
perfect it, or our popular industrially applied version of it” (The Art
of Being Ruled, 24, my emphasis).4 Lewis could hardly have sound-
ed more Wordsworthian, despite his scorn for sentimental roman-
ticism.
Although D.H. Lawrence and Lewis agreed on very little,
Lawrence expressed a very similar antipathy for industrial society
in Women in Love, written during the Great War. Gerald Crich, one
of the principal figures in the novel, and the manager of a coal
mine, represents the mores of industrial society in the novel: “His
vision had suddenly crystallised. Suddenly he had conceived the
pure instrumentality of mankind. There had been so much
humanitarianism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was
ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not mat-
ter in the least. They were mere conditions, like the weather. What
mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual. As a man

as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else mattered” (223).
Lawrence explained in the foreword (dated 1919) that the novel
was written between 1913 and 1917: “So that it is a novel which
took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does
not concern the war itself. I should wish the time to remain
unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted
in the characters.” Later in the foreword, Lawrence emphatically
marks his sense of historical crisis presaging a violent new begin-
ning: “We are now in a period of crisis. Every man who is acutely
alive is acutely wrestling with his own soul. The people that can
bring forth the new passion, the new idea, this people will endure.
Those others, that fix themselves in the old idea, will perish with
the new life strangled unborn within them. Men must speak out to
one another” (485). This kind of apocalyptic talk did not come nat-
urally to Pound, Eliot, or Lewis, but they shared Lawrence’s antipa-
thy for the new industrial society, and his sense of crisis.
Both Lewis and Lawrence saw the problem much as the eigh-
teenth-century Luddites had done. The Luddites went about
destroying power looms in the futile hope of saving their form of
life as cottage weavers. As we have seen, Lewis offers The Art of Being
Ruled as a sort of Noah’s Ark of the mind and claimed the Soviet
Union as an ally in his opposition to the baleful influence of sci-
ence: “One of the greatest innovations, and the most beneficent, of
the sovietic rule has been the check it has begun to put on the pop-
ularization of science” (48). And he even recruits fascists to his
Luddite cause: “By the agreement of the workers of the world,
through their accredited representatives, to align themselves with the
sovietic and fascist power, that unity would immediately be achieved”
(54). Since in 1926 there existed only one fascist “power” (Italy)
and one communist “power” (the Soviet Union), Lewis is calling
for an alliance between Moscow and Rome, oblivious to their mutu-
al hostility. Lewis’s naïve strategy seems to be based on the percep-
tion he shared with Lawrence Dennis that socialism and fascism are
really two faces of the same phenomenon – tyranny or dictatorship:
“everyone today is somewhere on the Left: all except fascism, which
is a faction of the extreme and militant Left who have burst round
and through to the Right, as it were – circumnavigated, boxed the
compass ... The principle conflict today, then, is between the demo-
cratic and liberal principle on the one side ... and on the other, the
principle of dictatorship of which Lenin was the protagonist and
the first great theorist, proving triumphantly in action what he had
arrived at speculatively beforehand. He discarded all the confu-
sions that the legacy of a century of liberal thought involved, and
all the concepts of democracy and mass-control were rooted out of
his system” (70).
The compelling choice facing society in 1926, in Lewis’s opin-
ion, is not how to organize the production and distribution of
goods – whether through government ownership and control
(socialism/communism), oligarchical control (fascism), or on lais-
sez-faire grounds (capitalism). For him the choice is simply between
(allegedly dysfunctional) parliamentary democracy and (enlight-
ened) dictatorship: “The political ferment expressed by the fierce
opposition of the principles of democracy or liberalism on the one
hand, and dictatorship on the other resolves itself into the secular
question of the One and the Many: of a unification of the world as
opposed to a plurality of nations; of the rule of the minority as
opposed to rule of the majority; of rule by the most vigorous and
intelligent as opposed to rule by a show of hands”5 (72–3).
Although Lewis abandoned the notion that fascism and bolshe-
vism are equivalent, that view is not as bizarre as it might appear.
Hannah Arendt also saw an essential equivalence between the two
in Totalitarianism, published in1951, twenty-five years later than The
Art of Being Ruled: “Practically speaking, it will make little difference
whether totalitarian movements adopt the pattern of nazism or bol-
shevism, organize the masses in the name of race or class, pretend
to follow the laws of life and nature or of dialectics and economics”
(11). Later, having become hostile to communism, Lewis conflated
liberalism and communism as Eliot did: “What people get if they
become too liberal we have all now been able to observe. They get
the cheap salvationist imperialism of marxian communism” (Men
Without Art, 319).
Insofar as liberalism is perceived to be a “bourgeois attitude,”
Arendt tends to agree with Lewis on this point. She supposed:
“bourgeois attitudes are very useful for those forms of dictatorship
in which a ‘strong man’ takes upon himself the troublesome
responsibility for the conduct of public affairs.”6 However, she
believes that only the non-ideological tyrant can tolerate liberal
attitudes, noting, “they are a positive hindrance to totalitarian

movements which can tolerate bourgeois individualism no more
than any other kind of individualism” (Totalitarianism, 11).
Arendt’s view corresponds quite precisely with what Lewis’s expect-
ed from dictatorship. His error was that the ideologies he briefly
espoused – bolshevism, fascism, and nazism – were not simple
tyrannies, but totalitarian movements.
Eliot saw Lewis’s objective in The Art of Being Ruled as being to con-
struct a political regime favourable to the conduct of art, as did other
“conservative” thinkers, placing him with “such critics as Benda, Bab-
bitt, or Maritain, whose approach is very different.” In Lewis’s
defence Eliot explains that the “artist in the modern world ... finds
himself, if he is a man of intellect, unable to realise his art to his own
satisfaction, and he may be driven to examining the elements in the
situation – political, social, philosophical or religious – which frus-
trate his labour.” Although, Eliot adds, such neglect of the artist’s
proper role may be criticized, “it is likely that some of the strongest
influences on the thought of the next generation, may be those of
the dispossessed artists” (“A Commentary,” Criterion 4, June 1926,
420). There is more than a touch of “whistling in the dark” in these
remarks, but they manifest the belief shared by all three of our sub-
jects that the artist is both victim of and therapist for social malaise.
Finding a form of governance disinclined to wage war was even
more important for Lewis than preserving “bourgeois attitudes.”
The thought that industrial democracies were more inclined to
military aggression than dictatorships might seem bizarre to us in
the twenty-first century, but it must be remembered that Lewis grew
up in the twilight of European Imperialism, which had brought
wars of conquest to the farthest corners of the globe. The principal
nineteenth-century imperial powers – Britain, France, Belgium, the
Netherlands, and Germany – were all either full democracies or
limited monarchies. As for capitalism, it was widely believed that
trade followed guns.7 It was not as obvious in 1926 that it would be
Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo who would once again plunge the world
into total war, and not Stalin. And not all dictators waged aggressive
wars. For example, neither the Spanish dictator Franco nor the
Portuguese dictator Salazar engaged in any wars of aggression.8
So I cannot agree with Frederic Jameson’s assertion, in his influ-
ential 1979 study of modernist art and politics, Fables of Aggression:
Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, that aggression is an in-

evitable concomitant of conservative political thought. My analysis
of Lewis’s politics is at odds with Jameson’s – largely because I
reject the historical determinism and class analysis that animates
his study. Read today, his rhetoric is distressingly aggressive and
jargon-ridden, but at the time of publication, Jameson was well
ahead of the wave of French-inspired neo-Marxist criticism that
dominated the North American academy in the late eighties and
nineties – a wave he helped to start.
Jameson sees modernists as “protofascists”: “Protofascism may be
characterized as a shifting strategy of class alliances whereby an ini-
tially strong populist and anticapitalist impulse is gradually
readapted to the ideological habits of a petty bourgeoisie, which
can itself be displaced when, with the consolidation of the fascist
state, effective power passes back into the hands of big business”
(14). Neither Lewis, Eliot, nor Pound could plausibly be accused of
populism, but their “anticapitalist impulse” is manifest. Lewis’s
Hitler makes Jameson’s classification of him as protofascist quite
plausible – as would Eliot’s championing of Maurras. Pound did
become a fascist booster, and hence the poster boy for protofas-
cism among artists, despite his opposition to big business, and poor
populist credentials.
Jameson identifies two erroneous ideological strains in play in
the interwar period – much as I see three. We agree that one of the
strains is liberalism, which Jameson lumps with “left-oriented ide-
alism.” He claims that liberalism “aims essentially at the transfor-
mation of the self, at some fundamental transformation of our own
consciousness (which will then make an external revolution in the
institutions unnecessary).” Clearly neither Lewis, Eliot, nor Pound
fits this strain, for all three see the necessity of institutional change,
and in any case all identify liberalism as a worn-out creed in need
of replacement. They clearly belong to what Jameson calls “the cul-
ture critique of the Right” (129).
What Jameson means by “the culture critique of the Right” is
“the diagnosis of pernicious attitudes and toxic ideas” – as if his
own discourse were not such a diagnosis. Through that analysis, he
says, “the agents of cultural decay are specified in advance and can
be no other than the very guardians of culture, the intellectuals
themselves, by definition disgruntled and embittered, failed artists
and would-be unsuccessful politicians – in short, the very arche-

type of ressentiment at its purest” (131–2). In these remarks, Jame-
son is reducing the cultural and political discourse of Lewis and
friends to a rather coarse caricature of Julien Benda’s Trahison des
Clercs, a work, as we have seen, they found not to their liking – in
contrast to his earlier Belphégor. Nonetheless, Jameson’s remarks
have some bite so far as Lewis is concerned, for he did direct his
polemic primarily at fellow artists and thinkers, though he scarcely
regarded them as “disgruntled and embittered.” That characteri-
zation is required to permit Jameson to apply the Nietzschean
term, “ressentiment,” a word that possessed much greater cathexis
for postmodern critics than its English equivalent, the plain white
bread term, “resentment.” Although Jameson is characterizing
Lewis’s cultural criticism, he applies the term, ressentiment, to Lewis
himself and by extension to his fellow cultural critics, Eliot and
Pound – neither of whom were much inclined to identify other
artists and thinkers as their antagonists, except within strictly cul-
tural controversy.
Through this sort of analysis, Jameson is able to cobble together
an account in which the undoubtedly aggressive behaviour of
Hitler and Mussolini is seen as a mirror image of the rhetorical
aggressiveness of the Modernists, arising out of their resentment at
being displaced from the centre of the cultural life of the English-
speaking democracies. There is no doubt that all three of my sub-
jects were distressed at their marginal role in the life of industrial
capitalist democracies, but it is surely a canard to reduce their cul-
tural commentary to nothing more than sour grapes, the com-
plaints of disgruntled artists. Like the similarly marginalized Marx
and Lenin, they sincerely thought they could contribute to making
the world a better place.
Insofar as it is Marxist, Jameson’s cultural critique is avowedly a
priori (a term much avoided in favour of “theory”) and therefore
immune to disconfirmation by mere testimony. That is very much
not the case for Lewis. Indeed, inconsistency seems to be a hall-
mark of The Art of Being Ruled; for example: although Lewis criti-
cizes Nietzsche,9 his contempt for the “small man” is compatible
with Nietzsche’s celebration of the Superman: “He [the “small
man”] is not only the enemy of a unification of the intelligent
forces of the world; he is the symbol of what has always held back
our race, held up all that challenged his self-sufficiency and small
conservatism” (104). The expression “our race” is not just a care-
less use of the term, for Lewis articulates an attitude toward racial
distinctions in this work that is far more uncompromisingly articu-
lated in Paleface three years later (1929): “The differentiation of
mankind into two rigorously separated worlds would not be on the
old ‘class’ lines at all, to begin with. It would be like a deep racial
difference, not a superficial ‘class’ difference. This would entirely
remove the sting of ‘inferiority’ and the usual causes of complaint.
A beaver does not compare itself with a walrus or an antelope.
There is no ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ between a cat and a dog. So it
would be with the new species of man” (127).
It is as if Lewis were channelling Mustapha Mond, the supreme
ruler in Brave New World. But Lewis imagines individuals being sort-
ed into categories by a system of competitive examinations that he
supposes would aid in the creation of “another type of man,” rather
than by selective in vitro breeding as in Brave New World: “Such a
separation as would be obtained by an examination system instead
of heredity, perhaps; or such a separation as the instinctive growth
and differentiation of another type of man, heredity serving a bio-
logic and not a social end: that is one solution of the present diffi-
culty” (129). Lewis apparently assumes that intelligence would
breed true. Earlier he had advanced the eugenic argument that
racial purity is essential for the maintenance of a healthy polity,
pointing to the Roman absorption of alien freemen as the princi-
pal cause of Rome’s decline (108–9).10
To be fair, Lewis consistently criticizes European imperial behav-
iour as an immoral and inexcusable exploitation of men and
women of different skin colour and culture. And I think his protes-
tation that there is no hierarchy of races can be taken as sincere. At
the same time, he regards the differences between the “races” as
not merely superficial – skin colour, hair, etc. – but as in some sense
fundamental. I have no recollection of Lewis articulating what that
difference would be, but I suppose it would be in the nature of cog-
nitive habits – as opposed to capacities; sub-Saharan Africans,
South Asians, East Asians, and American aboriginals all “think” dif-
ferently than one another and differently than Europeans. This
sort of view was very common in the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth century. One celebrated articulation of it was Lévi-Bruhl’s The
Savage Mind, a work that Eliot cited in his dissertation and dis-
cussed favourably in a 1916 review.11
Like most of those who distrust democracy, Lewis has little faith
in the wisdom, diligence, or energy of most human beings:
“Absence of responsibility and automatic and stereotyped rhythm,
is what men most desire for themselves. All struggle has for its end
relief or repose. A rhythmic movement is restful; but consciousness
and possession of the self is not compatible with a set rhythm” (130, my
emphasis). Fulfilling one of the characteristics both Griffin and
Sternhell identify as a hallmark of fascism, Lewis explicitly rejects
Enlightenment faith in the nobility and perfectibility of mankind:
“The libertarian slogans of the closing decades of the Eighteenth
Century were based, I assert, upon unreal premises. They ascribed
to man impulses that are not normally his. They deal in aspirations
which, if realised, would be disagreeable to the majority” (130). He
presses the point home a little later, after asserting that a society of
“free men,”12 though desirable, is an impossibility: “For in the mass
people wish to be automata; they wish to be conventional; they hate
your teaching them or forcing them into ‘freedom;’ they wish to be
obedient, hard-working machines, as near dead as possible – as
near dead (feeling less and thoughtless) as they can get, without
actually dying” (Art of Being Ruled, 151).
Lewis not infrequently sinks into such misanthropic rants, and
he has a well-deserved reputation for arrogance and irascibility in
personal relations. But, despite these rather unattractive personal
attributes, he was genuinely appalled at the slaughter of World War
I, and terrified at the prospect of even greater slaughter in a sub-
sequent war. He saw himself as a Cassandra valiantly striving to save
his fellow Europeans from walking into a disaster he foresaw clear-
ly. If he were truly a misanthrope, it is difficult to see why he would
care. A plausible answer might be that he sought to save the
abstract entity, “culture” or “civilization,” not the men, women, and
children who make up the society within which a culture must sub-
sist. In this respect Lewis’s social and political thought is of a piece
with Eliot’s and Pound’s. All three thought of a society primarily in
terms of its capacity to generate and support culture, that is, the
arts. (They thought of science as the antitype of art, and hence an
aspect of technology, not of culture – though they acknowledged
that both science and technology impacted culture.) For Lewis the
sine quae non was the deference due to the artist by society at large
– an attitude that gives some credence to Jameson’s attribution of
ressentiment to Lewis. What Pound wanted most was a guarantee of
freedom from economic necessity for the artist. Eliot’s later politi-
cal thought was dominated by his conviction that religious belief
was essential to a healthy culture, and hence for artistic creation.
He expressed that view most uncompromisingly in Notes Toward a
Definition of Culture, where he denounced the “widely held” recip-
rocal errors “that culture can be preserved, extended, and devel-
oped in the absence of religion,” or, alternatively, “that the preser-
vation and maintenance of religion need not reckon with the
preservation and maintenance of culture” (30).
One of the issues that concerned intellectuals in the early
decades of the twentieth century (and still today in the first decade
of the twenty-first) was how to maintain civil society without the
sanctions provided by religious belief. The “liberal” alternative was
humanism, influentially articulated by Bertrand Russell’s 1903
essay “The Free Man’s Worship” and Anatole France’s 1908 satiri-
cal fantasy Penguin Island. Both works targeted Christianity specifi-
cally, and religion generally, attributing the sanguinary nature of
human history to the stirring of men’s passions by religious super-
stition. Although Lewis was not a believer, he took a more benign
view of the influence of religion. His take on Christianity is pretty
much the same as Marx’s, that religion was the “opiate of the mass-
es:” “Christ’s perfection was full of impossibilities, on the mundane
plane, and to stage them he had to take his audience out of life
altogether. His doctrine was a drug: beneath its influence men saw
their wrongs being righted, saw ‘the oppressor’s wrong, the proud
man’s contumely’ punished, and humble faith rewarded, the last
first and the first last. Is it the action of an honourable man to give
people these flattering visions? Is not the modern benefactor of big
business (possibly sometimes of the type against which Christ
inveighed) really the eternal rich man justifying himself, stealing a
march on the magician and so-called Saviour?” (Art of Being Ruled,
371).
Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, Charles Maurras, and Benito
Mussolini were all atheists, but they all wished to retain religious
practices, precisely for the reason that Marx wished to abolish
them: religious practices tended to preserve the status quo. Lewis
leaned toward Marx’s view, though he occasionally countenanced

the humanist tolerance of religious superstition. Somewhat incon-
sistently, Lewis discredited all varieties of socialism on the grounds
that they are “simply the religion that has superseded christianity,
built largely on it” (278) – a judgment that Eliot reiterated in his
Criterion review of fascist literature.
Lewis rejected “Proudhon, Bakunin, Pelloutier,13 [and] Sorel” as
“in one degree or another, just the same” (279). “They are all,” he
declared, “without exception, and very strictly (whatever may be
said about them), utopian and other-worldly ... No religious
teacher promising paradise could be harsher in his disciplinary
proposals than Sorel. They are indifferent to the ‘happiness’ of
others not because they are heartless, but because they are fanati-
cal, and because they believe that their proposals are ad majorem dei
gloriam [“for the greater glory of God,” the Jesuit motto]. They
would willingly throw people to the alligators for saying the world
is flat, if socialism at the moment requires it to be round” (278–9).
In effect, then, Lewis dismissed socialist reformers as impractical
and fanatical dreamers who would bring disaster on those societies
they manage to reform.
Agreeing with the socialists that the status quo is not supportable
– either morally or practically – Lewis’s solution in The Art of Being
Ruled was benevolent tyranny, as exemplified in Lenin’s rule in the
Soviet Union and Mussolini’s in Italy: “His [Mussolini’s] govern-
ment is doing for Italy ... what the soviet has done for Russia. The
more militant liberalist elements are being heavily discouraged in
a very systematic way ... What will shortly be reached will be a great
socialist state such as Marx intended, rigidly centralized, working
from top to bottom with the regularity and smoothness of a
machine ... Complete political standardization with the suppres-
sion of the last vestiges of the party system, will rescue masses of
energy otherwise wasted in politics for more productive ends. All
the humbug of a democratic suffrage, all the imbecility that is so
wastefully manufactured, will henceforth be spared this happy peo-
ple” (321). One must recall that Lewis is writing in 1925 and 1926,
when the regimes in Italy and Russia had so far restricted their vio-
lence and oppression largely to political opponents – the “system-
atic” discouragement Lewis mentions. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia
and Stalin’s engineered starvation of Ukrainian “kulaks” were still
a decade in the future. Nonetheless, Lewis’s easy acceptance of

tyranny as the price of peace and prosperity is not to his credit –
either on moral grounds or as an instance of political wisdom.
Lewis ended The Art of Being Ruled on a Pollyanna note, seeing
the present time as hopeful just because things are so bad: “the
ever closer and more mechanical association of the great masses of
people into an ever more and more rigid system of clans, societies,
clubs, syndics, and classes” is driving “the original man” outside
where “these odd men out stand at present glaring at each other as
usual ... But the time must arrive when they, too, in spite of them-
selves, form a sort of syndic. That will be the moment of the
renascence of our race, or will be the signal for a new biological
transformation” (364). We can see a eugenic tinge to Lewis’s polit-
ical thought in the last sentence, as well as his usual presumption
that salvation can come only from extraordinary individuals. That
the “syndic” of “odd men out” will be an association of “geniuses”
is made clear in Paleface: “As ... society becomes, instead of an
organic whole, a mass of minute individuals, under the guise of an
Ethic there appears the Mystic of the Many, the cult of the cell, or
the worship of the particle; and the dogma of ‘what is due from
everybody to everybody’ takes the place of the natural law of what
is due to character, to creative genius, or to personal power, or even
to their symbols” (77–8).
Lewis, then, is a poster boy for the ubiquitous view that the mod-
ernists were proto-fascists, except when they were not fascists tout
court. His distaste for virtually all trends of scientific and philosoph-
ical thought of the modern era, his nostalgia for a past world, his
faith in rule by a wise leader or elite group, his contempt for popu-
larly elected democratic governance, his tolerance for “enlight-
ened” oppression, and his inclination toward eugenic arguments –
all align him with full-blown fascism. Two factors nonetheless dis-
tinguish his political posture from fascism – his pacifism, and his
focus on the arts as therapy for a sick society. Lewis believed that art
alone could provide an adequate response to the threat of the orga-
nized violence of war: “Where violence is concerned the aesthetic
principle is evidently of more weight than the “moral,” the latter
being only the machinery to regulate the former. One is an expedi-
ent, whose pretensions can easily be exploded: the other is the thing
itself. As measure is the principle of all true art, and as art is an
enemy of all excess, so it is along aesthetic lines that the solution of this
problem should be sought rather than along moral (or police) lines, or
humanitarian ones. The soberness, measure, and order that reigns in
all the greatest productions of art is the thing on which it is most
useful to fix the mind in considering this problem” (Art of Being
Ruled, 64–5, my emphasis). Lewis’s faith that art alone can provide
solutions to practical political, ethical, and economic problems in
some ways anticipates postmodern privileging of the virtual over the
actual.14 But, ironically, Lewis’s fiction and painting can hardly be
said to further the political and pacifist project that his polemical
prose is designed to foster, in that they express a contempt for the
way things were rather than a model of how they could be.
eliot and charles maurras
Eliot endorsed Lewis’s self-image as a pundit whose qualifications

derive from his status as an artist, characterizing him, as noted
above, as “the most remarkable example in England of the actual
mutation of the artist into a philosopher of a type hitherto
unknown” (“Commentary,” Criterion 4, Nov. 1927, 385). However,
by 1927 Eliot had moved well away from Lewis’s positive views.
Their disagreement about the attractiveness of fascism is evident in
Eliot’s review essay, “The Literature of Fascism” a year later. The
review examined five books on Italian fascism: J. S. Barnes, The Uni-
versal Aspects of fascism; Aline Lion, The Pedigree of Fascism; Gaetano
Salvemini, The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, Vol. I; Luigi Sturzo, Italy
and Fascism; and Luigi Villari, The Fascist Experiment. Villari, Barnes,
and Lion defend fascism; Salvemini and Sturzo are hostile to it.
Eliot began the review by declaring himself to be “a typical repre-
sentative of the British and American public in the extent of my
knowledge and ignorance of fascism in Italy,” and one as yet uncon-
vinced by the critics of fascism. The question for Eliot is “whether fas-
cism is the emergence of a new political idea, or the recrudescence of
an old one, that may infect the whole of Europe as Parliamentarism
infected it in the nineteenth century, or whether it is purely local”
(281). Eliot’s implication that fascism and parliamentary democracy
are equivalently pathological highlights his anti-democratic bias. It
becomes apparent in the review that the “old idea” – of which he
believes fascism is a recrudescence – is Maurrasian Royalism.
For Eliot the central issue was not the struggle between alterna-
tive political regimes – democracy on the one hand, and fascism or
communism on the other – as it was for most observers. He saw the
issue to be one of belief, and regarded both fascism and commu-
nism as “movements” that offer bogus substitutes for religious
beliefs and institutions. On this point he is in complete accord with
Lewis. “The human craving to believe in something is pathetic,
when not tragic; and always, at the same time, comic. I still believe,
however, that religious beliefs (including, of course, Atheism), are
on a different plane. Some so-called religious beliefs are really
political beliefs in disguise; but many political beliefs are substi-
tutes for religious belief ... So far as bolshevism is a practical way of
running Russia if it is for the material contentment of Russians, it
seems to me worthy of study. So far as it is a kind of supernatural
faith it seems to be a humbug. The same is true of fascism. There
is a form of faith which is solely appropriate to a religion; it should
not be appropriated by politics” (“The Literature of Fascism”).15
Unlike Lewis, Eliot was “not concerned with the feasibility of fas-
cism as a working programme for Italy. What matters,” he wrote,
“is the spread of the fascist idea.” Once again we find the ubiqui-
tous perception that democracy had run its course, and must be
replaced by something else: “Now it is manifest that any dispar-
agement of ‘democracy’ is nowadays well received by nearly every
class of men, and any alternative to ‘democracy’ is watched with
great interest. This is one point on which intellectuals and popu-
lace, reactionaries and communists, the million-press and the rev-
olutionary sheet, are more and more inclined to agree.” But,
rather surprisingly, Eliot confided that he could not “share enthu-
siastically in this vigorous repudiation of ‘democracy’” (287). But
the democracy Eliot defended was one with a restricted suffrage;
he deplored universal suffrage, which he said, will “send us on the
way merely to government by an invisible oligarchy instead of a
government by a visible one. But,” he added, “it is another thing
to ridicule the idea of democracy. A real democracy is always a
restricted democracy, and can only flourish with some limitation
by hereditary rights and responsibilities” (288). In short Eliot’s
idea of democracy was a limited monarchy with an entrenched
aristocracy – exactly British democracy before the Reform Bill of
1867.
Strikingly, the critique of democracy offered by Eliot and Lewis

is very much the same as Mussolini’s in his article “Political and
Social Doctrine”:
After socialism, fascism trains its guns on the whole block of

democratic ideologies, and rejects both their premises and
their practical applications and implements. fascism denies that
numbers, as such, can be the determining factor in human soci-
ety; it denies the right of numbers to govern by means of peri-
odical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and
beneficent inequality of men who cannot be levelled by any
such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage.
Democratic régimes may be described as those under which the
people are, from time to time, deluded into the belief that they
exercise sovereignty, while all the time real sovereignty resides in
and is exercised by other and sometimes irresponsible and secret forces.
Democracy is a kingless régime infested by many kings who are
sometimes more exclusively, tyrannical, and destructive than
one, even if he be a tyrant.” (Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions,
21–2, my emphasis)
Mussolini’s definition of fascism as “as an organised, centralised,

authoritarian democracy” (23) fits perfectly what both Eliot and
Lewis would like to have in place – though just how a centralized
and authoritarian government answers to the label “democracy” is
not self-evident.
So far, we can see a broad agreement between Eliot and Lewis.
But Eliot did not draw the same conclusions as Lewis (or Mussoli-
ni) about the suitability of fascism as a substitute for faulty democ-
racies – which, for Eliot, included the United States. Eliot believed
that the usa had ceased to be a democracy with “the presidency of
Jackson, and the Pork Barrel System.” The need, he said, is to
“build a new structure in which democracy can live.” He did not
think that fascism represented such a structure. Admitting that
“order and authority are good,” he lamented that in longing for
them there is “a certain spiritual anaemia, a tendency to collapse
the recurring human desire to escape the burden of life and
thought.” Eliot believed fascism appealed to this inchoate and
mute longing, a desire to “be benevolently ordered about.” Finally,
he declared that whatever is to be admired in fascism can already

be “found, in a more digestible form, in the work of Charles Mau-
rras” (“Literature of Fascism,” 288). The Maurrassian polity is supe-
rior to fascism, in Eliot’s view, because it retained the “Kingship
and hereditary class.” Even though Eliot had declared himself
“classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in reli-
gion” in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes published earlier in the
year,16 he does not call for a restored Christendom in this review.
Eliot’s rejection of fascism, then was not on grounds of its anti-
democratic and totalitarian character, nor because of its overt cel-
ebration of violence,17 but because he found it inferior to the anti-
democratic and totalitarian doctrines of Charles Maurras and the
Action Française!
Cautious as always, Eliot concluded the review with a remark
designed to isolate his political and social thinking from identifica-
tion with any party or ideology: “the function of political theory is
not to form a working Party, but to permeate society and conse-
quently all parties.”18 Despite his hostility to its humanistic bias,
Eliot cited Fabianism as a model of such a permeation of society by
political and social ideas. Russian communism and Italian fascism,
by contrast, “have died as political ideas, in becoming political facts”
(290). No doubt it is just such “permeation” of society that he
quixotically imagined might be achieved by the discourse published
in The Criterion. Like Lewis he expected some new political accom-
modation to follow democratic capitalism, and hoped to help for-
mulate that accommodation. Unlike Lewis and Pound, Eliot never
endorsed any established regime, but clung to the Action Française
fantasies of a Christian, Royalist polity. An example of Eliot’s com-
mitment to Maurras’ Action Française is found in his response a
year earlier than this review to the papal condemnation of the
Action Française and the works of Maurras on 29 December 1926.
In his “Commentary” for November, 1927 Eliot included that con-
demnation as one of “three events in the last ten years” which have
drawn men of letters to pay attention to political matters. The other
two were the Russian revolution and the fascist coup in Italy (Crite-
rion 6, 386)! There cannot have been many others who would have
ranked the papal prohibition of the Action Française so high!
When the Catholic writer Leo Ward published The Condemnation
of the Action Française in 1928, defending the Vatican’s condemna-
tion of Maurras, Eliot responded with a lengthy and tendentious

defence of Maurras in his “Commentary” for March 1928.19 At the
end of that piece Eliot remarked that he was moved to come to
Maurras’ defence by “Ward’s suggestion that the influence of Mau-
rras, indeed the intention of Maurras, is to pervert his disciples and
students away from Christianity,” adding: “I have been a reader of
the work of Maurras for eighteen years; upon me he has had exact-
ly the opposite effect.” And in his 1948 “Hommage à Charles Mau-
rras,” Eliot noted that he had written the date “1911” in his copy of
Maurrras’ L’Avenir de l’intelligence, but he could not recall who rec-
ommended Maurras to him (Hommage, 6). It is reasonable, then, to
suppose – as John Margolis and all later discussants do – that Mau-
rras influenced Eliot’s political philosophy from a very early date.
Indeed, Kenneth Asher points out that Maurras deeply influenced
the Harvard French professor Irving Babbitt, and that Babbitt’s
hostility to romanticism and fondness for the classic echoed Maur-
rassian views. Babbit passed on that attitude to his students, includ-
ing Eliot (Asher 1998, 24). Margolis speculates that it was the papal
condemnation of Maurras that led Eliot to adopt Anglicanism pub-
licly, citing Paul Elmer More’s opinion that Maurras was an impor-
tant element in Eliot’s conversion: “Some time between The Waste
Land and For Lancelot Andrewes [Eliot] underwent a kind of conver-
sion, due largely I believe to the influence of Maurras and the
Action Française” (cited in Dakin, note 269).
Before publishing his defence of Maurras in his March 1928
“Commentary,” Eliot had extended an invitation to Leo Ward to
respond, and printed Ward’s response in the June 1928 Criterion
number. It would be tedious to trace their respective observations
point by point, but it is worth noting that Ward explicitly alludes to
the rather bloodthirsty nature of the Action Française, which was
born in support of the infamous treason conviction of Alfred Drey-
fus, a Jewish army officer falsely accused of spying for the Germans:
“In regard to national hatred the memory of any of the readers of
this Review who have read the Action Française will supply abundant
evidence. I recall especially its attitude towards the deaths from
famine and alcoholism in post-war Germany. In the matter of class
(or at least of party) hatred I would recall the conviction of M.
Maurras for incitement to murder in the case of Abraham
Schramek” (“A Reply to Mr. Eliot” 83).20 Eliot did not respond to
these observations, nor to the following, which enrolls Wyndham

Lewis on Ward’s side of the issue: “Most of M. Maurras’ political
ideas were already to be found in Joseph de Maistre and his more
rhetorical nationalist outbursts are easily outdone by Mussolini. I
am wholly unable to believe that any fruitful inspiration is to be
derived from what Mr. Wyndham Lewis has well described as ‘the
senseless bellicosity of the reactionary groups of the Action
Française type.’”(“A Reply to Mr. Eliot,” 83–4).
Eliot, incidentally, was well aware of Maurras’ intellectual descent
from de Maistre, the eighteenth-century French conservative and
royalist. He had told Herbert Read in a letter of 14 September
1925 that he intended to do a book on Maurras, as one of a pro-
posed series of Criterion books. The series never came to pass, but
in a later letter (11 Dec. 1925) Eliot added: “When I do the Maur-
ras book I shall have to look into Comte, Joseph de Maistre etc.”
(Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria). It appears that
he did look into de Maistre, for he refers to him on several occa-
sions. One of them – in a 1937 review of Lewis’s Lion and the Fox –
is worth repeating, for it links Maurras, de Maistre and (by impli-
cation Eliot himself) as neglected social and political theorists: “Of
ideologues we find ... two kinds: the majority ideologue and the
minority ideologue. The former, if he is a big one like Marx, antic-
ipates the way in which things are going; if he is a little one like Mr.
Laski or Mr. Strachey, he accepts the current of ideas (not quite the
same thing as the current of events) as he finds it. The minority ide-
ologue – a de Maistre, a Bonald, a Maurras, or a Charles Benoist –
is against the current; and the best that he can expect is to be
hailed some generations later (by people with whom he would very
likely have little sympathy) as a forerunner. But his purposes are
the same, (whether his ideas be more or less desirable), as those of
the others” (“The Lion and the Fox,” 111).
Eliot gave himself the last word in the exchange with Leo Ward.
Responding to Ward’s observation that Maurras was not a believing
Christian, Eliot resorted to an insincere ad hominem retort: “Mr.
Ward, asserts again that Maurras is a profoundly anti-Christian
thinker. How can Maurras be anti-Christian, when he admits that
Catholic Christianity is essential to civilization? Mr. Ward would, on
the same assumptions, be obliged to affirm that Mr. Irving Babbitt
is ‘profoundly anti-Christian.’ What Mr. Ward says of M. Maurras,
he ought to say of several other people of importance: and

amongst persons of no importance, he might say it of myself”
(“L’Action Française,” Eliot’s rejoinder, 84).
This remark is at best a quibble, for Maurras and Babbitt, like
Matthew Arnold, recommended retaining the trappings of religion
in a cynical and paternalistic strategy to keep the masses in line.
Eliot’s Christianity is of an altogether different nature. Indeed,
years later, in his war-time meditation Notes Toward a Definition of
Culture, Eliot inveighs against just such a secular view of religion:
“The facile assumption of a relationship between culture and reli-
gion is perhaps the most fundamental weakness of Arnold’s Culture
and Anarchy. Arnold gives the impression that Culture (as he uses
the term) is something more comprehensive than religion; that the
latter is no more than a necessary element, supplying ethical for-
mation and some emotional colour, to Culture which is the ulti-
mate value” (Notes, 88).21 For Eliot the relationship between reli-
gion and culture is entirely the other way: “We may go further and
ask whether what we call the culture, and what we call the religion,
of a people are not different aspects of the same thing: the culture
being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a
people” (28). Rather lamely, Eliot protests that despite Maurras’
sceptical humanism, his political ideas are compatible with Chris-
tianity: “ I say only that if anyone is attracted by Maurras’ political
theory, and if that person has as well any tendency towards interior
Christianity, that tendency will be quickened by finding that a polit-
ical and a religious view can be harmonious” (“L’Action Française,”
Eliot’s rejoinder, 87).
That Eliot should have gone so far as to compromise his own
deepest beliefs in defence of Maurras is a measure of his indebted-
ness to the French thinker. Even after Maurras had fatally compro-
mised himself during the German occupation of France – so much
so that he was convicted of treason and sentenced to death
(though the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment) – Eliot
continued to defend him. In the 1955 essay “The Literature of Pol-
itics,” Eliot portrayed Maurras as a tragic hero, and reiterated his
admiration for his political thought: “I think of a man whom I held
in respect and admiration, although some of his views were exas-
perating and some deplorable – but a great writer, a genuine lover
of his country, and a man who deserved a better fate than that
which he had in the end to meet.” Eliot wondered if Maurras could

have avoided the “difficulties” he encountered if – like Eliot – he
“had confined himself to literature and to the literature of political
theory, and had never attempted to found a political party, a move-
ment ...” If he had been more circumspect, Eliot thought that per-
haps “those of his ideas which were sound and strong might have
spread more widely and penetrated more deeply, and affected
more sensibly the contemporary mind” (To Criticize the Critic,
142–4).
I would not go so far as Kenneth Asher: “Simply put, it seems to
me that from beginning to end, Eliot’s work, including both the
poetry and the prose, was shaped by a political vision inherited
from French reactionary thinkers, especially from Charles Maur-
ras” (T. S. Eliot and Ideology, 2–3). But there is no doubt that Eliot’s
political views derive in great part from Maurras, and that the lat-
ter’s influence on Eliot’s thinking began as early as 1911 – and was
never renounced. With less hesitation than Margolis, Asher argued
that it was politics that led Eliot to religion, rather than the other
way around, as most commentators assume: “Politics led Eliot to
religion but he rarely acknowledged the political element that con-
stituted a central part of what he understood – and in his writings
intended – by his religion” (9). But it is impossible to believe that
Eliot’s religious beliefs are merely expedient. Even though Lyndall
Gordon may have given Eliot’s religious temperament more promi-
nence in determining his actions and attitudes than it deserves, her
biographies have surely demonstrated beyond doubt the sincerity
of his beliefs – if any such demonstration was necessary.
Maurras’ appeal to Eliot was not based just on Maurras’ sanction
of the social role of an ecclesiastical institution. He also admired
his literary criticism, which he showcased in Criterion, rather than
his political views. Eliot published Maurras’ 1898 article, “Prologue
to an Essay on Criticism” in two parts (January and February 1928),
translated by himself. Maurras’ “Prologue” insists on the equiva-
lence of “creative” and critical writing, and assigns a high and
noble task to criticism: “Literary criticism, properly so called, con-
sists in perceiving and exhibiting the good and the bad in the
works of the mind; and this perception presumes two operations
which may be consecutive or simultaneous: feeling and choice”
(Criterion 7, 13). The same is true, Maurras maintains, of the poet:
“almost as the biological cell selects, among the juices available,

that which it needs and rejects the others, so likewise the poet
selects, among words and ideas, those which avail for his work, and
throws aside the perniciously useless; so also the critic selects,
among the artistic impressions which he has received from books,
those which have pleased him, and rejects and excludes all the
rest” (15). The affinity with Eliot’s critical views is obvious.
One could go on citing affinities between Maurras’ critical views
and Eliot’s, but those cited are sufficient to demonstrate that Mau-
rras’ influence on Eliot was not confined to his political posture.
Eliot echoes Maurrassian views as early as 1916 in his review of
Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (478). There he observes that Bradley’s
monism “expresses that violent and bitter reaction against roman-
ticism which is one of the most interesting phenomena of our
time” (576). As noted above, Eliot had purchased and read Maur-
ras’ L’Avenir de l’intelligence during his 1911 stay in Paris.22 Despite
that early exposure, I have found no expression of admiration for
Maurras’ political views prior to the 1920s.
And, even though the Action Française was a political move-
ment, it is worth noting that most of its participants were literary
figures, who – apart from their anti-Dreyfusard activities – sought
to find a way for the arts to preserve their independence in a mod-
ern, commercial environment. Edward Tannenbaum stresses that
aspect of the movement: “Although Maurras and his colleagues
were ostensibly working for a restoration of the monarchy, what
they really wanted was a world in which they could write their
poems and essays without having to worry about where they would
get money to live. Their sensitive natures revolted [sic] against the
mercenary spirit of modern society. In order to earn a living they
had to appeal to the general public. Since they could not satisfy its
tastes, they also expressed their longing for a return to the Old
Regime in their literary criticism” (Edward R. Tannenbaum, 60,
quoted by Ward, 90). Thus the members of Action Française faced
the same problems and issues as did our authors, though a gener-
ation earlier (Maurras was born in 1868, Eliot in 1888), and in the
context of Republican France rather than egalitarian America and
Imperial Britain. For all of them the issue was the survival of the
autonomy of the artist, a concern that arose from a tacit Romantic
conception of the artist as an individual possessing a special sensi-
bility – as opposed to the classical conception of the artist as an

individual possessing a special talent or skill.
Perhaps the best assessment of Maurras’ influence on Eliot was
penned by Eliot himself, in a letter to the editor of Time and Tide
(17 Jan. 1953): “It is misleading to describe Maurras as a ‘Catholic
Royalist.’ He was certainly a Royalist, though his form of Royalism
proved unacceptable to the Pretender and his friends; and I under-
stand that before his death he was reconciled to the Church and
received the sacraments. But throughout his life he was explicitly a
rationalist – a disciple of Comte: and it was precisely his support of
the Church solely on political and social grounds that exposed him
to ecclesiastical censure and led to the condemnation of the Action
Française in 1926. . . .. It is also misleading to term Maurras a ‘fas-
cist.’ He had formulated his own political philosophy long before
‘fascism’ was ever heard of. And if I am not mistaken, fascism and
Royalism are fundamentally incompatible” (quoted by Kojecky,
note 68). Notice that, in contrast to his defence of Maurras against
Ward in 1928, Eliot admitted in 1953 that Maurras’ “support of the
Church” was “solely on political and social grounds.” But he still
bemoaned the Church’s condemnation of Maurras. And – as
before – excused Maurras from the charge of fascism by pointing
out his priority, rather than by citing any incompatibility in doc-
trines or beliefs, other than Royalism.
Lewis was also familiar with Maurras. He claims to have met him
(Meyers, 16), and certainly shared some of his attitudes – notably a
distaste for democracy and romanticism. Lewis contrasted royalism
and Catholicism to secular democracy in The Art of Being Ruled –
though without naming Maurras or the Action Francaise: “A really
good, out-and-out ‘reactionary’ journal is, at first, like a breath of
fresh air in the midst of all this turbulent, pretentious, childish opti-
mism. A royalist publication is worth its weight in gold. Catholicism,
we feel, is essential to our health. We fly to the past – anywhere out
of this suspended animation of the so smugly ‘revolutionary’ pre-
sent” (32). But in the end Lewis opted for dictatorship and nation-
alism rather than royalism and Catholicism, abandoning Maurras –
as Ward noted. However, Lewis did recurrently praise the Catholic
Church in Maurrasian terms – commending its organizational wis-
dom – and he recognized it as an ally in his campaign of resistance
to Time Philosophy: “The catholic criticism of “modernity” is as irre-
trievably “historical” as the doctrine of Spengler. It is really a ‘time’-

doctrine too, as in the nature of things, perhaps, it must be. But the
converse to that of the “evolutionist.” It attaches a disproportionate
importance to one time, as its opponents to all time ... when we said
there was no ‘opposition’ today [to time philosophy], that would, in
this sense, be inexact: for there is, of course, always the catholic
opposition” (Time and Western Man, 371–2).
pound and social credit
In chapter II we saw Pound dismiss the Action Française as “French

modern mysticism.” Pound’s radicalization did not stem from his
religious views as did Eliot’s, nor from the shock of the First World
War, as did Lewis’s. Although Pound’s radicalization coincided with
the war, it was only tangentially related to it, being the consequence
of his “discovery” that wars between – and economic malfunctions
within – capitalist countries were the consequence of a misunder-
standing of the nature of employment, interest and money. The
source of that discovery was Major Douglas, a British engineer who
had no economic training. I have discussed Pound’s engagement
with Douglas’s economics at length in my 1999 study Pound in Pur-
gatory so I will not go into great detail on that topic here. However,
we need to have a clear sense of how these three men diverged in
the decade and a half between the end of the war in 1918 and
Hitler’s elevation to chancellor in 1933.
Pound first alluded to economic skullduggery in his 1918 New
Age series, “What America has to Live Down,” and even then rather
elliptically: “England herself must answer the questions of interna-
tional finance – whether or no Frankfort still works against New
York in international banking ... Internationalism of capital is
almost in being, capital can internationalise, and will do so, with a
rapidity infinitely greater than that which is possible to labour” (23,
5 Sept. 1918, col. 1, 298). It is striking that Pound picks on the
“internationalism” of capital as a mark of its infamy. This distrust of
trans-national institutions and forces is in strong contrast to the
supra-nationalist tendencies of Eliot and Lewis – even though their
internationalism was confined to Europe and North America.
Pound’s later commitment to fascist Italy reflects that same distrust
of the trans-national.
Major Douglas appeared at the offices of The New Age, A. R.

Orage’s journal, sometime in 1917 with what he believed was a
solution to the “business cycle,” that is, the recurrent cycle of
booms and busts. Under Orage, The New Age was backed financial-
ly by prominent Fabians, among them George Bernard Shaw, as
well as by wealthy individuals wishing to promote alternative reli-
gious views. Pound had been a regular contributor since 1909,
owing a considerable portion of his income to the journal in which
he appeared over his own name, and over the pseudonyms Bastien
(sometimes Baptiste) von Helmholtz, B. H. Dias, and William
Atheling. He spent a lot of time in their offices on Cursitor Street
in London. He told John Drummond that Orage “did more to feed
me than anyone else in England ... Orage’s 4 guineas a month ...
wuz the sinews, by gob the sinooz” (Letters, 344).
A journal of arts and letters, The New Age also published articles
on religion, politics, and economics. In the early years of the war it
welcomed articles from those promoting an economic and political
strategy called “Guild Socialism” whose principal theorist was G. D.
H. Cole. Guild Socialism was an effort to make the backward-look-
ing ideas of John Ruskin, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc suit-
able for an industrial economy. It was because of that economic
interest that Douglas thought The New Age would be hospitable to
his economic theory. Orage dubbed Douglas’s economics, “Social
Credit,” and spent several months with Douglas articulating the
theory. As pound recalled in 1934: “The actual battle with igno-
rance, in the acute phase wherein I shared, began with Douglas’s
arrival in Cursitor Street. The earlier Guild Socialism, and all other
political or social theory had lain outside my view. (This statement
is neither boast nor apology.) I take it I was present at some of the
earliest talks between the two leaders. At an rate my economic
study dates from their union, and their fight for its place in public
knowledge” (“He Pulled His Weight,” 13). Pound also memorial-
ized his economic enlightenment in Canto 46, first published in
1936 (the “fuzzy bloke” is Pound himself):
Seventeen
Years on this case, nineteen years, ninety years
on this case
An’ the fuzzy bloke sez (legs no pants ever wd. fit) ‘IF
that is so, any government worth a damn can

pay dividends?’
The major chewed it a bit and sez: ‘Y---es, eh ...
You mean instead of collectin’ taxes?’
‘Instead of collecting taxes.’ That office?
Pound first wrote explicitly and at length about Douglas’s eco-

nomic and political views in his New Age series “The Revolt of Intel-
ligence.” It ran from November 1919 to March 1920. In Number 9
of the series Pound articulated an early version of his view of histo-
ry as an either/or opposition between two contraries: “The func-
tion of civilisation, is to depreciate material values and to build up
values of intelligence. The counter-force, the destroyer of civilisa-
tions, has presumably been the effort of ‘rulers’ to levy taxes in
return. (Taxes, usury, tributes, etc., various forms of the same
thing).” In his view – still not uncommon among conservative
thinkers – a tax is merely a levy by the idle on the industrious, and
is morally equivalent to the charging of interest (of which most
conservatives approve) or the exaction of tribute by a conqueror
from the conquered. He divides society into a simple duopoly of
creators (artists, inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs) and parasites
(not so carefully catalogued, but including merchants, professors
and bankers).
Pound accused “the usurer’s propagandists” of deliberately
merging the productive members of society – whom he called “the
super-worker,” that is, hard-working and ambitious people such as
artists, inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs – “with the Capi-
talist.” In that way they conflate, “for purpose of propaganda, civil-
isation with exploitation.” In Pound’s view, the capitalist is the
usurer par excellence, the financier who provides the entrepreneur
(of whom Pound approves) with the necessary loan to build his fac-
tory, bridge or railroad, but does not support the artist while he
paints, writes, or composes. An improvement “of the economic sys-
tem will come,” Pound thought, only “when the super-labourer ...
the organiser, the out-reacher, turns against usury; when he disso-
ciates two ideas: leadership and exploitation” (New Age, 11 March
1920, 301).
In April of 1920 Pound reviewed Economic Democracy, Douglas’s
first book, in Margaret Anderson’s Little Review. He believed that
Douglas’s economic theories represented a cognitive revolution

equivalent to earlier world-shaking overturnings of ignorance and
superstition: “Universitaire [sic] economics hold the field as non-
experimental science and catholicism held the fields in Bacon’s day
and in Voltaire’s, and I have no doubt that the opposition to Major
Douglas’s statements will take the track of making him out a mere
Luther. Humanism came to the surface in the renaissance and the
succeeding centuries have laboured, not always in vain, to crush it
down” (6, April 1920, 40). Social Credit, he claimed, “offers an alter-
native to bloody and violent revolutions, and might on that account
be more welcomed than it will be, but perspicacity is not given to all
men, and many have in abuleia gone to their doom” (41). That is to
say, by resolving the economic malfunctioning of capitalist
economies, Social Credit renders communism unnecessary – if the
ignorant and unperceptive do not block the Douglasite insights.
We have seen that Pound was primed for just such a discovery,
having been convinced from as early as 1910 that he lived on the
eve of a renaissance or risorgimento equivalent to the Italian Renais-
sance. Given his predilections and humanistic education, he had
thought of the new civilization in cultural rather than social or eco-
nomic terms. But the response to the war articulated in the New Age
persuaded him that social and economic factors were essential
underpinnings to any cultural revolution. And, to be fair, he
stressed the socially redeeming features of the Douglas scheme as
well as its suitability for the preservation of the social structure –
something that, like Lewis and Eliot, he regarded as essential: “If
labour were paid for its produce at same rate as in xiv century, the
amount of produce per labourer (using machinery) would bring
him in about £5000 per year, i.e., counting for present cheapness
of money ... Nothing new. Merely the middle ages had sense
enough to dislike usury and we have let it become the basis of our
alleged civilization” (“A Letter from London,” EPPP 11, 4). This
remark demonstrates that Pound’s response to the promises of
Social Credit – apart from the fact that it was seriously flawed as an
economic theory – was heavily skewed by his Pollyanna attitude.
£5000 per year was a fantastic salary in 1920, when £500 per
annum was still a comfortable middle-class income. Although
Pound was no doubt being consciously hyperbolic, such exaggera-
tion could only harm his credibility.
Pound produced a flurry of published comments boosting

Social Credit from 1919 until the mid-1920s, declaring in a brief
notice of Douglas’s Credit Power and Democracy in W. C. Williams’
journal, Contact: “The symbolist position, artistic aloofness from
world affairs, is no good now. It may have assisted several people
to write and work in the 80’s, but it is not, in 1921, opportune or
apposite” (1, Summer 1921). But he eventually tired of the effort,
declaring in 1927: “As to our joining revolutions’ etc. it is unlike-
ly. The artist is concerned with producing something that will be
enjoyable even after a successful revolution.” “The artist, the
maker,” he claims, “is always too far ahead of any revolution, or
reaction, or counter-revolution or counter-reaction for his vote to
have an immediate result; and no party programme ever contains
enough of his programme to give him the least satisfaction.”
(“The State,” Exile, Spring 1927, in Selected Prose, 214–15). Al-
though these sentiments are similar to Eliot’s view that it would
be an error to enter into political action, Pound was not to stick
with this withdrawal from political and economic engagement.
Nonetheless, for several years he did refrain from commenting
on the age, publishing very little prose, and concentrating on his
epic, The Cantos – which, between 1921 and 1930, also avoided
political comment.
In the meantime, Pound abandoned Britain as essentially irre-
deemable. Moving back and forth between London and Paris for a
time, he published barbs criticizing London and England in letters
to British and American literary journals. In an open letter to
Harry Turner, the editor of Much Ado, a journal based in St. Louis,
Eliot’s home town, Pound mused about founding a university – a
fantasy that he never entirely abandoned, although the closest he
ever got was to dub his entourage at Rapallo, the “Ezuversity.” “It is
absolutely necessary,” he maintained, “to start the new civiliza-
tion’ whether one builds it inside the decaying cortex of the pre-
sent one or on the scraps doesn’t seem to me much to matter. The
present one will go to pot all quickly enough without one’s push-
ing.” Reflecting his disaffection with Britain, he wondered
“whether I shd. emigrate to the U. S. now (probably prematurely)
or wait till 1930 or 1940 or 1960?” (9, 1 Nov 1920, 2–3).
In the event, he left London for Paris and, not long after, left
Paris for Rapallo. The latter move was more for reasons of econo-
my than from disaffection with Paris – though both factors were in

play. Early in 1921 he told readers of the Chicago magazine Poetry:
“The intellectual curiosity of this island [Great Britain] is nil. The
desire for more precise ideation, for better prose, for internation-
al standards, is zero; and the young American who wants external
stimulant for this thought would do better to turn his attention to
Paris ...” (“Thames Morasses,” 17, 148). Earlier in 1921, Pound
published a peculiar piece in The New Age, titled “Axiomata” (13
January 1921, 125), which articulated a kind of pagan agnosticism
that has no apparent relevance either to Social Credit or to his
dreams of a renaissance. The editor, Orage (who was himself soon
to abandon the journal to become a missionary in New York City
for Gurdjeffian beliefs), represented the article as Pound’s farewell
to Britain, as well as his “intellectual will and testament.”
Although it is mostly concerned with the articulation of a sort of
pagan agnosticism, “Axiomata” also expresses distaste for “dogma,”
which Pound characterized as “bluff based on ignorance.” In the
spirit of “either/or” that we have seen to be characteristic of all
three artists’ thinking, Pound identified two types of dogma:
“benevolent” and “malevolent.” The former is “an attempt to ‘save
the world’ by instigating it to accept certain propositions.” Pre-
sumably Social Credit would be such a benevolent dogma – one
that he no longer wished to push so hard. “Malevolent dogma” is,
he said, “an attempt to gain control over others by persuading
them to accept certain propositions.” Dogma, then, is in itself,
innocent. It is its use – rather than its truth or falsity – that sepa-
rates benevolence from malevolence. There is a third, “nolent”
type of dogma, “a sort of automatic reaction of the dogmatiser, who
may have come to disaster by following certain propositions, and
who, from this, becomes crampedly convinced that contrary propo-
sitions are true.” Pound rejected all varieties of dogma, asserting:
“belief is a cramp, a paralysis, an atrophy of the mind in certain
positions” (“Axiomata,” 125).
Given Pound’s commitment to fascism in the next decade, these
remarks are rather prophetic of his own dogmatism, for in the thir-
ties and thereafter, because of its opposition to democratic capital-
ism he wilfully overlooks all the negatives that others saw in fascism.
Shortly after his “conversion” to Social Credit, he identified demo-
cratic capitalism with the “malevolent dogma” of “usurocracy,” by
which he meant the surreptitious governance of nations by finan-

cial interests for their own benefit. Here he is not so distant from
his friends, for as we have seen, both Eliot and Lewis regarded
Western democracies as in truth oligarchies. Pound’s analysis is
simpler and more naïve than theirs, and he is more inclined to
positing evil-doers opposing men and women of good will. But, like
them, he believed that a heightening of awareness amongst an
aroused public is required to repair the lamentable state of public
affairs in the twenties. And, like them, he believed that such a
heightening of awareness is the responsibility and duty of an elite,
but an artistic, rather than a scientific, philosophical, political, or
business elite.
Most important for the curve of Pound’s political engagement is
that he was convinced that Social Credit provided a recipe ensur-
ing a peaceful and prosperous future for Europe and the world.
That conviction meant, among other things, that – unlike Lewis –
he was uninterested in the rise of fascism in Italy, even though he
lived in Italy from late 1921. This point needs to be stressed
because he became a convinced fascist booster in the ‘thirties, and
remained so until his death. At the risk of boring my readers, some-
thing more needs to be said about the nature of Social Credit,
which Pound scholiasts tend either to reject out-of-hand as non-
sense, or to praise as valuable, though flawed, economic theory.
I argued in Pound in Purgatory that it is neither, and I am
supported in this judgment by J.M. Keynes, who paid Douglas
measured tribute in his epochal 1936 book, The General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money:
Since the war there has been a spate of heretical theories of

under-consumption, of which those of Major Douglas are the
most famous. The strength of Major Douglas’s advocacy has, of
course, largely depended on orthodoxy having no valid reply to much
of his destructive criticism. On the other hand, the detail of his
diagnosis, in particular the so-called A + B theorem, includes
much mere mystification ... Major Douglas is entitled to claim, as
against some of his orthodox adversaries, that he at least has not been
wholly oblivious of the outstanding problem of our economic system. Yet
he has scarcely established an equal claim to rank – a private,
perhaps, but not a major in the brave army of heretics – with
Mandeville, Malthus, Gesell and Hobson, who, following their

intuitions, have preferred to see the truth obscurely and imper-
fectly rather than to maintain error, reached indeed with clear-
ness and consistency and by easy logic but on hypotheses inap-
propriate to the facts. (371–2, my emphasis)
The truth that Douglas, Mandeville, Malthus, Gesell, and Hob-

son saw “obscurely” was that there was a monetary aspect to the
business cycle – a possibility that orthodox economists denied. The
basis of their denial was an economic axiom known as Say’s Law or
the equilibrium principle. It ruled economic thinking until the rev-
olution in economic thought brought about by Keynes’s The Gener-
al Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. John Kenneth Galbraith’s
assessment of the power of Say’s Law is more easily appreciated in
the twenty-first century, when equilibrium theory is once more
dominant in economic thought, than it was when Galbraith wrote:
“Until Keynes, Say’s Law had ruled in economics for more than a
century. And the rule was no casual thing; to a remarkable degree
acceptance of Say was the test by which reputable economists were
distinguished from the crackpots. Until late in the ‘30’s no candi-
date for a Ph. D. at a major American university who spoke seri-
ously of a shortage of purchasing power as a cause of depression
could be passed. He was a man who saw only the surface of things,
was unworthy of the company of scholars. Say’s Law stands as the
most distinguished example of the stability of economic ideas,
including when they are wrong” (Galbraith, 218–19).
Say’s Law held that the distribution of purchasing power in an
economy is immediate, automatic, and inescapable. Those who
questioned this axiom – Ruskin, Chesterton, Belloc, and Douglas –
are called “underconsumptionists” because they believed that it
was possible for an economy to produce more goods and services
than its residents could purchase with legal currency. According to
Say’s Law such a circumstance was impossible because every act of
production, or provision of service, creates a balancing or equiva-
lent amount of purchasing power in wages and profits to match the
prices of those goods and services – hence its alternative label,
“equilibrium theory.”
Douglas seems never to have heard of Say’s Law – at least he
never uses the tag. What he had seen was the operation of the busi-
ness cycle, which seemed to contradict Say’s Law, since periodical-

ly thousands – even millions – of people lacked sufficient purchas-
ing power to feed, house, and clothe themselves during the bottom
phase of the business cycle. He thought he had discovered the
cause – interest on loans. In the scheme I just outlined where wages
and profits are necessarily in equilibrium with prices, there is no
mention of the interest banks charge on loans. Pound incorporat-
ed this aperçu into Canto 38 (published 1933 in Orage’s new jour-
nal, the New English Weekly):
A factory
has also another aspect, which we call the financial aspect
It gives people the power to buy (wages, dividends
which are power to buy) but it is also the cause of prices
or values, financial, I mean financial values
It pays workers, and pays for material.
What it pays in wages and dividends
stays fluid, as power to buy, and this power is less,
per forza, damn blast your intellex, is less
than the total payments made by the factory
(as wages, dividends and payments for raw material,
bank charges, etcetera)
and all, that is the whole, that is the total
of these is added into the total of prices
caused by that factory, any damn factory
and there is and must be therefore a clog
and the power to purchase can never
(under the present system) catch up with
prices at large.
(Canto 38, p. 190)
This underconsumptionist perception, then, is “the truth” that

Douglas and the other heretics “saw obscurely.” Douglas described
his discovery as a revelation not unlike St. Paul’s on the road to
Damascus: “I had the idea that I had got hold of some specific tech-
nical information and I had only to get it accepted; I had the idea
that I was like a clever little boy and that I had only to run to father
and he would be very pleased about it” (quoted in Macpherson,
120). Pound’s reaction was similar, as can be seen from the follow-
ing remark: “Those of us who saw the Major’s point in the first
weeks of his first declarations find it rather difficult to unsee it, or
to put ourselves in the role of non-perceivers” (“The Delusion of
Super-Production,” Impact, December 1918, 161).
Douglas was unique among underconsumptionists in identifying
the cause of the chronic shortage in purchasing power as exclu-
sively the interest that banks charge on the loans they issue. His
theory is known as the A + B theorem. In a nutshell, it holds that
aggregate payments to individuals in wages, salaries, and dividends
(A items) plus aggregate costs of materials, interest charges, royal-
ties, and taxes (B items) produce an aggregate price (P). Obvious-
ly P will always be larger than A, since it must include B. The theo-
rem shows that the income of all citizens (the A figure) will be
insufficient to buy the produce of the nation (Douglas, Economic
Democracy, 28–9).
There are many difficulties with the theorem. Most glaringly, it is
simply an application of double entry book-keeping in a case where
it is inappropriate. It is entirely inadequate to categorize aggregate
transactions as either revenues or disbursements, since every dis-
bursement is revenue for some other economic agent, and vice
versa. Nonetheless the A + B theorem had the virtue of providing a
simple, comprehensible and plausible account of the undeniable
fact of endemic underconsumption. The “business cycle” was
apparent to everyone – even economists. Britain and Germany
experienced a sharp downswing in the cycle immediately after the
First War, giving economic heretics an eager audience. A decade
later, the worldwide depression of the thirties put a strong wind at
the back of economic heretics, since orthodox economists had no
remedies for the persistent economic malaise.
Douglas’s innovation was to target the issue of currency and cred-
it as the source of underconsumption. Few people realize that
banks do not just lend the money that depositors place in their
trust. In fact, they are “banks of discount,” that is, their loans
exceed their deposits by some “discount factor.” Today the ratio
between bank deposits and loans is call “leverage,” and can go as
high as 60 times deposits – as was the case with several European
banks in 2008. In short, banks create money and charge interest on
it. Douglas saw this system as a species of fraud – particularly when
governments borrow such fiat money from the banks when (as in
World War I) they run deficits. As Douglas put it in Economic Democ-

racy, “Now, it must be perfectly obvious to anyone who seriously
considers the matter that the State should lend, not borrow, and
that in this respect, as in others, the Capitalist usurps the function of the
State” (124, my emphasis). His solution was blindingly simple: the
state should deny the banks the power to create credit, and reclaim
that power for itself. But he did not recommend an expansion of
the money supply, accepting the orthodox view based on Say’s Law
that such a policy would only cause inflation (Social Credit, 118).
Instead Douglas called for the distribution of a “National Divi-
dend” to “every natural born inhabitant.” This dividend would be
calculated annually so as to bring the B items into balance with the
A items, replacing the money currently “expropriated” by bank
interest charges. Douglas also believed that the banks expropriated
the increase of wealth society had created by what he called the
“increment of association,” by which he meant the gains in pro-
ductivity consequent upon technological innovation and superior
organisation, such as Henry Ford’s assembly line (Social Credit,
206).
Although there are serious difficulties with Douglas’s scheme,
this is not the place to explore them. What I hope to have shown is
that Social Credit offered a plausible and attractive solution to very
real economic problems, problems for which orthodox economics
had no answer prior to Keynes’s Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money. (Neither Douglas nor Pound acknowledged Keynes as a fel-
low reformer.) The failure of Douglas’s ideas to gain acceptance
increasingly radicalized Pound’s political posture, ultimately lead-
ing him to believe in a conspiracy of bankers to control and impov-
erish the mass of humanity. However, that process took more than
a decade.23
Both Eliot and Lewis paid occasional measured tribute to Dou-
glas’s theories, since they were both sympathetic to his negative
criticism of industrial capitalism, and its failure to distribute
wealth equitably, or even to maintain an efficiently functioning
economy. In Hitler Lewis describes himself as a “credit -crank” and
identifies Oswald Mosley and Eliot as fellow credit cranks (170–3).
His economic argument in Hitler is an underconsumptionist one
clearly derived from Douglas. And in The Jews, Are They Human? he
endorses Douglas’s view of the banking industry, while being care-
ful to disassociate himself from Douglas’s anti-Semitism: “The ter-

rific usurious system of bank-capital, that fairyland of Credit in
which we wander like herds of lost souls at the present day, is all
our own doing, or the doing of men of our own race. Aryans like
ourselves conceived it and established it; and it is better that we
should realize that, and not blame it onto somebody else” (92).
However, economic theory remains a marginal component of
Lewis’s commentary.
Eliot, too, was familiar with Douglas’s theories and gave them
careful endorsement in a Criterion “Commentary”: “I hope that
Major Douglas is right from top to bottom and copper-plated; but
whether he is right or wrong does not matter a fig to my argument
for the priority of ethics over politics” (12, Oct. 1933, 120). Eliot’s
interest in economic arguments was even weaker than Lewis’s. For
example, he corresponded over many years with Philip Mairet, the
editor of the Social Credit journal The New English Weekly. They
were both members of the “Chandos Group,” an informal discus-
sion group on political and other issues. An index of Eliot’s high
regard for Mairet is that he often published in The New English Week-
ly, including “East Coker” and “Dry Salvages.” One would expect
some discussion of economic issues in their correspondence at the
Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, covering the years 1939 to
1963, but there is none, and only one tangential mention of Social
Credit. Like Lewis, Eliot was happy to endorse Douglas’s criticism
of industrial capitalism, but was unwilling to commit to his positive
solutions. Even in his correspondence with Ezra Pound, Eliot
evades economic topics as much as possible, despite Pound’s con-
stant harping on economic issues. In a letter of 5 October 1946 to
Pound’s wife, Dorothy – apparently in response to queries about
Social Credit issues, Eliot demurs from acting in that area: “ I can’t
do anything about Ezra’s economic ideas, because I am no econo-
mist” (Beinecke).
Pound’s Pollyanna attitude would prove to be his undoing, for
when Douglas’s ideas failed to gain a hearing, Pound’s tendency to
see things in black and white led him to fall back on the positing of
evil-doers – that is, usurers – malevolently misinforming and mis-
leading the public. Neither Eliot nor Lewis was quite so naïve. Both
of the latter recognized that governance was a messy and uncertain
affair involving the balancing of myriad competing interests, rather
than a simple contest between good guys and bad guys. Nonethe-
less, the analysis by all three of the deficiencies of capitalist democ-
racies in the decade between the signing of the Peace of Versailles
in June 1919, and the stock market crash of October 1929 had
much in common. Lewis’s emphasis on a division of classes is lack-
ing from Pound’s program, and is much less prominent in Eliot’s
criticism of democratic rule, but all three assume that mass democ-
racy is unworkable at best, and a recipe for oligarchical rule at
worst. And they all agreed that dictatorship is a lesser evil, disre-
garding Lord Acton’s observation: “Power tends to corrupt;
absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always
bad men.” Eventually, Lewis recognized the wisdom of this dictum
and withdrew his support for dictators. For his part, Eliot muted his
anti-democratic views, though he never entirely abandoned them,
and he avoided endorsing any of the regimes on offer. Pound
moved in the opposite direction, discovering Mussolini in the early
thirties, and portraying him (and Lenin) as leaders in the mould of
Thomas Jefferson in Jefferson and/or Mussolini – published in 1935,
but written in 1933, that is, on the other side of the onset of the
Depression, an occurrence that radically altered everything.
v
“Things Fall Apart”
One may be horrified by the activities of an industry which thrives on

the greatest of human curses; still it is well to acknowledge that the arms
industry did not create the war system. On the contrary, the war system
created the arms industry. And our civilization which, however reluctant-
ly, recognizes war as the final arbiter in international disputes, is also
responsible for the existence of the arms maker.
H.C. Engelbrecht and F.C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death
The Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of

October 1929 confirmed the belief of both the Cassandras and the
Pollyannas that the era of liberal, democratic capitalism had run its
course. The Crash came just two years after Charles Lindbergh had
inaugurated air travel by successfully traversing the Atlantic, land-
ing at Le Bourget on 21 May 1927, greeted by a crowd the New York
Times estimated at 100,000. The Times declared: “his feat electrified
the nation and inspired enthusiastic interest in aviation.” In that
same year Heidegger (1888–1976) published Sein und Zeit (Being
and Time), a work that dismissed the whole epistemological tradi-
tion of philosophy from Socrates to Frege, Russell, and Whitehead
in favour of the more mystical pre-Socratics. Heidegger’s great
philosophical hero was Nietzsche – an enthusiasm he shared with
Adolf Hitler. When Hitler appeared on the scene, a few years later,
Heidegger welcomed him as a Führer who could save Germany
from the plague of “modernism.”1 Wyndham Lewis’s rather simi-
larly titled Time and Western Man also appeared in 1927. Although
Lewis’s philosophical posture was the antithesis of Heidegger’s, he
too would hail Hitler as one who could save Europe from the philo-
sophical errors into which it had fallen.
Before turning to a consideration of how our trio responded to
the Depression, it will be instructive to consider a work that, so far
as I can determine, Eliot was the only one of the three to have read,
even though it was widely read at the time, and has continued to
find readers to this day. The work in question is Ortega y Gasset’s
La rebelión de las masas (1930), translated as Revolt of the Masses
(1933). Gasset was a University of Madrid professor of philosophy
of about the same age as our three (1883–1955). Like them, he
saw himself as witnessing a turning point in the history of Western
civilization. La rebelíon de las masas was published in the same year
as Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, Pound’s A Draft of Thirty Cantos, and
Lewis’s The Apes of God.2 I have not found any reference to Gasset
in Eliot’s prose of the period, but he mentioned The Revolt of the
Masses to Leslie Paul in his 1958 interview, “A Conversation with T.
S. Eliot.” Eliot asked Paul if he knew it, adding – misremembering
its date of publication – “It was published in the ‘20s, but it is cer-
tainly worth rereading now” (13–14).
Gasset’s thesis was that there is a new kind of person in the mod-
ern world – neither a peasant, or a burgher, or an aristocrat, but a
mass man or woman. “The mass,” he wrote, “is all that which sets
no value on itself – good or ill – based on specific grounds, but
which feels itself ‘just like everybody,’ and nevertheless is not con-
cerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with
everybody else.” He contrasted the mass individual to the elite,
“those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficul-
ties and duties” (11).
Even more than Eliot and Lewis, Gasset was perfectly frank
about his “aristocratic” tendencies: “What I have said, and still
believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is
always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the
extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and
ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic” (15). Enlight-
enment ideas of the “sovereignty of the people” were harmless, he
thought, so long as that sovereignty was regarded as an ideal, not
a reality. But in the twentieth century the “sovereignty of the
unqualified individual, of the human being as such, generically,
has now passed from being a juridical idea or ideal to be a psy-
chological state inherent in the average man”(17). This state of
affairs had been brought about, he believed, by “two centuries of
education of the multitude towards progress and a parallel eco-
nomic improvement in society” (19). While these are good things
“Things Fall Apart” 183
in themselves, Gasset believed that they had brought Europe to a

stage where political stability was undermined by an unpredictable
volatility.
Exacerbating that state of uncertainty was the tendency of the
masses to feel that their age was “superior to all times past, and
beyond all known fullness.” He attributed to the epoch the same
sentiment that we have seen animating Pound’s decision to write
an epic of the new age – a belief that this epoch is “more than all
the rest,” but “at the same time feels that it is a beginning”(28). He
cited the shrinking of the planet due to modern means of com-
munication (even though radio was still in its infancy, and air trav-
el only foreseen – thanks to Lindbergh’s feat) as a contributing fac-
tor. “This nearness of the far-off, this presence of the absent,” he
said, “has extended in fabulous proportions the horizon of each
individual existence” (29).
Despite his alarm at the new state of affairs, Gasset had no use for
such Cassandras as Nordau, Spengler, or Benda who spoke of the
decadence of the modern age. Gasset insisted that the current age
was, indeed, superior to previous ages, as the masses believed. How-
ever, he was equally dismissive of the Pollyanna belief that things
were getting better every day in every way, dismissing “progressive
Liberals and Marxist Socialists,” who assume “that what is desired
by them as the best of possible futures will be necessarily realised,
with necessity similar to that of astronomy” (34). Gasset set his lib-
eral belief that destiny is an illusion and that events are determined
by the actions of individuals in a contingent world against both the
Cassandras and the Pollyannas,: “To live is to feel ourselves fatally
obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in
this world.”(36). That is just what the mass man, in Ortega’s view,
was unwilling or unable to do.
He rejected both bolshevism and fascism as retrogressive and
anachronistic (70–3). He characterized both ideologies as a
return to the authoritarian state of the past: “The mass says to
itself, ‘L’Etat, c’est moi’” (92). Despite his pessimism about the
immediate political future of Europe, Gasset insisted on the con-
tinued vitality and resourcefulness of European civilization. The
legacy of the great scientific and technical triumphs of Europe
had created great prosperity in Europe and had spread around
the world – through migration in the Americas, and through con-
quest in Africa and Asia. In Europe and America they produced

the mass man, whose sense of entitlement rendered him suscepti-
ble to authoritarian ideologies like fascism and communism, both
of which Gasset rejected in the name of liberalism. Nonetheless he
lamented that:
The world to-day is suffering from a grave demoralisation

which, amongst other symptoms, manifests itself by an extraor-
dinary rebellion of the masses, and has its origin in the demor-
alisation of Europe ... . Europe is no longer certain that it rules,
nor the rest of the world that it is being ruled. Historic sover-
eignty finds itself in a state of dispersion. There is no longer a
“plenitude of the times,” for this supposes a clear, prefixed,
unambiguous future, as was that of the xixth Century. Then
men thought they knew what was going to happen to-morrow.
But now once more the horizon opens out towards new
unknown directions, because it is not known who is going to
rule, how authority is going to be organised over the world ...
No one knows towards what centre human things are going to
gravitate in the near future, and hence the life of the world has
become scandalously provisional. (138)
The remedy he offered for Europe appears rather prescient

from the perspective of the twenty-first century, for – like Angell
and Brailsford – he recommended the dismantling of the nation
states of Europe in favour of a European union much like that
which has in fact emerged. Such a European Union would, in his
view, represent the triumph of liberalism. He was writing nearly a
decade before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and more
than a decade before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. He could not
have foreseen that it would take the trauma of World War II and
the subsequent Cold War to unite Europe.
The Revolt of the Masses is a rare defence by an intellectual of lib-
eralism and capitalist democracy in the face of the widespread con-
sensus in the interwar period that both were bankrupt. It is striking
that it should have come from a Spaniard, since Spain had little
acquaintance with liberalism, democracy, or capitalism, but lots of
familiarity with authoritarianism and dictatorship – and was short-
ly to have more. And, in contrast to our trio, Gasset was a political
player. He was elected deputy for the province of León in the con-
stituent assembly of the second Spanish republic; was leader of a
political party, La Agrupación al servicio de la república (“The Associ-
ation in the Service of the Republic”); and governor of Madrid.
When Franco came to power, he had to flee Spain, living in exile
in Argentina and Portugal.
eliot in the thirties
Eliot also saw pan-Europeanism as the preferred future for Europe,

but his vision was thoroughly nostalgic and anachronistic. In his
“Commentary” for January 1930 Eliot waxed enthusiastic about the
international cooperation represented by a European literary
prize. Only through such international cooperation, he wrote, “can
there be any direction towards that higher community which exist-
ed in some ways throughout the middle ages, which persisted into
the eighteenth century, and which was only dissolved finally after
the Napoleonic wars.” Moreover, he persisted in the belief that
an “intellectual community” was essential, in contrast to political
action such as “peace pacts, world congresses, disarmament discus-
sions, and reform leagues,” which he saw as merely “concerned
with the body and not with the soul” (Criterion 9, 182). And, like
Gasset, he bemoaned the cognitive passivity of the “common news-
paper reader,” who “allows his paper to ... select what is important
and to suppress what is unimportant, to divert his mind with shal-
low discussion of serious topics, to destroy his wits with murders
and weddings and curate’s confessions, and to reduce him to a con-
dition in which he is less capable of voting with any discrimination
at the smallest municipal election, than if he could neither read
nor write” (184).
A measure of the degree to which Eliot was preoccupied with
the political and cultural state of Europe is that he turns to it in his
bbc talk of the same year, “The Minor Metaphysicals: From Cowley
to Dryden,” (broadcast 4 April 1930). There he compared the
inter-war period to the English seventeenth century, which, he said,
“was an age of lost causes, and unpopular names, and forsaken
beliefs, and impossible loyalties ... ” He added, in a sentiment that
anticipates Lewis’s sense expressed in Blasting and Bombardiering,
that those who experienced the war had crossed a gulf: “In our own
time, there is a chasm of isolation between living men and women

who belong to the pre-War and the post-War period” (The Listener,
9 April 1930).
As economic depression spread around the globe, Eliot turned
his attention to economics, attempting – like Ruskin before him
– to bring the dismal science within the orbit of ethics. His long
“Commentary” for January 1931 was entirely devoted to that
topic. He objected to the view expressed in a Times leading article
that “politics has nothing whatever to do with private morals, and
that national prosperity and the greatest happiness of the great-
est number depend entirely upon the difference between good
and bad economic theories.” “We need,” he declared in response,
“more and better Economics. We need another Ruskin” (Criterion
10, 308). Eliot was alluding to Ruskin’s application of ethics to
the dismal science in his Cornhill Magazine article of 1860, “Unto
this Last.” Eliot also mentioned Major Douglas. Reading Douglas,
he said, confirmed his “suspicion that conventional economic
practice is all wrong,” but, in contrast to Pound, he admitted that
he “can never understand enough to form any opinion as to
whether the prescription or nostrum proffered [by Douglas] is
right” (309). Alluding to his own “apprenticeship” in economics
in “the City” when he worked for Lloyds Bank, Eliot complained
that he “was never convinced that the authorities upon whom I
drew, or the expert public which I addressed, understood the
matter any better than I did myself – which is not at all” (310).
Like Ruskin, he concluded that economics, if it is a science, is one
that must recognize “the superior ‘scientific’ authority of Ethics”
(311).
In this “Commentary” he surveyed six new books on the current
scene, including Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, but not Gas-
set.3 Among them is a new book by Edgar A. Mowrer, whose This
American World was discussed in chapter I. Like Gasset, Eliot
deplored the consumer society, and was rather contemptuous of
the modern mass: “Instead of liberty, which most people can hard-
ly appreciate anyway, we are offered licence; instead of order, we
are offered mass-production of everything; including art and reli-
gion” (314). As a remedy he tentatively endorsed Mowrer’s call for
“a new asceticism,” but – in contrast to Gasset – he thought that it
must be imposed upon the many by the few: “But it will not do
merely to call for better individuals; the asceticism must first, cer-
tainly, be practised by the few, and it must be definite enough to be
explained to, and ultimately imposed upon, the many; imposed in the
name of something in which they must be made to believe” (314, my
emphasis). Eliot’s political thought seems to migrate frequently
toward such school-masterly sentiments.
Eliot repeated much the same sentiments, a couple of months
later in “Thoughts after Lambeth.” The Lambeth Conference was
convened to seek ways to bring the non-conforming British Chris-
tian denominations into the fold of the Anglican Church. Eliot
was offended by the degree to which Anglican bishops were will-
ing to water their theological wine in the name of ecumenism. His
analysis of the current “dilemma” in this work is remote from vir-
tually every other commentator we have surveyed. The present dif-
ficulties facing the world would not soon be overcome, Eliot
believed, because the world had turned its back on Christianity:
“Christianity, in spite of certain local appearances [such as the
Lambeth Conference], is not, and cannot be within measurable
time, ‘official.’ The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form
a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but
we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile
redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive
through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization,
and save the World from suicide” (Selected Essays, 387, my empha-
sis). Eliot’s anticipation of a new Dark Age, such as followed the
Fall of Rome, is an extraordinarily eccentric assessment of current
affairs in 1931 – as well as being an odd choice of analogy, given
that Christianity rose from the ruins of the Roman Empire, to
whose fall it had perhaps contributed. Admittedly, the Church
played a crucial role in preserving civilized values and skills after
the barbarian invasions, and it is perhaps that role that Eliot had
in mind.
Political events in Britain at that time turned Eliot’s attention
away from long-term concerns to more partisan issues. The British
general election of 1929 had produced a coalition government,
which fell, necessitating another election in 1931, producing a
solid majority for a new coalition under the leadership of the
Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald. Oswald Mosley was the
employment minister in the previous coalition, but resigned in
1930 over employment policy, and formed the New Party, which
did very poorly in the 1931 election. Writing in April 1931 Eliot
expressed some sympathy for Mosley’s employment program, but
found it too timid. (He was writing before Mosley’s founding of the
British Union of Fascists in October 1932.) In the same “Com-
mentary” Eliot praised I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian
Tradition by Twelve American Southerners (New York: Harpers,
1930). It was the manifesto of the Agrarian movement, as it came
to be known. Eliot agreed with their claim that industrialization
had destroyed New England society and was quickly destroying
Southern society as well. He also approved of their elitism – a ubi-
quitous feature of critics of modernity. Unlike Gasset, Eliot shared
the Agrarians’ dislike of industrialization, and offered a criticism of
it that reflects Major Douglas’ critique: “Unrestrained industrial-
ism, then (with its attendant evils of over-production, excessive
‘wealth,’ an irrelevance and lack of relation of production to con-
sumption which it attempts vainly to overcome by the nightmare
expedient of ‘advertisement’), destroys the upper classes first” (Cri-
terion 10, April 1931, 485).
Politics and economics became ubiquitous topics in Eliot’s
“Commentaries.” Where Gasset saw little to choose between social-
ism and fascism, Eliot sees little to choose between socialism and
capitalism, since both rest on the base of an industrial economy:
“some persons even suspect that socialism is merely a variant of
Capitalism, or vice versa; and that the combat of Tweedledum and
Tweedledee is not likely to lead to any millennium. Certainly, there
are many people, and there will be more, who are seeking some
alternative to both” (Criterion 10, July 1931, 715). This allegation
of equivalence between capitalism and socialism or communism is
a leitmotif in Eliot’s journalistic prose of the thirties. In his October
“Commentary” on the British Socialist Harold Laski’s Introduction to
Politics, Eliot took umbrage at Laski’s liberal principle “that neither
race nor creed, birth nor property, shall be a barrier against the
exercise of civic rights.” Eliot blusters in response: “Such a sentence
merely provokes a fresh explosion of questions. For what end does
the state exist? And why should not race, creed, birth and property,
any one or more of them be a desirable barrier? And what are civic
rights?” (66).
In the same “Commentary” he reviewed Lord Lymington’s Ich

Dien [I Serve]: The Tory Path, but found Lymington’s views to be
those of a Tory party “overrun by deserters from Whiggism and
later by business men” (71). The only suitable society in Eliot’s
view is an agricultural one: “agriculture ought to be saved and
revived because agriculture is the foundation for the Good Life in
any society; it is in fact the normal life. What matters is ... that the
land of the country should be used and dwelt upon by a stable com-
munity engaged in its cultivation ... it is hardly too much to say that
only in a primarily agricultural society, in which people have local
attachments to their small domains and small communities, and
remain, generation after generation, in the same place, is genuine
patriotism possible; not the artificial patriotism of the press, of
political combinations and unnatural frontiers and the League of
Nations” (72). He expressed the same view a decade later in “East
Coker I”:
Round and round the fire

Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. (ll, 34–40)
Eliot articulated his agrarianism most fully in his 1933 lectures

at the University of Virginia, written in the first flush of his bap-
tism (published the next year as After Strange Gods: A Primer of Mod-
ern Heresy). Anticipating the challenge-and-response thesis of
Arnold Toynbee, Eliot praised the New England culture in which
he was partly raised: “It is not necessarily those lands which are
the most fertile – or most favoured in climate that seem to me
the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation
between man and his environment has brought out the best qual-
ities of both; in which the landscape has been moulded by numer-
ous generations of one race, and in which the landscape in turn
has modified the race to its own character” (17). (The first three
volumes of Toynbee’s Study of History where he first elaborated the
challenge-and-response thesis were published the next year,

1934.) Alluding to the American Agrarian movement, Eliot said
that he knew “very well that the aim of the ‘neo-agrarians’ in the
South will be qualified as quixotic, as a hopeless stand for a cause
which was lost long before they were born. It will be said that the
whole current of economic determinism is against them, and eco-
nomic determinism is to-day a god before whom we fall down and
worship with all kinds of music.” But he did not back down,
believing “that when anything is generally accepted as desirable,
economic laws can be upset in order to achieve it; that it does not
so much matter at present whether any measures put forward are
practical, as whether the aim is a good aim, and the alternatives
intolerable” (18–19).
It would not be too much to say that Eliot pretty well wrote him-
self out of the political and ideological debates of his day by
adopting an extreme Anglican posture that scarcely any Anglican
bishop would have endorsed and an agrarianism that was even
more uncompromising than the similar views of Chesterton and
Belloc.4 It is doubtful that even King Edward would have dared to
express the aristocratic and royalist views that Eliot espoused – if
indeed he held such views. Nonetheless Eliot was given a platform
to air his radically conservative views by the bbc, which organized
a series of lectures under the title “The Modern Dilemma” in
1932. Other contributors were Christopher Dawson, represent-
ing the Catholic view, John MacMurray, representing the com-
munist view, and Bertrand Russell, representing the Fabian view.
Eliot gave four lectures in March and April – all published in The
Listener.5
He left no doubt about the provenance of his views in his first
talk, “Christianity and Communism”: “I believe that all our prob-
lems turn out ultimately to be a religious problem. Its most press-
ing form, probably, is the economic problem; but economic ques-
tions depend finally upon moral questions, as morals depend
upon religion. Theology is, of course, the one fundamental sci-
ence ... . in all that I say I shall speak from the point of view of
orthodox Christianity” (7, 382.2). The modern dilemma in Eliot’s
view was that we were obliged to choose between Christianity and
atheist communism as the only viable creeds to live by – and he is
quite belligerent on the point: “If we are incapable of a faith at
least as strong as that which appears to animate the ruling class of

Russia, if we are incapable of dying for a cause, then Western
Europe and the Americans might as well be reorganised on the
Moscow model at once. And you cannot hope to conquer merely
with election cockades; merely with British Conservatism or
British Liberalism, or British Socialism. Nor will you succeed in
inventing another brand new religion to compete with commu-
nism there can only be the two: Christianity and communism; and there,
if you like, is your dilemma” (383.1, my emphasis). Eliot’s model of a
simple either/or opposition is less offensive than Pound’s view
that we must choose either rule by financial interests or rule by
benevolent tyrants, or Lewis’s that we must choose either irra-
tional time philosophers or benevolent tyrants, but it is hardly less
far-fetched.
In his third talk, “The Search for Moral Sanction,” Eliot ex-
pressed his rather Luddite distaste for machinery: “There is the
danger,” he said, “of mechanised pleasure – pleasure which gives
the enjoyer less and less trouble to procure, and which requires less
and less co-operation on his part, pleasure which can be enjoyed
passively and stupidly (7, 480.1). The example he gave of this zom-
bie-like pleasure is driving a car! What would he have thought of
skidoos, seadoos, computer games, iPods, and Wii? He also prof-
fered a genuinely Luddite argument that machines put people out
of work: “It is now a commonplace of economics, apprehensible by
the dullest of us, that the more machines you have, the more des-
titution you will get. The more easily and cheaply goods can be pro-
duced, the less manual labour required, the fewer people there are
who can buy them, because they have not the money which can
only be got by working” (480.1). Eliot did not mention Douglas’
solution to this problem – the redistribution of the wealth created
by technological development through the National Dividend. Nei-
ther of them foresaw – as Gasset did – the enormous increase in the
consumption of goods and services by the general public, shorter
working hours, extended periods of education, and more holidays
– which have to date maintained reasonable levels of employment
in advanced industrial economies despite increasing automation of
industrial production.
Strikingly, Eliot made no mention of fascism or nazism, aiming
his barbs exclusively at communism. He closed the last lecture with
a remark that redefined the “modern dilemma” in a manner some-

what different from his opening remarks, identifying himself with
what he calls a “hopeless minority:” “we loathe communism and we
loathe the world as it is, and this is the dilemma” (“Building Up the
Christian World,” 502.2). It is true that the notion that the world is
broken was a leitmotif of virtually all commentary in the thirties, but
the therapy preferred by most of those Western intellectuals who
had given up on liberal capitalism was either socialism or commu-
nism. Intellectuals who had abandoned liberal capitalism and
rejected both socialism and communism, like Eliot, Lewis, and
Pound, were ineluctably drawn toward fascism as the only remain-
ing political alternative on offer.
Ortega y Gasset is a singular exception to this tendency in his
belief that liberalism could still function – even in a modern indus-
trial world dominated by the masses, whose role was no longer
purely to toil at the production of goods and services, but was now
also to consume the abundance produced by industrial economies.
Of course, Gasset was writing before the wheels fell off liberal cap-
italist industrial economies in 1929. That calamity changed every-
thing. Some minor adjustments, some fine tuning of the status quo
such as Gasset recommended no longer seemed adequate even to
the most sanguine.
The world depression seemed an inescapable confirmation of
Marx’s prediction that capitalism would collapse under the strain
of its internal contradictions. And Eliot did not dispute that gener-
al point – though he did not concede its inevitability. His bbc talks
illustrate the painfulness of the “dilemma” – which appeared to
him to amount to a choice between individual liberty accompanied
by widespread poverty on the one hand, and prosperity purchased
by the surrender of individual liberty to the iron laws of historical
determinism on the other. While atheism was the worst feature of
communism in Eliot’s view, Lewis, Pound, and Gasset were uncon-
cerned with the issue of religious belief. For them it was communist
suppression of individual liberty in the name of collective prosper-
ity and security that they loathed. With the advent of the Depres-
sion, prosperity became the overwhelming concern of all those
who imagined they had the responsibility and the wisdom to show
the way. But as the belligerence of Italy and Germany increasingly
manifested itself, security concerns began to displace concerns
about prosperity. Security was obviously a more urgent concern

than prosperity, and – providentially – the effort to secure it con-
ferred greater prosperity on the belligerent nations – at least ini-
tially, as they ramped up production of arms.
The cure Eliot proposed for the problems that the democracies
faced in the ‘thirties was Christianity, monarchy, and agrarianism.
In comparison with Lewis’s flirtation with fascism and nazism in the
same period, Eliot’s political views appear quaint and therefore
harmless.6 But it must be admitted that they reflect a much poorer
assessment of political, social, and economic realities than either
Lewis or Pound displayed – however unwise their political choices.
In seeing godless communism as his principal adversary, Eliot
anticipated Cold War attitudes – no doubt contributing to his pop-
ularity in the Cold War period – but seriously underestimated the
threat of fascism/nazism.
In “Religion and Literature” (1935) Eliot mocked liberalism
with a caricature of the sub-Darwinian view that public order can
arise from the competition of unregulated individual speculation:
“Ideas, views of life, they think, issue distinct from independent
heads, and in consequence of their knocking violently against each
other, the fittest survive, and truth rises triumphant.” And, with
attacks on himself in mind, he added: “Anyone who dissents from
this view must be either a medievalist, wishful only to set back the
clock, or else a fascist, and probably both.” His rejoinder is that the
liberal model of the free interchange of ideas (no doubt it is
Matthew Arnold’s model that he had in mind) is a fantasy: “if the
mass of the contemporary public were really a mass of individuals
there might be something to be said for this attitude. But this is not
[the case], and never has been, and never will be ... It is not that
the world of separate individuals of the liberal democrat is unde-
sirable; it is simply that this world does not exist.” Like Gasset, then,
Eliot regarded the mass man as quite incapable of exercising self-
government: “there never was a time, I believe, when the reading
public was so large, or so helplessly exposed to the influences of its
own time ... . Individualistic democracy has come to high tide: and
it is more difficult today to be an individual than it ever was before”
(Selected Prose, 104, my emphasis).
Mussolini shared Eliot’s view of liberalism, but of course he pro-
posed totalitarianism rather than a peasant Christian society as a
remedy in his encyclopedia article, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” (co-

authored by Giovanni Gentile):
Anti-individualistic, the fascist conception of life stresses the

importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so
far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands
for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic
entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism, which arose as a reac-
tion to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when
the State became the expression of the conscience and will of
the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the
individual; fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the
real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of
living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individual-
istic liberalism, then fascism stands for liberty, and for the only
liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individ-
ual within the State. The fascist conception of the State is all embrac-
ing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less
have value. Thus understood, fascism is totalitarian, and the fas-
cist State – a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values - inter-
prets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.
(Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, 10–11, my emphasis)
If one were to substitute “Christianity” for each occurrence of

“state” in this paragraph, it would represent pretty accurately
Eliot’s political view.
Though we have seen that Eliot rejected Mussolini’s fascism as
inferior to Maurrass’s Action Française, he is peculiarly reticent to
speak about fascism or nazism in the thirties – either to dismiss or
to endorse them. For example, Eliot reviewed Was Europe a Success?
by Joseph Wood Krutch in his “Commentary” of April 1936.
Krutch’s book is an attack on communism and fascism from an
essentially liberal and humanist perspective, sporting blurbs by
Aldous Huxley and Albert Einstein. Eliot is unimpressed by
Krutch’s argument that human nature cannot be fundamentally
altered, and that therefore communism cannot prevail in the end.
No doubt, Eliot is on firm ground in rejecting such a facile critique,
but his silence on Krutch’s critique of fascism is striking (Criterion
15, April 1936, 458–9).
Eliot’s reluctance to speak of fascism or nazism was maintained

to the end of the run of Criterion. When he did comment on those
movements, it was obliquely, as in his comments on Reactionary Eng-
land by H. R. G. Greaves. Reactionary England sported endorsements
by the Labourites Clement Attlee, Harold Laski, and R. H. Tawney.
Eliot objected to the label “reactionary” for right wing movements
(as I have done): “‘Revolutionary’ would be a more suitable word,
as we now know that revolution is not always towards communism:
but we have come to associate ‘revolution’ with a violent and sud-
den reversal of government, rather than with a gradual and hardly
perceptible concentration of power.” He characterized that con-
centration of power as “the dictatorship of finance and the dicta-
torship of a bureaucracy under whatever political name it is assem-
bled.” Eliot characterized the individuals and movements Greaves
identified as “reactionaries,” as resisters of the dominance of
finance and bureaucracy: “But the movement, towards the Right
so-called, about which Mr. Greaves is apprehensive, is far more pro-
found than any mere machinations of consciously designing inter-
ests could make it. It is a symptom of the desolation of secularism,
of that loss of vitality, through the lack of replenishment from spir-
itual sources, which we have witnessed elsewhere, and which
becomes ready for the application of the artificial stimulants of
nationalism and class” (Criterion 15, July 1936, 667–8). That Eliot
writes “nationalism and class” instead of “fascism” and “Commu-
nism” is an index of his reluctance to speak directly of those move-
ments. At the same time his remark indicates that his sympathy for
the “Right” that Greaves attacked does not include the Fascists or
Nazis.
The Spanish Civil War, now generally regarded as the first battle
in the war between fascism/nazism and democracy, was seen by
contemporaries as a battle in the struggle between communism
and fascism. As we have seen, it became a cause célèbre among com-
munists and left-leaning intellectuals in the democracies. Promi-
nent recruits to the International Brigade were George Orwell,
Ernest Hemingway, W. H. Auden, and Norman Bethune. The Inter-
national Brigade, which fought on the government or anarchist
side, achieved a strength of almost 60,000. The war took on the
form of a contest between fascism/nazism and communism when
– on 18 November 1936 – Italy and Germany recognized Franco’s
Falange faction as the legitimate government of Spain and sent

forces to aid Franco. Shortly thereafter Stalin sent soldiers and
materiel to the government side.
Normally Eliot did not date his “Commentaries,” but he gives the
“Commentary” of January 1937 the date “November 18, 1936,”
alluding to the recognition of the rebels by Hitler and Mussolini on
that date. Their intervention forced the democracies – principally
Britain and France – to face the issue of a balancing intervention.
They had already failed to act decisively against Mussolini’s inva-
sion of Ethiopia in October 1935. The League did impose ineffec-
tive sanctions on Italy, but Britain dropped even those in June
1936. As in the case of Ethiopia, Britain and France decided not to
intervene, and even attempted to stop their nationals from joining
the International Brigade. However that decision had not yet been
taken when Eliot wrote his “Commentary.”
Eliot complained of the partisan nature of the British press’s
coverage of the war. Readers of the Left-leaning New Statesman
would, he wrote, conclude “that the elected Government of Spain
represented an enlightened and progressive Liberalism,” and
readers of the right-leaning Tablet would “be persuaded that the
rebels were people who, after enduring with patience more than
one would expect human beings to be able to stand, had finally
and reluctantly taken to arms as the only way left in which to save
Christianity and civilization” (Criterion 16, Jan. 1937, 289). Despite
his anti-communism, Eliot was not persuaded that Franco repre-
sented Christian values: “The victory of the Right will be the victo-
ry of a secular Right, not of a spiritual Right, which is a very dif-
ferent thing ... And those who have at heart the interests of
Christianity in the long run ... have especial reason for suspending
judgment” (290). In the end, he recommended remaining neu-
tral in the conflict.
On 26 April 1937 German Stuka dive-bombers virtually
destroyed the Basque village of Guernica. Excluding the Luft-
waffe’s sporadic raids on London in the First World War, this was
the first bombing raid on civilian targets in Western Europe,7 and
it occasioned widespread outrage. The most famous testimony to
that outrage is Picasso’s painting Guernica, reproduced as a mural
at the United Nations building in New York.8 Eliot might have
been expected to join in the general outrage, but he did not.
Instead he accepted Franco’s claim that the town had been dyna-
mited and then burnt by Anarchist Brigades: “On the First of May
The Tablet provided its explanation of the destruction of Guernica:
the most likely culprits, according to The Tablet, were the Basque’s
own allies, their shady friends in Catalonia” (Criterion 16, July
1937, 670). By “shady friends in Catalonia,” Eliot means the
Republicans.
Six months later, Eliot was impelled to a bit of a rant by a peace
petition attached to a catalogue of the 1937 Exhibition of the
Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy, and Cultural Development.
Eliot objected to the Exhibitors’ assumption that art is internation-
al, and called into question the notion of “cultural progress.” He
further objected to the pacifist sentiment of the petition, dismiss-
ing it as naïve liberalism: “The temper of a statement such as that
which I have been discussing is clearly that of the amiable liberal-
ism which ... has become the political religion of England; and
which, whether it has a bias to the right, or, as more frequently and
in the present instance, a slight bias to the left, has little relation to
events on the continent” (“Commentary” Criterion 17, Oct. 1937,
83).
Aware that the alternatives to liberal democracy were commu-
nism and fascism, Eliot inserts a qualifying remark: “I am far from
suggesting that any continental ‘ideology’ should be taken over in
this country; only that the native one should be brought more up
to date, with a more realistic appreciation of the forces at work”
(83). Eliot gave no indication as to just what conclusions such a
“more realistic” assessment would lead, if it were neither commu-
nism nor fascism, but he made sure his readers were aware that it
was not democracy, observing that the term “democracy” is “used
by people whose activities are really directed towards one kind of
oligarchy or another – the kind of oligarchy you happen to prefer
will always be the one which is ‘democracy’” (83).
Eliot’s preoccupation with the political future of Britain and
Europe is manifest in his review of Wyndham Lewis’s The Lion and
the Fox, a book on Shakespeare’s plays Timon of Athens, Troilus, and
Coriolanus. These are all political plays, and Lewis used them to
comment indirectly on the contemporary scene, prompting Eliot
to digress from Shakespeare to Lewis’s political affiliations, remark-
ing: “As for Mr. Lewis’s politics, I see no reason to suppose that he
is any more of a ‘Fascist’ or ‘Nazi’ than I am.” (Since Lewis had

endorsed Mussolini and then Hitler in print, this seems a very
incautious remark.) Eliot defended Lewis by reiterating his stan-
dard antipathy for “liberalism: “Anyone who is not enthusiastic
about the fruits of liberalism must be unpopular with the anglo-
saxon majority.” His defence of himself and Lewis was to claim that
– unlike other commentators – they were “detached observers.” He
hastened to add that the “detached observer” is not a “dispassion-
ate observer,” denying the status of detached observer to “the
philosophers, the scientists, the artists, and [surprisingly] the
Christians.” It turns out that by “detached observer” he means
someone like himself and Lewis who rise above the parochial inter-
ests of their class, nation, and epoch: “There has never been a time,
surely, when it was more important that the thinker and the artist
should endeavour to get outside of their own country and own
epoch, which means anything rather than running round all the
rest, or settling oneself comfortably in some past age” (Review of
The Lion and the Fox, 111–12). Despite this disclaimer, it is difficult
to see where Eliot and Lewis would have been content other than
in “some past age.”
Eliot’s remarks incline one to suspect that his lonely and idio-
syncratic political posture was not solely a consequence of his
Anglicanism and Maurrasian Royalism but was also informed by his
status as an expatriate. Eliot could identify neither with the Ameri-
ca he had left, nor the Britain he had adopted. Indeed, he seems
to have succumbed to that very weakness of “settling oneself com-
fortably in some past age,” that he dismissed in his review of The
Lion and the Fox. A few months later in his “Commentary” for April
1938, Eliot reiterated his nostalgia for a nation of simple peasant
folk. His topic in this “Commentary” is education, one of the “two
most serious long-distance problems we have, apart from the ulti-
mate religious problem.” The other is “the problem of the Land,”
that is, “how to obtain a proper balance between country and town
life.” While admitting that he would “find it as difficult to live in the
country as to give up smoking,” he nonetheless believed “that the
real and spontaneous country life – not legislated country life – is
the right life for the great majority in any nation” (“Commentary,”
Criterion 17, April 1938, 482–3).
Like Gasset, he regarded the urban mass “as a complacent, prej-

udiced and unthinking mass, suggestible to head-lines and pho-
tographs, ready to be inflamed to enthusiasm or soothed to passiv-
ity, perhaps more easily bamboozled than any previous generation
upon earth. Their minds cannot be influenced, if they have none:
but their behaviour can be directed” (“Commentary” Criterion 17,
July 1938, 688). Although Lewis shared Eliot’s contempt for, and
distrust of, the half-educated and deracinated urbanite, he did not
share Eliot’s fondness for the uneducated peasant – nor did
Pound. It is difficult to understand how Eliot failed to see what Gas-
set saw clearly – that it was precisely to the deracinated urbanite
that fascism and nazism appealed. Paradoxically, communism,
which represented itself as the champion of the deracinated (their
term was “alienated”) urban proletariat, appealed relatively little to
the masses. Communism was primarily a movement of educated,
bourgeois intellectuals and agitators. Eliot’s distaste for commu-
nism was motivated as much by its championing of the urban mass-
es as by its atheism. He feared it as a creed competing with Chris-
tianity for the hearts and souls of the people. He seems not to have
seen fascism/nazism in the same light – presumably because nei-
ther was militantly atheist. Eliot regarded them as pagan – a lesser
fault in his view.
That Eliot’s antipathy for communism was much stronger than
for fascism is clear from his last comment on the Spanish Civil War
in his “Commentary” for October 1938. In a preface to a book on
the Spanish Civil War, the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain
had refused to grant Franco’s claim that he was engaged in a Holy
War against communism. In his “Commentary,” Eliot complained
of those who were “inclined to attribute all the ‘holiness’ of this war
to the party of Valencia and Barcelona,” that is, to the anar-
chist/communist Republican government. And he took the trou-
ble to point out that he was not speaking only of Communists: “I
do not refer, of course, so much to the small number of commu-
nists, as to the larger number of the heirs of liberalism, who find an
emotional outlet in denouncing the iniquity of something called
‘fascism’.” Even at this late stage in the descent into war, the enemy
Eliot feared most was liberalism; he feared it much more than
“something called ‘fascism’.”
He listed the dangers run by the “irresponsible ‘anti-fascist,’ the

patron of mass-meetings and manifestoes”: they may be exploited
by the foreign press; their “religious fanaticism” causes them to
neglect real political issues; and “they distract attention from the
true evils in their own society.” Those evils are three: 1) “the dom-
ination of Finance” (reflecting the Douglasite analysis), 2) “our
ideals and system of Education,” “and 3) “our whole philosophy of
life.” “What is fundamentally wrong,” he concluded – in what had
become a leitmotif in his political prose – “is the urbanization of mind
of which I have previously spoken, and which is increasingly preva-
lent as those who rule, those who speak, those who write, are
developed in increasing numbers from an urban background.”
His remedy is to return Britain to an agrarian state: “it is necessary
that the greater part of the population, of all classes (so long as we
have classes) should be settled in the country and dependent
upon it” (“Commentary,” Criterion 18, Oct. 1938, 59–60, Eliot’s
emphasis).
The inadequacy of such an analysis of the malaise affecting
Europe in 1938 is glaringly self-evident. Eliot’s analysis reflects, I
think, a kind of intellectual paralysis that overtook him in the face
of events that saw his preferred social and political ideology cap-
tured by unscrupulous (Mussolini) and evil (Hitler) men. Since
Mussolini and Hitler represented themselves as enemies of the
godless and classless Communists, Eliot was tempted to accept
them as allies, and was unwilling or unable to acknowledge their
opportunism, belligerence, malevolence, and racism. Eliot’s illib-
eral political posture – his Anglicanism, royalism, and elitism –
need not inevitably lead to belligerence, racism, and genocide.
Those consequences are no more inevitable than Stalin’s show tri-
als, the Ukrainian mass starvation, and the Gulag are inevitable
consequences of Marxist communism. After all the British royal
family is guilty of subscribing to the same “reactionary” political,
religious, and social posture as Eliot, but for all that have largely
escaped accusations of fascist tendencies.9
Eliot’s failure to see where fascism/nazism was headed may be
more reprehensible than his contemporaries’ failure to see where
Stalinist communism was headed, but it is a matter of degree. After
all, the engineered starvation of 7,000,000 Ukrainian so-called
“kulaks” occurred in 1932–33 and Stalin’s show trials began in
August 1936 – during the Spanish Civil War. By the same token,
Hitler enacted the first anti-Semitic laws in 1933 and the Nurem-
berg Laws depriving Jews of citizenship, among other injustices and
indignities, in 1935; Mussolini also enacted racial laws against Jews
in July 1938. All of that preceded Eliot’s defence of fascism/nazism
in his October 1938 “Commentary.” But we need to remember that
Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were not yet seen as pariahs among
nations – as the Munich Agreement bears witness.
It must have been just days or weeks after Eliot wrote his October
“Commentary” that Chamberlain returned triumphantly from
Berlin (on 30 September 1938) with the infamous Munich Agree-
ment partitioning Czechoslovakia in his hand. Standing in front of
10 Downing St., the prime minister’s residence, Chamberlain
announced to the assembled press: “My good friends, for the sec-
ond time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from
Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our
time ... Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”
While Chamberlain’s policy of “appeasement” has consigned his
administration to infamy, it was not unpopular at the time, so
strong was the British and French desire to avoid war. Klaus P. Fis-
cher points out in Nazi Germany: A New History that although in ret-
rospect the “strategy of appeasement appears politically indefensi-
ble and even cowardly ... at the time it was widely hailed as an act
of sapient statesmanship. What motivated it was not so much igno-
rance or cowardice but fear and guilt – fear of another senseless
war and guilt of having stripped Germany of its status as a great
power and humiliating it in the process. Additionally, the appeasers
were painfully aware of their own lack of military preparedness ...
[and] their fear of Communism was far stronger than their fear of
Hitler, a psychological fact that the passage of time tends to ob-
scure for us today” (428–9).
Neville Thompson is even stronger on the popularity of Cham-
berlain’s policy of appeasement in The Anti-Appeasers:
Until the end of 1938 “appeasement” was the most noble term
in the diplomatic vocabulary. Far from carrying its later conno-
tation of weakness, fear, and retreat in the face of bluff it sug-
gested accommodation, conciliation, and the removal of just
grievances. The very idea that it could mean “craven immorality”
rather than “virtuous endeavour” simply did not occur to most

Englishmen in the 1930s ... The first person to take exception
to appeasement in foreign affairs was Clement Attlee who
charged in 1937: “The policy of this Government throughout,
right on from1931, has always been to try and appease the
aggressor by the sacrifice of the weaker States, but the more
you yield to the aggressor the greater his appetite.” But this was
simply a straw in the wind. It was not until Munich that people
began to inquire closely as to its precise meaning. Thereafter
the term fell like Lucifer never to rise again, though there was
at first some attempt to distinguish between true and false
appeasement. (27)
A month after Eliot’s defence of fascism/nazism, the infamous

outrage known as Kristallnacht broke out in Berlin. It was a gov-
ernment-engineered riot against Jews and Jewish property in Ger-
many on 9 and 10 November 1938. Over one hundred synagogues
were destroyed and almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were damaged
or destroyed. No rioters were arrested, but 26,000 Jews were. They
were sent to concentration camps (which were not yet death
camps at that date). To add insult to injury, the German govern-
ment fined the Jewish community one billion marks for damages.
Kristallnacht caused outrage around the world, and convinced the
most hopeful of German Jews that their only hope was to leave
Germany. So far as I have discovered, Eliot never referred to
Kristallnacht. However, it may well have played a role in his deci-
sion to discontinue The Criterion. He explained his reasons for end-
ing the journal in the next number, January, 1939. There he
admitted that for him at least, the features of the post-war world
did not “begin clearly to emerge” until 1926. “From about that
date,” hope for a new future died, “one began slowly to realize that
the intellectual and artistic output of the previous seven years had
been rather the last efforts of an old world, than the first struggles of a new”
(“Last Words,” 271, my emphasis).
It is not self-evident why Eliot chose 1926. It was the year of the
unsuccessful British General Strike, an alarming manifestation of
socialist sentiment in Britain. But, probably more important for
Eliot, it was the year of the papal condemnation of Maurras and the
Action Française. It was also the year in which Vivien decided to
leave Eliot for a new lover – possibly Haden Guest. She fled to
Rome during the strike, which lasted from 3 to 12 May. However,
she returned to Eliot, who “consigned Vivien to a sanatorium at
Malmaison, outside Paris, and returned to England alone.” He
later “returned to Paris, eventually bringing home a shamefaced
and penitent Vivien” (Seymour-Jones, 440–3). Almost exactly a
year later, Eliot was baptized (29 June 1927), but he stayed with
Vivien for another five years and two months.
Whatever his reasons for choosing 1926, Eliot found that after
that year “communications became more difficult, contributions
more uncertain, and new and important foreign contributors more
difficult to discover. The ‘European mind,’ which one had mistakenly
thought might be renewed and fortified, disappeared from view” (“Last
Words,” 271, my emphasis). He confessed that “during the last
eight years or so” his “Commentaries” bear witness to “how obscure
and confused my own mind has been” (272) – a confusion I have
endeavoured to document. However, by the date of “Last Words”
that confusion has been dispelled by a firm Christian conservatism:
“For myself, a right political philosophy came more and more to
imply a right theology – and right economics to depend upon right
ethics.” Such views led him “to emphases which somewhat
stretched the original framework of a literary review.” Conceding
that perhaps he “devoted too much ... attention ... to the doctrines
of communism,” he insisted that such an emphasis was justified
because of what he perceived to be a vacuum in British politics. He
found “the version of fascism, which was offered locally ... to have
no great intellectual interest – and what is perhaps more impor-
tant, was not sufficiently adaptable to be grafted on to the stock of
Toryism, – whereas communism flourished because it grew so easi-
ly on the Liberal root” (272). This is a striking comment, for it
implies that some version of fascism would have been acceptable to
him – just not that offered by Mosley’s British Union of fascism,
and it reiterates Eliot’s idiosyncratic view that communism is the
fulfilment of liberalism. (For Eliot, Liberalism is defined by its
focus on worldly prosperity and comfort, and hence is compatible
with communism. From a political science point of view, liberalism
is defined by its focus on individual rights and liberties, and is
therefore incompatible with both communism and fascism; since
their focus is on collective rights and duties.)
Eliot concluded “Last Words” despondently: “In the present

state of public affairs – which has induced in myself a depression
of spirits so different from any other experience of fifty years as to
be a new emotion – I no longer feel the enthusiasm necessary to
make a literary review what it should be” (274). But he had not
decided to withdraw from the field of public commentary, for at
the time he wrote “Last Words” he must have already been work-
ing on The Idea of a Christian Society, three lectures delivered in
March 1939 at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In those talks
he repeated his plea for a Christian Britain based on the village or
shire – a vision that would have pleased J.R.R. Tolkien – and
repeated his now familiar charge that Britain was not in truth a
democracy but an oligarchy.
He restated his antipathy for liberalism, accusing it of “destroy-
ing traditional social habits of the people,” of “dissolving their nat-
ural collective consciousness into individual constituents,” and of
encouraging the masses to believe themselves capable of decision.
He held liberalism responsible for the rise of totalitarianism, but
conceded that totalitarianism – that is, both Soviet communism
and fascism/nazism – is the contrary of liberalism. In “Last Words”
he had characterized communism as the fulfilment of liberalism.
Now, in The Idea of a Christian Society, he abandoned that eccentric
posture but still blamed liberalism for the rise of totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism is, he argued, the consequence of the liberal values
of individualism and tolerance, for they prepare “the way for that
which is its own negation: the artificial mechanised or brutalised
control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos” (12). This posi-
tion is Maurrassian – the masses are imagined to need – indeed, to
long for – order and discipline.
Less compromised than Lewis, Eliot nonetheless took pains to
modify his criticism of liberalism in the face of the imminence of
war. He apologized if he had given “the impression that I think of
Liberalism as something simply to be rejected and extirpated, as an
evil for which there is a simple alternative.” Allowing that liberalism
is a “necessary negative element,” Eliot softened his criticism to the
rather weak observation that to make a negative element “serve the
purpose of a positive” is objectionable (13). But he was confident
that “the attitudes and beliefs of Liberalism are destined to disap-
pear, are already disappearing” (14). In the face of that inevitabili-
ty, we cannot rely, he said, on a visceral “dislike of everything main-

tained by Germany and/or Russia,” which “may lead us to reject
possible improvements” or to “adopt uncritically almost any atti-
tude which a foreign nation rejects” (15, Eliot’s emphasis). Such
sentiments on the eve of the German invasion of Poland cannot
have been very well received in Cambridge, even though – as always
– Eliot modulated his tolerance of nazism by aligning it with com-
munism, which had a significant, if decidedly minority, constituen-
cy in Britain.
“The fundamental objection to fascist doctrine,” for Eliot, “is
that it is pagan.” (Presumably he has in mind the Teutonic rituals
of the Nuremberg rallies, and Nazi celebration of Wagnerian
opera.) But he added: “we conceal [that objection] from ourselves
because it might condemn ourselves as well.” While there “are
other objections too, in the political and economic sphere,” to fas-
cism, Eliot reminded his Cambridge audience that Britain had its
own problems in those areas. Finally, he conceded that there “are
still other objections, to oppression and violence and cruelty,” but,
incredibly, he dismissed them on the grounds that they “are objec-
tions to means and not to ends” (15–16). This was said five months
after Kristallnacht. It is striking that with all his talk of morality, Eliot
is willing to turn a blind eye to the violent oppression practised in
both Italy and Germany, to the open racism of Germany’s anti-
Semitic laws,10 and to the brutal and unjust treatment of Jews in the
Kristallnacht outrage.
Apparently he was blinded by his commitment to Christian
belief, leading him to insist that (since he believed that liberalism
could not persist) Europe was faced with a stark choice between
Christianity, fascism/nazism, and communism: “To the quick and
simple organisation of society for ends which, being only material
and worldly, must be as ephemeral as worldly success, there is only
one alternative. As political philosophy derives its sanction from
ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning
to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social
organisation which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore
some essential aspect of reality. The term ‘democracy,’ as I have
said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to
stand alone against the forces that you dislike – it can easily be
transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous
God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin” (Idea of a Christian
Society, 50, my emphasis). But Eliot did not suggest any alternative
political organization in this work – or elsewhere – after 1938. We
are left to assume that a Christian polity would also be a monar-
chical one as Maurras envisioned – although Maurras regarded
Christianity as merely a necessary buttress for a monarchy. Of
course, the notion of a Christian monarchy could not have
appeared entirely absurd to a Cambridge audience, all of whom
would certainly have tolerated – if not warmly embraced – the sta-
tus quo in Britain of a hereditary monarch, who was also the head
of the Anglican Church.
Despite the abundant evidence of the belligerent, brutal, and
oppressive nature of the fascist and Nazi regimes available by
March of 1939, Eliot still insisted that they were only marginally
worse than parliamentary, capitalist, humanistic liberal regimes.
The only effect that the march of events had on Eliot’s political
commentary was to turn his attention away from the long-term
political threat of socialism/communism toward the immediate
military threat of fascism/nazism. He seems to prefer the latter to
liberal democracy, if only it could be purged of its “oppression and
violence and cruelty.” That preference appears to have been based
primarily on a shared antipathy for the “licence” and atheism of lib-
eralism. Eliot’s stance represents a striking failure of imagination
on his part – if not worse.
lewis in the thirties
Although Wyndham Lewis shared most of Eliot’s antipathies, he

did not share his Anglican faith – or, indeed, any conviction beyond
a belief in the right of what he called “genius” to rule the world.
Like Eliot, he regretted the passing of an imagined organic agrari-
an society, and abhorred the urban society of isolated individuals
that replaced it: “As this society becomes, instead of an organic
whole, a mass of minute individuals, under the guise of an Ethic
there appears the Mystic of the Many, the cult of the cell, or the
worship of the particle; and the dogma of ‘what is due from every-
body to everybody:’ takes the place of the natural law of what is due
to character, to creative genius, or to personal power, or even to
their symbols” (Paleface, 77–8). “The ‘dogma of what is due from
everybody to everybody’” is, of course, Communism, whose slogan

in the 1848 Manifesto was “to each according to his need, from each
according to his ability.” In Paleface (1929) Lewis argued for the
right of the white man to dominate other races, as a corollary of the
right of the “genius” to dominate lesser men.
In the infamous Paleface, Lewis articulated a more authoritarian,
more racist, and more fascistic political posture than Eliot ever did.
Although Eliot defended Lewis in his 1937 review of The Lion and
the Fox, he refrained from commenting in print on any of Lewis’s
more outrageous political tracts – Paleface, Hitler (both 1931), Doom
of Youth (1932), Left Wings over Europe or How to Make a War about
Nothing (1936) and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! Or A New War in
the Making (1937). Like all of Lewis’s political prose, these works
are patched together hastily, incorporating large chunks of other
works, and expressing an increasing anxiety over the gathering war
clouds. Like Eliot, Lewis saw fascism/nazism as a response to the
malaise of the twentieth century. But, unlike Eliot, Lewis initially
considered fascism/nazism to be a legitimate response worthy of his
support.
Lewis was preoccupied – even obsessed – by a horror of mod-
ern warfare, whereas Eliot’s concerns were almost exclusively cul-
tural and religious. Lewis’s fear that another war would be
marked by worse atrocities than the previous one turned out to be
well founded: “Every Western government has now accepted all
that the new conditions of gas and aerial warfare entail. No future
belligerent will be able to make use of a propaganda campaign
about ‘atrocities,’ as was the case in the last war: in advance every
form of “atrocity” is taken for granted. That is an entirely new situa-
tion in the civilized european world. It imposes a formidable
change of attitude upon any civilized government taking up arms
today. The first thing on the declaration of war that all the air-
squadrons of those governments engaged would have to do would
be to go and bomb and murder the sleeping citizens of the nation on
whom war had been declared” (Paleface, 244, my emphasis). And, in
contrast to Eliot’s preoccupation with the restoration of an Angli-
can and agrarian society, Lewis’s concerns were shared by pun-
dits, politicians, and ordinary citizens. As we have seen, there was
broad public support for the Anglo-French policy of appease-
ment. Lewis’s fear that every form of atrocity would be taken for
granted in the next war was unhappily fulfilled. Certainly the

Nazis outdid even our Soviet allies in atrocities and outrages, but
the Allied bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan puts to the
lie democratic outrage at the Guernica atrocity. Unhappily, the
aerial bombardment of civilians in time of war has indeed been
“taken for granted” ever since.
Paleface was written before Guernica, before, that is, any signifi-
cant aerial bombardment of civilian targets. (As noted above, the
Germans had bombed London, and shelled Paris with long range
cannon in the 1914–18 war, but the casualties and damage had not
been heavy, and was not much commented upon.). Although
Lewis’s prediction of aerial bombardment of civilians was accurate,
he wildly exaggerated its efficacy, estimating that “millions of peo-
ple ... will be wiped out in a single night of fairly successful bomb-
ing” (25). Of course, bombing was not nearly so deadly. Estimates
of the total fatalities in Europe from allied bombing throughout
the war – terrible as they are – do not reach one million. The infa-
mous firebombing of Dresden, whose population was swollen with
refugees, killed probably 40,000 people (almost all civilians) and
required three days of bombing by 1,300 heavy bombers. The 57-
day “Blitz” of London killed about 43,000 – again mostly civilians.
The 1944 “Buzz Bomb” and V1 and V2 attacks on London lasted
about 75 days and destroyed almost as many buildings as 12
months of bomber attacks had done in 1940–41, but killed fewer
people. Even the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed
“only” 70,000 immediately; plus a similar number who died within
days from radiation poisoning. That almost all were civilians goes
without saying. While it may seem ghoulish to recite these obscene
numbers as evidence of Lewis’s exaggeration, I think it is important
to have them in mind, as an index of Lewis’s almost hysterical state
of anxiety in the interwar period.
All of Lewis’s books share Gasset’s and Eliot’s elitist distrust of the
masses, as well as their nostalgia for an earlier “organic” condition
of society. Lewis was more plain-spoken on this point than the oth-
ers, but there is no doubting the broad agreement among them.
Like Eliot and Gasset, Lewis believed that Western civilization was
currently in a transitional stage – one in which the artist has no
secure place: “I am a man of the ‘transition,’ we none of us can help
being that – I have no organic function in this society, naturally,
since this society has been pretty thoroughly dismantled and put out
of commission” (83). Like them – and like Brailsford and Angell –

Lewis hoped for a supra-national political organization, noting that
“all terrestrial societies [are] being called upon to coalesce into a
vaster unit – namely a world-society.” And he was in favour of such
a development if it “can be effected without more violence and con-
fusion than the human organism is able to endure” (84).
In this respect, Lewis anticipated the new supranational world
order heralded by Hardt and Negri in Empire. However, where
Lewis hoped for a new supranational regime rather like that now
attained in the European Union, the neo-Marxists Hardt and Negri
look forward to a transformation of the very nature of humanity
through the advent of a Deleuzian post-industrial virtual reality:
Empire takes form when language and communication, or real-

ly when immaterial labour and cooperation, become the domi-
nant productive force. The superstructure is put to work, and
the universe we live in is a universe of productive linguistic net-
works. The lines of production and those of representation
cross and mix in the same linguistic and productive realm ...
Production becomes indistinguishable from reproduction; pro-
ductive forces merge with relations of production; constant cap-
ital tends to be constituted and represented within variable cap-
ital in the brains, bodies and cooperation of productive
subjects. Social subjects are at the same time producers and
products of this unitary machine. In this new historical forma-
tion it is thus no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a
value, or a practice that is “outside.” (385)
It is difficult to guess what Eliot, Pound, or Lewis would have

thought of such dreams of “variable capital in the brains,” but they
might have warmed to the notion that “language and communi-
cation” would “become the dominant productive force.” In The Art
of Being Ruled Lewis contrasted the writer’s habit of dwelling with-
in language to behaviourism’s focus on overt behaviour: “We [that
is, artists] live largely, then, in an indirect world of symbols.
‘Thought’ having been substituted for action, the word for the
deed, we live in an unreal word-world, a sort of voluminous maze
or stronghold built against behaviour, out of which we only occa-
sionally issue into action when the cruder necessities of life compel
us to. Some of us live in this world more than others, of course.
Some of us actually like it” (341, Lewis’s emphasis.) But Lewis was
interested in acting in the world. The focus on internal mental
states that dwelling in “an unreal word-world” entails was the prin-
cipal target of Lewis’s polemic in Time and Western Man: “In all
movements we have under consideration the thing to be stressed
more than anything else is the disposition to bestow “reality” upon the
image, rather than upon the thing. The reality has definitely installed
itself inside the contemporary mind, ... The external world is no
longer our affair, as indeed it ceases to be ours in any civic or polit-
ical sense” (Time and Western Man, 368–9, my emphasis). Lewis
had proleptically identified the postmodern disregard of mere
physical conditions and actions as a cultural tendency to which he
was vehemently opposed.
Quite apart from dreams of a future utopian world, Paleface
reflects a fundamental confusion that tainted most of Lewis’s
polemical writing between the wars. On the one hand, he was hor-
rified – justifiably, as events proved – at the prospect of another
war in the age of the machine. (In this respect, he is alone
amongst those under consideration here, none of whom express
any pacifist tendencies.) On the other hand, he was anxious to
preserve the hegemony of the Europeans – his “palefaces” – in the
world, a hegemony he believed to be justified by what he consid-
ered to be the inherent superiority of the European’s rational
nature to the allegedly emotional nature of the “coloured races.”
He did not fear an insurrection of the peoples subjugated by the
Europeans, but a more subtle conquest – that the Europeans
would adopt their modes of thought – that they would “go native.”
He saw that coming to pass through the “romantic” “time philos-
ophy” he excoriated in Time and Western Man. Even if one is
inclined to grant some credence to Lewis’s worry about the appar-
ent abandonment of long-standing Western cognitive practices
descending from Aristotle, his attribution of irrational tendencies
to the coloured races is ridiculous as well as offensive. It is a clear
case of projection of those attributes one fears in oneself onto
some “other.”
Like Gasset, Lewis recommended a “melting pot,” such as the
Americans practised with European immigrants, as a solution for
Europe, and like Eliot, Lewis reminded his readers that Europe
once had a unified culture under the Roman Church. It appears
that Lewis’s European melting pot would exclude Arabs, Africans,

and Asians, and would simply dissolve the national borders that he
thought preserved national rivalries, which all too frequently led to
war.11 It is striking that in the 1930s all factions seem to have
agreed that a unified Europe was desirable, if not inevitable. Eliot,
Angell, Brailsford, Gasset, Lewis, and the Communists all agreed
on this point. The fiercest opposition to the hope of a unified
European state was found in fascism/nazism, whose basic appeal
was to the mystique of national identity. Of course, Nazi Germany
did briefly unify most of Europe, but by conquest, not the kind of
unification that our dreamers had in mind.
Immediately after Paleface, Lewis published Hitler, perhaps his
most infamous book. Published in 1931, most of it had previous-
ly appeared in Time and Tide in January and February of 1931. It
was prompted by the Nazi party’s political success in the German
elections of September 1930 – though still a minority party.
Lewis’s attitude to Hitler in this book is much the same as that he
had adopted toward Mussolini in The Art of Being Ruled. Indeed,
he reminds his readers that he was in Rome on the occasion of
Mussolini’s March on Rome, and was in Berlin in November, a few
weeks after the Nazis’ electoral breakthrough (5–6) attending a
rally at which Göring and Goebbels spoke: “it was impossible to be
present and not to be amazed at the passion engendered in all
these men and women, and the millions of others of whom these
were only a fraction, by the message of these stormy platform
voices” (11).
He sketched a picture of Berlin under the Weimar Republic that
is very much like Christopher Isherwood’s in Goodbye to Berlin.
Unlike Isherwood, Lewis was not appalled at the violence and
homophobia of the Nazis, largely sharing their antipathy for what
he calls “Lesb and So” (lesbians and sodomites) – a feature of
nazism that the homosexual Isherwood naturally abhorred.12 Lewis
also excused the ubiquitous street violence of Hitler’s Brownshirts
as a justified response to communist public rallies (16–21). He
declared that “in Adolf Hitler, The German Man, we have, I assert,
a ‘Man of Peace’.” While Lewis saw a similarity between the “mili-
tant nationalism” of the Nazis and “that much slighter affair, the
Action Française’s nationalism,” he believed that nazism was based
on a “much more substantial impulse than that animating its puny
french counterpart. It is really national, in its extent and solidarity”

(32–3). Lewis’s preference was the opposite of Eliot’s, who we have
seen rejected fascism as inferior to the Action Française.
Lewis does not deny the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but
does not fully endorse it as he did in Paleface. Instead he enjoins his
British readers to excuse Nazi anti-Semitism on the grounds of
their shared Teutonic blood: “Do not allow these difficult matters
to sway you too much (though decidedly warning this crude Teu-
ton to be civil, when in your company). But still allow a little Blutsge-
fühl to have its way (a blood-feeling towards this other mind and
body like your own) – in favour of this brave and very unhappy
impoverished kinsman. Do not allow a mere bagatelle of a Juden-
frage to stand in the way of that!” (42). In an effort to mollify his
British readers, Lewis even ventures the opinion that “once he
[Hitler] had obtained power he would show increasing modera-
tion and tolerance” (48). We should bear in mind that although
Nazi anti-Semitism was open and violent, Hitler was still only the
leader of a minority party as Lewis wrote. He did not become chan-
cellor until 30 January 1933. The infamous Nuremberg Racial
Laws were not enacted until 1935, and the extreme violence of
Kristallnacht was still seven years in the future when Lewis wrote
Hitler. Inexcusable as Lewis’s toleration of Nazi anti-Semitism is, he
could not have foreseen the brutality against Jews that was to come
– still less the Final Solution.
In preparation for Hitler, Lewis had read the as yet untranslated
Mein Kampf. (It did not appear in English until 1933 in an abridged
version.).13 He would have learned from it that Hitler intended to
expand the German Reich to the East by military conquest, and to
reunite the German peoples resident in parts of Czechoslovakia
and Poland, as well as those in Austria, his homeland. Nonetheless
Lewis dismissed any worry of German aggression, claiming that
France’s overwhelming military superiority would hold it in check:
“The military power of France today is so overwhelming, and Ger-
many has been so scrupulously disarmed, that such an eventuality
as a ‘war of revenge’ – or even, if the French were not there, an
attack upon Poland about the famous ‘corridor’ – would be like
asking a naked unarmed man to make a frontal attack upon a
machine-gun nest (with a cloud of bomb-bearing aeroplanes cir-
cling overhead)” (56).14
What is most shocking about Hitler is Lewis’s acceptance of

Hitler’s argument in Mein Kampf that the world was faced by a Jew-
ish conspiracy to control it – a paranoid fantasy Lewis had not pre-
viously expressed, despite his evident anti-Semitism.15 He regarded
the Nazi race analysis of the cultural crisis as an explanation of the
current economic malaise superior to the communist class analysis:
“What the Nationalsocialist is, in reality, attempting to do, is to put
Race in the place of Class” (83). “The Class-doctrine – as opposed
to the Race-doctrine” – he continues, “demands a clean slate. Every-
thing must be wiped off slick. A sort of colourless, featureless,
automaton – temporally two dimensional – is what is required by the
really fanatical Marxist autocrat” (84). A Nazi revolution, in con-
trast, Lewis believed, permits the preservation of the social struc-
ture ante.
An element of Hitler’s analysis in Mein Kampf that attracted Lewis
was his “absolute distinction between concrete and productive capi-
tal (great or small) upon the one hand, and Loan-capital (as the
Hitlerist calls it) upon the other.” Lewis sees this as an improve-
ment on Marx’s attack on capitalism: “The arch-enemy is not Das
Kapital pure and simple, as with Marx, but Das Leihkapital, or Loan-
capital.16 Property – up to some specified, reasonable, amount –
that Hitlerism has no objection to” (147–8). To Lewis’s mind
Hitler’s analysis seemed to answer the question many were asking
in the thirties: “[despite] man’s technical ability to produce and to
transport great quantities of produce anywhere that is required ...
yet everywhere in the world today the black cloud of economic dis-
aster and of want – ‘Crise mondial,’ ’world-slump,’ it is called – set-
tles down upon every land, more and more deeply and hopelessly?
One word – there is only one possible one – is able to provide a sat-
isfactory answer to that stupendous riddle. And that word is debt!
The technique of Credit, as that is practised today – and its sequel
in universal scarcity and in universal debt” (Hitler, 159–60, original
emphasis). Lewis’s approval of this analysis reflects his exposure to
Social Credit, whose analysis of the economic malaise also targeted
banks and interest on loans – as we have seen.
In a chapter entitled, “Credit-Crankery Rampant” Lewis invoked
Oswald Mosley and T. S. Eliot as other credit cranks having some-
thing in common with Hitler in that they had addressed the dys-
functional nature of the current economic organization of the
world. He quoted at length from Eliot’s “Commentary” for Janu-

ary 1931, discussed above, in which Eliot cast doubt on conven-
tional economic wisdom, but also confessed his own puzzlement:
“I cannot but believe that there are a few simple ideas at bottom,
upon which I and the rest of the unlearned are competent to
decide according to our several complexions; but I cannot for the
life of me ever get to the bottom” (Criterion 10, 309). In an unchar-
acteristic expression of humility, Lewis added, “if Mr. Eliot under-
stands ‘nothing at all’ upon this matter, I understand infinitely
less” (173). If he understood more, he said, he too would be a
credit crank (164).
By the term “Leihkapital” or “Loan Capital” Hitler meant bank
credit based on the “fiat money” that banks create and lend, charg-
ing the borrower interest. Pound, a committed Social Crediter, and
by the date of the following remark a believer in the myth that
there was a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, noted and
approved Lewis’s comment: “Hitler’s statement on Leihcapital
[sic] in ‘Mein Kampf,’ so masterfully cited by Wyndham Lewis and
used as chapter head in his ‘Hitler’ already pre-existed as idea in J.
A. Hobson’s exposition of the syphilitic venom of international
lending”17 (“Symposium – I. Consegna,” Purpose 10.3, July/Sept.
1938, 165). Even though Pound is the most bona fide “credit
crank” of the three, Lewis refrained from mentioning him.
Lewis’s next book, The Doom of Youth (1932), is more cautious,
focusing on the perception that Europe and the world are in “a
state of transition:” “What is taken for granted in these pages is that
the disintegration ... cannot be arrested, even if we would and ... is
bound to contradict many things that are desirable ... .” He was
confident that the disintegration of the old European social and
cultural accommodation would be followed by a new integration,
but he worried that much “that is purely destructive – indeed well
nigh imbecile – is bound to get mixed into the integrating sub-
stance: and that is bad” (x). His title alludes to the apprehended
slaughter of Europe’s youth in a new war that he feared as a con-
sequence of the “disintegration.” Once again, we can say that
events proved Lewis’s apprehension to be well founded. However,
he was not so prescient in distinguishing what was destructive and
imbecile from what was constructive and wise. In The Doom of Youth
Lewis reiterated his anti-communism, bemoaning the disintegra-
tion of society into warring classes. Indeed, its theme is that con-
temporary political discourse had degenerated into multifarious
“classes,” each clamouring for special attention – the bourgeoisie
and proletariat, of course, but also male and female, young and
old, homosexual and straight, gentile and Jew.
Whereas in Paleface Lewis had been on the side of trans-nation-
alism, in The Doom of Youth – having read Mein Kampf – he excoriat-
ed the internationalists – by which he meant capitalists and
communists alike. This lumping together of capitalism and com-
munism is new for Lewis and reflects Hitler’s conviction that a
Jewish conspiracy aspired to world domination. From Hitler’s per-
spective banks and industry were in the hands of the Jews, and
(incoherently) he saw socialism and communism as Jewish ideas,
somehow combining to form a conspiracy for world domination.
These fantasies were an unfortunate but common prejudice at the
time.18 Lewis did not openly endorse either fascism or nazism,
restricting himself to an allusion to “an alternative to communism”
found in “France or Germany and, of course, Italy, and in all the
smaller countries of the north and centre of Europe” (140). (The
“alternative” in France is no doubt the royalist and Catholic pro-
gram of the Action Française, much admired by Eliot.)
As war clouds gathered, Lewis rushed two more books into print
– Left Wings over Europe or How to Make a War about Nothing (appear-
ing in June of 1936) and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! (appear-
ing in April of 1937). Hitler’s army had occupied the Rhineland in
March, 1936, abrogating the Peace of Versailles, but the French
failed to take military action. Lewis was frantic by then, and no
longer argued against the impending war on pacifist grounds – as
he had done in Paleface. In Left Wings over Europe he saw the issue in
terms that anticipate the later Cold War: “those who are so busy
preparing the ground for this new Great War are either camou-
flaged communists, or dupes or tools of communism and of the
great international interests [code for Jews] who have compacted
with the communists”(50). He believed that German aggression
was a fantasy conjured up by those “dupes of Communism.” He
even went so far as to claim “that the war in which we were engaged
from 1914–18 was in fact designed by fate (we are debarred from
imagining a more concrete creator) to serve as a backcloth for the
Russian communist revolution” (165). His focus in this work on
the bogeyman of communism is a departure from his previous cou-

pling of communism and fascism – probably motivated more by
rhetorical strategy than by any new convictions. His objective was
primarily to forestall a new war.
Blinded by his hostility to capitalist democracy, Lewis was unwill-
ing to believe that Britain and France were being driven to war with
Germany by Hitler’s aggressive acts. With some justice, he rejected
antipathy to dictatorship as a motive: “for after all they left Mus-
solini in complete peace for a decade,” and they left Stalin undis-
turbed despite “a permanent Reign of Terror and the massacre of
millions of people” (239). He thought the real cause was friendli-
ness toward communism in the democracies. Like Eliot – and prob-
ably influenced by him – he saw communism as a species of reli-
gion, in effect a secular form of Christianity. Communism, he
wrote, “is an exploitation of the automatic christian [sic] responses
and reflexes which have survived the extinction of Christianity
among the western proletariat, or intelligentsia.” Communism is,
he believed, “concocted out of the refuse of discarded emotions,
ingrained in Christendom, and which cannot at once be extirpat-
ed – emotions of ‘decency,’ of ‘charity,’ of ‘kindliness,’ of ‘compas-
sion,’ and of ‘selflessness’” (265). He does not add the observation
that those “discarded emotions” are singularly lacking from fascism
and nazism.
It is true that there was a strong lobby for socialism/communism
in both Britain and France. But there were also Right Wing move-
ments of comparable popularity – Maurras’ Action Française in
France and Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in Britain. Moreover,
the strongest voice opposed to appeasement in Britain was Winston
Churchill, who could hardly be accused of being a fellow traveller
of communism, or a Leftist of any description. Nor could France’s
De Gaulle be considered Left Wing. De Gaulle was just as opposed
to appeasement as was Churchill – though from a far less influen-
tial position as a colonel in the French army.
De Gaulle’s post-war assessment of the causes of the “catastro-
phe” of France’s defeat in World War II is not so different from that
of our literary trio: “To many,” De Gaulle wrote, “the disaster of
1940 seemed like the failure of the ruling class and system in every
realm” (cited in Judt, Postwar, 63). “It was,” believed by many in the
post war, Judt observes, that “the politicians and bankers and busi-
nessmen and soldiers of the inter-war years ... had brought their
countries to catastrophe, ... had betrayed the sacrifices of the First
World War and laid the ground for the Second” (Judt, 63). Of
course, neither De Gaulle nor Churchill saw Action Française, fas-
cism, or nazism as a remedy for those ills as did Eliot, Pound, and
Lewis (respectively).19
Lewis conceded that Hitler and Mussolini were both dictators,
and admitted the repressive nature of both regimes. But he cited J.
S. Mill to the effect that an enlightened and benevolent despot
might be the best sort of government in an emergency, and
reminded his readers that they were, in 1936, facing an emergency.
Then he praised Hitler as perhaps such an enlightened and benev-
olent despot: “This celibate inhabitant of a modest alpine chalet –
vegetarian, non-smoking and non-drinking, has remained the most
unassuming and simple of men. He is a man in mortal danger,
every moment of his life, who has sacrificed himself, literally, to a
principle; that of national freedom. That principle may be ill con-
ceived or not: that I am not concerned to debate. But this man
does not conform to the popular conception of a ‘tyrant,’ at least.
He is more like one of the oppressed! He is more like Epictetus [a
2nd century Stoic] than like Nero” (280).
Accustomed as we are to see Hitler portrayed as evil personified,
Lewis’s portrait seems like deliberate obfuscation. But the British
prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had a similar opinion of the
German chancellor two years later when they both signed the
Munich agreement. And we should recall that the butcher Stalin
was portrayed in the Western media after 1941 as “Uncle Joe,” com-
plete with pipe, walrus moustache, and benign smile. Necessity
makes strange bedfellows. As we have seen, according to Niall Fer-
guson, Lewis’s assessment of Hitler was not seriously out of step
with that of some of his aristocratic compatriots, nor with that of
Charles Lindbergh (see Friedman, 106–7), nor of course with that
of Mosley and his British Union of fascists (see Skidelsky, Oswald
Mosley, 424–5).
Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! Or a New War in the Making is
another tract opposing British involvement in a war against Ger-
many. Unlike the previous works discussed, it is thinly disguised as
a work of fiction. Its publication followed closely on the heels of
Left Wings over Europe, and it repeats the same arguments. Lewis’s
views are expressed by Ned, a self-confessed Bolshoi-Tory, anti-

Russian and anti-John Bull. Ned repeats the observations already
stated in the previous works: “There is no issue whatsoever but
Communism, as the logical outcome of the progressive enslave-
ment resulting from ‘Loan-Capital.’ If you accept one you must
sooner or later accept the other. Something as near as damn it to
Soviet Russia would ensue of its own accord” (Count Your Dead, 82,
original emphasis). This is an outcome Ned wishes to forestall. In
addition to this refrain of the evils of “Loan-Capital” Count Your
Dead continued the anti-Semitic strain found in Hitler and Left
Wings over Europe.
But most of Count Your Dead is given to Launcelot, a caricature of
a gullible English patriot. His twenty-four “Thoughts” articulate the
“lies” about, and “misrepresentations” of, the international scene,
focusing on the Spanish Civil war. His last “Thought” is entitled
“Launcelot sees the Light.” Launcelot’s revelation is that France,
Britain, and Russia are preparing for war against Germany!! The
book concludes with Launcelot’s passionate plea: “I can see all the
dead, each body with its group of mourners. I would like to say to
these bereaved and helpless masses now, if I could reach them:
Count your dead! I would take each one aside and shout: They are
alive! Can’t you see that they are not dead yet – though people are
preparing to butcher then in millions. For nothing at all. In a Great
War, all about nothing. But it would make no difference, of course,
if I did. No one bothers about death. It’s odd that you can’t rouse
them at the threat of death. Are they so tired of life?” (358, origi-
nal emphasis).
Although Count Your Dead closes with this pacifist-sounding plea,
it is mostly a sounding of alarm at the danger of communism, and
an indictment of the capitalist democracies as toadies of “Loan-
Capital.” The democracies are excoriated for having failed to meet
the challenge of communism, and Nazi Germany is praised for
confronting it. Lewis continued to identify Jews as the principal
beneficiaries of the status quo – as he had done since Hitler. When
he looked back on these books in Rude Assignment, his intellectual
autobiography, Lewis declared himself to be “in complete dis-
agreement with much of the contents of Left Wings,” and charac-
terized it as “a violent reaction against Left-wing incitement to war”
(226). But who could agree with Lewis’s assessment – still in 1952
– that the Left fomented World War II? Even Niall Ferguson does
not make such a claim.
Lewis is less apologetic about Count Your Dead, judging it to have
been “a first-rate peace pamphlet, which would have resounded in
a smaller, more instructed, society like the hammering of an alarm-
gong” (226). It is difficult to agree with Lewis on this point. The
leaders of Britain and France did in fact pursue a policy of appease-
ment such as Lewis recommended until their hand was forced. As
we have seen, the German historian, Klaus Fischer represents the
motivation of the British and French to be very much the same as
Lewis’s. It is true that Lewis did not regard nazism/fascism as just
the lesser of two evils, but actively promoted some similar right-
wing movement for Britain – as did Eliot – albeit in a much more
cautious manner. In this respect Lewis was on quite a different
course than the leaders of Britain and France, but – if Niall Fergu-
son is to be believed – not so far from the course of British high
society. On the other hand, neither the British appeasers (Neville
Chamberlain, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, and Lord Hali-
fax), nor the French (Edouard Daladier and George Bonnet)
could, Fischer writes, “be described as pro-Nazi or even pro-Ger-
man.” That cannot be said of Lewis – though it can of Eliot. How-
ever, Fischer’s judgment that “no one could have anticipated the
degree of infamy with which statesmen had to contend in their
dealings with Hitler” applies to all the observers and commentators
of the time (429).
Blasting and Bombardiering, a personal memoir of Lewis’s experi-
ences in World War I, was also published in 1937. There he pro-
fessed not to have a preference for either communism or fascism –
in clear contradiction of the books just discussed: “In 1937 every-
body’s talking about ‘communism’ versus ‘fascism’. I am not one of
those who believe that either ‘communism’ or ‘fascism’ is in itself
a solution of anything. They are purgatives. Both are good as such”
(17). He adopted a light, satirical tone in his comments on the
political scene – in stark contrast to the earnest, even panicky, tone
of the earlier books: “But have you ever reflected how in isolation
none of these figures mattered so much as they do all together?
Take Mussolini. He went on for over ten years ‘dictating’ away to
his heart’s content in the south of Europe without anyone caring a
tuppence, till Hitler popped up in Germany, and sent all the Jews
flying. And these two together seem to have a very odd effect on
old Stalin – who’d been a pretty sleepy old dictator up till then, pol-
ishing off masses of moujiks but nothing more serious than that”
(17–18). His cavalier attitude to the orchestrated famine in the
Ukraine and Hitler’s anti-Semitic laws is chilling. Although Blasting
and Bombardiering offers an entertaining memoir of the London lit-
erary scene in the years just before and just after World War I, no
one would have supposed that the author of this book had also
written such works as Hitler, Left Wings Over Europe, and Count Your
Dead.
pound in the thirties
Although Pound was already a “credit-crank” (to use Lewis’s term)

by 1919, his general views on civilization and culture were still very
much in line with those of Eliot and Lewis at that time – including,
it must be admitted, casual anti-Semitism. Like them he saw civi-
lization not only as a good in itself, but as a product of intelligent
actions – as opposed to some natural product of human nature, or,
worse, of some particular sub-set of the human race, such as the
white European, or, alternatively of a Bergsonian élan vital. Pound’s
May 1921 review of a reissue of Edward Carpenter’s 1889 work,
Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure demonstrates such a view, even
before Mussolini’s coup d’état in Italy. Carpenter is best known for
championing what was then called “sexual inversion,” that is, male
homosexuality. Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure proffers the echt-
Romantic argument that civilization is a pathological condition
that could be cured by abolishing rules and prohibitions so that
men and women could live in a state of natural freedom and har-
mony. Pound is not convinced – for reasons that resonate with the
kind of anthropological arguments we have seen articulated by
Eliot and Lewis. With the late trench warfare in mind, Pound dis-
missed Carpenter’s scenario as naïve: “it is not easy to share these
visions thirty-two years later; we can see that civilisation is at war
with the barbarian, both within and without; and the barbarian
seems to have captured the weapons of civilisation ... If we do not
practise deliberate infanticide ... we are certainly adept at killing
adults” (“Civilisation and Barbarism,” 23).
The “barbarian” is the new mass-man whose easily manipulable

nature Eliot, Lewis, Gasset, and Pound all feared. At the same time,
they all thought it was their responsibility to lead that same mass-
man – or at least to guide and inform those who would inevitably
lead him. We can see in these remarks a fundamental pacifism that
persisted in Pound’s commentaries – though it is hard to see it
in his polemical prose, which implausibly displaces the belliger-
ence of Hitler and Mussolini onto the shoulders of Churchill and
Roosevelt.
Pound’s political posture was determined less by the rise of bel-
ligerent right-wing political ideologies such as that of Maurras,
Mussolini, or Hitler, or the intricacies of international relations,
than it was by the phenomenon of the world-wide economic
depression from 1929 to 1938 or thereabouts. Although he moved
from Paris to the Italian Riviera town of Rapallo in 1924, the move
was not inspired by Mussolini’s installation as Duce two years pre-
viously (October 1922). Rapallo was a destination for many British
and America literary figures, including Yeats and Max Beerbohm.
It was inexpensive, had a benign climate, and boasted charming
inhabitants.
The earliest praise of Mussolini by Pound that I have been able
to find is a letter to Harriet Monroe of 30 November 1926 – more
than two years after his move – in which he said that he thinks
“extremely well of Mussolini” (Paige, 279). In his book of praise for
Mussolini, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound denied any interest in
him at the time of his move: “Life was interesting in Paris from
1921 to 1924,” he wrote, “nobody bothered much about Italy.
Some details I never heard of at all until I saw the Esposizione del
Decennio [of 1932]” (Jefferson, 51).
If we accept Pound’s claim that he wrote Jefferson and/or Mussoli-
ni between the ninth and twenty-second of February 1933,20 then
it is plausible to conclude that it was written in response to his
interview with Mussolini on 30 January 1933 – by coincidence, the
very day that Hitler was installed as chancellor of Germany. The
only other information that has surfaced about the interview is in
a letter to the American historian, W. E. Woodward, of 28 Novem-
ber 1933, in which Pound boasted that he “had a long jaw with the
boss [Mussolini] in Jan. (as I wrote you). He got to the 4th item on
my questionnaire and said ‘ugh I have to think about that.’ ‘That’

bein’ remark that taxes are unnecessary”(Preda, Economic Corre-
spondence, 76, original emphasis).
Jefferson and/or Mussolini declares Pound’s admiration for Mus-
solini’s fascism in the subtitle, L’Idea Statale, Fascism as I Have Seen it.
Pound had been attempting to get to see the great man since April
of the previous year (Zapponi, 48–9). The meeting with Mussolini
seems to have been the catalyst that made Pound an unqualified
admirer of Mussolini, and a fascist. However, as early as 1931,
Pound believed that he had found in Mussolini the man who could
lead the masses in a manner of which he could approve. Claiming
in “Fungus, Twilight or Dry Rot,” that the Depression demonstrat-
ed that “democracy does not foster a sense of responsibility,” he
added: “I was perfectly right 25 years ago [in 1906!!] in not both-
ering about socialism. It was not the affair of my time” (314). Even
so, he declared an admiration for Soviet communism because of its
“aristocratic” government. Revealing the elitist bias he shares with
Eliot and Lewis, Pound claimed that when “a country is governed
by one percent of its population that one percent indubitably form
an aristocracy.” In his view both “the communist party in Russia
and the fascist party in Italy are examples of aristocracy, active.
They are the best, the pragmatical, the aware, the most thoughtful,
the most wilful [sic] elements in their nations” (315, 317).
In advance of his interview with Mussolini, Pound had forwarded
his “Volitionist Economics” manifesto, and a copy of Thirty Cantos.
Rather pathetically, Pound was so impressed with Mussolini’s non-
committal remark on the Cantos – “But this is amusing!”– that he
immortalized it in canto 41: “‘Ma questo,’/ said the Boss, ‘e diver-
tente.’ / catching the point before the aesthetes had got there”
(Canto 41, 202). Of course, Pound intended the Cantos to be
instructive, not just amusing. (The latter attribute, incidentally, is
one that few readers other than Mussolini have found in The Can-
tos.) Despite the clear disinterest Mussolini displayed in Pound’s
poetry and economic nostrums, his interview with Mussolini sets
him apart from his two friends – neither of whom ever had person-
al contact with any of the world historical figures who strode the
political stage in the thirties. That Pound managed such a coup
seems to have unhinged him. Henceforth he imagined himself a
force to be reckoned with in the political sphere.
By 1932, Pound’s admiration for Mussolini was firmly in place.

Replying to a letter from John Drummond, a young English admir-
er and later acolyte, Pound cautioned: “Don’t knock Mussolini, at
least not until you have weighed up the obstacles and necessities of
the time. He will end with Sigismondo [Malatesta, one of Pound’s
renaissance heros] and the men of order, not with the pus-sacks
and destroyers ... Don’t be blinded by theorists and a lying press”
(Letter of 18 February 1932, Letters, 320). Like Lewis and Eliot,
Pound believed in “personal rule,” and hoped that if he could get
Mussolini’s ear, he could persuade him to adopt the economic
remedies proffered by Social Credit. It was in pursuit of this goal
that he sent the newly published Thirty Cantos to Il Duce.
In Pound’s defence, it must be conceded that Mussolini had
charmed an entire nation, much of Europe and a good deal of
the United States of America. As Richard Collier reports, Mus-
solini was a charismatic figure – something difficult to appreciate
by those of us accustomed to later portrayals of him as a postur-
ing buffoon: “His confiding, ingenuous manner, his voice, low-
pitched and melodious, made most people take to him on sight.
No less a being than Mahatma Gandhi lamented: ‘Unfortunately,
I am no superman like Mussolini.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury
saw him as ‘the one giant figure in Europe.’ Banker Otto Khan
declared: ‘the world owes him a debt of gratitude.’ ‘He was,’
avowed Thomas Edison, ‘the greatest genius of the modern age’”
(Collier, 93). Mussolini was still highly regarded in many quarters
in Britain, France, and the United States in 1933, so Pound’s
infatuation with him was not particularly culpable at that date. In
1933 the original “axis of evil” between Italy, Germany, and Japan
had not yet been formed. Nonetheless, that Pound was so easily
recruited as an apostle of fascism does not speak well of his polit-
ical acumen. Eliot, and even Lewis, were much more cautious,
and ultimately wiser.
The extent to which his audience with Mussolini brought Pound
to wildly overestimate his own importance is manifest in a letter of
7 February 1934 to the historian W. E. Woodward. Woodward had
suggested that Pound visit his homeland to see for himself what the
New Deal was doing (“F/D” is Franklin Delano Roosevelt): “I do
not want to come to the U. S. that is I am puffikly content here/
and any time I spent on the ocean wd/ be unpleasant. and I don’t
imagine fer ten minutes that anybody wants to see my moog in N.Y.
At the same time I am willing to come if it wd/ be the least god
damn use. ... If Muss/ who is more a man than F/D/ can take off
a half hour to think about wot I say to him/ bigod I ain’t going to
set in anybody’s front hall asking permission from anybody’s third
footman to hang up me cap/ I am not offering any impertinence”
(Pound-Woodward Correspondence, New York Public Library,21
original emphasis). Pound did sail to New York after all, in a
quixotic effort to forestall America’s entry into the coming war. He
was there from 21 April to 16 June 1939 and saw a few politicians
in Washington, but he was taken no more seriously in Washington
than he had been in Rome.22 Of course, the usa did stay out of the
war, until it was attacked itself in December 1941.
A lot was happening early in 1933. Adolf Hitler was installed as
chancellor of Germany on the very day of Pound’s audience with
Mussolini – 30 January. The Reichstag was set on fire on 27 Febru-
ary – blamed on the Communists, but probably the work of Nazis
(Fischer, 271–2) – and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had won
the presidential election of 1932, was inaugurated the next week –
on 4 March 1933. He was immediately faced with a banking crisis,
and famously assured Americans in his inaugural address that they
“had nothing to fear but fear itself.” Roosevelt also singled out
those who controlled financial matters in his speech: “Plenty is at
our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight
of the supply. Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange
of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness
and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure and have
abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand
indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and
minds of men” (“Inaugural Address” in Looking Forward, 262–3, my
emphasis.).
That the president of the United States would make such an
accusation renders Pound’s targeting of banks and other financial
interests as the root cause not only of the business cycle, but also of
war, appear less idiosyncratic than it might otherwise. Pound quot-
ed Mussolini in Jefferson and/or Mussolini expressing almost the
same sentiment as Roosevelt’s “plenty is at our doorstep”: “science
has multiplied the means of producing plenty, and science prod-
ded on by the will of the State should solve the other problem, that
of distributing the abundance, and putting an end to the brutal
paradox of grinding poverty amid plenty” (viii). It was not so obvi-

ous to contemporaries, as it is to us seventy-odd years later, that
Roosevelt was sincere in his desire to redistribute income, and Mus-
solini was not.
I would not go as far as Niall Ferguson does when he opens chap-
ter 7 of War of the World with excerpts from Roosevelt’s inaugural
address without identification, then appends the query:
Who was this demagogue who so crudely blames the Depres-

sion on corrupt financiers, who so boldly proposed state inter-
vention as the cure for unemployment, who so brazenly threat-
ened to rule by decree if the legislature did not back him, who
so cynically used and re-used the words ’people’ and ’Nation’ to
stoke up the patriotic sentiments of his audience? The answer is
Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the speech from which all the above
quotations are taken was his inaugural address as he assumed
the American presidency on March 4, 1933.
Less than three weeks later, another election victor in
another country that had been struck equally hard by the
Depression gave a remarkably similar speech, beginning with
a review of the country’s dire economic straits, promising rad-
ical reforms, urging legislators to transcend petty party politi-
cal thinking and concluding with a stirring call for national
unity. The resemblances between Adolf Hitler’s speech to the
newly elected Reichstag on 21 March 1933, and Roosevelt’s
inaugural address are indeed a great deal more striking than
the differences. (War of the World, 223–4)
Nonetheless, Ferguson’s rhetorical trick does draw attention to

the difficulty of knowing just who was on the side of the angels, and
who was with the devils in 1933.
Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini is a typically ill-focused work –
Lewis’s polemical prose is a model of perspicuity compared to
Pound’s23 – but there is no mistaking its message: Mussolini is a
great leader in the mould of the American founder, Thomas Jef-
ferson. (Lenin is also praised, but less fulsomely.) Neither Jefferson
nor Mussolini, according to Pound, believed in popular democra-
cy: “Jefferson was one genius and Mussolini is another ... Jefferson
guided a governing class. A limited number of the public had the
franchise” (19).
A noticeable aspect of Jefferson and/or Mussolini is that Pound

inserts himself as an actor in, and intimate observer of, the inter-
national political field. In this vein he cites a remark that the Irish
republican Arthur Griffith made to him personally (27); mentions
conversations he and Mussolini had separately with the American
journalist Lincoln Steffens on his return from Russia where he had
witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution (31); alludes to a talk with the
German anthropologist Leo Frobenius (32), to a conversation with
Lawrence of Arabia “one evening after he had been with Lloyd
George”(33); and a chance he had to “show up” Mr. Balfour (67)
– among numerous other reports of conversations with less illustri-
ous individuals. Surprisingly, he does not mention his interview
with Mussolini.
Pound supplied Jefferson and/or Mussolini with two prefaces when
it was published in 1935. In the second preface, dated 18 Septem-
ber 1933, he observed that when he wrote the book in February of
that year “almost nobody ‘saw Roosevelt coming’” (ix) – by which
he must have meant that nobody realized how radical his adminis-
tration would be. And Pound added the request that his British
readers consider the case made in Jefferson and/or Mussolini “in rela-
tion to what has happened since 4th March, 1933, in the u.s.a. ...
[from which they] may get some faint inkling of what to expect
from our country” (x) – that is, the usa. Indeed the New Deal’s
emphasis on public works such as the Tennessee Valley Authority
was seen by some as an imitation of Mussolini’s earlier policy of
public works – such as the draining of the Pontine Marshes to
which Pound refers frequently.
A striking difference between Pound’s political polemics and that
of his friends is that whereas Eliot and Lewis had nothing but criti-
cism of the status quo to offer their audience, Pound had a positive
program – Social Credit – which he believed could cure the eco-
nomic malaise afflicting the world – a malaise that most believed
was the principal cause of war. It is true that like his friends, Pound
had little use for democracy, preferring an enlightened despot –
and for the same reasons as Eliot and Lewis. They believed that a
despot could be persuaded by wise men like themselves to pursue
wise policies that would benefit everyone, but the masses could be
lead only by a demagogue. But neither Eliot nor Lewis had any wise
policies to offer. Although they cautiously endorsed Douglas’ cri-
tique of capitalism, they never embraced his solutions, and had

nothing else positive to offer. Pound, in contrast, was confident he
had the wise policies that would solve the world’s economic prob-
lems, and naïvely assumed that universal prosperity itself would ren-
der all political and social issues irrelevant.
The handbill “Volitionist Economics” that Pound had sent Mus-
solini was intended to promulgate those policies. It contained a set
of eight observations recommending monetary reform on Dougla-
site lines that Pound believed would bring about peace and pros-
perity all round. It was a sort of catechism, asking, “Which of the
following statements do you agree with?”
1 It is an outrage that the state shd. run into debt to individu-

als by the act and in the act of creating real wealth.
2 Several nations recognize the necessity of distributing pur-
chasing power. They do actually distribute it. The question is
whether it shd. be distributed as favour to corporations; as
reward for not having a job; or impartially and per capita.
3 A country can have one currency for internal use, and
another good both for home and foreign use.
4 If money is regarded as certificate of work done, taxes are no
longer necessary.
5 It is possible to concentrate all taxation onto the actual paper
money of a country (or onto one sort of its money).
6 You can issue valid paper money against any commodity up
to the amount of that commodity that people want.
7 Some of the commonest failures of clarity among economists
are due to using one word to signify two or more different con-
cepts: such as, demand, meaning sometimes want and some-
times power to buy; authoritative, meaning also responsible.
8 It is an outrage that the owner of one commodity cannot
exchange it with someone possessing another, without being
impeded or taxed by a third party holding a monopoly over
some third substance or controlling some convention regard-
less of what it be called. (Quoted in Surette, Pound in Purgato-
ry, 301)
Notice that there is no mention of parliaments, elections,

bureaucratic ministries, or their attendant regulations; nothing
about religion or ideology; no mention of private property, the

proletariat or the bourgeoisie; no call for a charismatic leader, no
appeal that artists be heeded; and not a word about national des-
tinies. In short, there is nothing about the handbill that can be
identified as Liberal, Conservative, capitalist, socialist, Commu-
nist, or fascist; Christian, atheist, humanist or pagan; German,
French, British, Russian or Italian. It is instead, a set of “techni-
cal” observations about the nature and role of money in the pro-
duction and exchange of goods, and the provision of services,
including government services. As such Pound’s “Volitionist
Economics” handbill is ideologically neutral. Certainly there is
nothing fascistic about it, as Mussolini’s indifference to it tends to
corroborate.
However, the subtitle – L’Idea Statale: Fascism as I Have Seen it –
leaves no doubt that Pound endorses Mussolini’s fascism. The
phrase, “Volitionist Economics,” follows Pound’s name on the title
page without further explanation. The statements on the handbill
do not appear in the book, even though part of Pound’s intention
was to make the case that fascism is compatible with Douglasite
economics. Unfortunately, Mussolini’s economic policies bore no
relation at all to Social Credit policy recommendations. Nonethe-
less, Pound persisted in the illusion that there was some agree-
ment between fascism and Social Credit – even in the face of Dou-
glas’ repeated denial of any compatibility in correspondence with
Pound.
Pound was in correspondence with a myriad of people in the
thirties. They included the economist Irving Fisher; his assistant,
Hans Cohrssen; Major Douglas; and a fellow Social Crediter, Odon
Por, amongst many others.24 A typical instance of his belief that
Social Credit and Mussolini were compatible is found in a letter to
Douglas of 14 April 1933 – a few weeks after finishing Jefferson
and/or Mussolini. Pound defended Mussolini’s economic policies
with a characteristically non-specific and cryptic assertion: “My
belief is that the duce understands more real econ/ that Doug/
He (the Duce) not giving a damn about slips of paper (as an
autotelic end)” (Preda, Economic Correspondence, letter 12, 92).
Pound wanted Eliot to publish Jefferson and/or Mussolini as a
series in The Criterion, but Eliot turned it down in a letter of 12 Jan-
uary1934 on the grounds that it was not suitable for a British audi-
ence, and encouraged him to seek to publish it as a book in New

York (Eliot-Pound Correspondence, Beinecke). And that is what
eventually transpired when Stanley Nott published it in 1935,
together with excerpts from a Pound letter Eliot had published in
The Criterion in January 1935, and a new preface. The Criterion let-
ter gives great prominence to a speech Mussolini gave in Milan on
6 October 1934 that Pound heard on the radio. He gives the time
of day as well as the date: “Dead, at 4:14 in the Piazza del Duomo,
Milano, anno XII. Scarcity Economics died. Scarcity Economics
being that congeries of theories based on an earlier state of human
productive capacity ... Lavora Garantito, that means that no man in
Italy is to have any anxiety about finding a job” (vii). Pound returns
to that speech recurrently for many years. No one else gives it such
prominence as a statement of economic policy. Indeed, the prima-
ry purpose of the speech was to prepare the Italian public for news
that Italian forces had invaded Ethiopia on the previous day.
Pound’s reaction to Mussolini’s Milan speech is as good an indi-
cation as can be found of his radical disconnect from the reality of
historical events in the thirties. Blind to Mussolini’s belligerence
and economic conservatism, Pound could only see a leader capa-
ble of addressing pressing economic issues decisively. The strategy
of Jefferson and/or Mussolini was to place Mussolini in conjunction
with both Jefferson and Lenin as decisive leaders who were also
suspicious of popular democracy.25 The discussion is held under
the rubric: “The best government is that which governs least,”
attributed to Jefferson (11). Pound pushed the argument that the
best government is a benevolent dictatorship because all one
wants from government is that it ensures an adequate supply of
goods and services, and their equitable distribution. “The rest,”
Pound believes, “is political ‘machinery,’ bureaucracy. flummydid-
dle. Jefferson, Mussolini, all hated or hate it. Lenin wanted to get
rid of it: ‘All this political machinery, want to get rid of it,’ as Stef
[Lincoln Steffens] reported Lenin’s opinion in 1918” (69–70).
Such a view is politically naïve, but not inherently ill intentioned,
and not so far from right-wing opinion in the United States in the
twenty-first century.
Pound’s political posture would have been more coherent if he
had adopted Proudhon’s anarchist argument that government is
unnecessary, but he does not. Even more than Lewis, he adheres to
the illusion that governing a nation is analogous to composing a

work of art: “I don’t believe any estimate of Mussolini will be valid
unless it starts from his passion for constitution. Treat him as artifex
and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything save the
artist and you will get muddled with contradictions” (33–4 original
emphasis). Of course, there were plenty of “contradictions” to the
image of Mussolini as a benevolent leader – among them his
suppression of political opposition and his adventures of foreign
conquest.
Even though in 1933 Pound did not yet need to defend Mus-
solini’s Ethiopian war,26 he nonetheless went out of his way to
defend Mussolini’s buildup of Italy’s military, and his celebration of
military valour, finding a precedent in early American practice:
“Jefferson was super-wise in his non-combatancy, but John Adams
was possibly right about frigates.” (Adams had frigates built, and
they played a crucial role in the war with Britain of 1812–14.) His
attitude toward war preparedness was Churchillian: “Unprepared-
ness and sloppy pacifism are not necessarily the best guarantees of
peace.” He dismissed pacifism – such as Lewis’s and Chamberlain’s
– as hypocritical: “As to actual pacifism; there are plenty of people
who think it merely a section of war propaganda, and until there is
at last one peace society that will look at the facts, one may suspect
the lot of corruption” (35). Despite his new-found antipathy for
the British, Pound even goes so far as to praise them for their pluck
in World War I: “I saw groggy old England get up onto her feet
from 1914 to ‘18. I don’t like war, etc. ... but given the state of deca-
dence and comfort and general incompetence in pre-War Eng-
land, nobody who saw that effort can remain without respect for
England-during-that-war” (67, original ellipsis).
Pound posed the question, “Why Italy?”and answered it: “after
the great infamy [that is, World War I] there was no other clot of
energy in Europe capable of opposing any force whatever to
the infinite evil of the profiteers and the sellers of men’s blood
for money.” He went on to excoriate Britain and France for grov-
elling “before bankers and banker’s touts” (61, original empha-
sis). While it is true that the policies of the Western democracies
in the face of the Depression were unwise, ineffective, and tend-
ed to be designed to protect the value of money – albeit without
success – those policies would be more properly characterized as
misguided than as malevolent. Moreover, Mussolini’s policies

were little different.
Pound was cautious on the issue of tyranny, but he defended
“one party rule”– in part by the silly claim that “Jefferson governed
for twenty-four years in a de facto one-party condition.”27 And, like
Eliot and Lewis, he assumed that democracy in the United States of
America was a fraud: “Secondly, when a corrupt oligarchy of any
nature controls a country, they will very probably set up in theory a
two-party system, controlling both of these parties, one of which
will be ‘solid and conservative’ and the other as silly as possible”
(125). He was writing immediately after the election of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, but dismissed him, complaining that in the Pres-
idential campaign the American “Press howls that we should give
power to Roosevelt, i.e., to a weak man, or a man who has shown
no understanding whatsoever, and no knowledge whatsoever of
contemporary actuality.” However in the second preface to Jefferson
and/or Mussolini, dated September 1933, Pound had altered his
view of Roosevelt: “Recommending the book to a British public I
could say, read it in relation to what has happened since 4th March,
1933 [the date of Roosevelt’s inauguration], in the U.S.A. and you
may get some faint inkling of what to expect from our country ...
Many of them [the American public], perhaps one might say most
of ‘em, have been very much surprised by Mr. Roosevelt, and it
might do them no harm to try to ‘place’ F. D. R. in relation to con-
temporary phenomena in other countries”(108). Pound’s enthusi-
asm for Roosevelt and the New Deal was not to last – in contrast to
his enduring enthusiasm for Mussolini, even after the collapse of
his regime and his death.
pound, eliot, and lewis compared
Pound’s political posture is distinct from both Eliot’s and Lewis’s

in several ways. Most importantly Pound focused on economic pol-
icy to the exclusion of ideology. Another big difference was his
attention to American politics. Neither Eliot nor Lewis were much
concerned with Roosevelt’s New Deal, nor with Huey Long, the
populist governor of Louisiana, or the radio priest, Father Cough-
lin – all of whom figure significantly in Pound’s political prose. He
wrote to both Long and Coughlin, and regarded them as allies in
his campaign to save the world from the banks.28 About all that
Pound shared with Eliot and Lewis on the political front was their
mutual distrust of democracy and capitalism, and a preference for
what Lewis came to call “personal rule,” borrowing Machiavelli’s
term.
In Rude Assignment, Lewis expressed a view very like Pound’s in
Jefferson and/or Mussolini: “all government of late has approximat-
ed more and more to personal rule: Franklin Roosevelt was a
demagogic autocrat, and Mr. Churchill, as war-leader, exempli-
fied personal rule – though abruptly dismissed when the war
ended.” Lewis added a qualification that demonstrates his superi-
or political acumen: “Personal rule has the great disadvantage of
its effect upon the person exercising it,” and admitted, “for one
benevolent ruler you might get nine who were bad. And even one
who starts harmlessly enough is apt to become unspeakably bad.”
But despite that caveat, Lewis alluded to the case he made in The
Lion and the Fox, approving Shakespeare’s celebration of “the
Patriot King,” whose “interests are identified with those of the
People – he stands between them and the rapacity and pride of
the oligarchy, the ottimati. And so it may be: may be if the king is
not a blackguard or a fool, and is really a patriot” (Rude Assign-
ment, 179, original emphasis).
In his review of The Lion and the Fox, Eliot had disassociated him-
self from such a view. “The modern ‘dictator,’ a Hitler or Mussoli-
ni,” Eliot wrote, “must be thought of rather ... as a highly paid lead-
ing actor, whose business is to divert his people (individually, from
the spectacle of their own littleness as well as from more useful
business)” (110). Reflecting his commitment to an Arnoldian view
of the intellectual’s role, Eliot preferred to put his trust in
“detached observers” such as himself, Lewis, and Machiavelli. He
distinguished the “detached observer” from “ideologues,” exempli-
fied by Marx, Mr. Laski, Mr. Strachey, “a de Maistre, a Bonald, a
Maurras, or a Charles Benoist.” Eliot saw the Machiavelli type as a
more admirable political thinker: “We do not need to believe that
Machiavelli was an ‘ideologue’ of either kind. He was ... a mild,
detached man, who could never be the dupe of an idea, but who
would be rather inefficient in private affairs, the prey of pickpock-
ets, and the recipient of many a leaden half-crown. What gives his
book [Machiavelli’s The Prince] its terrifying greatness is the fact
that he does not seem to care. He is not advocating anything, he is

merely expounding and exposing” (111). That this Arnoldian pose
of the dispassionate and disinterested observer was manifestly false
has left Eliot open to justifiable criticism from the perspective of
postmodernism, which denies that such intellectual objectivity is
possible. Lewis and Pound were more forthright in presenting
themselves as partisans for one view or another.
Pound’s analysis of the political scene is not only distinct from
that of Eliot and Lewis, but it is also far cruder, and – so far as Jef-
ferson and/or Mussolini is representative – was expressed in a prose
that is distressingly disconnected, cryptic, and even devious. Even
though Eliot and Lewis leaned toward “personal rule” – that is, dic-
tatorship – they were sufficiently in command of their critical pow-
ers to be cautious in associating themselves with the “personal
rulers” on offer in their day – most notably Lenin, Stalin, Mussoli-
ni, Hitler, and Franco. Pound, blind to what everyone else could
see, clung to Mussolini: “I assert again my own firm belief that the
Duce will stand not with despots and the lovers of power but with
the lovers of order” (128). Such a faith was perhaps not entirely
blind in 1933, when he wrote Jefferson and/or Mussolini, but Pound
adhered to that assessment throughout the Second World War and
beyond. For example, in a letter to Olivia Rossetti Agresti of 7
August 1953, Pound repeated his claim in Jefferson and/or Mussolini
that there was no censorship in fascist Italy: “The false picture of
Italy/ smear so heavy that takes rock drill to get it into anyone that
a fascist govt/ had given me freedom of microphone/ as per
statement in Mercure de France. (You have a copy? if not will send at
once)” (“I Cease not to Yowl,” 119).
And, in the same letter, he reiterated his belief that World War II
could have been avoided if only he had been listened to: “As to
being right, there is now a faint perception that Roose [Roo-
sevelt] was not a blessing to the U.S./Churchill, god damn him,
has admitted the war was unnecessary, and wanted at the end to
attack thru the Balkans. The “IF they had listened to E.P.” is at least
proper subject for speculation / and the non-use of E.P.’s knowl-
edge after the 600 days is mentionable.” The “600 days” is a ref-
erence to the period between Mussolini’s overthrow on 24 July
1943 and his summary execution by partisans on 25 April 1945.
His mistress, Clara Petaci, was with him and was also killed. Both
corpses were taken to Milan, where they were hung upside down at
a service station. Pound’s memorializing of the latter vengeful act
in canto 74, the first of the Pisan Cantos, is testimony to his contin-
ued admiration for Il Duce :
The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent

shoulders
Manes! Manes was tanned and stuffed,29
Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano
by the heels at Milano
That maggots shd/ eat dead bullock
digonos, but the twice crucified
but the twice crucified
where in history will you find it? (The Cantos, 445)
vi
Looking Back
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has
descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of
the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin,
Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these
famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call
the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to
Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing mea-
sure of control from Moscow.
Winston Churchill, Fulton, Missouri, 1946
In retrospect the post-war decades took on a radically altered signifi-

cance. Once understood as the onset of a new era of permanent ideolog-
ical polarization they now appeared for what they were an extended epi-
logue to the European civil war that had begun in 1914, a forty-year
interregnum between the defeat of Adolf Hitler and the final resolution
of the unfinished business left behind by his war.
Tony Judt, Post War, commenting on the fall of the Soviet Union
pound’s war
As we have seen, Pound sailed to the United States in 1939 in a

quixotic effort to persuade the United States to stay out of the
impending conflict. His intervention had no effect whatsoever, but
it is worth reminding ourselves that in 1939 he was in line with
majority American opinion on this point. Although Hollywood
depictions of American involvement in World War II would lead
one to believe that the United States was a leading opponent of fas-
cism and Nazism, in fact, it stayed out of the conflict until it was
itself attacked by the Japanese in December 1941. In January of
that year Pound had begun broadcasting over Rome radio, intend-
ing to discourage his compatriots from entering the war, and to
support the Axis cause. After the attack on Pearl Harbour he
stopped the talks, but then began broadcasting once again, a deci-
sion that lead to his indictment for treason.1
Pound persisted in the belief that his broadcasts were not trea-
sonous – on the grounds that they were anti-war, and not pro-Axis.
However, the transcripts taken by American military authorities
and published by Leonard W. Doob, clearly demonstrate that they
were distinctly pro-Axis. There is no doubt where Pound’s sympa-
thies lay during the war and after, for he continued privately to
express support for the Axis powers during his incarceration in St.
Elizabeths.2 As a consequence of the radio talks, the American
army arrested Pound in 1945, held him for a time at a “Detention
Training Center” near Pisa, and then flew him to Washington
where he was indicted for treason. He was found mentally unfit to
stand trial, and was confined in St. Elizabeths, a federal asylum in
Washington for the mentally infirm, from 1945 to 1958, when he
was released without ever having faced a trial and returned to Italy
in “custody” of his wife.
Pound’s incarceration has complicated the reception of his
“political identity” in ways that are quite distinct from the reception
accorded Eliot and Lewis. On the one hand, the fact of the broad-
casts, and his indictment are objective matters that render his sup-
port for fascism beyond question. On the other hand, his “incar-
ceration” has given him some “street cred” as a martyr. These
conflicting responses were acutely manifest in the controversy
when the Pisan Cantos – so called because they were written during
Pound’s imprisonment at Pisa (from May to November 1945) and
include the brief elegy for Mussolini cited above – were awarded
the Bollingen Prize in 1949 (see Stock, 426–7).
I have traced how the apolitical poet and dreamer of a new age
that Pound was before World War I became an obsessive booster of
Mussolini and fascism, and a rabid anti-Semite by 1939 in my 1999
study Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism into Anti-Semitism.
Here I want to compare the development of his views with those of
his friends, Eliot and Lewis. We have seen that Pound hitched his
wagon to Mussolini largely because of his conviction that the capi-
talist democracies were in thrall to financial and manufacturing
Looking Back 237
interests. Eliot and Lewis thought the same, and both considered
Mussolini as a possible champion in the fight against the captains
of industry, whose influence they saw as inimical to the future of
Western civilization. Although Lewis did not share Eliot’s fantasy of
a Europe renewed by a return to Christendom, they both argued
for some sort of benevolent “personal rule” as the best available
alternative to popular democracy, which all three regarded as a
fraud disguising an oligarchy.
I now want to examine the response of our trio to the Second
World War and the ensuing Cold War. Pound’s case is the clearest.
Once he had committed to the Axis, he never wavered in his con-
viction that the burden of virtue lay with Italy, Germany, and Japan
– though he had little to say about the Pacific war. As an American
living in Italy, it is just possible to understand his identification with
Italy during the war. After all he was exposed to the Italian press
and his hostility to what he regarded as corrupt regimes in Britain
and France predisposed him to condone German and Italian
aggression against them. However, it is much more difficult to find
an acceptable explanation for his continued sympathy for
nazism/fascism in the post war, when the Nazis’s “final solution” of
the “Jewish problem” had been fully exposed. Tim Redman argued
in Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (167 and 203) that Pound suf-
fered from “semantic schizophrenia” and, in recent papers I have
heard him read, Redman amends that to the hypothesis that
Pound suffered from bipolar disease (formerly called “manic
depressive syndrome”). Robert Casillo’s diagnosis of paranoid anti-
Semitism is less forgiving.3
In Pound in Purgatory I attributed Pound’s adherence to fascism
– even to the point of embracing nazism, complete with its viru-
lent anti-Semitism – to his radicalization by Major Douglas’s
Social Credit analysis of economic factors. Pound was convinced
that the application of the insights of Major Douglas to the func-
tion of industrial economies (supplemented by those of Silvio
Gesell) would immediately bring an end to the worldwide depres-
sion. Given that conviction, he concluded that the failure of
democratic governments to implement those policies demon-
strated malignant intent on the part of the governing classes.
According to Douglas the principal beneficiaries of the econom-
ic and fiscal status quo were banks; hence it was tempting to con-
clude that governments were in the pay of the bankers. From

there it was a short – though scarcely warranted – step to con-
clude that the international conspiracy of bankers was identical to
the supposed international conspiracy of Jews outlined in The Pro-
tocols of the Elders of Zion. When one added to that the fairly com-
mon perception in those years that the armaments industry was
similarly international in scope, and of course profited from wars,
it was easy to believe that interested parties fomented wars for
their own profit.
While Pound’s views were extreme, they were not particularly
eccentric. It was not uncommon in the inter-war period to suppose
that industry and finance profited from war and the preparation
for war. A Times Magazine review of two books on the subject – Mer-
chants of Death, co-authored by H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hani-
ghen, and George Seldes’ Iron, Blood and Profits – is a case in point.
Merchants of Death was a Book-of-the-Month selection. The review
article was entitled “Dragon’s Teeth,” alluding to the teeth of the
dragon that Cadmus had slain. For reasons unexplained in the
myth, Cadmus extracted the dragon’s teeth and planted them.
They promptly sprouted warriors who fell upon one another in a
bloody battle.
Times Magazine can hardly be thought of as a radical journal – not
to speak of the Book-of-the-Month Club – but the anonymous
reviewer accepts as true the accusations these authors made of
international collusion in the arms trade, and even alludes to an
earlier Fortune Magazine article on the topic (another Luce publi-
cation that can hardly be considered radical):
Last March Fortune -readers gasped at a devastating exposure of

the international armaments industry (“Arms and the Men”).
Last fortnight appeared two books on the same subject, one of
them (Merchants of Death) sponsored by the Book-of-the-Month
Club. The Senate has authorized an investigation of U. S. arms
manufacturers. Old George Bernard Shaw might well have said:
“I started it.” His play, Major Barbara (1905) contained the first
popular warning against munitions makers but, like many
another Shavian admonition, was taken as a joke.
The four biggest arms makers are England’s Vickers-
Armstrong, France’s Schneider-Creusot, Germany’s Krupp,
Looking Back 239
Czechoslovakia’s Skoda. Their interlocking connections (which

authors Engelbrecht and Hanighen show in charts) are almost
incredibly complex; the only real competitor any of them has is
peace. Says Author Seldes: “It is a recurrent paradox of the
international gun trade that nations arm their enemies.” Dur-
ing the War German scrap iron at the rate of 150,000 tons a
month was shipped into France, via Switzerland. French bauxite
(aluminum) found its way into the construction of German sub-
marines; German barbed wire helped defend Verdun. (Time
Magazine, 7 May 1934)
Note that the American publications do not take sides on the

issue, but include British, French, and Czech armament manufac-
turers alongside German ones. The clear message is that it is not so
much nationalism that promotes war, as it is the desire of the arma-
ment industry for profits.
However, few if any were blind to the history of national rivalry
and xenophobia that had dominated the bloody history of Europe
for several centuries, and to which both Mussolini and Hitler
explicitly appealed. For his part Pound ignored the very real anxi-
ety felt in the capitalist, liberal democracies at the prospect of the
spread of bolshevism. And he completely ignored the trauma of
the Great War, which – far from rendering democratic leaders bel-
licose – caused them to seek every expedient that would permit
them to avoid armed confrontation. All Pound can see is a desire
on the part of the democratic leaders to preserve the status quo. In
itself that narrow focus would be innocent enough, but he regard-
ed the status quo as politically undesirable, economically indefensi-
ble, and culturally inimical. Despite his condemnation of the
alleged war-mongering of the democracies – particularly of Britain
and France, both of whom had imperial conquests which they
retained and augmented in the Peace of Versailles – Pound was
vocal in his support of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, and of the Ger-
man and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War. And he con-
tinued to condemn the Allies and support the Axis powers during
the Second World War. In short, the political, economic, and cul-
tural concerns that underlay – however mistakenly – his initial
attachment to Mussolini were in the end set aside by his partisan
identification with fascist Italy.
Pound’s most extended articulation of his posture on politics,

culture, and economics is the little studied Guide to Kulchur, which
Faber published in 1938. It is an idiosyncratic work even for
Pound, but it is the best testimony we have to his political and cul-
tural position on the eve of the war. In the preface he declared his
“intention in this booklet to commit myself on as many points as
possible,” adding that “very few men can afford” to do so “for the
simple reason that such taking sides might jeopard [sic] their
incomes” (Guide to Kulchur, 7). Pound began with a digest of the
Confucian Analects, and throughout the work argued for the essen-
tial agreement of Confucian and fascist political philosophy. He
declared: “Confucius offers a way of life, an Anschauung or disposi-
tion toward nature and man and a system for dealing with both”
(24). He praised the benign influence of the Catholic Church, but
he said it sank into decline “when its hierarchy ceased to believe
their own dogmas” (27). He rejected the Arnoldian (and Maur-
rassian) compromise of an ecclesiastical institution with unbeliev-
ing worshippers.
He represented Guide to Kulchur as “notes for a totalitarian trea-
tise” (27). What he meant by that is to be found in the Confucian
Analects: “Take the whole ambience of the Analects (of Kung fu
Tseu), you have the main character filled with a sense of responsi-
bility. He and his interlocutors live in a responsible world, they
think for the whole social order” (29). In short, in a totalitarian
polity, the few think for the many. Pound’s “either/or” view of polit-
ical action is manifest in this work as elsewhere: “We know that
there is one enemy, ever-busy obscuring our terms; ever muddling
and muddying terminologies, ever trotting out minor issues to
obscure the main and the basic, ever prattling of short range cau-
sation for the sake of, or with the result of, obscuring the vital
truth” (31). For Pound, the enemy was not just the Jews, but also
all those who supported the status quo of capitalist monetary poli-
cy, which Pound personified as Usura.
Money and commerce are obsessive concerns of the book, but its
principal focus was on the futility of standard European philo-
sophical thought because of its alleged focus on “an arid and futile
quibble over abstractions. Leading to desiccation of culture” (41).
He contrasted the totalitarian ideas designed to “go into action” to
such effete intellectualism. “The New Learning,” he hoped, “will
Looking Back 241
get hold of ideas, in the sense that it will know where they ‘weigh
in’. It will take the man of ideas when he ‘pulls his weight’ ... The
history of a culture is the history of ideas going into action” (44).
This posture is essentially anti-intellectual, and clearly echoes Mus-
solini’s dismissal of philosophical thought. As Mussolini put it in
“Political and Social Doctrine”: “A doctrine must ... be a vital act
and not a verbal display” (26). However, the economic ideas to
which Pound gave a great deal of attention in Guide to Kulchur were
never “put into action” by Mussolini – or, indeed, ever entertained
by his regime.
Pound gave a capsule account of the three stages of his own and
Wyndham Lewis’s political thought over the period examined in
the previous pages, culminating in totalitarianism: “If I am intro-
ducing anybody to Kulchur, let ‘em take the two phases, the nine-
teen teens, Gaudier, Wyndham L. and I as we were in Blast, and the
next phase, the 1920’s. The sorting out, the rappel à l’ordre, and
thirdly the new synthesis, the totalitarian” (95). “Rappel à l’ordre”
(“A Call to Order”) is the title of Jean Cocteau’s 1926 book, which
called for discipline in French political life. The “new synthesis”
would replace democratic capitalism as found in Britain and
France, nations Pound denounced with a rhetorical violence char-
acteristic of his polemics in the late thirties: “America was largely
acephalous. Russia is a barbarism. Spain is a barbarism. France and
England have not even these partial alibis, their government a
usurocracy, that is foetor, and its protagonists rotten” (132). Much
later he evinced the distrust of the common man shared by all
three of our subjects: “An advance wd. imply either in public mind
or in the spirit of controlling oligarchies a preference for human
rulers, and an intolerance of having lower animals ‘at the
helm’”(302–3).
Pound left little doubt about where his political sympathies lay.
Praising Lewis for having “discovered Hitler,” he attributed that dis-
covery to Lewis’s “superior perception. Superior in relation to my
own ‘discovery’ of Mussolini” (134). Pound did disassociate him-
self from the German and Italian laws forbidding marriage
between Jews and Gentiles (156), but his criticism was focused on
Britain and France. Although his principal criticism of parliamen-
tary democracy was that it is corrupt, he also portrayed it as an
anachronism: “Obvious and archi-obvious and triple obvious: par-
liaments as now run (Parliament, U.S. House of Representatives

and Senate) are as obsolete as the Witenagemot. It is marvellous
that the jaw-house has survived into the press age. Unbelievable
that it can continue into the age of radio” (173). In this last
remark we can see the survival of Pound’s early flirtation with
Futurism’s belief that technology had changed the game of gover-
nance and culture.
Pound argued that Europe must abandon its long submission to
Christian doctrines. The “serious Victorians, from Hardy to Swin-
burne,” he claimed – accurately enough – “did not accept the cur-
rent code of morality and ... they had a contempt for that church
which, in the words of my great uncle Albert, interfered ‘neither
with a man’s politics nor his religion’” (290). He was speaking of
the Anglican Church. Pound had kinder things to say about
Catholicism, but generally, he argued for the advent of a new form
of belief. Speaking of the influence of the Victorian atheists and
agnostics on his generation he said, “they bred a generation of
experimenters, my generation, which was unable to work out a
code for action. We believed and disbelieved ‘everything’ ... The
best of us accepted every conceivable ‘dogma’ as a truth for a situ-
ation, as the truth for a particular crux, crisis or temperament”
(291).
Pound’s description of his generation as cut loose from any par-
ticular belief and willing to adopt any belief that seemed appropri-
ate or helpful for “a particular crux, crisis or temperament” fits
Pound and Eliot in their early years, and Lewis for pretty well his
whole career. But, so far as his political beliefs are concerned, Eliot
seems to have emerged from the head of Maurras fully formed.
Pound took longer to find Mussolini and continued to forage
among economic radicals well into the ’thirties. In an impossibly
tangled paragraph, alluding to the watershed of World War I,
Pound speaks of the discovery of a “new Synthesis” by “a few serious
survivors of war” who managed “a dissociation of personal crises and
cruces, that ... are so encumbered by, and entangled in, the root
problems of money, that any pretended ethical or philosophical
dealing with them is sheer bunk until they be disentangled” (291).
In short, money is the key to that still unidentified “new synthesis.”
Another component of that synthesis is the form of belief offered
as a replacement for Christianity. Addressing Eliot directly, Pound
Looking Back 243
offered for Eliot’s “reflection the thesis that our time has over-
shadowed the mysteries by an overemphasis on the individual.” He
called his alternative faith “Eleusis,” alluding to the Greek myster-
ies: “Eleusis did not distort truth by exaggerating the individual,
neither could it have violated the individual spirit ... No apter
metaphor having been found for certain emotional colours. I
assert that the Gods exist.” Pound’s faith for the modern age, then,
is “corporative” rather than individual – in conformity with fascism
– and polytheistic, which was his own bent, unrelated to fascism. By
way of clarification of the nature of this faith, Pound added: “I
assert that a great treasure of verity exists for mankind in Ovid and
in the subject matter of Ovid’s long poem, and that only in this
form could it be registered” (299). The poem he has in mind is
Metamorphoses, a collection of accounts of theophanies by various
divinities. Pound had celebrated such theophanies early in the
Cantos, as in Canto 3:
Gods float in the azure air,

Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.
Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen.
Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,
And from the apple, mælid,
Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices,
A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake,
And there are gods upon them, (Cantos 11)
Pound professed to find some persistence of this pagan sensibil-

ity in Italy: “Only in basicly [sic] pagan Italy has Christianity
escaped becoming a nuisance. Only there has it escaped the das-
tardly fanaticisms which grow into it in barbarous climates” (300).
He pretended to approve of Eliot’s essay, “Thoughts after Lam-
beth,” calling it “one of Eliot’s most creditable essays.” But he char-
acterized it as a “lot of dead cod about a dead god,” and added:
“That anyone ‘believes’ seems now doubtful.” Citing George Wash-
ington’s approval of “the benign influence” of religion, Pound
adopts an Arnoldian posture, placing his faith “in the benign influ-
ence of litterae humaniores” (301–2).
Approximately the last third of the book is devoted to a quirky
commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, the point of which
seems to be that we need new ethical standards in the twentieth

century. In any event, he concluded his commentary with six
numbered observations. The first endorsed aristocracy, defined as
“people shd. do what they like” (348). The second observation
denounced oligarchy or plutocracy, somewhat whimsically
described as “code of the luxury-trade magazines and swank hotels”
(349). The third observation identified the approved elite: “Con-
structive element in society ... a few writers, a few senators and min-
isters (say a very few), a considerable number of engineers, inven-
tors, etc.” (349). Four returns to the unapproved: the “Credulous,
Crap, the book trade, retrospective writers, ‘the public,’ anyone ass
enough to swallow editorials.” Five blesses “the workers and the
well-disposed unemployed,” while six damns the “dregs, that is, the
poor who are no better than the individual members of the oli-
garchy or of the ‘public’ or the credulous.” These last are held
responsible for tolerating “the present infamies in England, France
and America” (349).
As political theory, or even political journalism, Guide to
Kulchur is unsatisfactory to say the least, but it has been worth
surveying to show the nature of Pound’s political thought – prim-
itive as it is. Pound’s political science unfolds as follows: Every-
thing hinges on the creation and equitable distribution of wealth
(goods and services), and that, in turn, depends crucially on a
proper monetary theory. Wealth – whether material or intellec-
tual – is created by exceptional individuals, be they engineers,
scientists, or artists. Unfortunately the individual of average
intelligence cannot understand the innovations created by those
exceptional individuals even when they benefit everyone. Hence
popular democracy will remain susceptible to the blandishments
of greedy and unscrupulous individuals bent on appropriating
the product of artists and scientists. The best available solution is
government by an intellectual elite, indirectly controlling the
state through a wise leader. Quite apart from the naïveté of this
political theory, Pound’s conviction that Italy’s fascist dictator-
ship instantiated such a polity, bespeaks a truly exceptional
capacity for self-deception.
Even worse is Pound’s persistence in the post-war to fulminate
against the allies, and to defend Hitler and Mussolini in his pri-
vate correspondence. A letter to Olivia Rossetti-Agresti of 31
Looking Back 245
October 1953 will serve as an example. Pound had been reading

Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944,4 and told ora – as he
called Olivia Rossetti-Agresti – that Hitler was “crazy as a coot, as
Mus/ noted on first meeting him. but with extraordinary flashes
of lucidity.” The lucidity, he has in mind is that Hitler “smelled
the idiocy of judeo-xtianity”– his target in Guide to Kulchur, fifteen
years earlier. Recalling his focus in that work, Pound complained
that Hitler “had no basis either in Aristotle or Confucius.” He
derisively characterized nazism as “the Nietzsche-Wagner teuto-
bobble wobble,” and disapproved of Hitler on the grounds that
he had “NO ethical basis.” But we can take little comfort from this
disapproval, for he extends it to Churchill: “Churchill just the
same kind of grabber and without any extenuating charm” (I
Cease not to Yowl, 130).
Although it is difficult to extract any clear position from this far-
rago of remarks, it is clear that Pound still saw fascist Italy as pos-
sessing the balance of virtue in the recent conflict. That he
dragged Machiavelli into his comments as a poor representative of
Italian virtue probably reflects his exchange two years previously
with Lewis on his reading of Rude Assignment (in February or
March 1951). After a lengthy break in communication, Pound
had reconnected with Lewis in the summer of 1946 – through the
intermediary of Eliot (Letters of Wyndham Lewis, 394). Lewis replied
with a friendly letter, and the correspondence continued for sev-
eral years. Pound’s letters are remarkable for their vigour –
though not for their wisdom, of which there is very little. In his
sixty-sixth year, the sixth year of his incarceration in St. Elizabeths
hospital, Pound was still eager to debate the issues that had pre-
occupied both of them for thirty-seven years. Lewis, however, had
little stomach for such a debate, and did not reply to Pound’s
detailed comments.5
Characteristic of the kinds of comments Pound made is the fol-
lowing speculation on the different political postures that he,
Lewis, and Eliot had adopted: “Wonder if any use in speculation
re/ dichotomy: WL conditioned by being riz in the rotting/ [Not-
ting Hill]/ Poss O. M. 6 choosing the sinking, and Ez sticking to the
rising (however Holly-Luced crass and tec/) but with some clean
sprouts in the middan. Waaaqkk, ‘ear de eagul scream” (Rude
Assignment, 276).
Pound’s parenthetic remark “(however Holly-Luced crass and

tec/)” translates as follows: “however much the culture has been
debased by Hollywood and the Luce papers (Life, Fortune, and
Time magazines).” I am not confident of the meaning of “tec/,”
but suspect that he has in mind the degree to which technology
drives social and cultural trends in the post-war world. The “clean
sprouts in the middan” are his young acolytes who gathered
around him on the lawn of St. Elizabeths – some of them decid-
edly unsavoury characters. The scream of the eagle invokes the
United States of America, whose emblem is the bald eagle.
Pound’s meaning was that he is loyal to America despite the influ-
ence of the inauthentic Americanism propagated by the Luce pub-
lications. He saw himself and his acolytes as fighting a rearguard
action to “save” the Republic from its internal enemies. Pound’s
holding forth to them on the lawn at St. Elizabeths, then, was the
“scream of the eagle.”
The abbreviations and abrupt shifts of this passage had been
characteristics of Pound’s correspondence for many years – long
before his troubles with the American authorities. Early examples
of this epistolary style can be found in his correspondence in the
late thirties and forties with the Spanish-American philosopher
George Santayana, then resident in Rome. Santayana’s comment
on Pound’s epistolary style to John Hall Wheelock – admittedly
after Pound had been found incompetent to stand trial – gives
some taste of how Pound’s epistles were received by his corre-
spondents: “From Ezra Pound I continue to receive communica-
tions: the last was stark mad: a few unintelligible abbreviations on
a large sheet of paper, and nothing else. Yet the address, although
fantastically scrawled, was quite correct and intelligible. His
madness may be spasmodic only” (16 Jan. 1947, quoted in Mc-
Cormick, 410–11).
In his comments on Rude Assignment, we find Pound noting
much the same dichotomy between himself and Eliot with which
we began this study. He sees Eliot as a Cassandra – “the sinking” –
and himself as a Pollyanna – “the rising.” He didn’t place Lewis
within this schema, merely attributing his (unclassified) posture to
having been raised in Notting Hill, a region in Kensington. Pound
and Eliot, of course, were both raised in the usa – as was Lewis until
his seventh year. Nor was Lewis raised in Notting Hill, but in sever-
Looking Back 247
al London districts: Highgate, Hampstead, Becking, and Ealing

(Meyers, 4). In fact, Lewis cannot be situated on either side of this
dichotomy. He was sometimes a Cassandra – as in his fear of the
threat of communism; and sometimes a Pollyanna – as in his mis-
guided hope for Hitler and nazism. He remained always an oppo-
nent of modernity and democracy, and still regarded democracies
in the nineteen fifties as oligarchies functioning more or less as
usual – that is, in the interests of moneyed men.
It would be tedious to go through Pound’s detailed comments
on Rude Assignment – even though deciphering Pound’s letters does
offer a pleasure much like that of doing crossword puzzles. Many
of his remarks simply share reminiscences of their shared experi-
ences in London in the 1910s and 1920s. But Pound’s response to
Lewis’s critique of Machiavelli’s celebration of “personal rule” –
that is, dictatorship – is worth our attention because it offers anoth-
er opportunity to put the three together.
Lewis’s remarks in Rude Assignment are designed to “massage”
his favourable portrayal of Machiavelli twenty-three years earlier in
The Lion and the Fox, at which we have already glanced. Now, in
1950, Lewis claimed that The Prince articulated “the first scientific
hard-boiled theory of the State,” one that exposed the state as
founded on “criminal callousness.” He listed among Machiavelli’s
“merits,” his complacent account “of a batch of murders perpe-
trated by his favourite politician.” Lewis sardonically placed such
politic brutality beside the “big lovely piles of dead women and
masses of Bosche brats left by our bombing raids.” (That he choos-
es to illustrate the callousness of war with the Allied bombing cam-
paign is typical of Lewis’s tendency to rub the faces of his coun-
trymen in their failings. Most British writers would have spoken of
Guernica, Coventry, or Hiroshima to illustrate war’s brutality.)
Lewis was unimpressed by Machiavelli’s honesty in openly coun-
selling the murder of associates representing potential opponents.
He doubted that we should praise Machiavelli for “his extreme
frankness” as some (including Eliot) do. He admitted that “people
in general are almost as unpleasant as he [Machiavelli] declares
them to be,” but questions whether the greed, stupidity, and all-
round cussedness of ordinary people justify tyranny; asking “by
what right do you go and plant yourself on them as a ruler?”
(177–8).
Pound’s response to all of this is defensive – but typically scat-

tergun. (I have left Pound’s whimsical orthography uncorrected.)
First he asked, “Was Macchiavel very intelligent? Register con-
siderbl doubt. I shd/ think Caesare [Borgia?] was prob/ more
intelligent. (Not saying this as untempered eulogy.)” This rather
tangential remark is followed by a request for a reference to a cri-
tique of that other famous renaissance sceptic, Montaigne: “know
of any good debunking of Montaigne??” Pound’s next query is
more to the point: “How yu goin’ ter Define the struggle for
order??? not too much of it, of course” (Rude Assignment, 277).
The implication is that only “personal rule” – Machiavelli’s label for
tyranny – can maintain order.
In his defence of tyranny, Pound invoked a distinction between
“power” and “authority” (277). He had previously drawn this dis-
tinction in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, where he claimed that Mus-
solini’s “authority comes, as Eirugina [sic] proclaimed authority
comes, ‘from right reason’ and from the general fascist conviction
that he is more likely to be right than anyone else is” (110). In
other words, the personal ruler rules by right of his superior wis-
dom. Perhaps conscious that he does not have a very strong case,
Pound then resorted to an ad hominem argument, accusing Lewis of
bigotry towards Italians: “Undoubtedly Muss’s humanity gets under
brit/ skin, even yours, the dam dago. No I distinguish/ it aint his
humanity that gits under yrs/ its that he was a wop/ which is the
last advice I got from another of ’em, at a given date” (277).7
There is no hint of a willingness on Pound’s part to admit any
imperfections in Mussolini’s rule or in fascist governance. Pound’s
intransigence contrasts quite strongly with Lewis’s capacity to learn
from his mistakes, and to adjust his position in response to chang-
ing circumstances. As we have seen, Lewis acknowledged the risks
of personal rule in Rude Assignment, admitting, “for one benevolent
ruler you might get nine who were bad. And even one who starts
harmlessly enough is apt to become unspeakably bad” (179).
The flaws Lewis now sees in “personal rule” were corroborated
by the case of fascist Italy. The historian Martin Clark points out
that a “major weakness” of the fascist system “was the excessive per-
sonal power of the Duce himself.” Moreover, Mussolini did not exer-
cise that power wisely: “He had a lively journalistic intelligence, but
he was impulsive. He over-simplified and dramatized everything,
Looking Back 249
and had no patience for prosaic long-term planning. He was also

distressingly vulgar and vulnerable to flattery. Corruption and
incompetence were tolerated, even encouraged” (240). Pound was
oblivious to such faults – some of which he shared. Other well-
known “personal rulers” are Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung,
Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Robert Mugabe
– to name only those that come to mind. They serve to further cor-
roborate Lewis’s judgment and to discredit Pound’s.
As we have seen, Eliot came to the defence of Machiavelli in his
1937 review of The Lion and the Fox. He had already published two
defences of him ten years earlier: “Shakespeare and the Stoicism
of Seneca” and “Niccolo Machiavelli,” both of which allude to The
Lion and the Fox. In the same year (1927) Eliot came to Machi-
avelli’s defence in his response to Leo Ward’s justification of the
Vatican’s condemnation of Maurras and the Action Française,
favourably comparing Maurras and Machiavelli to Mussolini. In
“Niccolo Machiavelli” (first appearing in TLS in 1927) Eliot had
claimed that Machiavelli’s “first thought always is for peace and
prosperity and the happiness of the governed” (For Lancelot
Andrewes, 54). Like Pound, Eliot thought tyranny justifiable in
some circumstances, invoking Machiavelli’s defence of tyranny as
a justification for European imperialism: “You cannot govern peo-
ple for ever against their will; and some foreign peoples you can-
not rule at all; but if you have to govern an alien and inferior peo-
ple – a people inferior in the art of government – then you must
use every means to make them contented and to persuade them
that your government is to their interest.” And he adds a chilling
approval of strong-arm tactics: “Liberty is good; but more impor-
tant is order; and the maintenance of order justifies every means”
(58).8
Though it was not obvious in 1927 that Mussolini’s emphasis
on “order” was a thinly disguised justification for tyranny, as
Hitler and Franco came on the scene no possibility of doubt
remained. Lewis was the only one of the three to come to recog-
nize the plain facts of totalitarian oppression, perhaps because he
was also the only one to see first-hand in 1937 the terrible condi-
tions in which the Jews of Warsaw were living, long before the
infamous “sealing” of the Warsaw ghetto in 1941. Pound persist-
ed in his fantasy that Mussolini was a wise and benevolent leader
despite Mussolini’s obvious aggression in Ethiopia, and he con-

tinued to promote the totalitarian or “Confucian” view of gover-
nance articulated in Guide to Kulchur, even after the outbreak of
the European war. Eliot embraced neither Mussolini nor Hitler,
but neither did he speak out against them or Franco, and he
clung to Maurras, whose views on order were compatible with fas-
cism – as Eliot himself admitted in his review essay “The Litera-
ture of Fascism.”
The Idea of a Christian Society, delivered in March 1939 at Cor-
pus Christi College, Cambridge, is an articulation of Eliot’s polit-
ical and social views as they were on the eve of war. The lectures
are based on four bbc talks broadcast in March and April of 1932.
So it is evident that well before it was clear that war was inevitable,
Eliot’s views had changed radically. Eliot was unwilling – even in
1939 – to concede much more virtue to the democracies than to
Nazi Germany: “Certainly there is a sense in which Britain and
America are more democratic than Germany; but on the other
hand, defenders of the totalitarian system can make out a plausi-
ble case for maintaining that what we have is not democracy, but
financial oligarchy” (11). He dismissed both Liberalism and Con-
servatism, claiming that they are not philosophies, but “merely
habits.” Against such mere habits, instead of Maurrasian Royal-
ism, he invoked a distinctly un-Arnoldian view of culture: “what I
mean by a political philosophy is not merely even the conscious
formulations of the ideal aims of a people, but the substratum of col-
lective temperament, ways of behaviour and unconscious values which
provide the material for the formulation” (my emphasis). In defence
of totalitarianism, he claims: “it is this which totalitarianism has
sought partly to revive, and partly to impose by force upon its peo-
ples” (14). In short Eliot admired the Volkisch attributes of
nazism, a species of Heimat primitivism we have seen him cele-
brating in “East Coker.”
Though pulling up short of endorsing totalitarianism, Eliot saw
it as a legitimate response to the modern condition in which those
“ways of behaviour and unconscious values” have been eroded, if
not erased. The label he employs for “ways of behaviour and
unconscious values,” is “way of life” (41), perhaps a conscious echo
of the German term for such Heimat virtues – Lebensform. We have
seen Pound use the same term in the nearly contemporaneous
Looking Back 251
Guide to Kulchur (1938). However, Pound preferred the neologism

– paideuma 9 – borrowed from the German anthropologist Leo
Frobenius. Pound defines paideuma as the “the tangle or complex
of the inrooted ideas of any period” (Guide to Kulchur, 57): “When
I said I wanted a new civilization, I think I cd. have used Frobenius’
term. At any rate for my own use and for the duration of this trea-
tise I shall use Paideuma for the gristly roots of ideas that are in
action” (58).
Like Eliot, Pound distinguished the paideuma from the mere
habits of thought, which he calls – using still another German term
– the Zeitgeist : “I shall leave ‘Zeitgeist’ as including also the atmos-
pheres, the tints of mental air and the idées reçues, the notions that
a great mass of people still hold or half hold from habit, from wan-
ing custom” (58). Lewis remained an outrider on this point, stick-
ing to his elite concept of culture as a conscious, hard-earned pos-
session. But both Pound and Eliot vacillate. Pound did not want to
erase book learning, merely to submerge it in a Volkiisch semi-con-
sciousness: “Knowledge is not culture. The domain of culture
begins when one has ‘forgotten-what-book’” (Guide to Kulchur,
134).
eliot’s war
Even in 1939, Eliot refused to condemn fascism/nazism as a polit-

ical doctrine totally antipathetic to Christian as well as to liberal val-
ues on the spurious grounds that British oligarchical democracy
was equally culpable. This is a nearly desperate equivocation: We
cannot condemn Nazi tyranny, brutality, and paganism, Eliot
argued, because our own society is also infected with tyranny, bru-
tality, and paganism. Even in the wake of the outrage of Kristall-
nacht, then, Eliot was still unwilling to condemn nazism – though
he was equally unwilling to endorse it.
Despite his rejection of Marxism’s historical determinism, Eliot
shared the Marxist perception that industrial man was alienated,
and that totalitarian regimes were the predictable result of “highly
industrialised” societies. “The tendency of unlimited industrial-
ism.” he wrote, “is to create bodies of men and women – of all class-
es – detached from tradition, alienated from religion and suscepti-
ble to mass suggestion: in others words, a mob. And a mob will be
no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well hosed and well dis-
ciplined” (Christianity and Culture, 17). (Of course, Eliot knew very
well that the Marxist theory of the proletariat’s alienation from its
tools and materials is an echo of the long-standing theological
notion of man’s alienation from God.) The only solution to this
dilemma in Eliot’s view was a “Christian society” in which an elite
“community of Christians” would provide the moral and cultural
guidance for the “Christian State” and the “Christian Community”
(23). Such sentiments would have been very well accepted in Fran-
co’s Spain, or colonial New England, but scarcely anywhere else.
They demonstrate a disconnect from the political and economic
realities of the day almost as complete as Pound’s in Guide to
Kulchur. Eliot’s qualification – “well fed, well clothed, and well
hosed” (that is, possessing good stockings) – is almost cruel given
that as he spoke millions were ill fed, ill clothed, and ill housed in
the capitalist democracies and elsewhere.
That was Eliot’s view in 1933 and 1939. We must ask if the expe-
rience of World War II led him to alter his attitudes. The principal
document articulating his post-war view is Notes Toward a Definition
of Culture. Although the first chapter is revised from four articles
published in the New English Weekly in January and February of
1943, the balance was written for the 1948 Faber edition. And the
Appendix is the English text of a talk first published in Germany in
1946 and broadcast over German radio in 1948. The dates are
important because Eliot would not have had incontrovertible
knowledge of the Nazi death camps in late 1942 when he was writ-
ing the New English Weekly series, but by 1948, when Notes was pub-
lished, he would have had such knowledge.
In The Myth of Rescue, William Rubinstein notes that although
“the first knowledge in the West of Auschwitz and the other
extermination camps has been frequently debated and exam-
ined,” reports of the slaughter of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen
appeared as early as 1941.10 The earliest date of incontestable
evidence Rubinstein gives is April 1944 (86). But he notes that
the Jewish Chronicle (a British publication) for 11 December 1942
ran an article under the headline, “Two Million Jews Slaughtered
/ Most Terrible Massacre of All Time / Appalling Horrors of
Nazi Mass Murders” (124). In the wake of that piece, British Jews
and sympathizers formed the National Committee for Rescue
Looking Back 253
from Nazi Terror in March 1943. It produced fourteen booklets

and pamphlets on the Holocaust between September 1943 and
January 1946 (The Myth of Rescue, 128–9). And Rubinstein notes
that these reports were widely disseminated in Britain: “From vir-
tually the moment that news of the Holocaust reached Britain,
the magnitude of the evil being perpetrated by the Nazis was
understood by Britain’s opinion-leaders in almost uncannily
accurate terms. “The Greatest crime in history is now being per-
petrated, the murder of a nation and the deliberate extermina-
tion of the Jews in Europe,” wrote the Archbishop of York, Dr.
Cyril Garbett, in his 1943 New Year’s message to his congregants
(Myth of Rescue, 131).
Only chapter 1 of Notes was written before these revelations, and
the whole was published well after them. The Allies liberated the
extermination camps in the spring of 1945, and thereafter the fact
of the Holocaust was no longer in any possible doubt. Newspapers
around the world expressed shock and outrage at accounts and
images of piles of human bodies and of emaciated survivors.
Despite all of that there is no indication I can find in Notes or the
Appendix that Eliot recognized that horror as a fact that he need-
ed to take into account in his assessment of the past and future of
European culture. Nor had Eliot changed his mind about the
tenor of his thesis when Notes was reissued in 1961: “I re-read them
for the first time for some years, expecting that I should have to
qualify some of the opinions expressed therein. I found to my sur-
prise that I had nothing to retrace, and nothing upon which I was
disposed to enlarge” (7). He even reiterates his royalism, albeit
with minor modification: “I should not now, for instance, call
myself a ‘royalist’ tout court, as I once did: I would say that I am in
favour of retaining the monarchy in every country in which a
monarchy still exists” (7). Eliot’s silence on the most abhorrent
manifestation of unmitigated evil in European history in his med-
itation on European culture bespeaks an evasion that is almost
pathological. It is all the more remarkable when we recall, as
noted above, that Eliot did protest the Vichy government’s partici-
pation in the German racial laws in a 1941 letter to the Christian
News-Letter.
Eliot’s infamous remark in After Strange Gods – “where two or
more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be
fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still

more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of
race and religion combine to make any large number of free-
thinking jews [sic], undesirable” (After Strange Gods, 19–20) – is
often invoked as evidence of latent anti-Semitism. The remark has
been plausibly defended on the grounds that it is to “free-think-
ing” that Eliot objects, not an ethnic community. But, since by no
means all freethinkers in Europe and America are Jews, the sin-
gling out of Jews is still offensive. But despite that offensive gaffe,
it is impossible to believe that Eliot was indifferent to the suffering
of Europe’s Jews - to do so would entail regarding his professed
Christian morality as pure hypocrisy. His silence, nonetheless, is
deeply troubling.
Eliot was out of step with progressive opinion in the democracies
on the assimilation of Jews. The common view was that “free-think-
ing” Jews – that is, non-observant Jews assimilated to a humanistic
post-Christian culture – did not represent any sort of problem,
since they were like everyone else. Apart from the anti-Semites,
most of those who believed there was a “Jewish Problem” in the
inter-war period would have agreed with Lewis that it would be best
if all issues of race and religion were laid to rest. When Lewis wrote,
“if there were no Jews, there would be no Jewish Problem,” he was
recommending assimilation within a pan-European identity, not
extermination: “To a ‘good European’ it seems a pity that there
must be ‘Frenchmen,’ ‘Italians,’ and ‘Germans’ any longer. And it
is certain that, in the end, those troublesome political distinctions
will disappear. It is natural for us to wish that such things should
come about quickly. That is all I meant by expressing a wish that
there were no ‘Jews’ any more” (The Jews, Are They Human? 106–7).
The fact that the assimilated Jews of Germany, Holland, France,
Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were rounded up with their Ortho-
dox brethren and sent to the gas ovens rendered “assimilation” a
dirty word in the post war, but it was not so in the early nineteen
thirties.11
I have not cited Eliot’s evasion of the Holocaust, or the remark
in After Strange Gods, as evidence that he was anti-Semitic, for I
agree with Harding and others that he was not. As Harding points
out, tolerance of the Holocaust would have been impossible for a
devout Christian like Eliot (Harding, 158). However, I cannot
Looking Back 255
think of any presentable excuse for his silence. The only motive I
can imagine is Eliot’s perception that his commitment to a homo-
geneous Christian culture for Europe would make any expression
of outrage at the Holocaust appear hypocritical. It is not a judg-
ment I would have made in his position. However one looks at his
silence, it does not speak well of the carefully constructed Christian
Europe that he imagined. Moreover, it suggests that Eliot’s world-
view was not coextensive with Anglican Christianity, for Anglicans
have had no difficulty in condemning the Holocaust.
In Notes, Eliot for the first time adopted an explicitly anthropo-
logical notion of culture: “By ‘culture,’ then, I mean first of all what
the anthropologists mean: the way of life of a particular people liv-
ing together in one place. ... A culture is more than the assemblage
of its arts, customs, and religious beliefs (Notes in Christianity and
Culture, 120).12 This represents a significant change from his view
as recently as the 1941 Listener article “Towards a Christian Britain,”
in which he reminded his audience, “We must be sure that we are
relying on God, and not merely clothing still one more ambitious
human scheme in the vestments of Christianity” (525). However,
his principal contention in Notes is that “no culture has appeared
or developed except together with a religion” (15). While one can
hardly dispute that historical observation, the prevailing opinion
then, as now, is that European culture was (is) well on its way to a
post-religious condition. Of course, it was just this tendency that
Eliot hoped to reverse.
Eliot’s strategy is Arnoldian. His view – constant since at least
1917 – was that “our own period is one of decline; that the stan-
dards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago” (Notes,
19), and his recipe for cultural repair was that an elite should
“transmit the culture which they have inherited” to their less able
fellow citizens. “It is the function,” he believed, “of the superior
members and superior families to preserve the group culture”
(42). Arnoldian humanists would not have used such language –
certainly not “superior families” – but the notion that culture is
made, maintained, and transmitted by superior individuals was cer-
tainly Arnold’s view. Such an understanding of culture was shared
by all three, and accounts in large part for their hostility to Marx-
ism, which holds the contrary belief that culture is epiphenomenal
of the organization of the means of production.
Rather surprisingly Eliot held up the Soviet Union as a nation

governed by an elite, but he was not sanguine of its success: “Three
things may happen. Russia may show us how a stable government
and a flourishing culture can be transmitted only through elites; it
may lapse into oriental lethargy; or the governing elite may follow
the course of other governing elites and become a governing
class” (45). (With the advantage of hindsight, we can choose
between these options – none of which quite precisely fits what
happened, though number three seems much the closest, insofar
as it is appropriate to consider the nomenclatura as a class.) Eliot
was not much more sanguine about the usa. Even with the New
Deal well begun, he repeated his belief that the usa had been gov-
erned by an oligarchy since the civil war. France, he thought, had
no ruling class – hence the well-known political instability of that
nation (47).
Despite protestations that he was not articulating “a defence of
aristocracy,” that is in fact what he did – though he preferred to
think he was defending classes, that is, “a continuous gradation of
cultural levels,” as if a class structure did not entail a top and a bot-
tom (48). His ideal society would instantiate a “way of life,” trans-
mitted from parent to child and specific to occupations, regions,
and “races.” “If we agree that the primary vehicle for the transmis-
sion of culture is the family, “he wrote, “and if we agree that in a
more highly civilised society there must be different levels of cul-
ture, then it follows that to ensure the transmission of the culture
of these different levels there must be groups of families persisting,
from generation to generation, each in the same way of life” (48, my
emphasis).
Once again, we see that the “way of life” Eliot preferred for the
bulk of society – not for himself – is rather like that of the Hob-
bits in Tolkien’s imagined Shire: “On the whole, it would appear
to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should
go on living in the place in which they were born. Family, class
and local loyalty all support each other; and if one of these
decays, the others will suffer also” (52). He believed that it is only
in an intellectually impoverished state that a true community can
subsist: “to be educated above the level of those whose social
habits and tastes one has inherited may cause a division within a
man which interferes with happiness; even though, when the
Looking Back 257
individual is of superior intellect, it may bring him a fuller and

more useful life” (99–100).
In effect, Eliot’s social and political views had not altered from
those he articulated in the twenties. He still saw the difficulty fac-
ing the West as “disintegration” – a perception poetically expressed
as early as the conclusion of The Waste Land: “These fragments I
have shored against my ruins.” “Education in the modern sense,”
he now bemoaned, “implies a disintegrated society” (Notes, 105).
And he expressed a shocking hostility toward the perceived desire
of the masses for education: “A higher average of general educa-
tion is perhaps less necessary for a civil society than is a respect for
learning.” His recommendation of such forelock-tugging deference
for one’s betters is grotesquely anachronistic in 1948. And his fear
that an educational system which fostered equality of opportunity
“would disorganise society, by substituting for classes, elites of
brains, or perhaps only of sharp wits,” is impossibly condescending
(100–1, my emphasis.).
We have examined Eliot’s first full-scale attempt to articulate
his cultural views in the Clark Lectures, delivered in January
1926. While in La Turbie, France, preparing the lectures, he had
written to Herbert Read explaining his intentions: “The idea is
briefly this: to take the XIII century – in its literary form, Dante –
as my point de repère, to treat subsequent history as the history
of the disintegration of that unity – disintegration inevitable because
of the increase of knowledge and consequent dispersion of attention, but
bringing with it many undesirable features. Disintegration, which,
when the world has crystallised for another moment into a new
order, can be treated as a form of generation; but which the his-
torian at the present time, who does not anticipate, must regard
partly as the history of corruption” (11 Dec. 1925, Herbert Read
Collection, University of Victoria, capitalization as in original,
italics my emphasis).
By cultural “disintegration” Eliot did not mean simply “decay” or
“decline” but literally a falling apart – though he believed that
decay and decline were the inevitable consequences of the failure
of cultural integration.13 It is certainly true that modern Western
culture is simply too variegated and complex for any one individ-
ual to master all aspects of it – from literature and religion through
philosophy to the social and physical sciences. No one could pre-
sume to write a Summa of twentieth-century culture as Thomas

Aquinas did for medieval Europe. Eliot’s example of such cultural
mastery in the lectures was not the philosopher, Aquinas, but the
poet, Dante, to whom he contrasted the “disintegrated” Donne. In
1925 and 1926 Eliot still looked forward to a crystallization of the
world into “a new order” that he and a few others would anticipate
in their art.
In Notes he recognized the impossibility of such a summa in the
twentieth century and retreated to a notion that had appeared as
early as “Tradition and Individual Talent” – now invoked as
grounds for opposing universal education. Culture, he said, “can-
not altogether be brought to consciousness; and the culture of
which we are wholly conscious is never the whole of culture.” Since
that is the case, “the more education arrogates to itself the respon-
sibility, the more systematically will it betray culture” (Notes, 107).
As I have already noted, the notion that the common folk possess
an inarticulate wisdom because they share geography, history, and
social practices has much in common with the German theory of
the Lebensform exploited by the Nazis in their celebration of the
Volk.14
Even in 1948, then, Eliot found himself in the intellectual com-
pany of fascists and Nazis who looked back to Roman or Medieval
organizations of society in which the state, the church, or the folk
replace the isolated, autonomous individual of liberal social theory
as the ground of legitimacy. He looks forward with horror to a
European future polluted by half-educated tourists: “there is no
doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are low-
ering our standards ... destroying our ancient edifices to make
ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future
will encamp in their mechanised caravans”(Notes, 108).
We have seen that Eliot shares this contempt for mass culture
with many cultural analysts in the inter-war period such as Mowrer,
Siegfried, and Gasset – not to speak of Pound and Lewis. Like
Mowrer and Siegfried, Eliot attributed the spread of mass culture
around the globe to the influence of his native land: “America has
tended to impose its way of life chiefly in the course of doing busi-
ness, and creating a taste for its commodities ... American eco-
nomic expansion may be also, in its way, the cause of disintegration
of cultures which it touches” (Notes, 92, my emphasis). We saw this
Looking Back 259
view expressed by others in the 1920s and, of course, continue to

hear it in the twenty-first century. “Coca-colonization,” the pun
coined by European Marxists in the ‘sixties to describe American
export of its popular culture, captures the same sentiment. That
term has sunken into desuetude following the collapse of the Sovi-
et Union. It was supplanted for a while by an older term, “new
world order.” (The first President Bush, when employing that
phrase, was no doubt unaware of its currency following the First
World War.) In its turn, “new world order” was supplanted by “glob-
alization.” In all cases, the terms implied the inevitability of a flat-
tening of cultural diversity in the world; a flattening that entailed a
subservience of cultural values to economic and commercial
imperatives.
Despite the diversity of their cultural programs, and their very
different vision of how a united Europe should be governed,
Angell, Brailsford, Eliot, Pound, Lewis, and Gasset all looked for-
ward to a united Europe. In his radio talk “The Unity of European
Culture,” appended to Notes, Eliot revisited his experience with The
Criterion. As in the manifesto he had published in the last issue of
its first year, he described it as an endeavour to carry out the
Arnoldian program to disseminate the best European thought: “In
starting this review, I had the aim of bringing together the best in
new thinking and new writing in its time, from all the countries of
Europe that had anything to contribute to the common good”
(Notes, “Appendix,” 115). He lamented that his aims “in the end”
failed, and he attributed the failure “chiefly to the gradual closing
of the mental frontiers of Europe. A kind of cultural autarky fol-
lowed inevitably upon political and economic autarky” (Notes,
“Appendix,” 116).
Eliot’s recipe for a reunited Europe in Notes was not a political
union like the European Union – a possibility to which Lewis
looked forward in his post-war commentary – nor is it a return to
the united Christendom of which Eliot had dreamt in The Idea of A
Christian Society. Now his hopes were more modest, and less ecclesi-
astical. All he dared hope for was the survival of Christian values as
a “form of life” even after the fading of belief – which is just what
Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer had counselled a century
earlier: “An individual European may not believe that the Christian
Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all
spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon

that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have
produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche [unbelievers both]. I do not
believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete dis-
appearance of the Christian Faith. ... If Christianity goes, the whole
of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you
cannot put on a new culture ready made” (Notes, Appendix, 122).
This represents an almost complete abandonment of the dream, to
which he had clung for two decades, of a Europe purged of the
heresies of humanism and liberalism and united under the banner
of Christianity.
In 1958 Leslie Paul asked Eliot if he still felt – as he had in 1939
when he wrote The Idea of a Christian Society – that the choice before
us was between “the formation of a new Christian culture, or the
acceptance of a pagan one.” Eliot’s reply makes it clear that the
pagan culture he had in mind in 1939 was nazism: “Well, I don’t
know whether or not I’d use those exact words. I think I should
prefer now to say a new or renewed Christian society rather than
‘culture,’ ... You see, we’ve had since I wrote – or it was going on
then – the attempt in Hitler’s reign to foster a Germanic culture,
and that, if it wasn’t altogether an attempt to suppress Christian
culture, was at least an attempt to bypass it” (“A Conversation with
T. S. Eliot,” 12).
Although the distinction Eliot drew in 1958 between a “society”
and a “culture” is not particularly idiosyncratic, it is nonetheless
worth pausing over. That he should have called nazism “a Ger-
manic culture” is certainly peculiar, but it seems clear enough that
he saw Hitler’s project as somewhat analogous to his own. Both he
and Hitler hoped to impose a pre-formed “culture” on an existing
“society” – nazism in Hitler’s case and Christianity in Eliot’s.
Although Europe was nominally Christian when Eliot began his
project, its Christianity was largely dormant and needed to be
revived. In the same way, the Weimar Republic allowed German
nationalism to decline. It needed to be reanimated if nazism was to
prevail. Eliot’s Arnoldian instincts led him toward a “European”
culture – as opposed to a British, French, German, or Italian – so it
was natural for him to choose trans-nationalism as the carrot to
draw Europeans toward Christianity. Hitler’s instincts were the
reverse. Accordingly he chose nationalism and chauvinism as the
Looking Back 261
carrot to draw Germans towards the Führer Prinzip – total obedience

to a charismatic leader.
Despite the example of Nazi Germany – which one might have
thought demonstrated the inadequacy of social practices or
“forms of life” as a protection against radical changes in collective
behaviour – Eliot came to believe that social practices were more
durable and resistant to change than “beliefs” such as Christiani-
ty, communism, or nazism. Though it was a painful realization for
him, Eliot evidently took some comfort from it, for he was then
content to hope for a renewed “Christian society,” that is, a soci-
ety in which Christian values persist despite the near-extinction of
Christian beliefs. That a seasoned Christian jouster against
Arnoldian humanism should come to such a position represents
a humiliating climb down. Perhaps it is also evidence of a little
wisdom.
But Eliot was still capable – in 1958 – of being aroused to indig-
nation at the spectacle of contemporary mass culture. Paul com-
plained to Eliot of the “mass entertainment culture, which is ...
without any values at all – and yet is getting hold of the world.”
Eliot was quick to agree: “I do think that what you are pointing to
is exactly what seems to me to be happening.” He mentioned Gas-
set’s Revolt of the Masses as an early sounding of the alarm, and
went on to complain of the “deterioration ... in the quality of
amusement” that is purveyed by the “cinema first; now, televi-
sion.” He predicted that the “purely materialistic civilization with
all its technical achievements and its mass amusements” would
end in boredom – provided “there’s no actual destruction by
explosives.” But in the end, he admits that it is not so much the
presence of mass culture that is the source of decadence, as it is the
absence of religion: “A people without religion will in the end
find that it has nothing to live for” (“A Conversation with T. S.
Eliot,” 13–14).
He added, “I did touch on this problem a good many years ago
in an essay I wrote on the death of a great music-hall artist, Marie
Lloyd” in his 1922 “London Letter” for The Dial (14), where he
referred to an essay by W. H. R. Rivers in which Rivers argued that
the natives of the Melanesian islands “are dying out principally for
the reason that the ‘Civilization’ forced upon them has deprived
them of all interest in life. They are dying from pure boredom.”15
Anticipating his 1958 remarks, Eliot elaborated the point: “When

every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musi-
cal instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every
horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor cars, when electrical
ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime
stories from a loudspeaker, when applied science has done every-
thing possible with the materials on this earth to make life as inter-
esting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the
entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians”
(Selected Essays, 459).
How much more despondent must we be today with computers,
cell phones, iPods, dvds BlackBerries, and the Internet. However,
unlike the Melanesians, who were obliged to give up their practice
of head hunting, we still have our wars and terrorist acts to get the
adrenalin flowing. And religion seems no less important a motiva-
tor of human action today than it was in the Middle Ages when
Europeans felt entitled to liberate the Holy Land from the Saladin.
And today, radical Muslims have taken up arms to rid Islam of West-
ern infidels.
That Rivers’ account of the Melanesians made an impression on
Eliot is apparent from his repetition of the same sentiment in
“Thoughts after Lambeth” (1931): “Without religion the whole
human race would die, as according to W.H.R. Rivers, some
Melanesian tribes have died, solely of boredom ”(Selected Essays,
370). But Eliot was quite aware that alternatives to religion have
also captured men’s passionate allegiance – nationalism, commu-
nism, fascism, and nazism, to name those most operative in the
twentieth century. The adherents of those “faiths” did not seem to
be expiring from inanition; on the contrary, they were turning the
world upside down with their violent passions.
Eliot feared humanism, a benign alternative to religion, even
more than those passionate creeds. It is humanism that he had
in mind in the following remark in “Thoughts after Lambeth”:
“The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civ-
ilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but
we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile
redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive
through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civiliza-
tion, and save the World from suicide” (387). By 1958 Eliot has
Looking Back 263
lost that confidence and concedes that the “experiment” of a

non-Christian “civilized” society is not only possible but actually
exists in Europe.
Eliot’s antipathy for humanism is shared by the Marxist critical
theorists Horkheimer and Adorno, who – rather surprisingly –
lump together fascism and humanism in their 1944 work Dialectic
of Enlightenment, complaining that “the brazen fascists hypocriti-
cally laud and pliable humanist experts naïvely put into practice”
Enlightenment beliefs (xi). We have seen that in his 1932 bbc
series “The Modern Dilemma,” Eliot insisted that society would
not “succeed in inventing another brand new religion to compete
with communism.” He believed that humanism would be inade-
quate, and he gave a rather surprising reason – that humanism is
too cool and rational: “if we are incapable of dying for a cause,
then Western Europe and the Americans might as well be reor-
ganised on the Moscow model at once” (The Listener 7, 16 March
1932, 383.1). Eliot’s taste for unreasoning passion must have
been severely tested by the upsurge of passion during the Second
World War.
It seems fair to say, then, that Eliot’s antipathy for what is com-
monly called “modernity” was constant from at least the period of
The Waste Land to the end of his career. I say this in spite of Eliot’s
complaint in the very late work To Criticize the Critic: “I find myself
constantly irritated by having my words, perhaps written thirty or
forty years ago, quoted as if I had uttered them yesterday” (14). His
irritation is justified with respect to his literary critical views, but we
have seen that in an interview he gave in 1958 Eliot himself direct-
ed us to his comments in his 1922 tribute to Marie Lloyd – which
provides evidence of the constancy of his Cassandra-like views on
modernity.
lewis’s war
Lewis was just as hostile to modernity as Eliot – though for differ-

ent reasons. Unlike Eliot, he had adopted Hitler as a champion in
the opposition to modernity. However, Lewis’s toleration of Nazi
anti-Semitism changed radically after he and his wife visited the
Jewish sector in Warsaw in October 1937. His experience of the
miserable condition of the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto prompt-
ed him to write the unfortunately titled, The Jews, Are They Human?
decrying the abominable treatment of the Jews of Warsaw.
And this was before the German conquest of Poland and the
forced displacement of all the Jews of Warsaw into a sealed ghet-
to in October 1940. Lewis was appalled: “If anyone is desirous of
forming an opinion upon the Jewish Problem they should visit
the Ghetto in Warsaw. This inferno continued for miles upon
miles – or so it seemed ... the percentage of diseased, deformed,
and generally infirm persons is what strikes one most: that and
the inexpressible squalor” (The Jews, Are They Human, 43). Cruel-
ly, Nazi propaganda routinely used such scenes as Lewis witnessed
to demonstrate the congenital inferiority of Jews. It is to Lewis’s
credit that he did not respond in that way, but rather with sympa-
thy for those so horribly disadvantaged. Neither Eliot nor Pound
was ever exposed to such scenes. Even without such exposure, we
have seen that Eliot did protest the persecution of Jews in Vichy
France.
Lewis’s unwise title alludes to the Dutch historian Gustav Renier’s
whimsically titled 1931 book, The English, Are They Human? (Mey-
ers, 245). The reviewer of The Jews, Are They Human? for The Jew-
ish Chronicle managed to get past the title and gave the book a
favourable review. Essentially, Lewis put forth the sensible argu-
ment that all human “races” are much the same and are differen-
tiated only by circumstances and acquired cultural traits. In a typ-
ically incautious assessment he asserted that Jews are just like the
rest of us – venal, duplicitous, greedy, and so forth: “It can, as a
matter of fact, be very easily demonstrated how nearly every dis-
obliging thing that is said about the Jew can with equal truth be
said about the Gentile” (61). Contemporary readers might well
be offended by his retention of the term “race,” when he is really
speaking of ethnicity – that is, acquired cultural traits rather than
some genetic distinction. But he makes it very clear that anti-
Semitism is indefensible. And, most particularly, he argues that
Britain, and the democracies generally have a duty to admit
Jewish refugees from the persecution imposed on them in Nazi-
dominated countries.16
Lewis’s biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, is offended that Lewis com-
pares the plight of the Continental Jews to the indigenous British
poor and judges The Jews, Are They Human? rather harshly – charg-
Looking Back 265
ing that it retains elements of anti-Semitism (244–5). I think that is

too harsh. Lewis’s point in mentioning the British poor is to
debunk the claim that “that there is no room” in Britain for the
Jews. Until, he said, “we begin to show that we really care about our
own destitute or semi-destitute people, we have no right to use that
argument” (18). He saw the “Jewish Problem” – as expressions of
anti-Semitism were then euphemistically labelled – as an aspect of
the general “problem” of the moral and economic bankruptcy of
the capitalist democracies that the Depression exposed: “As I have
said, you cannot begin to master the Jewish Problem unless you are
prepared to recognize how it is linked with the Problem of Pover-
ty, and to turn your eyes – for however brief a space – upon the mis-
ery in which the great majority of all races live. Furthermore, if we
solved our own economic problem, we should automatically solve
all the racial problems. It is the crops that rot, the fish that are
flung back into the sea, the milk that is withheld from the starving
children of our own people, that are at the bottom of the Jewish
Problem, or at least they are complementary issues” (39, original
emphasis). With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that Nazi
racial policies were rather more evil than Lewis realized, but no
one in 1939 – not even the Jews of Europe themselves – imagined
the death camps.17
In The Jews, Are They Human? Lewis inveighed against national-
ism, returning to the internationalist posture he had abandoned in
Hitler and The Doom of Youth. Now he saw Hitler as setting himself
against “three great world-institutions ... the Catholic Church, the
Jewish Community, and the Anglo-Saxons (the British Empire, with
English-speaking America at the back of it)” (46). There is more
than a scintilla of insincerity in his substitution of the Catholic
Church for communism in this trio of those whom Hitler identified
as his opponents. In fact, Hitler was not hostile to the Catholic
Church – though the Church opposed his regime – and Lewis
knew perfectly well that nazism/fascism represented itself as the
only bulwark against godless communism.
I suspect he expunged communism from his list of the foes of
nazism because of the accusation by anti-Semites that communism
is a Jewish-inspired and controlled movement. (Marx, of course,
was Jewish – though secular.) Lewis explicitly dismissed “the charge
against the Jew of being not only a destructive element in Euro-
pean civilization, but the prime source of all the disintegration

which we see going on around us.” Such “an accusation,” he said,
“is self indulgent; it is to blame this stranger in our midst for trou-
bles which we have brought upon ourselves, by our own actions.”
While conceding that many “Jews took part in the destruction of
Russian Czarist society,” he asked, “can anyone pretend that that
society was worthy to endure? Had it not within itself the seeds of
violent dissolution?” (89).
With characteristic rhetorical recklessness, Lewis did not attempt
to deny accusations that Jewish businessmen indulge in sharp prac-
tices. Instead he invoked the Proudhonian principle that “all com-
petitive business is a racket, and often a particularly criminal one.”
Moreover, a Jew often “gets the blame, because of his sinister rep-
utation, for some racket at the bottom of which is a dear old bluff
John Bull all the time.” In any case, since “the economic and polit-
ical system for which we are all responsible” is, in Lewis’s view, “so
absurd and so unjust,” that “I should feel myself a very objection-
able hypocrite if I gave myself airs regarding a person who had
availed himself of some hole in the net of an oppressive chicanery”
(73).
All in all, The Jews, Are They Human? reveals Lewis as humane and
clear-headed – in contrast to the impression created by his previous
agitated attempts to understand the forces leading to war. It is as if
he had emerged from a state of turbulent waters into a flat calm.
But in addition to his humanity, and the acuteness of his mind, it
also displays his incapacity for persuasive writing. His argument
that the anti-social behaviour of which Jews are accused is no worse
than that committed by Gentiles has the weakness of admitting that
some Jews are guilty of the charges that anti-Semites level against all
Jews. Of course, it must be true that some Jews engage in criminal
behaviour. To allege otherwise would certainly be racist. Nonethe-
less, it was probably imprudent in 1939 to stress the unexception-
able nature of the Jewish community, when it was evident that the
Jews of Europe were in dire peril.
His conclusion that “if there were no Jews, there would be no
Jewish Problem,” was also imprudent. Of course, he was not rec-
ommending Hitler’s “final solution,” but rather the assimilation
of Jews within a Europe in which there would no longer be
Frenchman, Italians, or Germans either – perhaps tellingly, he
Looking Back 267
does not expunge Englishmen (107). Lewis’s vision has to some

extent come to pass in the European Union, which transcends
national divisions as Lewis recommended. However, national
identities seem to be far more difficult to expunge. Nor is it clear
that humanity would be better off without ethnic and cultural
diversity – even though such factors continue to fuel conflict
around the world, even in Europe where the Balkans fairly
recently erupted and Irish, Basque, and Muslim discontent con-
tinues to fester.
Events were now overtaking Lewis, as they had Eliot. Germany
invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Britain and France declared
war on Germany two days later – though no major military actions
ensued until the following May, when Germany attacked France
through Holland and Belgium. To everyone’s amazement – not
least the Germans – the Allied defence quickly collapsed, and
France was forced to sue for peace on 2 July. In response to the out-
break of war, Lewis rushed into print with The Hitler Cult, a palin-
ode for his previous pro-Nazi books. Its publication date was 7
December 1939, just three months after Germany invaded Poland.
Rather disingenuously, in his Foreword he characterized his pre-
vious posture toward fascism/nazism as “neutral.” However he was
“no longer neutral ... Today, to be neutral is to be anti-British. Fur-
ther, it is to be anti-European culture, as I understand it.” His claim
that he had “adopted ‘Neutrality’ ... because another war like the
last one is hardly an event lightly to repeat. And to be on bad terms
with Germany would entail that” is more honest (vii). And he quot-
ed himself from The Jews, Are They Human? as evidence that he no
longer excused Nazi anti-Semitism (19). Attempting to rewrite his
political record, he further claimed that, like André Gide (a com-
mitted Communist), he “had succumbed to the charms of com-
munism,” but – also like Gide – he now renounced that allegiance.
The appeal of communism for him allegedly was that it promised
“a classless society and a world in which barbaric social values have
no part.” However, he professed to have been disappointed in the
Soviet version of communism. It was that disappointment, he
claimed – with some justice – that threw him “back upon the pis-
aller of the traditional Western scene, with its routine half-mea-
sures, of which National Socialism was a spectacular specimen”
(21). While this account rather understates his hostility to the mass
society, for which socialism and communism claimed to speak, it is

not entirely inaccurate.
Seeking further justification for his previous friendliness
toward the Nazis, he invoked his distaste for “the stupid French
Chauvinists’” (read Action Française); his admiration for “the
views on finance of Herr Feder,” which reminded him of “our
Major Douglas”– whose Social Credit arguments we have seen
also attracted Eliot, and to whom Pound might be said to have
sold his soul (26–7). As further justification he cited Germany’s
economic and military weakness in the twenties. And he alluded
to the common British sentiment that Versailles was unfair to Ger-
many: “The ‘Versailles shackles,’ designed to immobilize the
stricken German giant, seemed unnecessarily galling and oppres-
sive” (27).18
In the wake of Germany’s invasion of Poland, Lewis aligned
nazism with his long-time bête noir, Romanticism: “in order to be
able to ‘place’ this political phenomenon, and to judge it at its
proper worth, you must know something about the Romantic
Movement in Germany” (33). He admitted that he “was badly
taken in, in 1930.” He said that “more than anything else” what
caused his “judgment to trip was that unusual trinity of celibacy,
teetotalism, and anti-nicotine” that characterized Hitler’s person-
al conduct. He could not resist claiming that – despite his error
about Hitler – he was wiser than most of his contemporaries, hav-
ing seen the evil of bolshevik communism before others: “That
Communism had become a racket seemed plain enough to some
of us by 1930 – though it started from a great principle of social
justice, and was planned as a great feat of social engineering. To-
day a majority probably of ‘the intelligent’ agree that Russia is a
very imperfectly Socialist state ... But in 1930 the Anglo-Saxon
political smart-alecs had just caught up with this big idea. Typical-
ly ... communism was discovered after it had ceased to be commu-
nism” (44).
It was not just Hitler’s anti-communism that recommended him
to Lewis. He had also seen Hitler as an ally in the supposed strug-
gle of “the White European, submerged as he has been in a ‘dark’
flood of African barbarity.” However, he now realized that Hitler’s
Germany “is surely another jungle;” by which “we are about to be
submerged” (45–6, original emphasis). Now, like “those who
Looking Back 269
regarded him as a handy antidote to a corrupt and savage version

of the Socialist dream of the West,” Lewis has “had enough of
Hitler” (46).
Then he turned to a survey of the rise of nazism, drawing on
Mein Kampf and Konrad Heiden’s 1936 Hitler: A Biography. (Heiden
was a strong critic of Hitler and nazism.) Lewis perversely persisted
in finding common ground between himself and Hitler, quoting
Hitler’s view, as expressed in Mein Kampf, that “the trend of affairs”
in 1914 “seemed bound to transform the world into a mammoth
department store.” “That stirs an answering chord in me,” Lewis
remarked. “For the world as ‘a mammoth department store’ is
none too good a place.” He admitted: “a world war, as an alternative
to a world store, has its disadvantages, and they are disadvantages to
which Hitler is oddly insensible. He takes it for granted that a poi-
son-gas attack is preferable to a bargain basement” (83). As in Blast-
ing and Bombardiering Lewis struck a light and jocular tone here that
seems inappropriate for the times. However, Charlie Chaplin had
done much the same in his satirical portrait of Hitler, The Great Dic-
tator, released the year before.
But even in 1939 Lewis did not disguise his antipathy for mass
culture and liberal, capitalist democracies. In what we can only see
as a grotesque misalliance, he aligned Hitler “alongside of the Hol-
lywood magnates” and “the ‘geniuses’ who invented the Yellow
Press” as “a destroyer of culture.” And, shockingly, he declared that
in his demagogic “hanging upon the emotional suffrage of the
masses,” Hitler is “a typical democratic statesman – and this in spite
of the fact that the agreeable laissez-faire of Western democracy has
passed over, with him, into a demagogic despotism” (114–15).
Accepting the inevitability of war, and unequivocally siding with the
Allies, Lewis did not abandon his critique of the allied democra-
cies: “Now we are at war, every soldier should go into battle with a charter
of new liberties in his pocket. A solemn promise from his rulers of a
new deal for him and his children. They should be handed to every
conscript, as he is called up. Then, indeed, we should be on the
side of the light” (184, original emphasis).
The Hitler Cult, then, does not represent any real change of polit-
ical position on Lewis’s part. His critique of the Western democra-
cies remains the same – that they are in dire need of a radical over-
haul that would involve a departure from the legacy of the
nineteenth century: capitalism, democracy, and nationalism. He

had imagined that some kind of totalitarianism might be a better
option and had surveyed communism, fascism, and nazism as pos-
sible models. One by one, he had disassociated himself from these
instances of totalitarian regimes. That he had entertained both
Left and Right varieties of totalitarianism places him beyond the
tolerance of virtually the entire literary community then and now –
even, paradoxically, amongst those who share his critique of liber-
al, capitalist democracies (which today includes a significant por-
tion of the literary community).
Lewis’s difficulty, I think, so far as political engagement is con-
cerned, was that he has a reasonably coherent critique of his cul-
ture and society but has no strongly held positive beliefs or policies
that could replace the civilization in which he found himself and
which he regarded as bankrupt. Eliot, in contrast, had a positive set
of beliefs – Maurrasian conservatism, Anglicanism, and royalism –
in which he was comfortable. However narrow the appeal of that
accommodation among his contemporaries, it protected Eliot
from the sorts of political blunders into which Lewis and Pound fell
– and it permitted him to continue writing poems and plays
expressing those views in terms tolerable to an audience that did
not share them. Lewis’s lack of positive beliefs – as opposed to dis-
tinct dislikes – rendered him prone to identify with those individu-
als and movements that shared his dislikes. If we are to judge
Lewis’s political stance charitably, we must assess his dislikes rather
than his fleeting support for particular political movements.
Indeed, since he supported, in turn, bolshevism, fascism, nazism,
and finally “internationalism” – by which he meant some sort of
super-state, not unlike the European Union, which he did not live
to see – it is scarcely possible to characterize his political philoso-
phy by referring to his enthusiasms.
In this respect, Lewis is the truest conservative of the three,
since it is change itself that he finds objectionable. He is too clear-
sighted to imagine that change can be avoided, but he is also too
bloody-minded to accept change as a value in itself. He was torn
between the conviction that all change was illusory – merely a mat-
ter of the surface, while the fundamentals remained unchanged –
and the fear that a society and a culture could – indeed had –
become so addicted to change that it could no longer perceive or
Looking Back 271
imagine that solid fundament underneath it all. Had he been of a

mystical, or even religious, cast of mind he might have rested con-
tent in the notion that, despite the superficiality of mass culture,
an elite could maintain contact with that fundament and commu-
nicate its essence to the masses through ritual and sacrament.
Eliot and Pound both managed to satisfy themselves in some such
manner.
But Lewis was the complete sceptic. He could not participate in
the Romantic notion that some sort of sub-intellectual or sub-con-
scious communication took place between artist and audience.
Unwilling to postulate quasi-mystical access to the noumenal
realm, Lewis was constrained to insist that the surface of things was
all that there was. He made this point quite explicitly in Time and
Western Man:
we are surface-creatures only, and by nature are meant to be

only that, if there is any meaning in nature. No metaphysician
goes the whole length of departure from the surface condition
of mind – that fact is not generally noticed ... We are surface-crea-
tures, and the “truths” from beneath the surface contradict our values.
It is among the flowers and leaves that our lot is cast, and the
roots, however “interesting,” are not so ultimate for us. For us
the ultimate thing is the surface, the last-comer, and that is
committed to a plurality of being. So what in a sense we have
arrived at, is for practical reasons, the opposite to the conclu-
sions of Kant’s “practical reason.”19 For the same reason we
think it is most true and better to say there is no God. (387–8,
my emphasis.)
The italicized sentence reveals the conundrum Lewis faced. He

believed in permanent “truths,” but did not believe – as Kant and
Hegel did – that those truths are, or can be, instantiated in human
societies. For Lewis those permanent truths “contradict our values.”
Lewis was permanently conflicted on these points, for he was
committed to art as not just a decorative and therapeutic activity
but one that had serious cognitive content that could be expressed
in no other way. Earlier in Time and Western Man he articulated a
view pretty well contrary to that we have just examined: “If you
want to know what is actually occurring inside, underneath, at the
centre, at any given moment, art is a truer guide than ‘politics,’

more often than not. Its movements represent, in an acuter form,
a deeper emotional truth, though not discursively.” In contrasting
art to politics, he expresses the truthfulness of art hypothetically:
“So if art has a directer [sic] access to reality, is a truer and less arti-
ficial and more like what it naturally grows out of, than are poli-
tics, it seems a pity that it should take its cue from them” (120,
original emphasis).
V
Conclusion
Eliot’s assessment of himself and Lewis in a letter of June 1919 –

“Lewis is not a sham, but a simple natural innocent, like myself”
(Letters, 303) – is compatible with Lewis’s assessment of Pound in
Time and Western Man as a “revolutionary simpleton.” All three men
were babes in the woods in the realm of political philosophy and
realpolitik. Lewis was more outspoken than Eliot, and more sensible
and prudent than Pound. They were all anti-democratic, as is fre-
quently alleged. But we should remember that popular democracy
was a new thing in their lifetime. That they should have been sus-
picious of it is hardly surprising – however much we may disap-
prove of their failure to acknowledge the wisdom of the masses.
They should have cited the democratic installation of Hitler as
Führer in Germany as corroboration of their distrust of democra-
cy, but they did not. Instead, they continued to inveigh against
Britain, France, and the United States as examples of the failure of
democracy, while pointing to the Soviet Union as the real threat to
civilization and freedom.
It is, I think, because they thought like artists rather than like
political scientists, that they failed to recognize that the tyranny of
such men as Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler represented a
much greater threat to peace, order, and good government than
the putative oligarchies of the liberal democracies. It is perhaps
admirable that they believed that it was the duty and glory of the
artist to, as we say today, “speak truth to power.” But the day when
the intelligentsia could determine public policy was past – if it ever
existed. In popular democracies political power was widely dissem-
inated amongst a variegated electorate, “captains of industry”

(including the media) and a professional civil service in addition to
the politicians themselves. While governing elites still existed, they
were more concerned with mass opinion than with the opinions of
an educated “clerisy” – to use Eliot’s term (borrowed from
Coleridge) in The Idea of a Christian Society. And elite artists like
Lewis, Pound, and Eliot were useless for either gauging or manip-
ulating mass opinion. The Americans, at least, had been born into
a nation governed by an educated minority, most of whom had
read the same books, attended the same three or four universities,
and adhered to much the same political and ethical principles.
Britain was very similar, with the difference of an influential aris-
tocracy – even though most peers were men of commerce and
industry raised to the peerage, or their sons. But that world was
rapidly disappearing, being displaced – as they recognized – by one
dominated by what Ortega y Gasset called “the masses” – an amor-
phous “crowd” thought to be amenable to manipulation through
the mass media, and impermeable to “ideas.”
Two principal factors governed their thinking about the world in
which they grew up. One might be called the theory of the avant-
garde, that is, the notion that each generation of artists was oblig-
ed to chart its own course, rejecting the practices and predilections
of the previous generation. The second factor was their perception
that they were experiencing unexampled changes in the human
environment caused by technical innovation that impacted not
only the details of daily life but also the very nature of culture.
Radio and the cinema created for the first time a mass culture, that
is, a culture not dependent on the written word but common to
large areas – in contrast to folk culture, which was necessarily local.
And, perhaps most important of all, these new media were not con-
stituted to express the considered thoughts of a single individual.
“Teams” of technical people, “creative” people, and performers
generate movies and radio programs.1 They saw these two factors
as representing a challenge to the status, role, and influence of the
traditional arts in which they hoped to excel. Just as painting
responded to photography by migrating away from representa-
tional verisimilitude, so literature migrated away from song and
story toward a fragmented presentation. Indeed Pound told his
father that the fragmented nature of his Cantos should be experi-
Conclusion 275
enced as one experiences the disembodied voices of a radio drama:

“Simplest parallel I can give is radio where you tell who is talking
by the noise they make.” (Beinecke, cited in Surette, A Light from
Eleusis, 126). They attacked the perceived demise of traditional cul-
ture with vigour and confidence.
However, all of that aesthetic/cultural energy was skewed and
ultimately perverted by what Tony Judt has called the long Euro-
pean civil war, 1914–45. Now we can see that war as essentially an
old-fashioned confrontation between nation states competing for
dominance, but contemporaries saw it as a struggle for civilization.
It was the duty of artists to speak for civilization. Unfortunately, our
trio was convinced from the outset that liberal, capitalist mass
democracy did not stand for civilization, and looked everywhere
else for someone or some group that did. From the perspective of
the twenty-first century, we have to conclude that they failed to find
any such saviour. Eliot’s choice of royalty and the Anglican Church
can be seen as harmless, but hardly compelling. Lewis bounced
from one tyrant to another, eventually giving up the game. Pound
alone found a saviour in Mussolini – a disastrous choice.
In 1952, once again looking back on World War I in The Writer
and the Absolute, Lewis confirmed Eliot’s judgment of their politi-
cal engagement in the immediate post-war period. “None of the
young writers, who had started publishing only a short time before
the war of 1914–18, or were beginning to write just before it, were
socialists. Politically they adhered to no particular theory of the
State, although highly unorthodox as writers.” Lewis claimed that
their alleged political innocence left them in a minority position
“when an extreme Socialist doctrine suddenly became a violent
fashion among the ‘post-war’ young.” The vogue of socialism “was
favourable for such veterans as Shaw and Wells, rather than for
them.” It was a different matter for himself, Pound, Eliot, and
Joyce “for whom,” he says, “the so-called Great War over, the main
period of their production was to begin ... Politics did not enter
into their scheme of things, as a first-line issue” (41–2, original
emphasis).
Of course, we can accept these assessments of their political
innocence only if we take “politics” to mean an engagement in par-
tisan politics. The preceding discussion has, I believe, demonstrat-
ed beyond doubt that from very early in their careers all three
feared the levelling tendencies of popular democracy and popular

culture – a fear they shared with most of their educated contem-
poraries, whether intellectuals or political actors. Marinetti and the
futurists are an outstanding exception. They vehemently embraced
the machine age and all that came with it – even the mass slaugh-
ter of men by machines in trench warfare. While it is true that Eliot
and Pound at least attempted to accommodate popular culture in
their own work, those efforts were abortive. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes
was never finished, and Pound’s cracker-barrel philosophizing was
largely confined to his prose and can hardly be judged a successful
accommodation to popular taste. Lewis’s novels – though rhetori-
cally conservative – never achieved a large readership.
While it would be wrong to claim that their engagement with
political thought was “innocent” in the sense that they should not
be held accountable for their views, at the same time, it was inef-
fectual. It was “innocent” in the sense that no one other than them-
selves was helped or harmed by it, and “ineffectual” in the sense
that their opinions and doctrines proved incapable of affecting the
march of events. Only Eliot managed to create a loyal band of fol-
lowers who continue to admire not only his art but also his reli-
gious, social, and political views. It would be egregiously unfair to
hold them as in any significant way responsible for the disasters of
the twentieth century. They were caught up in cultural, technolog-
ical, and political earthquakes beyond their capacity to understand
or influence.
It is fair to ask, “Who of their cohort group did better?” Lewis
claimed with some justice that their elders and their juniors alike
largely opted for communism or socialism. However much commu-
nism represented a well-intentioned political philosophy in the
hands of Marx and Engels, it proved to be little better than fas-
cism/nazism in the hands of Lenin and Stalin. Moreover, Marxist
communism offered no response at all to the challenge represent-
ed by the advent of the mass audience created by the cinema and
radio. Of course, most ordinary men and women in the West opted
for the status quo of liberal, democratic capitalism – at least until
the Great Depression. That trauma suffered by capitalist democra-
cies made the authoritarian ideology of fascism/nazism seem attrac-
tive to many ordinary citizens, as well as to intellectuals like Lewis,
Eliot, and Pound – all of whom feared the judgment of the ordinary
Conclusion 277
citizen. All three were also essentially internationalist in sentiment,

and hence were predisposed to reject the nationalism and xeno-
phobia that characterized fascism/nazism. Unfortunately that pre-
disposition was insufficient to prevent Pound from embracing Mus-
solini’s authoritarian regime. Pound was convinced that only a
benevolent dictator could combat the malign intentions of the
financial oligarchy that he imagined controlled nations. Pound’s
choice bespeaks very poor judgment, and his toleration of the
crimes of the Axis powers is far worse – evincing a serious ethical
lapse. Lewis was similarly tempted by dictators; but his moral com-
pass proved more reliable than Pound’s, and he renounced his sup-
port of Hitler when confronted with the suffering of Europe’s Jews.
Eliot had the same political and cultural predispositions as Lewis
and Pound, but those predispositions were trumped by his conver-
sion to Anglican Christianity. Unlike the other two, Eliot never con-
sidered communism a possible alternative to the allegedly oli-
garchic regimes of the capitalist democracies. Instead Eliot
adopted early, and never abandoned, the fantasy that it was possi-
ble to restore European Christendom consisting of kingdoms in
which contented peasants pursued a sempiternal way of life in har-
mony with the seasons. His reputation has suffered grievously for
that fantasy – not just because it is out of touch with modern reali-
ty but also because it has affinities with the heimisch world of the
blond, Aryan Volk of Nazi propaganda.
Where Eliot hoped for a return to Christendom, Pound looked
to the past for cultural and political models, which could be reno-
vated or “made new,” and suitable for a modern, industrial society.
He evinced no nostalgia for a pre-industrial society of uneducated
peasants showing due respect for their intellectual and social bet-
ters. He believed that a future free from poverty and toil was possi-
ble if only men of good will would stand up and put an end to the
oligarchy of financial and commercial interests who, he believed,
perpetuated poverty by their greed and lust for power. Although
Pound was not drawn to Marxism, his analysis of the future and
present state of mankind was not much different from that of Marx
and Engels. Where it differed was in Pound’s desire to preserve the
best of what we have inherited from our fore-parents (revised to
meet new circumstances), and to select the best of what has been
newly discovered or created.
In this vein, Pound stressed in an article of 1927 – before he had

plumped for Mussolini and fascism – that the “capitalist imperialist
state must be judged not only in comparison with unrealised
utopias, but with past forms of the state.” He listed “the feudal
order ... [and] the small city states both republican and despotic”
as alternatives. If the capitalist state could not match achievements
in “social justice” and in “art, science, literature” of those earlier
styles of governance, then he wrote, “the onus of proof goes against
it” (“The State,” Exile Spring, 1927 in Selected Prose of Ezra Pound,
214). But, as we have seen, Pound ultimately chose the “unrealised
utopia” of fascist Italy, leaving Eliot to champion the feudal order.
Pound’s disastrous choices demonstrate that a sensible strategy
of selection is no guarantee that one will make wise choices, and
Pound did not. Confucian political, social, and ethical thought may
be admirable in itself, but the Confucian emphasis on the central,
quasi-mystical role of the emperor was designed to guarantee sta-
bility and continuity, and is therefore ill-suited to the dynamic
nature that has marked European culture and society since the
Renaissance. Confucianism encouraged a simple-minded dualism
of the virtuous and the malignant to which Pound was tempera-
mentally predisposed, and which the social and political thought of
both communism and fascism/nazism encouraged. That way lay
disaster, and Pound went that way.
Pound’s politics of “us against them” fit the post-war confronta-
tion of “Democracy” and “Communism” much better than Eliot’s
vision of peasant, squire, and priest living contentedly in harmony
with the seasons. But Pound chose the wrong “us” and the wrong
“them.” Both Pound and Eliot found themselves to be “dead-
enders” in the Cold War period. Eliot prudently stopped lecturing
the public on political and cultural matters, and Pound was out of
circulation in St. Elizabeths. Eliot has not escaped condemnation
for his retrograde views, but his post-war career – indeed his entire
career – was much more successful than Pound’s.
Although Pound maintained his allegiance to fascism while at St.
Elizabeths, and for some time after his return to Italy, he did even-
tually see the error of his ways and registered his regret on two
occasions. The first was a 1963 interview with the Italian journalist
Grazia Livi. He told her that he had “arrived at doubt too late.” She
pursued the point, asking him, if that great doubt had come to you
Conclusion 279
before, how could you have directed your life, your work?” In his
answer, Pound renounced his entire political enterprise: “I would
have avoided so many mistakes! My intentions were good but I
missed the means of attaining them. I was stupid as a telescope
looked through from the wrong end. Knowledge came too late.
The certainty of knowing nothing came too late” (“Interview with
Ezra Pound,” 42). The translator, Jean McClean, doubts the
authenticity of the quotation, but I see no reason to doubt it.
Indeed, Pound’s assessment of his political activities is in accor-
dance with my own.
The other occasion was in a conversation with Michael Reck and
Allen Ginsberg in Venice five years later. He shocked his two admir-
ers by asserting: “my poems don’t make sense.” Pound was mostly
silent at that time, but he went on to denounce his own work: “My
writing. Stupid and ignorant all the way through. Stupid and igno-
rant.” In response to their remonstrance that his poetry was won-
derful, Pound added: “Any good I’ve done has been spoiled by bad
intentions – the pre-occupation with irrelevant and stupid things.
... But the worst mistake I made was that stupid suburban prejudice
of anti-Semitism” (Reck, 27–8).
Pound’s “apology” was well received by Reck and Ginsberg, but
not by everyone. Pound’s admirers like Jean McClean – not sur-
prisingly – are loath to accept Pound’s dismissal of so much of his
work. And Pound’s detractors – equally unsurprisingly – are unwill-
ing to accept such a late apology as sufficient recompense for
Pound’s long-standing identification with Italian fascism and sym-
pathy for German nazism – even its virulent anti-Semitism. Pound’s
admission of error is better than persistence in error, but it cer-
tainly came much too late. One would like to know what prompted
Pound’s change of heart, given that he persisted in his identifica-
tion with the Axis nations throughout his time at St. Elizabeths.
One can only speculate that his removal from the paranoid hang-
ers-on that peopled his afternoons on the lawn at St. Elizabeths per-
mitted him to see that the victors in the war were not as evil as he
and his hangers-on imagined them to be.
Lewis’s reputation was never as great as that of either of his
friends. His literary and painterly achievements have never been
granted the prominence enjoyed by the literary achievements of
Eliot and Pound. Although Eliot – and Pound more so – have their
influential detractors in the academy, their place in the canon

remains firm, if diminished. Lewis’s political affiliations were less
fixed that either Eliot’s or Pound’s, but his political views were
nonetheless those of a dead-ender. His commitment to a quixotic
polemic against philosophical relativism, and virtually the whole of
modern science which underpins it, was amateurish, though heart-
felt. But, as with Pound, it led him into dangerous and reprehensi-
ble enthusiasms. He had the good sense finally to drop all of that,
but in so doing he was obliged to discard the core of his opposition
to modernity. That said, Lewis’s involvement in ideological
polemics was motivated as much by his horror of the senseless
slaughter of modern warfare as it was by his dread of the levelling
of popular democracy. Both concerns are prominent in the early
work, The Art of Being Ruled, where he “showed, that these democ-
ratic masses could be governed without a hitch by suggestion and
hypnotism – Press, Wireless, Cinema. So what need is there, that
was my humane contention, to slaughter them?” (Time and Western
Man, 120). And his sympathetic response to the suffering of the
Jews of Warsaw is testimony to a moral compass that was evidently
superior to that of his two friends.
As an unreconstructed Pollyanna, Pound, alone of the three,
maintained his social and cultural views from the first decades of
the century well into the Cold War period. Those views were often
wrong-headed, and never coherent, but Pound’s career represents
a quixotic effort to formulate the Modern Age. As he said of him-
self in the 1962 Paris Review interview, “I am writing to resist the
view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being
‘crucified for an idea’ – the coherent idea around which my mud-
dles accumulated – it is probably the idea that European culture
ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along
with whatever other cultures, in whatever universality” (Plimpton,
57). In this respect Pound stands aside from his friends who want-
ed to preserve European culture as a pure strain – though they dis-
agreed about just what that pure strain was. For Lewis it must
exclude the “oriental” relativism he saw infecting European abso-
lutism. For Eliot it was the purity of a society in which belief and
knowledge were “integrated” – as they had been in the medieval
period. But Pound’s project was to create a hybrid culture combin-
ing Western science and economics with Confucian ethics and
Conclusion 281
political structure. Of course, Pound was woefully inadequate to

the task of concocting a new hybrid culture and civilization – as
even the most able would have been. The fact that he set out on
such a quixotic task supports the diagnosis of egomania by the gov-
ernment psychiatrists who found him unfit to stand trial.
None of these men, in my view, can be seen as reliable guides to
toward a new social and political accommodation suitable to the
unprecedented social, economic, and technological conditions of
the twentieth century. That they felt qualified to offer themselves
as such places them among the Romantic artist-geniuses who also
believed they saw more, and with greater clarity, than ordinary
mortals. To the Romantic hubris they added a Victorian convic-
tion that they could offer moral and ideological guidance to their
readers. Their dismissal of their Romantic and Victorian forebears
was largely on grounds that the Victorians at least would have
understood – essentially the historicist claim that new times
require new ideas.
Their self-perception as men qualified to show the way to others
stands as a cautionary tale for those who persist in the Romantic
view that artists somehow possess a wisdom denied to scientists,
philosophers, scholars, clerics, entrepreneurs, engineers, lawyers,
and the ordinary men and women in the street. As Pound put it:
“The artist, the maker is always too far ahead of any revolution, or
reaction, or counter-revolution or counter-reaction for his vote to
have an immediate result; and no party programme ever contains
enough of his programme to give him the least satisfaction” (“The
State,” Selected Prose, 215). And in Jefferson and/or Mussolini he had
claimed that Mussolini was himself an artist: “Treat him as artifex
and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything save the
artist and you will get muddled with contradictions” (34).
In The Hitler Cult, Lewis’s palinode for having published Hitler,
Lewis in his turn compared the tyrant to the artist, but less flatter-
ingly: “The genus ‘artist’ is volatile, nervous, prone to emotional
excesses.” Lewis goes on to demean politicians for being just as
devoid of training and intelligence as the artist: “politics and art
have much in common. Both are occupations that demand very lit-
tle intelligence and no training to speak of; both are a refuge for
people who could shine in no other walk of life – for human throw-
outs in short” (The Hitler Cult, 78, 75). Readers of Apes of God,
Lewis’s satirical portrait of the interwar London artistic and literary

scene, will recognize the satirist in these remarks. In that work his
target was the London artistic circles, among them Bloomsbury,
which cautiously welcomed Eliot, but neither Lewis nor Pound: “It
is even possible that the English were the first in the field with the
Ape art-type. The notorious amateurism of the anglo-saxon mind
makes this doubly likely. In Bloomsbury it takes the form of a select
and snobbish club. Its foundation-members consisted of monied
middleclass descendants of victorian literary splendour ... In their
discouragement of too much unconservative originality they are
very strong. The tone of ‘society’ (of a spurious donnish social ele-
gance) prevails among them. Where they have always differed has
been in their all without exception being Apes of God” (Apes of
God, 131–2).
Hitler (1931) was written just after Lewis completed Apes of God
(1924–30), and represented an advance over that satirical work
only to the extent that he now ridiculed all artists, not just Blooms-
bury, and added politicians. However, it was not the artist Lewis dis-
dained so much as the average man, the Mass, the consumer. And
he stuck to that disdain, repeating it in Rude Assignment: “in a
mixed society, the sciences and the arts have to be protected
against Caliban; against Matthew Arnold’s Philistine, Flaubert’s
Bourgeois, or Swift’s Yahoo. Or rather to protect them adequately
is an impossible task; the sciences are misdirected and misused, the
Arts scorned – debased, diluted, vulgarised, brought to the level of
an unintelligent pastime. Bitter impatience with the philistine or
the bourgeois it is natural to experience; but that is an emotion
very different in origin from a snobbish disdain. That is a distinc-
tion upon which I continue to insist” (203–4). Not all his readers
have been willing to grant Lewis this subtle distinction.
No doubt Lewis, Pound, and Eliot would have been wiser if they
had been content to articulate the human experience for the rest
of us who have had the experiences but missed the meaning.
Indeed, that was pretty much the way they originally perceived
their roles when young men. It was their misfortune that they lived
through a period of violent upheavals that they could not hope to
influence and could not understand – who could? The Cassandras
– Eliot and Lewis – feared the upheavals; Pound, the Pollyanna –
welcomed them, but understood them no better than his friends.
Conclusion 283
Those upheavals distracted them from the core function of the

artist – which I take to be to bear witness to the human condition
– and led them to enter the lists of men of action, in ill-found
hopes of influencing the future. They achieved little or nothing in
that respect and almost certainly damaged the legacy of their
achieved work. Nonetheless, it seems to me that their engagement
in political debate was well intentioned: none of them, not even
Pound, stood to gain personally from the political posture they
adopted – quite the contrary.
The champions of my three modernists would claim of them –
collectively or severally – a clear-sighted recognition of the dangers
confronting their culture and society. I have no claim for the per-
spicacity of their critiques of cultural and social trends in their
troubled period. Although I have refrained from condemning
them for their errors and ethical failures, I have not attempted to
disguise or excuse them. I have attempted to articulate their analy-
sis of cultural and social trends in such a way as to blunt accusations
of malign intentions on their part. All three participated in the not-
uncommon prejudice against Jews that considered them to be an
indigestible alien presence in the erstwhile Christian nations of
Europe and America, but Pound was the only one to endorse the
institutional anti-Semitism of the Nazis and later the fascists. Even
Pound did not go so far as to approve the “final solution;” but he
did denounce it very late in life.
Lewis fled England for Canada, the land of his birth, on the
advent of war in fear that his championing of Hitler would lead to
his internment – as happened to Oswald Mosley. But he wrote
nothing against the Allied cause during the war. And he renounced
his endorsement of Hitler in The Hitler Cult. For his part, Eliot
never flirted with fascism or nazism, and never wavered in his loy-
alty to Britain. He remained in London, and served as a fire war-
den during the Blitz. Pound, alone, threw in his lot with the Axis
powers during the war. Prior to Pearl Harbour, there was nothing
treasonous in his behaviour. He saw himself as condemning war,
convinced, as he was, that Britain and France had fomented the
conflict. His Italian residence, which exposed him to fascist propa-
ganda, no doubt made that delusion possible. But he had access to
French and British journals, which he peppered with letters to the
editor deploring their economic and foreign affairs policies right
up to the outbreak of hostilities. His hostility to the Allies was pri-

marily motivated by his conviction that they were acting in the
interest of international finance – dominated, he believed, by Jews.
As I indicate in the Appendix, Pound was not alone among self-per-
ceived loyal Americans in holding such views.
Both Eliot and Pound tried to imagine a better world than the
flawed one in which they found themselves. In this respect they
belong in the “society” of Utopian dreamers that includes William
Blake, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Morris
– to mention only their literary forbears. History has been justifi-
ably kinder to most of them, than to Pound at least, but Blake’s
singing the glories of the American revolution did little to endear
him to his countrymen, and Wordsworth’s youthful championing
of the French Revolution would have put him beyond the tolera-
tion of his contemporaries had he not withheld it in youth, and
withdrawn it in middle age. Lewis was not a Utopian, not a Pollyan-
na, but rather an unrepentant Cassandra whose darkest fears came
to fruition in the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. He
was the only one of the three to look frankly on the face of evil and
to recognize it for what it was – even though he was initially
seduced by its protective colouring. That he was also the only
British-raised of the three – though all were born in North Ameri-
ca – may, perhaps, account in part for his greater scepticism. More
likely though, what distinguished Lewis from the other two – apart
from matters of personality – was his experience of combat in
World War I.
appendix
An American Fascist
Anyone who looks at the state of political opinion in the democra-

cies in the 1930s will know that Pound, Eliot, and Lewis were not
alone among self-described “loyal” citizens of the democracies in
their distrust of capitalist democracy. Dissatisfied with the failure of
capitalist democracies to deliver either peace or prosperity, many
turned toward one or another variety of tyranny as a remedy. Nor
was Pound alone as a citizen of a democracy who became a radio
propagandist for the Axis powers. The Irish-American William
Joyce, broadcasting from Hamburg as “Lord Haw Haw” during the
war, was convicted of treason and executed by the British after the
war, despite the fact that he was not a subject of his Majesty, King
George VII. Also charged with treason was Iva Togari D’Aquino, a
Japanese American, and one of several women who broadcast in
English from Tokyo, collectively called “Tokyo Rose.” Unlike
Pound, she was convicted (in 1949), sentenced to ten years, which
she served. President Ford pardoned her in 1977, among more
prominent malefactors.
But there is little analogy between William Joyce and Ms
D’Aquino, on the one hand, and Pound on the other, for the for-
mer were anonymous individuals chosen for their linguistic skills
and largely motivated by pecuniary needs. Pound, in contrast,
broadcast in his own person as a literary celebrity, and was largely
motivated by his political convictions. Noel Stock notes that Pound
lobbied for two years to get access to a microphone in order to pro-
mulgate his political and economic views, but he acknowledges
that Pound, like William Joyce and Ms D’Aquino, also needed the
money he was paid for the broadcasts (Stock 390–1).
286 Appendix
Another American Fascist sympathizer who was motivated by his

political convictions is the mostly forgotten black American,
Lawrence Dennis. Dennis never had access to a broadcast studio,
but he was a vigorous print propagandist for the virtues of tyranny,
and the exposure of the bankrupt state of capitalist democracies.
He was a little younger than the artists we have been examining,
having been born on Christmas day 1893 in Atlanta, Georgia to
a woman of mixed African and Amerindian ancestry and a father
of mixed French and Amerindian ancestry. Although he had
rather kinky hair, he kept it short and was sufficiently pale of skin
to pass as white – which he did for almost all his adult life (Horne
18 et seq). That he “passed” so successfully as an adult is all the
more remarkable in that he had an early career as a black child
evangelist. A heading in the 9 January 1899 New York Times read,
“Negro Child’s Preaching; Crowds at Mount Olivet Church to
Hear Lawrence Dennis.” He toured the usa and even travelled to
Europe as a child preacher in 1904.
After obtaining a scholarship to the Phillips Exeter Academy,
Dennis put his career as a black child preacher behind him, even
cutting off relations with his family. He entered Harvard as a white
student, interrupting his studies to serve in France in 1917 as an
infantry lieutenant. He remained in Europe for some time after
the war before returning to Harvard, graduating in 1920. He
entered the U.S. diplomatic service and served as chargé d’affaires
in Haiti, Romania, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Unlike Lewis, who
was radicalized by his wartime experience in the army, Dennis
seems not to have been much affected by his brief military service.
It was his experience of American economic colonialism during a
1926 Nicaraguan revolution that radicalized him. He resigned
from the diplomatic service shortly after his Nicaraguan assign-
ment – in 1927 (Stimely).
He then took up a career as a journalist. He had the good for-
tune to have published several articles critical of the excesses of
Wall Street in the Leftist journal the New Republic just before the
crash of 1929. Those articles launched Dennis’s reputation as an
economic and political commentator. Unlike Pound, Dennis did
not identify himself with either the Left or the Right, melding the
two as equivalent opponents of democratic capitalism – much as
Lewis did (although Lewis ultimately abandoned communism).
An American Fascist 287
However, it was his support of fascism/nazism that got Dennis into

trouble. His role as associate editor of the fortnightly journal The
Awakening, which was “issued in New York by an American fascist
group” backed by Mussolini (Horne 47) did not help. Throughout
his considerable polemical writing, Dennis promoted fas-
cism/nazism and communism as equally viable alternatives to
democratic capitalism. As with Eliot and Lewis, the principal issue
for him was the dysfunctional state of democratic capitalism. His
1936 book, The Coming American Fascism, exhibits a tolerance for
virtually any sort of critique of the status quo in the democracies.
He endorses Fascist, Communist, and even Catholic critics (no
doubt he had Father Coughlin in mind): “Broadly generalizing,
one may say that, in modern Christendom, only reformers thinking
in the framework of the Roman Catholic faith, and the various
schools of modern fascist and communist thought, have consis-
tently and seriously attempted to work out social solutions in terms
of an all-embracing social synthesis” (chapter I).
Like Pound, Dennis admired Huey Long and Father Coughlin.
He even visited Long in Baton Rouge, and boasted that Long read
his publications (Horne 51). Cementing his identification as a Fas-
cist sympathizer, Dennis defended fascism in a broadcast debate
held in the Manhattan Town Hall on 30 May 1945 in which the
merits of socialism, capitalism, communism, and fascism were
debated. As Horne reports: “In his rebuttal, Dennis did not retreat.
‘I consider Senator Long, Father Coughlin ... and other champions
of the discontent of the people as precursors of fascism ... I salute
Senator Long, Father Coughlin and a great many other honest
leaders ... I don’t agree with their particular views entirely,’ he said,
leaving himself a narrow escape route, but ‘[they] deserve to be
heard and will be heard’” (Horne 54).
Thus, despite a radically different background – racially, socially,
and professionally – Lawrence Dennis adopted a political posture
very similar to those adopted by our trio of European based artists.
Politically, he is closest to Pound in that he persisted in his support
of the Axis powers even after Pearl Harbour. And, like Pound, he
was punished for that behaviour, being indicted for sedition – not
treason, as was the charge against Pound – on 25 July 1942. He was
one of thirty accused, amongst whom was William Dudley Pelley.
Pelley is of marginal interest in our story since he was the founder
288 Appendix
of the Fascist organization the Silvershirts and editor of the journal

Liberation, a copy of which Louis Zukofsky had sent Pound in 1934.
Pelley’s article in that issue, “The Mystery of the Civil War and
Lincoln’s Death,” triggered Pound’s belief in a Jewish conspiracy –
as I demonstrated in Pound and Purgatory (252–5). However, Den-
nis had no association with Pelley or the Silvershirts, and, unlike
Pelley and Pound, was not a believer in a Jewish plot to control the
world.
Pelley, prior to his indictment for sedition with Dennis, had
already been convicted of the same charge and sentenced to fifteen
years. Another of the accused, George Sylvester Viereck, had also
been convicted previously and sentenced “for failure to register as
a German agent.” And a third of the co-accused, Gerhard W.
Kunze, had been convicted and sentenced to fifteen years. In A
Trial on Trial, an account of the trial published in 1946, co-written
by Maximilian St. George (one of the defence lawyers) and Dennis,
the authors claim that the inclusion of individuals already convict-
ed of sedition was a ploy to tar the others by association (St. George
and Dennis 73). Their defence was that Dennis, at least, was guilty
of no offence and that the charge of sedition was so vague as to be
impossible of proof. We will never know if their arguments would
have prevailed because the presiding judge, Chief Justice Edward
C. Eicher, died in his sleep on 30 November 1944, forcing a mis-
trial. However, the authorities never sought to re-indict (St. George
and Dennis 43).
The highly charged nature of ideological opinion at the time is
illustrated by the career of Hermann Rauschning, the star witness
called to the stand by the chief prosecutor, John Rogge. Rauschn-
ing was a former Nazi leader in Danzig who, renouncing nazism,
fled to the United States and published Conversations with Hitler in
1940 (entitled The Voice of Destruction in the United States). It was
an account of private conversations Rauschning allegedly had with
Hitler between 1932 and 1934. Rogge called him as a witness be-
cause of his intimate knowledge of Nazi ideology.
Rauschning’s career demonstrates the opportunism in the
behaviour of so many individuals in the convoluted political world
of the thirties and forties. Although Rauschning’s Conversations with
Hitler was entered as evidence at the Nuremberg trials, as well as in
Dennis’ sedition trial, it was later revealed by the Swiss historian
Wolfgang Hänel in The Journal of Historical Review 4 (Fall 1983),

that the book was a hoax. Hänel discovered that it had been com-
missioned by New York and London publishers as a propaganda
weapon – although it is not clear that the publishers knew Rauschn-
ing fabricated the conversations with Hitler from various published
statements plus some pure inventions. Despite the book’s fraudu-
lent nature, “Virtually every major biography of Adolf Hitler or his-
tory of the Third Reich,” Mark Weber observes, “quotes from the
memoir of Hermann Rauschning” (Weber, 1983) and it is still fre-
quently invoked by various fringe groups as evidence of Hitler’s evil
or prescience – depending of the bias of the individual citing it –
as a cursory search of the Web will reveal.
Rauschning’s story should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone
confident that it is easy to separate the angels from the devils in the
political landscape of the thirties. I do not mean to deny that the
Nazi regime was evil, but I do mean to remind my readers that the
communist regime of Stalin – one of the Allies – was only margin-
ally less evil. In addition, we need to admit that in the heat of the
conflict the democracies behaved in ways that were not always
admirable. The dispossession and internment of individuals of
Japanese descent in the United States and Canada is only the most
egregious domestic injustice. German and Italian nationals in the
Allied nations were also interned, and some dispossessed. None,
however, were brutalized or executed merely for being Japanese,
German, or Italian as were Jews, Gypsies, and Poles in Nazi-occu-
pied Europe. While the oppression was mild in Britain, Canada,
and the United States as compared to Germany, the Soviet Union,
or Italy, it was nonetheless oppression.
Unfortunately for Rogge, Rauschning did not corroborate the
prosecution’s theory that Dennis’s writings expressed Nazi ideolo-
gy. St. George and Dennis cite the following demurral by Rauschn-
ing (139. My emphasis):
Yes, he says, even if I am not quite right, he uses the words, the
American brand, or something like this, of National Socialism
exactly this National Socialism of Germany, but to put it in con-
trast to International socialism. But as a whole, this book gave me
the impression that we are on the threshold of the decline of Western civ-
ilization and that the old principles of our order are outmoded. Now if
290 Appendix
I may say, objectively, that the real thesis of this book is working
in the line of National Socialism in the propaganda of Hitler.
Out of the book alone one cannot say that the author is making
National Socialist propaganda but definitely he is anti-democra-
tic. He is more for a new order.
I have italicized two sentences of his testimony because, in my

judgment, they represent a fair and judicious description of Den-
nis’ political posture. Like Pound, Lewis, and Eliot, Dennis was dis-
tinctly anti-democratic, and looked forward to a new political
order, but he was motivated primarily by his conviction that demo-
cratic capitalism was dysfunctional rather than by a particular fond-
ness for the policies of Stalin, Mussolini, or Hitler. He was closer to
Eliot and Lewis than to Pound, for Pound did persuade himself
that Mussolini was pursuing wise and benevolent policies.
As we will see, it was a dictatorial or oligarchic order that Dennis
hoped to see established in the United States. He saw Mussolini’s
Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Soviet Union as versions of a
new political order – seriously flawed but nonetheless preferable to
the status quo of the capitalist democracies. He regarded all of
them as unavoidable transitional stages between democratic capi-
talism and a very imperfectly articulated benevolent meritocracy.
And, like Pound, Dennis reminded his readers repeatedly that an
American fascism need not be bellicose and tyrannical like the
European versions. For example in The Dynamics of War and Revolu-
tion (1940), he describes the desired polity in terms that Pound
would have found compatible with Social Credit emphasis on tech-
nological imperatives:
The new revolution everywhere stands for redistribution and

reorganization in line with the technological imperatives of the
machine age. The cause of the Allies is that of counter-revolu-
tion. It upholds the status quo and opposes redistribution
according to the indications of need, capacity for efficient uti-
lization of resources and social convenience. It seeks to reverse
in Europe the dominant trends, technological and political, of
the past century and, more particularly, of the past two or three
decades. The democracies have displayed their inability to uti-
lize their resources in a way to end unemployment. But they
now propose a crusade in the name of moral absolutes to pre-

vent worldwide redistribution of raw materials and economic
opportunities. The real issue before America may be stated as being
one of achieving redistribution at home or fighting it abroad. (Dynam-
ics, 216, my emphasis)
I have argued that Pound, Lewis, and Eliot were motivated by

three leading anxieties – though not in the same degree for each
of them. Those anxieties were 1) a distaste for, and fear of, popu-
lar democracy; 2) a conviction that capitalism was incapable of
delivering prosperity for all; and 3) a belief that popular democ-
racy and capitalism together promoted wars. We have already sur-
veyed those motives for Pound, Eliot, and Lewis in some detail.
The objective of the discussion of Dennis is to discover the degree
to which his concerns and remedies coincide with theirs. Such a
comparison is of interest simply because Dennis’s background,
education, and life experience is so very different from the three
European-based artists. He is considerably younger, is a black
American living in the United States, and a former diplomat with
first-hand experience of American imperialist behaviour in Cen-
tral America.
As the citation above indicates, Dennis’s concerns were very sim-
ilar to those of Pound, Lewis, and Eliot. He distrusted popular
democracy, was convinced that capitalism could not deliver pros-
perity for all, and believed that war was an inevitable consequence
of the economic imperatives of capitalism. However, Dennis was
more forthright – one might even say more clear-headed – than
even Lewis, the most capable political observer of the three artists.
Dennis’ clear-headedness, however, was his greatest weakness as a
propagandist. For example, in the preface to his study The Dynam-
ics of War and Revolution: A Study of the Hidden Economic Origins of
Conflict, published shortly before Pearl Harbour, he equates Ger-
man concentration camps with unemployment in the United
States: “The Nazis cannot say that concentration camps are alien to
their system and Americans cannot say that chronic unemploy-
ment is alien to our system. Facts are normative” (xxviii). Although
Nazi concentration camps were not yet death camps in 1940, such
a comparison could not have gained him many converts amongst
his American audience.
292 Appendix
As already noted, unlike Pound, Lewis, and Eliot, Dennis saw no

great difference between fascism and communism: “In the theory
of this book communism (Russian style), fascism, and Nazism are
merely different national variants of socialism.” And he saw all
three as characterized by a combination of “many of the features of
capitalism, laissez-faire and the free market with socialism, state
capitalism and planning” (Dynamics, xxx). In short, Dennis per-
ceived the regimes in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union as
essentially the sort of mixed economy that Britain and France
became after 1945, taking the full name of the Nazi party (“Nation-
al Socialism”) seriously. Dennis overlooked the belligerence of the
Italian, German, and Soviet regimes toward their neighbours, and
the brutality of all three regimes toward their own citizens – fea-
tures not characteristic of post-war Britain and France – but he did
not overlook the eager seizure of the remnants of the Ottoman
Empire by the French and British in 1919, nor, of course, the pre-
existing colonies of Britain and France in Asia. In short, he was
selective in his condemnations.
The only difference Dennis sees between fascism and Nazism on
the one hand and communism on the other is their “manner of
coming into operation. A vital element of the Fascist and Nazi way
of coming to power was the taking of the big businessmen and mid-
dle classes into the socialist camp without resistance and, even, with
enthusiasm on their part for a revolutionary movement which they
lacked the social intelligence to understand” (Dynamics, xxxi). But
most important for Dennis was his agreement with the critique of
democratic capitalism mounted by the Fascists and Nazis: “Hitler’s
revolutionary genius has consisted in understanding since the war
[that is, World War I], as no liberal democratic leaders anywhere
have understood, that capitalism is doomed, and in having always
a will to do concrete things about it. Given an understanding of the
situation and a will to action, plans and their execution follow as
matters of course. Whatever else it may be, the result is action
which is the only cure for stagnation” (Dynamics, xxv). Like Pound,
Eliot, and Lewis, then, Dennis was motivated more by the shared
perception that capitalist democracy has failed than by the partic-
ular ideological features of communism, fascism, or Nazism.
As a consequence, he largely neglects the negative aspects of the
European fascist and communist regimes. His argument is essen-
tially that the democracies were no better – were just as belligerent,

and just as careless of the welfare of their citizens. And he points
out – with some justice – that the history of such democracies as
Britain, France, and the United States is one of conquest and
exploitation: “The liberal ideologist would have us believe that the
new revolution of socialism is an orgy of blood and anarchy burst-
ing upon the idyll of democratic peace, traditionalism and stabili-
ty. The tradition of democracy is revolution; its essence, change
and expansion; its characteristic incidents, territorial aggrandise-
ment and easy wars” (Dynamics, 14).
He points out, with more acumen than any of our artists, that the
spread of commercialism and industrialism by Britain in the nine-
teenth century was itself a world revolution, and further claims that
it is analogous to the revolution being preached severally by the
Communists, Fascists, and Nazis. The earlier revolution, he says,
“was imposed by coercion with the aid of a [British] world monop-
oly of sea power, maritime shipping, banking and industry” (15).
Dennis believed that war is the inevitable consequence of industri-
al capitalism because war was the only means industrial capitalism
has of maintaining its plants at full capacity so as to maintain full
employment (Dynamics, 17). As we have seen, these arguments
were familiar ones amongst pre-World War I analysts of European
industrial nations such as Hobson, Brailsford, and Angell, and were
echoed by Major Douglas. But Dennis does not cite any of these
British writers. The writers he identified are American and conti-
nental rather than British: Frederick Jackson Turner, Vilfredo Pare-
to, Oswald Spengler, and Thorstein Veblen. Obvious omissions are
Marx and Engels.
Dennis noted that Communists, Socialists, Fascists and Nazis
shared a critique of democratic capitalism as oppressive, exploita-
tive, and dysfunctional, and that they invoked that assessment as
justification for their “revolutions.” What he does not note is that
the remedies brought to the table were very different for each of
them – even though he was certainly not ignorant of that fact. Den-
nis was far too cynical for his own good, being willing to see Hitler’s
ideological posture as mere political manoeuvering: “The anti-
communist line got the capitalists, the anti-Versailles line got the
army and the nationalists, the anti-Semitic line got the masses as
well as the classes while, at the same time, sugar-coating the initial
294 Appendix
ill of anti-capitalism” (Dynamics, xxxiv). Dennis’s assessment of

Hitler as a canny, unprincipled politician, rather than as the obses-
sive, power hungry, and homicidal racist that he was, is an error dif-
ficult to overlook or forgive. However, we must admit that Dennis’s
assessment of Hitler was not as egregious – nor particularly uncom-
mon, even in 1940 – as it would be in 1943 and later. Dennis’s
assessment of Hitler is very similar to Lewis’s in 1930, but which he
abandoned in the 1939 Hitler Cult. What Dennis said of Hitler is
probably true of Mussolini and Huey Long – both of whom were
admired by Dennis. Dennis apparently believed that these selfishly
motivated politicians could nonetheless serve the public interest –
on the dubious grounds that they could lead their citizens only
where most of them wished to go in any case.
Dennis’s rule that the enemy of his enemy is his friend explains
his promiscuous approval of a range of mutually hostile ideologies
and regimes. For example, where Pound – after an initial brief
honeymoon – fulminated against the Roosevelt administration in
his polemical writings and broadcasts, Dennis praised Roosevelt for
advancing the economic and political revolution he (Dennis)
desired, comparing him favourably to Hitler and Stalin: “President
Roosevelt has driven more nails into the coffin of economic free-
dom in America than Hitler and Stalin. He has laid the institu-
tional and bureaucratic foundations of the new revolution in
America. Yet he may lead America into war against the new revolu-
tion in Europe which has gone a little further than he has yet had
time or need to go in this country” (Dynamics, 174). In this respect,
he is in agreement with the more virulent Republican attacks of the
day on the Roosevelt administration as fundamentally socialist. Of
course Dennis disapproves of the “economic freedom” Roosevelt’s
opponents wished to preserve, regarding it as freedom to enslave
and impoverish the majority of mankind. But both Dennis and the
radical Republicans wanted the United States to stay out of the war.
It is worth another citation to demonstrate Dennis’s views on the
question of economic freedom, and at the same time his reckless
rhetorical strategy of attacking on several fronts at once. (The
advocates of free love, of course, are the American Communists):
I have no hesitation or reservations whatsoever in declaring cat-

egorically that I personally find the ethics of economic freedom
and individualism, as applied in today’s America, as despicable

and intolerable as the ethics of free love. I make this statement
forcefully because I am aware that my views and the way of
totalitarian collective discipline are now being denounced
generally in this land on supposedly high moral grounds.
(Dynamics, 179)
Fortunately, his critics were unaware at that date that Dennis was
vigorously promiscuous (heterosexually), a behaviour that would
have exposed him to an ad hominem response.
Like Pound, Dennis’s political posture is motivated principally by
his belief that technological developments had made it possible to
achieve universal prosperity, and his belief that it was the nature of
capitalism to co-opt the increased wealth it created for the few,
denying the masses the prosperity now available to them as a result
of technological developments. Both men concluded that the fail-
ure of capitalist democracies to deliver prosperity rendered politi-
cal revolution necessary. As we have seen Dennis regarded the
“cause of the Allies” to be one of “counter-revolution.”
Although a more cogent, lucid, and concise statement of the
issue than anything Pound – or even Lewis – ever wrote, Dennis’s
assessment is essentially the same as theirs. Eliot was more con-
cerned with cultural and religious issues than his friends, or Den-
nis, but Eliot would not have disagreed with the economic assess-
ment on which Dennis based his political affinities. Where Dennis
differs significantly is in his apparent belief that Nazism/fascism or
communism promised “world-wide redistribution of raw materials
and economic opportunities.”
So far as I have been able to discover, neither Eliot nor Lewis
took note of Dennis, but Pound did comment on him in his radio
broadcast of 22 August (Ycal Box 130 of an uncertain year, possi-
bly 1944). Pound began by comparing Dennis – somewhat ambiva-
lently – to Brooks Adams: “Lawrence Dennis is not yet a Brooks
Adams/ at least I don’t think so.” Pound was responding to a Den-
nis article that appeared in the spring issue of the Examiner. I have
not found the article, but, judging from Pound’s remarks, Dennis
is pushing pretty much the argument I have outlined above.
Predictably, Pound complains that Dennis has not got “down to
the natr/ of money.” In addition, he is disappointed that Dennis
296 Appendix
“does not keep hammerin on simple elements of the problem/

such as the great betrayal of the U.S. by Ikleheimer and Sherman/
in the 1860s” (Pound’s emphasis). This last remark is a reference to
the infamous (and non-factual) intervention of European bankers
in the American Civil War, which Pound found in Willis A. Over-
holser’s, A Short Review of the History of Money in the United States. (See
my Pound in Purgatory for details of Pound’s reading of Overholser.)
Some of his dissatisfaction with Dennis derives from Pound’s
poor grasp of economic discourse. For example, after summarizing
Dennis’s criticism of the disastrous policy of the Bank of England
in its intervention in support of the pound sterling in the late twen-
ties, which caused a collapse of British exports, Pound complained
that Dennis did not explain what he means by “intervention.”
Pound muses that he might mean “intervention in Europe and
Asia/ which countries the interventioners know very little about.”
Clearly Pound supposes that Dennis is speaking of some sort or mil-
itary – or perhaps commercial – action external to Britain, when
Dennis is using the term, “intervention,” in the standard way of
economists to mean the efforts of a central bank to support its cur-
rency by buying it on the open market.
After registering this uncomprehending complaint, Pound
moves toward a conclusion of his assessment of Dennis by appeal-
ing to an opaque analogy, rejecting Dennis’s support of the New
Deal and his praise of Fascists and Nazis:
We see so many people tinkerin trying gadgets borrowed

from fascism. Without any motor/trying to have a corporate
movement/ or taking over spare parts of Italian and German
mechanisms without any motor and engine; cant make an
automobile out of gear shifts and stearin [sic] wheels/ which is
what Rosefield [Roosevelt] and his brain rusters [trusters]
tried to do.
The “Brain Trust” was a group of American businessmen whom

Roosevelt brought in to his administration. Also called “Dollar-A-
Year Men” because they were paid only that token amount. Pound’s
point – such as it is – is that Roosevelt’s New Deal was insufficient-
ly radical in its policies. Since he speaks of a “corporate move-
ment,” he presumably faulted the New Deal because it was not cor-
poratist, as Mussolini’s fascism purported to be. (Mussolini’s cor-

poratism was derived from George Sorel’s syndicalism, which envis-
aged a political system based on industrial and craft unions, or syn-
dics. However, Mussolini’s corporatism amounted to the
government taking over unions and dictating terms advantageous
to employers.) Pound – who knew nothing of industry or trade –
never understood how corporatism worked in Italy. In point of fact,
the Roosevelt administration did introduce legislation making it
easier for workers to organize and negotiate better terms with their
employers, but Pound was oblivious to all such details, focussing as
he did on the “big picture.”
As we have seen, Pound’s radicalization was prompted by contact
with the monetary theories of Major Douglas, which revealed to
him that the banking industry was based on a species of fraud, and
eventually led him to the belief that the banks were allied in an
unholy international conspiracy to maintain their power, influ-
ence, and outrageous profits. While Dennis knew nothing about
Douglas’s Social Credit theories, he, too, saw capitalism as confis-
catory and oppressive, and looked forward to the new order fol-
lowing the collapse of the power of money: “The old revolution of
capitalism was revolt for economic freedom. The new revolution of
socialism is a revolt against economic freedom. The old revolution
was a revolt for power for money. The new revolution is a revolt
against the power of money” (Dynamics, 163).
Dennis’ assessment of the power and behaviour of the “money
power” is very like that which Pound attributed to a conspiracy he
called “usurocracy,” but Dennis does not succumb to the easy
explanation of a conspiracy. More analytical than Pound, and more
competent on economics than Lewis or Eliot, Dennis sees the prob-
lem as structural and ideological, rather than simply ethical:
The money power can make millions jobless and destitute with-
out once firing a single shot or emitting an audible sound or
explanation of what it is doing. It is, of course, nonsense to try to
personify or identify the money power as a given group, clique or indi-
vidual in Wall Street, Lombard Street or anywhere else. The rare
charm of economic freedom is that nobody is ever responsible
for anything that happens. No conspiracy can be proved if
international capitalists start taking their money out of one
298 Appendix
country, as our Committee of the Nation did in early 1933 ...

The responsible capitalists ... neither know nor care what the
result will be to which their individual acts contribute. They
have the word of Adam Smith and all the pious humbugs ratio-
nalizing liberalism, democracy and capitalism ever since that
the result can be only for the common good. An invisible hand
guides all this. If you do not believe it, you lack faith in democracy
and freedom. If it is not true, democracy does not work. (Dynamics,
165, my emphasis)
(It is impossible to read this assault on international finance in

2010 without some frisson of fear that it may be an accurate assess-
ment of capitalism.)
Believing that faith in Smith’s invisible hand was misplaced, Den-
nis was convinced that capitalist democracy could not produce eco-
nomic justice. Whereas Pound, Eliot, and Lewis viewed democratic
governments as not true democracies but oligarchies dominated by
the leading capitalists in each of the putative democracies, Dennis’s
complaint about the democracies was more radical, and more
damning. Writing in the midst of the Great Depression, he looked
back on the history of the United States and Britain, and found it
to be brutally exploitative and hypocritical:
American intellectuals like Jefferson could write and talk end-

lessly about our government’s being founded on consent and
law rather than force and violence, having all the while a plan-
tation full of slaves, with armed overseers and manacles, and
while fighting the Indians and the French more or less all the
time. Thus was born Jeffersonian or Jacksonian democracy.
.......
One of the great secrets of Anglo-Saxon success is the imposi-
tion on others of their canons of definition, taste and ethics.
According to these canons, anything the Anglo-Saxons do in
the furtherance of their interests is, by definition, not a use of
force or violence. If they have slaves, theirs is still a government
based on consent. When they worked nine year old children in
textile mills, it was with the consent of the children whose right
to freedom of contract Anglo-Saxon justice respected. (Dynam-
ics 185)
No doubt Dennis’ focus on slavery, force and hypocrisy was in part

a consequence of his being the descendant of slaves. Nonetheless,
his assessment of pre-Civil War America contrasts strongly with that
of Eliot and Pound, who held up Jeffersonian democracy as a
model to be restored.
Dennis argued for a meritocratic form of governance, not so dif-
ferent from Eliot’s “clerisy,” in which a select number of wise and
benevolent officials would govern the state and direct industry and
commerce in a rational and efficient manner:
Czarist Russia was a dictatorship of a bureaucracy, exactly like

communist Russia, Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Only Czarist
Russia attempted to perpetuate the dictatorship of a hereditary
bureaucracy, which must always prove impossible. A dictator-
ship of a bureaucracy, to survive, must provide for the easy
access to power of most of the elite. capitalism is a dictatorship
of money, impersonal, anonymous and hard to put your finger
on because of the ways of money under such a system. To work,
it must provide opportunities for a large percentage of the elite
to make money and must not perpetuate inherited fortunes too
long.
... A non-hereditary bureaucracy is probably the most stable regime
possible for human society to achieve. (Dynamics, 187, my emphasis)
In these remarks he shows the profound influence of Vilfredo

Pareto on his political thought. Pareto believed the democratic
forms of government would always be co-opted by the wealthy and
powerful. It was this belief that led Pareto to welcome the rise of
fascism in Italy in his old age. Since he died in 1923, Pareto did not
live to see the excesses of Mussolini’s regime.
That Dennis was willing to accept Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mussoli-
ni’s Fascist Italy, and Hitler’s Nazi Germany as way-stations on the
road to a bureaucratic utopia bespeaks either a disregard for
human dignity and liberty or a wilful blindness to the true nature
of those regimes. The latter was clearly the case for Pound, but
Dennis seems to have had few illusions about the oppressive nature
of the European Communist and Fascist regimes. Instead of deny-
ing the “human rights abuses” of the Communists, Fascists, and
Nazis, he equated them with the abuses of his own country: “it is
300 Appendix
good form in America to be indignant over the frustrations of

European minorities and to ignore or deny the frustrations of the
American unemployed or farm minorities. We cannot tolerate in
Europe oppression of minorities but we have never been without it
in America from the day the first African slave was landed and the
first Indian aborigine was murdered for his land by the white man”
(Dynamics, 214).
It is clear from this brief summary of Dennis’s views that his rad-
icalism, like that of Pound, Eliot, and Lewis, was motivated by the
perception that democratic capitalist nations were incapable of
securing prosperity and a just distribution of wealth within their
boundaries. In addition those regimes were seen to be structurally
disposed to foreign conquest and exploitation in order to secure
markets for the industrial output that could not be consumed
internally because of the mal-distribution of wealth. In short the
motives of all four men were altruistic – albeit based on an analysis
of the political forces of their day that was blind to the malignity of
the regimes challenging democratic capitalism. In their defence it
must be admitted that the imperfections of democratic capitalism
which motivated their hostility were not – and are not – imaginary.
However, the alternatives they championed were certainly more
seriously flawed than is democratic capitalism.
appendix
Notes
introduction
1 Forster’s novel Howard’s End, written between 1908 and 1910, reflects the
class anxiety that the educated elite felt in those years. One of his lower-
class characters, Leonard Bast, is befriended by the upper-middle-class
Schlegels who attempt to “improve” him – with disastrous results. The
novel also reflects a Tolkienish nostalgia for an earlier England dominat-
ed by the rural squirarchy that Eliot absorbed so completely.
2 Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s recent study, Empire, attempts to sal-
vage the Marxist dream of the withering away of the state by postulating
a post-national condition, which they call “empire,” a global condition in
which there are no longer any competing states, but only a “multitude”
which has no need of state institutions.
3 If there were anything to choose between fascism/nazism and Commu-
nism on this point, probably the edge would go to the Communists.
Although the Stalinist Soviet Union strictly regulated cultural products,
there was no incident in the Soviet Union (or in fascist Italy) that had
the dramatic force of the burning of books on 10 May 1933 at universi-
ties and libraries across Germany.
4 Somewhat ironically, Eliot was keenly aware of the failure of Machiavelli
to influence events: “No history could illustrate better than that of the
reputation of Machiavelli the triviality and the irrelevance of influence.
His message has been falsified by persistent romanticism ever since his
death” (“Nicollo Machiavelli” in For Lancelot Andrewes, 48–9).
5 Michael Tratner argues in Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot,
Yeats that Eliot was influenced by Gustav Le Bon’s 1895 book The Crowd
302 Notes to pages 12–15
(translated 1897), which warned of the danger represented by the mass-

es – as were, he claims, George Sorel and Sigmund Freud, among less
well known figures (1–2). Tratner cites chapter and verse for Sorel and
Freud, but presents no evidence that Eliot ever read or heard of Le
Bon’s book. Eliot was only ten years old in 1897 and unlikely to be read-
ing books such as Le Bon’s. Of course, Le Bon’s critique of mass culture
no doubt percolated through commentary in the early twentieth century
much as, say Derrida’s critique of logocentrism did in the late twentieth.
Sigmund Freud’s Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921; English transla-
tion Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1922) was explicitly based
on a critique of Le Bon’s work. I am unaware of any reference to Le Bon
by Eliot – though some of his comments on the crowd are compatible
with Le Bon. Lewis does cite Le Bon in The Art of Being Ruled, but not
from The Crowd. And Pound never mentions him, so far as I can discover.
It is a stretch, I think, to credit Le Bon with formulating the modernists’
cultural analysis as Tratner does:
Examining in detail the surprising similarities between modernist liter-
ature and contemporary theories of the crowd … upsets many critical
commonplaces concerning the character of literary modernism …
Modernism was not, then, a rejection of mass culture, but rather an
effort to produce a mass culture, perhaps for the first time, to produce
a culture distinctive to the twentieth century, which Le Bon called
“The Era of the Crowd.” The contest between modernist and realist lit-
erary forms was thus not a contest between literature for a coterie and
literature for the masses, but rather a contest between different ways of
speaking to and from the mass mind, a contest based on different con-
ceptions of how the masses think. (2)
6 Here is what Eisenhower said in 1961:
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no arma-
ments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and
as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emer-
gency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to
create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to
this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in
the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security
more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large
arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence
– economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State
Notes to pages 15–20 303
house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the

imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to compre-
hend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all
involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisi-
tion of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our lib-
erties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper
meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with
our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may pros-
per together. (Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower,
1960, 1039)
7 The unfortunate title was an allusion to Gustav Renier’s 1931 book The
English, Are They Human? In fact The Jews, Are They Human? is intended as
a defence of Jews – though perhaps not in a manner that would please
everyone.
8 For more on Pound and Social Credit see my Pound in Purgatory.
9 I probably have to remind my readers that I am using “liberal” in the his-
torical sense of a combination of a focus on individual, as opposed to
collective, rights and laissez-faire capitalism, and not in the current Ameri-
can sense of “liberal” indicating social attitudes that tolerate such things
as abortion, sexual freedom, atheism, euthanasia, etc.
10 Even though fascism/nazism has retained a presence as a kind of ideo-
logical bogey-man to be invoked by the press from time to time, and by
gangs of thugs who like to sport Swastikas and leathers, it has not repre-
sented a serious political force in any country since 1945. Italy is a possi-
ble exception, but even there fascism is a fringe movement, despite the
presence of a Mussolini on the ballot in the form of Benito’s grand-
daughter.
chapter one
1 Although, as we shall see, at least two observers prophesied that the

“New World order” (which the victors expected to emerge from the
Peace Conference) would be dominated by the United States of Ameri-
ca. Both Edward Mower’s This American Century (to which Eliot wrote an
introduction), and André Siegfried’s America Comes of Age (which he

read) predict American world hegemony – although neither is particu-
larly happy about such an outcome. Both were published before the
Great Crash of 1929, an event that cast doubt on the inevitability of the
triumph of American “civilization,” characterized as “Fordism” by
Siegfried.
2 Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in the first decade of the
twenty-first century we are on the verge of the restoration of European
power and prestige and the relative decline of America. The titles of
such recent American books as T. R. Reid’s The United States of Europe: The
New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (New York: Penguin,
2004) and Jeremy Rifkin’s The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the
Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (New York: Penguin, 2004)
proclaim such a view. The recent global economic meltdown, triggered
by the practices of American financial institutions, however, reinforces
the American economic and financial hegemony.
3 It was first published as a double series in Alfred Orage’s The New Age:
“Patria Mia” (5 Sept. 1912–14 Nov. 1912; and “America: Chances and
Remedies” (1 May 1913–5 June 1913).
4 It is perhaps not entirely inappropriate to note that, according to the
Harvard University Press website, Negri is currently serving time in an
Italian prison for terrorist activities. Like Pound he apparently acted on
his convictions, and suffered the consequences. Pound, of course, com-
mitted no terrorist activities – unless his intemperate radio broadcasts
count as such.
5 F.T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” Le Figaro
(Paris), 20 Feb. 1909. This is the last of eleven “principles.” In Marinetti,
Marinetti: Selected Writings, 43.
6 I am using “historicist” and “historicism” in Karl Popper’s negative sense
as defined in The Poverty of Historicism, meaning “an approach to the
social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal
aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the
‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns,’ ‘the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the
evolution of history” (3). Popper’s main target is historical determinism.
He saw both Communism and fascism as products of historicist assump-
tions. He divides historicists into two camps: 1. “pro-naturalistic or posi-
tive” and 2. “antinaturalistic.” The former favour the application of the
method of physics to the social sciences, the latter do not. His most pal-
pable hits are on the positivistic social scientists.
Of course, Eliot is writing decades before Popper’s articulation of his-

toricism, and therefore does not use the term. But his objections to
Spengler are precisely in line with Popper’s arguments.
“New Historicism” reverses the negativity of Popper’s critique. It is
somewhat different from the classic historicism in that it is not primarily
concerned with prediction but rather with exposing the false conscious-
ness of particular historical periods. In that sense it looks back to Dilthey
and Schleiermacher more than to Hegel.
Michael North in The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound concocts
a peculiar version of historicism to buttress his argument that Left and
Right converge. According to North it is little more than historical nos-
talgia. Historicism, he says, “seems committed to the past, to a defence of
tradition, or, in the worst case, to a simple reinforcement of the status
quo” (11). North makes no mention of Popper.
7 For example, page 177 of This American World: “To Oswald Spengler, one
of the greatest thinkers of the modern world, Americanism is merely the
last sad phase of the European culture cycle which, having run most of
its course, at this point necessarily hardens into materialism, money rule,
democracy and the empery of soul-less reason. The only charm of Ameri-
canism for him is that it is inevitable.” This assessment of “Americanism”
in 1928 – and by an American – is strikingly similar to that of
Horkheimer and Adorno twenty years later.
8 I subscribe to Zeev Sternhell’s view on the distinct natures of fascism and
nazism, in contradiction of Ernst Nolte’s contrary view. Here is Sternhell
on Nolte: “Racism is ... not a necessary condition for the existence of fas-
cism; on the contrary it was a factor in fascist eclecticism. For this reason,
a general theory that seeks to combine fascism and Nazism will always
come up against this essential aspect of the problem. In fact, such a theo-
ry is not possible. Undoubtedly there are similarities, particularly with
regard to the “totalitarian” character of the two regimes, but their differ-
ences are no less significant. Karl Bracher perceived the singular impor-
tance of these differences, which Ernst Nolte (this was his chief weak-
ness) completely ignored” (Sternhell, 5).
9 In the case of Japan the cultural exchange went mostly the other way.
Japanese culture was virtually destroyed by the incursion of Western val-
ues and practices. Some few Americans did try to preserve elements of
Japanese culture, notably Lafcadio Hearne and Ernest Fenollosa (whose
influence on Pound will be discussed later), but for the most part Japan-
ese influence in our period was confined to America and, so far as litera-
ture is concerned – peaked in the forties. So far as Europe is concerned,

the exotic influences were primarily Polynesian and African, and had the
most impact on painting – particularly on Gauguin and Picasso.
10 Apparently Eliot read it, or at least knew of Nordau’s argument, for
Manu Jain reports that during his Harvard graduate year (1913–14)
Eliot copied in his notebooks “Max Nordau’s view that mysticism is a
characteristic of degeneration”(T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy,
172). Understandably, Eliot scholars have not paid a lot of attention
to Nordau, but Louis Menand places his analysis of the decay of cul-
ture front and centre in Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Con-
text : “The 1890s is the missing chapter in many versions of the history
of literary modernism, in part because all the issues in its cultural con-
troversies appear to be overdrawn, so that it is not easy to know just
how seriously to take them. If Nordau’s position seems absurd, Wilde’s
seems deliberately calculated to provoke absurdity. But however self-
consciously extravagant it may have been, the aestheticist valorization
of style had a significant role in the formation of the ideology of mod-
ern art, and the problem Nordau’s argument makes for it is a real
one” (87).
I cannot endorse Menand’s claim that the 1890s have been neglected
in literary commentary on modernism. They have just gone out of style.
My own study of the late nineteenth century, The Birth of Modernism
(1993), postdates Menand’s study.
11 See Nancy K. Gish, “Discarnate Desire: T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Dis-
sociation” in Cassandra Laity, ed., Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 107–29; and Grover
Smith’s earlier “T. S. Eliot and the Fragmented Selves: From ‘Suppressed
Complex’ to ‘Sweeney Agonistes,’” Philological Quarterly 77 (Fall 1998),
417–37.
12 See Donald J. Childs, “Fantastic Views: T.S. Eliot and the Occultation of
Knowledge and Experience,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 39
(Winter 1997).
13 Émile Faguet (1847–1916) was a French literary historian, elected to the
Academy in 1900. One of his more influential works was Politiques et
Moralistes du XIXe Siècle (1891), a study of Joseph de Maistre, De Bonald,
Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Royer-Collard, and Guizot. Not
irrelevantly to my discussion, his focus was on how those nineteenth-cen-
tury figures responded to the demise of religious belief. However, his
thinkers all attempt to “save” Christianity, or at least some of its features.
Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) was a French priest and theologian. He was

a “modernist” who denied the literal truth of scriptures, including the
New Testament. When he expressed these views most uncompromisingly
in The Gospel and the Church, his defence of Catholicism in response to
Harnack’s Das Wesen Des Christentum (The Nature of Christianity), he was
excommunicated (on 7 March 1908). No doubt it is his excommunica-
tion that rendered him “somewhat scandalous.”
It is striking that this is the only reference to Faguet or Loisy that I
have discovered in Eliot’s published work or unpublished material, even
though both would seem to have been concerned with the same issues
that occupied him. The other figures mentioned are still well known or
are discussed elsewhere in this study.
14 Spengler refused to permit a second edition of Untergang des Abenlandes
to appear until he had completed revisions in the light of the cultural
theories of Leo Frobenius, which he encountered after the appearance
of volume I. See H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler. New Brunswick
(U.S.A.[?]): Transaction Publishers 1992, 134. Pound, too, was an admir-
er of Frobenius, but came to him later.
15 In the preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment they leave no doubt about their
distaste for the mindless prosperity of the consumer society they encoun-
tered during their exile in America: “In an unjust state of life, the impo-
tence and pliability of the masses grow with the quantitative increase in
commodities allowed them. The materially respectable and socially
deplorable rise in the living standard of the lower classes is reflected in
the simulated extension of the spirit. Its true concern is the negation of
reification; it cannot survive where it is fixed as a cultural commodity
and doled out to satisfy consumer needs. The flood of detailed informa-
tion and candy-floss entertainment simultaneously instructs and stultifies
mankind” (xiv–xv).
Though Eliot would not sympathize with their Marxist historical deter-
minism, he shared their distaste for the culture of consumerism and for
the mass man. In his 1958 interview with Ronald Paul he articulates a
very similar view: “There’s a deterioration, it seems to me, in the quality
of amusement as it becomes more mass entertainment and as the media
for mass entertainment become more highly developed. The cinema
first; now, television. It’s profitable to appeal to the largest audience and
therefore to the lowest common denominator. I think that the end of a
purely materialistic civilization with all its technical achievements and its
mass amusements is – if, of course, there’s no actual destruction by
308 Notes to page 42
explosives – simply boredom. A people without religion will in the end

find that it has nothing to live for” (Paul, 14).
16 Mowrer is referring to George Babbitt, the eponymous hero of Sinclair
Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt, and not Eliot’s former teacher, Irving Babbitt,
after whom Lewis’s character is said to have been named.
17 Margaret MacMillan entitled “Part Two” of her study of the Paris Peace
Conference Paris 1919, “A New World Order,” but refrains from drawing
the parallel to more recent events.
18 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. includes Mowrer in a list of “the brilliant genera-
tion of foreign correspondents that had educated an isolationist America
about the outside world in the years between the two great wars.” “They
were,” he wrote, “a venturesome crowd, audacious, irreverent, resource-
ful, hard-playing, hard-drinking, and hardworking, and their ardent dis-
patches brought home to Americans the personalities, ambitions,
intrigues, and dangers that were putting the planet on the slippery slope
into the Second World War.” “A Man from Mars,” The Atlantic Monthly,
April 1997. Of course, in 1928 all that lay in an as-yet unimagined
future.
He had established himself in Paris in 1913 with the intention of
becoming a writer. As a consequence of renting rooms above an art
gallery he fell into an artistic crowd – Rose and Charles Vildrac, Georges
Duhamel, and Romain Rolland. He read Du Coté de Chez Swann by the
still unknown Marcel Proust, and Barnabooth by Valéry Larbaud, author
of Les Lauriers sont coupés, the model for Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness
technique (Triumph and Turmoil, 27–9). He planned to write “a sort of
sequel to Arthur Symons’ Symbolist Movement in Literature,”[?] and a book
on the plays of François de Curel (Triumph and Turmoil, 33). In the
meantime he sent literary articles to various periodicals, among them:
“[?]‘Discipline and the New Beauty,’ a short attack upon irresponsible
aesthetic experimentation” and “The Dearth of Genius” – both appear-
ing in Dora Marsden’s The New Freewoman ( 1 Nov. and 1 Dec. 1913
respectively), a journal in which Eliot and Pound also appeared. And
Mowrer published “France Today, A group of Modern Thinkers” in its
successor, The Egoist, for January 1914 (Triumph and Turmoil, 34–5). I
have seen no indication that either Pound or Eliot read any of these
pieces. Eliot’s contributions to The New Freewoman date from 1915, by
which time Mowrer had abandoned his literary ambitions. Pound, how-
ever, began publishing in The New Freewoman as early as September 1913
and could well have read Mowrer’s contributions, though he makes no
mention of him that I have seen. Lewis does mention Mowrer in The
Hitler Cult (49), but only in passing.
Mowrer’s brother, Paul, chief of the (one-man) Paris bureau for the
Chicago Daily News, hired Ansell in 1914 to tend the office while Paul
was in the field covering the war. This appointment put an end to Mowr-
er’s literary ambitions and settled his fate as a journalist. He didn’t stay
in Paris long, deciding to report on the war from Belgium. When Bel-
gium fell to the Germans, he was deported to London by the British
Army (Triumph and Turmoil, 42–62). He does not seem to have sought
out the expatriate Americans in London – most likely because he was
out of sympathy with the literary avant garde of the day, exemplified in
England by Pound, Lewis, Hulme, and Eliot. In any case, Lewis and
Hulme were in the army and out of circulation.
19 Kolakowski remarks (Main Currents of Marxism, 737): “There can be no
doubt that Lenin’s insurrectionary policy and all his calculations were
based on the firm expectation that the Russian Revolution would touch
off a world revolution or at least a European one, this view was in fact
shared by all the Bolsheviks: there was no question of “socialism in one
country” for the first few years after the Revolution.”
20 Margaret MacMillan notes that The Economic Consequences of the Peace sold
more than 100,000 copies and “helped to turn opinion against the
peace settlements and against the French” (Paris 1919, 479).
21 For an excellent discussion of the motivation and conduct of The Criteri-
on see Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks
in Inter-War Britain.
22 Eliot did not share Massis’ support for Mussolini’s Ethiopian adventure.
In response to Pound’s invitation to Eliot to visit him in Rapallo, Eliot
declined, refusing to visit Italy while Mussolini was invading Ethiopia
(Letter to Pound, 4 May 1936, Pound-Eliot Correspondence, Beinecke).
23 See especially Jason Harding, The Criterion. Harding points out that the
infamous review of The Yellow Spot that Julius erroneously attributed to
Eliot was written by Belgion – and clearly attributed to “MB” (143).
Rather scandalously, that erroneous attribution is also found in Ronald
Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (1985), C. K. Stead, Pound,
Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Movement (1986), and Christopher Ricks
(who notes that the attribution cannot be certain) T. S. Eliot and Prejudice
(1988). Harding provides a detailed account of Belgion’s association
with Eliot and The Criterion (143–58).
24 As Julius does in his comments on Montgomery Belgion’s review of The
Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany in the Criterion – a

review he attributes to Eliot, even though it is signed “MB” (T. S. Eliot,
Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, 168–70).
chapter two
1 Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound, 43–5. It was his first – and only –
teaching post. His subject was Romance Languages, but he held the post
only for a few months, proving somewhat too bohemian for the college
authorities. He was persuaded to leave, and was given a severance, which
enabled him to try his luck as a professional writer in Europe.
2 He told Floyd Dell, writing from the steamer Mauritania – returning to
Britain in January 1911, after six months in America – that he found his
“sanity in Plato, Dante, Spinoza, Pater, Simons, Longinus,” and added
praise of the “whole set of The Rhymes,” especially Ernest Dowson (let-
ter of 20 Jan 1911. Quoted in G. Tansell, “Two Early Letters of Ezra
Pound, American Literature 34 (March 1962), 114–19 at 117). We can
safely conclude that even after eighteen months in Europe, Pound
remained an admirer of the current dominant poetic style of the British
“Nineties.”
3 That Eliot’s aesthetic was primarily expressivist hardly needs to be
demonstrated, but the following remark from a 1927 talk is clear on the
point: “The poet who ‘thinks’ is merely the poet who can express the
emotional equivalent of thought. But he is not necessarily interested in
the thought itself. We talk as if thought was precise and emotion was
vague. In reality there is precise emotion and there is vague emotion. To
express precise emotion requires as great intellectual power as to express
precise thought” (“Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” Selected
Essays, 135, my emphasis).
4 Their prudential focus on form was continued and intensified in the
academy by the so-called New Critics, who tirelessly argued against any
approach to literature so crude as to concern itself with the content or
message of artworks. Postmodernism, with its Marxist bias, has over-
turned this tactic with a vengeance. I am attempting in this – as in other
of my studies – to find a middle way between a Marxist-inspired exposé
of politically incorrect content and a New Critical avoidance of content
as anything other than a dance of contraries.
5 Kenneth Asher, for example, sets out to demonstrate that “from begin-
ning to end, Eliot’s work, including both the poetry and the prose, was
shaped by a political vision inherited from French reactionary thinkers,

especially from Charles Maurras” (T. S. Eliot and Ideology, 2–3). Asher
acknowledges that his study descends from John Harrison’s 1967 study,
The Reactionaries (10).
The judicious Jason Harding, in his excellent study, The Criterion
employs “reactionary” as a description of Eliot’s political posture, even
while he more accurately characterizes it in the same paragraph:
Eliot’s habitual caution and prudence, or more charitably his Christian
belief, make it impossible to characterize the Criterion as anti-Semitic.
This is not a case of special pleading. It is quite simply to observe that
what Eliot and Belgion had in common was a strain of reactionary,
occasionally intolerant, orthodox Tory Anglican morality; a defining
trait of the Criterion from the late 1920s onward. Unfortunately, Mont-
gomery Belgion’s outbursts of bigotry were a caricature of the Criteri-
on’s founding and highly cherished desire to fight a rearguard action
on behalf of a tradition of Latin-Christian civilization. (158)
6 The term “revisionist” originated as a characterization of Eduard Bern-
stein’s (1850–1932) revision of the Erfurt program adopted by the Ger-
man Social Democratic party in 1891. The program was posited on the
expectation that capitalism would inexorably worsen the condition of the
proletariat through monopolization of profit and thus bring about revo-
lution. In the interim, socialists should seek lesser objectives such as a
widened suffrage, direct taxation, and the like, and above all to educate
the masses in preparation for the seizure of power (Schorske, 4–5).
Bernstein proposed a “revision” of the Erfurt program, arguing that
capitalism had learned to stabilize itself through cartels and world mar-
kets as well as through a more equitable distribution of wealth. This
amounted to a renunciation of dialectical materialism and its corollary,
the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. Change would depend entirely
on reform of the system through political action from within rather than
on its sudden and violent overthrow through internal stresses (Schorske,
16).
7 It would be derelict of me not to cite Lewis’s rant against the sort of
chronological pigeon-holing in which I have just indulged:
Well, sure enough, the birth years of Mr. Pound’s little circle, including
Mr. Pound himself, were “all sprinkled up and down,” as Eliot once
remarked to me, “the Eighties of the last century.” And if being born
in a stable makes you a horse, why then being born in the same years is
liable, perhaps, to make you an identical human product. A mechani-
cal theory at the best, for the purposes of the literary pigeonholing of
a complex society this method is useless. According to this simple-
hearted rule, Herr Adolf Hitler is as like as two peas with any Can-
tonese or Peruvian born at the exact minute of the Eighties of the last
Century at which Herr Hitler saw the light – irrespective of place, tra-
ditions, individual ancestry, glandular, nervous, and other bodily
make-up – race, religion and what not! Here we have the time-philoso-
pher’s classification with a vengeance!
… There is only one sense in which any such a grouping of us
acquires some significance – we all got started on our careers before
the War. This was, I believe, an advantage. In other respects, Joyce
brought up by the Jesuits – in Ireland – in the “Celtic Twilight”–
trained as a medico – thereafter exiled in Trieste and Switzerland, and
becoming an Italianate Irishman: what a different set of circumstances
are those to the origins for instance and early environments of Eliot?
(Blasting and Bombardiering, 289–90)
8 Wyndham Lewis was born to a British woman on a yacht belonging to his
American father, moored in Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia. He was raised
for his first nine years in the usa and then in England. However, he
retained his Canadian passport throughout his life, and spent a few
unhappy years in the Canadian cities of Windsor and Toronto during
the Second World War.
9 No doubt automobiles could have done fine with non-electric diesel
engines, but I have never heard of a diesel-powered aircraft. The late
Max Nänny subtitled his 1973 study of Pound Poetics for an Electric Age.
Nänny drew heavily on the then-popular theories of Marshall McLuhan
as articulated in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media
(1965). His general thesis – somewhat tentatively asserted – is that “the
writer’s role, the form and function of his art have not been left
untouched by the continuing and even accelerating transformation of
the word through the pervasive and global spread of the electric media
of intercommunication”(12).
My interest is not in any formal consequences of the “electric age” that
may have ensued. The point I want to make is that the men and women
born in the decade of the 1880s witnessed unprecedented technological
change in their early adulthood, as well as cataclysmic military and polit-
ical events. While they could be certain that “the times, they are a-chang-
in’,” they could have no confidence that those changes would be desir-
able, and – after 1914–18 – lots of reasons to fear that they would not be.
10 However, it must be admitted that the sense of the journal’s title had
more to do with the current astrological sense – the advent of the Age of
Aquarius – than with the advent of the electrical age. Nonetheless, it was
a journal that counted among its angels George Bernard Shaw, as well as
wealthy theosophists and Gurdjieffians, and included among its contribu-
tors the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton and the future-oriented and sci-
ence friendly atheist H. G. Wells.
11 For example, Francis Herbert Bradley, whose philosophy Eliot chose to
study for his Harvard PhD, was a Hegelian, as were most of the leading
philosophers at Harvard in Eliot’s day. Eliot’s complaint in a letter to J.
H. Woods (graduate chair at Harvard) of 28 Jan. 1915, of his Oxford
professor Joachim’s “Hegelianism” (Letters, 84), reflects the influence of
Bertrand Russell, who was at that date sharing his London flat with the
newlyweds Tom and Vivien.
My supposition that Pound has Hegel in mind is made the more plau-
sible when one remembers that Hegel’s philosophy of history saw the
Prussian state as the culmination of Spirit instantiated in history. Howev-
er, British wartime propaganda focused rather more on the malign influ-
ence of Nietzsche on the Germans than that of Hegel.
Of course, the triple-headedness of the “beast” suggests the triadic
Hegelian dialectic: thesis / antithesis / synthesis.
12 Noel Stock dates their meeting as 1913 (Life of Ezra Pound, 148) – too
late to have influenced “Patria Mia.” But Fenollosa’s biographer,
Lawrence Chisholm, places it in 1910. Mary Fenollosa is known to have
been in London in 1910, only several months after Pound’s arrival there.
She and Pound both knew Laurence Binyon, the British Museum’s Far
Eastern librarian. Chisholm reports that, according to Mary’s recollec-
tion, “Pound questioned her at length about her husband’s work and
their life in Japan and was so enthusiastic about Fenollosa’s literary
researches that Mrs. Fenollosa promised, on her return to America, to
send him whatever translations and notes she had” (222).
Pound also recorded their meeting – though many years later and
without any date: “I met her at Sarojini Naidu’s [the Bengali female poet
(1879–1949)], and she said that Fenollosa had been in opposition to all
the profs and academes, and she had seen some of my stuff and said I
was the only person who could finish up these notes as Ernest would
have wanted them done” (Plimpton, Writers at Work 2: 49).
Naidu was sent to England to study at the age of sixteen, but she
returned to India in 1898 to marry, and I have found nothing in biogra-
phies to indicate that she was in London in 1910. However, Douglas

Goldring’s recollection of an evening at Yeats’ Woburn flat at which both
Pound and Naidu were present corroborates Pound’s recollection (Col-
lected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 2: 730) – though neither of them gives a year.
Even though I have been unable to find anything to place Naidu in Lon-
don in 1910, Mary Fenollosa was certainly there in that year and there is
no record that Mary Fenollosa ever returned to Britain.
Stock’s dating is no doubt based on the fact that the first mention of
Fenollosa in Pound’s correspondence is in an unpublished letter to his
mother of October 1913 – in which he also mentions Sarojini Naidu. In
sum1910 seems the only possible year for their meeting, despite Pound’s
silence on Fenollosa prior to December 1913, when he received Fenol-
losa’s papers by mail from America.
13 A Lume Spento and Other Early Poems. Noel Stock in The Life of Ezra
Pound says it was written in London in 1906 (29).
14 For the text of these suppressed cantos, and commentary on them, see
Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Three Cantos. The text is found
on pages 53–73.
15 Angered by the failure of the Versailles Treaty to grant Italy the Yugosla-
vian city of Fiume as promised, Gabriele D’Annunzio – a novelist, poet,
and World War One hero – led about two thousand artists and irregulars
in an invasion of the city of Fiume in September 1919. The allied forces
occupying Fiume retreated in the face of D’Annunzio’s army. His style of
governance included frequent speeches from balconies – said to have
influenced Mussolini. Futurists were among those taking part in the
exploit – which was brought to an end by the Italian military in Decem-
ber 1920. See Martin Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1982.
16 The Globe-Wernicke Company is credited with inventing the filing cabi-
net, circa 1910. Pound’s remark is an instance of his general distaste for
orderliness – an attribute singularly lacking in D’Annuzio’s Fiume
regime. Despite that shared predilection, Pound disapproved of D’An-
nuzio’s adventure – citing its Futurist tendencies.
17 Admittedly, Siegfried did not foresee the economic might of a united
Europe. The gdp of the European Union exceeded that of the United
States of America in 2010. However, Europe’s ability to project its influence
in the world has not returned to the levels of the nineteenth or early twen-
tieth century, and pales in comparison to American global dominance.
Michael North, in the preface to The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and
Pound, also sees the dilemma that the modernists faced as still current: “I
feel that modernism still has a claim on our interest precisely because it
does not make good sense, because we find in it more of the unfinished
business of our time than in any other literature” (viii).
chapter three
1 I presume Pound has in mind the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Prussia as a

consequence of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Charles-Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte had installed himself as Emperor of France in
1852. “Barbiche” is a reference to his goatee.
2 “Jusqu’ici, rien ne paraît distinguer la pensées d’Eliot de celle de M.
Lasserre et de M. Benda: même horreur du mysticisme de la petite
secousse, même soucie rationnelle de redistribution et de mise au
point.” “Lettres Étrangères: Le Classicisme de T. S. Eliot,” Nouvelle revue
française 24 (Jan.– Juin 1925) 246–51.
3 Dominic Rowland’s assessment of Eliot’s social criticism in “T. S. Eliot
and the French Intelligence, Reading Julien Benda,” is at odds with my
own. He writes: “Although he did find Belphegor sympathetic at first
encounter, Eliot’s own work in 1920 was less concerned than Benda’s
with the ways that literature functioned as a paradigm of cultural
decline. His critique of literary culture, while polemical, was far more
specifically directed against individual writers rather than the abstract
movements of which they were representative” (36). While it is true that
Eliot’s critical commentary is keyed to individual writers, nonetheless he
invariably places them in the context of the general “sensibility” of the
age – either unified or disassociated – just as Benda does. Of course,
Eliot’s cultural analysis is not the same as Benda’s in every respect, but
Rowland’s claim that Eliot has no broad thesis about cultural movements
is not sustainable.
4 Although Eliot’s essay was published earlier than Belphégor (in 1917).
Belphégor was “mostly written before 1914” according to its preface. Of
course, there is no question of Eliot deriving the idea from Benda.
5 Dominic Rowland missed the TLS review in his otherwise excellent dis-
cussion of Eliot’s changing attitude toward Benda, “T. S. Eliot and the
French Intelligence: Reading Julien Benda.” Rowland concludes that
“Benda’s disinterested, though not dispassionate, critique of culture was
subsumed by the affiliation that Eliot felt with Maurras’s ideas” (48).
6 T. S. Eliot, “Culture and Anarchy,” Review of La Trahison des clercs, TLS,
23 Feb. 1928. Gallup’s bibliography missed this unsigned review, which
explains Dominic Rowland missing it in “T. S. Eliot and the French Intel-
ligence: Reading Julien Benda.”
7 Most likely by the term “race hatred” Eliot is thinking of the animosities
between the various nationalities of Europe, rather than Nazi anti-Semi-
tism. Although Mein Kampf had been published in two parts in 1924 and
1926, it had not been translated at the time Eliot was writing. Of course,
Eliot could read German, but it is very unlikely that he knew of Mein
Kampf at this date. Nor is it likely that he knew anything of Hitler as yet.
In the May 1928 German elections the Nazis elected only twelve
deputies (Leiden, 298).
8 (Belphégor 40–1): “On peut définir plus au fond la tendance que
manifeste ici la société moderne. Distinguons deux grandes sortes de
sensibilité: ‘une – dont la vue et le toucher sont les principaux modes –
qui, s’agrégeant autour de l’idée de forme, tire de cette origine un
caractère spécial de netteté et de fermeté; appelons-la sensibilité
plasticienne; l’autre – l’ouïe, l’odorat, le goût – qui, exemple d’un tell
armature, consiste au contraire dans une sensation sans contour,
incomparablement plus troublante; appelons – la sensibilité musicale.”
9 In an April 1949 letter to Theodore Weiss, Lewis was attempting to
demonstrate his suitability for a teaching appointment at Bard College.
Lewis claimed that he was attracted to Bergson at first, and, like Eliot,
attended his lectures at the Collège de France. He wrote that he found
Bergson to be “an excellent lecturer, dry and impersonal,” and added
that he, Lewis, “began by embracing his evolutionary system” (Letters,
488–9). However, I have not found any indication elsewhere to support
an early enthusiasm for Bergson. Nor does Lewis mention attending any
lectures at the Collège de France in the letters from Europe written dur-
ing his six-year stay on the Continent (1902–08). It may be that he was
telling Weiss what he thought Weiss wanted to hear.
10 Here is the original from Belphégor,177–8: “Quant à la société en elle
même, on peut prévoir que ce soin qu’elle met à éprouver de l’émoi par
l’art, devenant cause à son tour, y rendra la soif de ce plaisir de plus en
plus intense, l’application à la satisfaire de plus en plus jalouse et plus
perfectionnée. On entrevoit le jour où la bonne société française
répudiera encore le peu qu’elle supporte aujourd’hui d’idées et
d’organisation dans l’art, et ne se passionnera plus que pour des gestes
de comédiens, pour des impressions de femmes ou d’enfants, pour des
rugissements de lyriques, pour des extases de fanatiques.”
11 T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary:” “The Politics of Men of Letters,” 378–9.
Eliot’s remark on Wells is a canard. He was not a libertarian, but believed

in restraints on individual liberty as in the following comment in A Mod-
ern Utopia, 33: “Individual liberty in a community is not, as mathemati-
cians would say, always of the same sign. To ignore this is the essential fal-
lacy of the cult called Individualism. But in truth, a general prohibition
in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may
diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe,
that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted
where there is most law. A socialism or a communism is not necessarily a
slavery, and there is no freedom under Anarchy.” Apart from Wells’
approval of socialism and communism, Eliot would certainly agree with
Wells on this point.
12 By Mussolini’s mistress, Margherita Sarfati. She was Jewish and married
to a prominent Venetian Jewish businessman. Mussolini was eventually
forced to abandon her, taking up with Claretta Petaci, who was later mur-
dered at his side by Partisans.
13 See Harries, “The Rare Contact: A Correspondence between T. S. Eliot
and P. E. More,” 136–44.
14 Lewis’s perception that Marxism and fascism were essentially face and
reflex of the same coin is very much at odds with opinion at the time,
since fascism represented itself as a bulwark against Communism. How-
ever, the German scholar Ernst Nolte presented a similar assessment in
Three Faces of Fascism (20–1): “Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to
destroy the enemy by the evolvement [sic] of a radically opposed and yet
related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically mod-
ified methods, always, however, with the unyielding framework of nation-
al self-assertion and autonomy.”
This definition implies that without Marxism there is no fascism, that
fascism is at the same time closer to and further from communism than is
liberal anti-communism, that it necessarily shows at least an inclination
toward a radical ideology, that fascism should never be said to exist in the
absence of at least the rudiments of an organization and propaganda com-
parable to those of Marxism. However, leading contemporary scholars,
Roger Griffin and Zeev Sternhell, both reject Nolte’s analysis, and insist on
fundamental opposition between fascism and Communism as ideologies,
despite their similarities as tyrannical and oppressive political regimes.
As we will see, the American radical Lawrence Dennis would have
agreed with Nolte regarding fascism/Nazism and Communism as essen-
tially interchangeable versions of the rule of an elite.
15 Jules Bonnot, a French gangster and self-declared anarchist, was gunned

down in April 1912 after a crime spree that included car chases. He was
apparently the first criminal to use an automobile as a means of fleeing a
crime scene. The pursuit of his gang was celebrated in the European
press, and his exploits led to a general crackdown on anarchists and
communists in France.
16 Lewis went straight from finishing at the bottom of his class at Rugby to
the Slade School (of art) in London, and never saw the inside of a uni-
versity (Meyers, 8–9). Pound had a ba and an ma in Romance languages,
but he chose to profess expertise in economics and history, where he
had no formal training. Eliot had the most advanced education of the
three, completing a dissertation for a Harvard PhD, which was accepted,
but he declined to cross the ocean to defend it and hence never took
the degree.
17 Meyers, reports that “despite the impression that Lewis’ polemical books
... are hasty, careless and slapdash, his manuscripts and correspondence
with publishers reveal the minute care he took with them.” Nonetheless,
he admits that Lewis “wrote very rapidly” and that “Prentice was not
strict in his demands for structural improvement” (The Enemy, 147). For
his part, Pound had an entrée to Faber and Faber through Eliot, but
Eliot tried to modulate Pound’s excesses. Indeed, he turned down Jeffer-
son and/or Mussolini for The Criterion – though Faber did publish Guide to
Kulchur, a work that not very many publishers would have considered,
given its disorganization and other eccentricities.
18 Charles Fourier (1772–1837), a French utopian thinker who recom-
mended the organization of society into “phalanxes” of trades and pro-
fessions residing in “Phalantseries,” gigantic buildings in which all activi-
ties would be organized in a stratified social structure. However,
individuals would be free to determine their place in the structure by
their own efforts and capabilities. The town of Utopia, Ohio, was found-
ed by followers of Fourier in 1844, but was disbanded two years later.
19 An allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s famous opening lines from “The Ballad
of East and West” (1892): “East is East and West is West, and never the
twain shall meet / Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great judg-
ment seat.” However, the lines do not represent either Kipling’s general
view or the tenor of the poem. It opens and closes with four lines of
which the foregoing are the first two. The second two are rarely cited.
They express a robust machismo, but they do qualify the sentiment of
incompatibility: “But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed,
nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face, though they come
from the ends of the earth!”
20 Nietzsche recommended the suppression of the “Apollonian” principium
individuationis through the medium of the musical drama, which – he
argued in The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music – releases the self
from its isolation, permitting it to enter into a communal Dionysian
ecstasy.
Lewis also intended to raise the spectre of the Nietzschean superman,
the “blond[?] beast” celebrated in On the Genealogy of Morals.
Bergson’s view is quite different. I suppose Lewis read Bergson as rec-
ommending that we transcend our personal limitations by permitting
intuition (which is in touch with the élan vital) to be expressed. While
Bergson does argue that there should be greater integration of intellect
and intuition, he does not call for the suppression of the intellect, as
Nietzsche calls for the suppression of the ego, or principium individuation-
is, in a communal ecstasy.
21 Eliot was hardly a Social Crediter, but he did give Douglas’s ideas some
cautious approval: “When I read, say, an economic article in the Referee,
or any of the numerous productions of Major Douglas and his disciples,
I am confirmed in my suspicion that conventional economic practice is
all wrong, but I can never understand enough to form any opinion as to
whether the prescription or nostrum proffered is right” (“A Commen-
tary,” Criterion 10, Jan. 1931, 309). And he did publish occasionally in
The New English Weekly, a journal founded by A. R. Orage, a co-founder of
Social Credit.
Harding (The Criterion, 188–9) disputes the claim made by David Brad-
shaw that “Eliot was a committed advocate of Social Credit, not a writer
who made the odd reference to the theory in his literary journalism” (“T.
S. Eliot and the Major,” 14). Harding points out that Eliot met Douglas
only twice – in March 1920 with Pound and in November 1931 with
Hugh MacDiarmid, but he does not mention that Eliot knew Orage,
Douglas’s energetic apostle, not to say creator. Bradshaw also found an
article Eliot published in Soddy’s journal New Britain “In Sincerity and
Earnestness” (25 July 1934, 274). Bradshaw concludes that Soddy and
Douglas prompted Eliot’s anti-Semitic remark in After Strange Gods, but
Harding rejects that claim, pointing out that both Douglas’ Social Credit
and Soddy’s Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt were unfavourably reviewed in
the Criterion by J. McAlpin–Douglas in April 1925, 472 and Soddy in
June 1928, 429 (189–90). And R. McNair Wilson reviewed a batch of
Social Credit pamphlets in the Criterion (Jan. 1935, 342.) Eliot did pub-
lish Pound’s pro-Gesell piece, “The Individual in His Milieu” (Oct.
1935), but the economic theories of Silvio Gesell and Douglas were
incompatible. Pound tried (unsuccessfully) to “sell” Gesell to Douglas.
22 The Alexander text is the Gifford Lectures for 1916–18 entitled Space,
Time, and Deity. They were published in two volumes in 1920 and reis-
sued in 1927. The Whitehead book Lewis discusses is Science and the Mod-
ern World (1926), the Lowell Lectures delivered at Cambridge in Febru-
ary 1925. Whitehead acknowledges Alexander’s Gifford Lectures as a
formative influence on his own, which no doubt led Lewis to describe
Alexander as Whitehead’s teacher. But Alexander was less than two years
older than Whitehead and never taught at Cambridge. Ayers accepts
Lewis’s erroneous assumption that Whitehead was a pupil of Alexander
and also repeats Lewis’s canard that they were both “disciples of Berg-
son” (Time, 86). Here is Ayers assessment of the relationship: “White-
head was a pupil of Samuel Alexander, whose Space, Time and Deity is also
frequently maligned by Lewis. Alexander’s work is more substantial than
that of Whitehead, more philosophically rigorous, while the latter is
more of a populariser. But both are dwarfed by their mentor, Bergson”
(Ayers, 74).
Whitehead, Cambridge-educated, was never the pupil of the Oxford-
educated Australian, Alexander. Nor were either of them disciples of
Bergson. And to describe Whitehead, senior co-author of Principia Math-
ematica, as a “populariser” is a canard. His reputation dwarfs that of
Alexander, and – at least in recent years – outshines Bergson.
Eliot was also a reader of Whitehead. Whereas Lewis found Whitehead
too relativistic, Eliot found him not Christian enough. In his anonymous
review of More’s The Demon of the Absolute. in Times Literary Supplement (21
Feb. 1929) Eliot approved More’s exposure of “some of the most
remarkable ambiguities in Professor Whitehead’s theories, and asserts
the uselessness of Professor Whitehead‘s God in religion.”
23 Hailie Selassie was the emperor of Ethiopia, invaded by Italy in 1935 in
defiance of the League of Nations.
In the novel Trilby is tone deaf, but is hypnotized by Svengali,
enabling her to sing. She becomes a great diva. Svengali has survived as
a clichéd figure, but his creation, Trilby, has sunk into obscurity.
Leon Trotsky fled the Soviet Union in 1933, eventually finding
refuge in Mexico in 1936, where Soviet agents assassinated him on 20
August 1940.
Notes to page 145 321
chapter four
1 See William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream.

Howard Scott (1890–1970) founded the technocracy movement with
Thorstein Veblen in New York in 1919. That movement was disbanded
by the mid-twenties, but in 1932 Scott formed the Continental Commit-
tee on Technocracy with Walter Rautenstrauch, Chairman of Columbia’s
Department of Industrial Engineering. The renewed movement attract-
ed a great deal of attention. Scott split with the cct to form Technocracy
Inc., which was widely accused of fascist tendencies. The cct did not
long survive the schism, but Scott’s Technocracy Inc. survives in pockets
to this day.
J. George Frederick published For and Against Technocracy (New York:
Business Bourse) in 1933, a collection of essays intended to expose
Technocracy as an undesirable political movement. The movement with-
ered after a disastrous nationally broadcast radio speech by Scott on 13
January 1933 (Elsner, The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation, 15).
Elsner disputes the standard assessment that Technocracy, as formulat-
ed by Howard Scott, was an American version of fascism: “The fascist,
typically, is the little guy caught up in an increasingly organized society
which threatens his status, power, and income; he would, if he could,
return to the world of small business, the family farm, and private rather
than corporate property, with marked income and status differences. But
the technocratic future represents the most extreme extrapolation of the
very urbanization-industrialization against which the fascist reacts; it is a
completely bureaucratized society, with equalitarian income, universalis-
tic recruitment of elites, and no property rights apart from immediate
personal possessions” (209). However, to define fascism exclusively by
the constituency to which it appeals, as Frederick does, fails to pay ade-
quate attention to the differing socio-economic contexts of Europe and
America, and – perhaps most importantly – to ignore the tendency of
both movements to exploit nationalist sentiment and xenophobia while
legitimating dictatorial, undemocratic governance.
2 Noel Stock notes that Pound was appointed a correspondent for The Dial
in March 1921. The Dial was a venerable journal that Eliot’s Harvard
classmates Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson had recently pur-
chased (Stock, 229). Pound appeared only sporadically in The Dial over
the next two or three years, but he was in regular correspondence with
Thayer and was awarded the Dial poetry prize for 1927 (Stock, 272).
3 Part II of The Communist Manifesto makes the point explicitly: “The Com-
munists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this
only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different
countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of
the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various
stages of development, which the struggle of the working class against
the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere repre-
sent the interests of the movement as a whole” (23).
4 It is worth noting that Veblen, one of the founders of the original tech-
nocracy, held much the same view – though he considered the change
in temperament to be benign. The following is Elsner’s paraphrase of
Veblen’s assessment of the consequences of the mechanization of man:
This state of affairs generates pressure for change but not of the sort
usually foreseen by both radical strategists and the defenders of the
status quo. For them, labour organization provides either hope or fear.
Veblen, surveying the contemporary A[merican] F[ederation] of
L[abour] and I[nternational] W[orkers] [of the] W[orld], saw little
justification for such views. A violent revolution by the oppressed and
exploited is neither probable nor, if it occurred, could it succeed ... In
what is probably the most quoted passage of the Engineers, Veblen
declares the technicians to constitute “the General Staff of the indus-
trial system ... whatever law and custom may formally say in protest ...
Therefore any question of a revolutionary overturn, in America or in
any other of the advanced industrial countries, resolves itself in practi-
cal fact into a question of what the guild of technicians will do.” Indis-
pensable to society’s livelihood, dependent on socially accumulated
knowledge, “the technicians may be said to represent the community
at large in its industrial capacity.” (20–1)
The choice of the engineer Herbert Hoover as the presidential candi-
date of the Republican Party, and his subsequent election, perhaps
reflects Veblen’s faith in technical expertise. His failure to respond effec-
tively to the crisis of 1929 discredited Veblen’s faith in technocratic
expertise so far as the American electorate is concerned.
5 This stark choice between rule by the masses or by an elite is precisely
that which the Spanish sociologist Ortega y Gasset offered his readers in
The Revolt of the Masses (1930). Oddly, Lewis never mentions Gasset
despite their broad agreement on this point and Gasset’s prominence.
Of course, The Art of Being Ruled precedes The Revolt of the Masses by four
years – and its translation by seven. Gasset, despite his distrust of the
masses, regards liberal democracy as mankind’s best hope – not a view

with which Lewis would be sympathetic. Eliot did read Revolt of the
Masses, and spoke highly of it in a 1958 interview with Leslie Paul (“A
Conversation with T. S. Eliot”), but I have found no earlier mention by
Eliot.
6 Eliot expressed a strikingly similar view in a 1934 “Commentary”: “to sur-
render individual responsibility to a party is, for many men, a pleasant
stimulant and sedative” (“Luxembourg Gardens,” 453). He had made
the same observation earlier in “The Literature of fascism,” where he
spoke of the desire of ordinary folks to “be benevolently ordered about.”
7 John A. Hobson’s influential 1902 study, Imperialism, A Study, saw imperi-
alism as a principal cause of armed conflict in the nineteenth century:
Earth hunger and the scramble for markets are responsible for the
openly avowed repudiation of treaty obligations which Germany, Rus-
sia, and England have not scrupled to defend. The sliding scale of
diplomatic language, hinterland, sphere of interest, sphere of influ-
ence, paramountcy, suzerainty, protectorate, veiled or open, leading
up to acts of forcible seizure or annexation which sometimes continue
to be hidden under “lease,” “rectification of frontier,” “concession,”
and the like, is the invention and expression of this cynical spirit of
Imperialism. (14)
Hanna Arendt pays Hobson’s study generous tribute in Imperialism,
Part Two of The Origins of Totalitarianism, calling it “a masterly analysis of
the driving economic forces and motives as well as some of its political
implications” of imperialism (note 42, 27).
8 Despite a personal appeal by Hitler in September 1940, Franco refused
to join Germany in the war against Britain (then the only Ally in Europe
left standing) despite German offers of African colonies. (Weitz, 252–4).
And Stalin seems to have had no intention of breaching the non-aggres-
sion pact he signed with Hitler in September 1939. Of course, that did
not prevent Stalin from seizing Eastern Poland or invading Finland and
making the Baltic States satellites of the Soviet Union. I suppose all that
one can say for Stalin’s aggressive tendencies is that they were confined
to weak and adjacent victims.
9 For example, later in The Art of Being Ruled : “The influence of Nietzsche
was similar to that of Bergson, James, Croce, etc. He provided a sanction
and licence, as the others did, for life – the very life that he never
ceased himself to objurgate against; the life of the second-rate and shod-
dily emotional, for the person, very unfortunately, smart and rich
enough to be able to regard himself as an ‘aristocrat,’ a man ‘beyond

good and evil,’ a destroying angel and cultivated Mephistopheles” (115).
These remarks count as reasonably effective ridicule, but hardly evince
any understanding of Nietzsche’s actual views.
10 Lewis’s views seem to reflect the vogue of eugenics at that time. For a dis-
cussion of some Modernists’ attitudes toward eugenics, see Donald
Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degen-
eration. Childs does not discuss Lewis or Pound. With respect to Eliot, I
disagree with Childs’ claim in chapter 5 that Eliot’s comments in his
review of several books on eugenics, “Recent British Periodical Litera-
ture in Ethics” in International Journal of Ethics (Jan. 1918) 270–7, repre-
sent an approval of the eugenic project.
11 In a review of C. J. Webb’s Group Theories of Religion and the Religion of the
Individual, The International Journal of Ethics 27: 1 (Oct. 1916), 115–17.
12 The term “free men” is doubtless an allusion to Bertrand Russell’s
famous essay “A Free Man’s Worship,” first published in the Independent
Review (December 1903), and reprinted many times. It presents the case
for a humanistic atheism, concluding with the stirring call for man “to
worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the
empire of chance to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that
rules his outward life.”
13 Fernand Pelloutier (1867–1901), a prominent French Syndicalist.
14 Compare Hardt and Negri’s Deleuzian view as expressed in Empire:
Empire takes form when language and communication, or really when
immaterial labor and cooperation, become the dominant productive
force. The superstructure is put to work, and the universe we live in is
a universe of productive linguistic networks. The lines of production and
those of representation cross and mix in the same linguistic and pro-
ductive realm ... Production becomes indistinguishable from repro-
duction; productive forces merge with relations of production; con-
stant capital tends to be constituted and represented within variable
capital in the brains, bodies and cooperation of productive subjects.
Social subjects are at the same time producers and products of this
unitary machine. In this new historical formation it is thus no longer
possible to identify a sign, a subject, a value, or a practice that is “out-
side.” (385, my emphasis)
15 For example, The Art of Being Ruled:
The early christian insisted on the destruction of the world. Nothing
short of that would satisfy him. He wanted to wipe out entirely every-
Notes to page 161 325
thing that existed, in order to install his Kingdom of Heaven.

Absolute denial of life is the logical solution of the thought of the
religious fanatic: and whenever you follow him for long, you will find
him leading you to destruction, so far as this life is concerned. Péguy,
Proudhon, Sorel, Bakunin, Herten, etc., all desired the End of the
World as thoroughly as any primitive christian awaiting with pious sat-
isfaction that much-canvassed event. (281, original emphasis)
16 Eliot’s declaration in For Lancelot Andrewes shocked many of Eliot’s admir-
ers. Perhaps one of the best informed on the issues in question was Cur-
tius, a distinguished German scholar whom Eliot admired (see letter to
Curtius, 28 Aug. 1922, Letters, 565–6), and whom he published in The
Criterion. Harding paraphrases Curtius’ reaction as expressed in a 1929
article in Die Literatur:
Curtius spelt out their critical differences. Calling Eliot “der Führer con-
servativer Geistespolitick” [“leader of conservative political thought”] in
England, he proceeded to dismantle Eliot’s tripartite declaration. Cur-
tius noted that Eliot’s “classicism” had more in common with reac-
tionary French political thought than the civilization of Greece and
Rome; his “royalism” ... made little sense outside of the French nation-
alism of Maurras’s Camelots du roi; finally his Anglo-Catholic via media
and his essays on the Anglican bishops, Lancelot Andrewes and John
Bramhall, signaled to Curtius a regrettable shrinkage and parochialism
in his interests as a critic, a defection from literary criticism to lay the-
ology, and worse, a retreat from “europäïscher Universalgeschichte” [“Pan
European Studies”]. (Harding, 213)
17 Although Eliot probably had not seen Mussolini’s article, “Political and
Social Doctrine,” its celebration of violence is faithful to fascism’s Futur-
ist provenance:
Fascism does not, generally speaking, believe in the possibility or utility
of perpetual peace. It therefore discards pacifism as a cloak for cow-
ardly supine renunciation in contra-distinction to self-sacrifice. War
alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets
the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it.
All other tests are substitutes which never place a man face to face with
himself before the alternative of life or death. Therefore all doctrines
which postulate peace at all costs are incompatible with fascism. (Fas-
cism: Origins, 19)
18 John Margolis thinks that Maurras’ career may well have offered Eliot a
cautionary model, leading him to avoid any direct involvement in, or
endorsement of, political movements (T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development,

97). Margolis does not draw the contrast to Eliot’s less cautious friends,
Pound and Lewis.
19 Despite Asher’s assertion that Eliot scholars have neglected Eliot’s rela-
tion with Maurrasian views, there is a long tradition of excellent com-
mentary on that relationship, beginning with Roger Kojecky, T. S. Eliot’s
Social Criticism. John D. Margolis’ 1972 study, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual Devel-
opment 1922–1939, supplements Kojecky’s article, but does not refer to
it. No doubt it was written before Kojecky’s article appeared. Kenneth
George Asher, however, had ample time to consult the earlier works. His
T. S. Eliot and Ideology and “T. S. Eliot and Charles Maurras” do, however,
add some details of interest. Jason Harding’s The Criterion: Cultural Poli-
tics and Periodical networks in Inter-War Britain, while of great value in
other ways, adds little to our knowledge of Eliot’s relation to Maurrasian
thought.
In defence of Asher’s claim that Eliot scholars have neglected the
influence of Maurras, it is true that Lyndall Gordon makes no mention
of him in any of her three biographies of Eliot. Nonetheless, Maurras
gets at least a mention in most discussions of Eliot’s ideological posture.
20 Abraham Schramek, as minister of the Interior in 1926, was responsible
for disarming the private army of the Action Française, Les Camelots du
Roi. After seven members of that group were killed in a confrontation,
Maurras held Schramek responsible and wrote a letter to Schramek threat-
ening to kill him like a dog. Maurras was imprisoned for that threatening
letter. The fact that Schramek was Jewish exacerbated the offence.
21 This distinction between his own view of culture and Arnold’s must be
seen to modify Lobb’s assessment of the impact of Arnold’s social
thought on Eliot – with which I largely agree:
Eliot’s affinities with Arnold are frequently mentioned but seldom
analysed: the complex pattern of shared ideas, influence, and opposi-
tion is most often reduced to a few generalizations about attitudes
towards culture. Certainly the careers of the two men are parallel in
many ways ... It is, in fact, in Eliot’s social criticism that Arnold’s legacy
is clearest. The treatment of classes and elites, the approach to the
question of culture, the concern for the whole life of man, even the
sanctioning of force, all have their origins in Arnold’ work. (T. S. Eliot
and the Romantic Critical Tradition, 76)
22 Eliot said in his 1948 talk “L’Hommage de l’étranger” (delivered on the
occasion of receiving the degree honoris causa from L’Université d’Aix-
en-Provence), that he could not recall who recommended Maurras to

him. He said that his assessment of Maurras was based principally on
four books: L’Avenir de l’Intelligence, Anthinée, Les Amants de Venise, and La
Leçon de Dante. He said that he could not recall who recommended the
first of them, but that he had written the date “1911” in his own hand in
his copy. He went on to speak of Irving Babbitt as a reader of Maurras,
though he claimed that Babbitt rejected some of Maurras’s views as
romantic (6).
23 For a fuller discussion of Pound’s engagement with economics see my
Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism and Preda,
Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1940.
chapter five
1 Heidegger’s thought spawned the – primarily French – existentialist

movement, which flourished in the aftermath of World War II. J.-P.
Sartre was a principal figure in that movement and his L’être et le néant
(1941) is a skeptical re-working of Sein und Zeit. Lewis seems not to have
been aware of Heidegger until after the war. He is dismissive of him, and
of Sartre, in The Writer and the Absolute (1952).
2 However, it is based on arguments in Gasset’s 1922 book, Espana Inverte-
brada; “Masas,” a 1926 article appearing in El Sol; and two lectures given
to the Association of Friends of Art in Buenos Aires (1928).
3 The books reviewed include Edgar Mowrer, Sinon: or the Future of Politics
(Kegan Paul); F. McEachran, The Civilized Man (Faber); and Hugh l’An-
son Fausset, The Modern Dilemma (Dent). (He likes McEachern best of
these three.) Of Fausset on progress, he remarks: “I am breathing the
same old stuffy atmosphere of Matthew Arnold’s Cloud Cuckoo Land”
(312). But worst of all, in his view, was Julian Huxley’s Conway Lectures,
Science, Religion and Human Nature (Watts). Freud’s Civilization and Its Dis-
contents (Hogarth) was his next target, linked with Bertrand Russell’s The
Conquest of Happiness (Allen and Unwin). He is dismissive of both.
4 But Eliot did consider his position to be compatible with that of Chester-
ton and Belloc as well as the American Agrarians. In footnote 1 to page
20 of After Strange Gods he aligned himself with Chesterton and the
American Southern Agrarians, among others: “I should not like to hold
any one of them responsible for my opinions, however, or for any that
the reader may find irritating. I have in mind Mr. Chesterton and his
‘distributism,’ Mr. Christopher Dawson (The Making of Europe), Mr;
Demant and Mr. M. B. Reckitt and their colleagues. I have also in mind
the views of Mr. Allen Tate and his friends as evinced in I’ll Take My
Stand, and those of several Scottish nationalists.”
5 “Christianity and Communism,” 382–3; “Religion and Science: A Phan-
tom Dilemma,” 428–9; “The Search for Moral Sanction,” 445–6, 480;
and “Building Up the Christian World,” 501–2.
6 Of course, Anthony Julius did not find them so in T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism
and Literary Form, but his study is itself so prejudiced, that it is difficult to
give it much credit.
Terry Eagleton makes a canny comment on Eliot’s politics in his review
of Jason Harding’s The ‘Criterion’: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in
Interwar Britain that I find more balanced and just than Julius’ polemic:
“conservatives do not regard their beliefs as political. Politics is the
sphere of utility, and therefore inimical to conservative values. It is what
other people rattle on about, whereas one’s own commitments are a mat-
ter of custom, instinct, practicality, and common sense. The Criterion was
thus embarrassed from the outset by having to address an urgent politi-
cal crisis while apparently not believing in politics.”
Harding himself makes a similar point, less trenchantly: “With the
prospect of war, the apparent collapse of liberal democracy, and follow-
ing his rejection of fascism and communism, Eliot put his faith in the
millennial programme of the notional idea of a Christian society” (201).
By calling Eliot’s program “millennial,” Harding draws attention to its
otherworldly, impractical quality.
7 General Badoglio, with Mussolini’s approval, had dropped mustard gas
from aircraft on military and civilian targets in Ethiopia in October and
December of 1935. When the Red Cross revealed these atrocities, a Red
Cross encampment in Ethiopia was “accidentally” bombed. However,
these atrocities resonated much less with the European and American
press than did Guernica.
8 I cannot refrain from noting that during the debate over the American
invasion of Iraq and the application of “Shock and Awe” tactics in the
bombing of Baghdad in 2003, the mural was covered with a large sheet
so as not to invite invidious comparisons.
9 “Largely,” because Prince, briefly King, Edward (VIII) has been accused
of such sympathies. My point is that, as literary scholars, we should not
succumb to the sort of Manichaean oppositions that so distorted
Pound’s political analysis, and insist on placing all players into one of
the three camps: liberal capitalism, fascism/nazism or socialism/
communism. Moreover, each of these “camps” permits considerable

variation within it.
10 Although Eliot was silent on the Nuremberg Laws prior to the fall of
France, he did write a special commentary deploring the Vichy govern-
ment’s anti-Semitic policies and expressing his hope that Christians
would speak out against them (Christian News-Letter 97, 3 Sept. 1941,
1–2. Cited in Schuchard, “Burbank with a Baedeker,” 17–18.). But, even
here, Eliot exhibited an ill-considered faith that the Vichy government of
Maréchal Pétain would listen to ethical arguments.
11 It is striking that while the pundits we have examined all speak of
“Europe” as a geographical entity incorporating many nations, they
speak of “America” as exclusively the United States of America, exclud-
ing Canada, Mexico, and the Central American countries – none of
which participate in “American” culture any more than European
nations do.
12 The Nazi antipathy toward homosexuality was in spite of Hitler’s close
deputy Ernst Röhm, leader of the Sturmabteilung (sa), being openly
homosexual, as were many of his lieutenants. However, Hitler and Röhm
fell out. Hitler had the sa destroyed and Röhm murdered in the purge
known as “The Night of the Long Knives” even though it actually contin-
ued for three days, 30 June to 2 July 1934.
13 Lewis might be the source of the common misrepresentation that Hitler
was a house painter, for he describes him as “an Austrian house-painter,
just over forty years old” (7). Of course, Hitler was an unsuccessful easel
painter of landscapes, not a house painter.
14 Lewis’s view may not be as wrong-headed as it appears in the light of the
rapid fall of France to the German invasion in 1940. Klaus Fischer,
among others, has argued that if the Allies “had struck at the Ruhr with
all the power at their command while Hitler was preoccupied in Poland,
they could have seriously crippled Germany, perhaps to the point of forc-
ing Hitler to sue for peace.” But, Fischer adds, “Nothing of the sort hap-
pened.” (Nazi Germany, 451). And Ronald Powaski notes that “the
French army ... was touted as the strongest in Europe” at the outbreak of
war (Lightning War: Blitzkrieg in the West, 1940, 2).
15 At the risk of pedantic excess, it is worth discriminating here between
simple anti-Semitism as a form of racism and conspiracy theory, which
alleges a Jewish plot to control the world. The fons et erigo of the latter
variety of anti-Semitism is, of course, the phony Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. It is known to be a forgery by the secret police (the Okhrana) of
Czar Nicholas II, issued in 1903. That forgery was based on Maurice
Joly’s Dialogues aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (1864), as was
revealed by a series of articles in the Times in August of 1922. Joly’s work
was a satirical attack on the regime of Louis Philippe, and had nothing
to do with a Jewish conspiracy.
16 Gottfried Feder was a Nazi deputy in the Reichstag in 1931 and the Nazi
economic critic. He blamed “loan capital” (Leihkapital) and “internation-
al finance” for the economic difficulties of the 1930s. Hitler endorsed
Feder’s economic ideas in Mein Kampf (chapter 8). Hjalmar Schacht, the
new Economics minister, dismissed Feder from the Reichsbank in the
summer of 1934 (Weitz, Hitler’s Banker, 147, 181).
17 Pound is referring to J. A. Hobson’s well-known 1902 study Imperialism. It
came out in a third edition from George Allen and Unwin in 1938.
18 Albert S. Lindemann observes in Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the
Rise of the Jews that Hilaire Belloc’s assertion in his 1919 book, The Jews,
“that Jewish Bolsheviks had spread anti-Semitism more widely than ever
before was taken up by many others. It would find echoes even at the
end of the twentieth century, most notably in the efforts of German his-
torian Ernst Nolte to explain the Holocaust as stemming from Hitler’s
fear of the Bolshevik’s Asiatic deeds” (434). Lindemann goes on to note
that such sentiments were to be found in France and the usa as well
(434–5). The famous aviator Charles Lindbergh was a prominent Ameri-
can anti-Semite, anti-Communist, and Nazi sympathizer, though not a
believer in a conspiracy (see David Friedman). It is perhaps worth
adding that none of our three writers warrant a mention in Lindemann’s
study of anti-Semitism – no doubt because they are too insignificant in
the history of anti-Semitism to be mentioned in his very detailed study of
the phenomenon. Lindemann also overlooks Lindbergh.
19 However, it is worth noting that neither Churchill nor De Gaulle was
much concerned with Nazi brutality or its anti-Semitism. As Tony Judt
delicately observes: “De Gaulle (like Churchill) was curiously blind to
the racial specificity of Hitler’s victims, understanding Nazism in the con-
text of Prussian militarism instead” (805). The post-war tendency to see
World War II as primarily about the “final solution” does not reflect con-
temporary perception of the conflict. In The Myth of Rescue: Why the
Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis, William D.
Rubinstein documents the depth of anti-Nazi sentiment in the United
States prior to the outbreak of war, and notes that the racial policies of
the Nazis were an important cause of that hostility (45–8). These senti-
ments were manifest despite popular support for American reluctance to

offer sanctuary to Jewish refugees (50–1). However, he also points out
that the scattered reports of the Holocaust were generally disbelieved,
and when believed no plausible plan of action beyond the total war
already in progress was available (85–7).
20 In “Points,” a review of F. D. Roosevelt’s Looking Forward in the American
Social Credit journal New Democracy (I, 25 Aug. 1933), Pound included
the following note: “from the 9th to the 22nd of Feb. this year I was
occupied in writing a book.” No doubt that book was Jefferson and/or Mus-
solini.
21 Preda does not include this letter in her book, Economic Correspondence.
22 Stock reports that Paul de Kruif, a journalist with whom Pound had been
in correspondence, introduced him to Henry A. Wallace, the secretary of
Agriculture. He also met Senators Borah, Byrd, Bankhead, and Wheeler,
and Congressman J. Voorhis (Stock, 361). While none of his economic
recommendations came to anything, Pound had been in correspon-
dence with Borah. See Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting: A Political
Correspondence, 1930–35. Another politician Pound befriended was
George Tinkham. See “Dear Uncle George”: The Correspondence between Ezra
Pound and Congressman Tinkham of Massachusetts.
23 Here, as elsewhere, Pound attempts to present the disorganized nature
of his discourse as somehow a virtue: “I am not putting these sentences
in monolinear syllogistic arrangement, and I have no intention of using
that old form of trickery to fool the reader” (28).
24 For a detailed account of Pound’s struggle with his commitment to Social
Credit and the non-conforming policies of the fascist state see my Pound
in Purgatory and Roxana Preda, ed., Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence
1933–1940.
25 It is worth remembering that universal suffrage was a relatively new thing
in the democracies in the period under discussion. Until the early years
of the twentieth century only male property holders could vote in most
democracies. Universal male suffrage followed in the early decades of
the twentieth century, but female suffrage was much slower to gain
acceptance. Distrust of the political sagacity of the common man and
woman was not confined to “reactionaries” like our three in the twenties
and thirties. The fact that Hitler gained the chancellorship through the
electoral process did nothing to reassure those who worried about the
consequences of universal suffrage. Lewis alluded to this failure of
democracy in Left Wings Over Europe: “It was a pure parliamentary democ-
racy that voted in – as nearly by democratic vote as it is humanly possible

to get – and has periodically confirmed in power, the great patriot who
is now the “Dictator of the German Democracy” (298).
26 However, he did defend Mussolini’s invasion in “The fascist Ideal,” The
British-Italian Bulletin 4, 16 (18 April 1936): “Italy does not need
colonies ‘to employ’ her sons. Italy needs Abyssinia to attain economic
independence, by which I do not mean written permission from the
enemies of all mankind; I mean the material wealth, the raw materi-
als necessary to feed and clothe the people of Italy. And I hope Italy gets
every inch of it” (EPPP, 47). Of course, it was a fantasy that Ethiopia had
anything of value to Italy – but one that the Italian press fostered.
27 Of course, Jefferson served only two terms (1801–09). However, the
Republican party, which he had founded, dominated American federal
politics for twenty-four years. And Jefferson continued to offer advice as
a senior statesman – giving some credence to Pound’s outrageous claim.
28 The list could be extended. Once again, see my Pound in Purgatory and
Roxana Preda’s Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence.
29 The allusion to Manes, the founder of Manichaeism, unintentionally
draws attention to Pound’s simplistic “either/or” schema of evil usurers
triumphing over benevolent dictators. “Digonos” is a version of
“Dionysus.”
chapter six
1 Pound began his biweekly talks in January 1941. After a break he

resumed the broadcasts on 29 January 1942. He continued these inflam-
matory talks until 25 July 1943. In all there were 125 broadcasts, many
recorded by American authorities. They were cited in Pound’s indict-
ment for treason. See Leonard W. Doob, ed., “Ezra Pound Speaking:”
Radio Speeches of World War II.
2 See in particular, Demetres Tryphonopoulos and Leon Surette, eds. “I
Cease not to Yowl”: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Agresti. Olivia Agresti was a
former fascist, but a Catholic, and not an anti-Semite. She was also the
niece of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The correspondence – most of it written
while Pound was in St. Elizabeths – shows her castigating Pound for his
persistent expression of anti-Semitic views – among other things. See my
Pound in Purgatory for details of their relationship.
3 It cannot be denied that the Rome broadcasts exhibit paranoid anti-
Semitism, as do many of the letters Pound wrote to Olivia Rossetti-
Agresti. However, I do not accept Casillo’s argument that anti-Semitism

was the motivating factor in Pound’s political posture. I was able to show
in Pound in Purgatory that the anti-Semitism was a consequence of his eco-
nomic views rather than a cause of them as Casillo believes. Of course, I
do not pretend that my diagnosis excuses Pound in any way. Indeed, his
moral failure is more marked if we accept my argument, since his anti-
Semitism was a moral – as well as a cognitive – failure rather than a men-
tal pathology.
4 In contrast to the spurious Conversations with Hitler (1940) discussed in
the Appendix, Hitler’s Secret Conversations is a genuine record of Hitler’s
“table talk.” It was published by Farrar, Straus and Young in the United
States, with a preface by the eminent British historian Hugh Trevor
Roper.
5 The Letters of Wyndham Lewis does not contain any letters in reply to
Pound’s comments, though there are several from the period to Pound
or to his wife, Dorothy. In conjunction with Eliot, Lewis took an interest
in securing Pound’s release from St. Elizabeths. But despite sympathy for
his old friend, it would appear that Lewis saw no purpose in entering
into a debate with Pound, given that Pound was rehashing the same mis-
guided arguments he had been spouting for nearly twenty years.
Bryant Knox attributes Lewis’s reluctance to debate with Pound to
Lewis’s “inability to incorporate matters of substance” (262). I cannot
agree with that assessment. Lewis’s correspondence reflects a still agile
and perceptive intelligence in 1951 and beyond. It seems evident to me
that he avoided engaging Pound on the issues because Pound’s views
were wildly incorrect, often incoherent, and always incorrigible.
6 Ever since Eliot was awarded the British Order of Merit in 1948, Pound
commonly referred to him as O.M. – an epithet that replaced “Possum,”
which had served Pound ever since Eliot stopped “playing possum” and
openly declared his Anglicanism, royalism, and Classicism. Here Pound
combines the two: “Poss O. M.”
7 The accusation that Lewis was bigoted toward Italians is particularly inap-
posite. In The Lion and the Fox Lewis is practically adulatory of Renais-
sance Italy, crediting the Italians with virtually all the accomplishments of
the European Renaissance, even – somewhat hyperbolically – asserting
that “without Italy it is unlikely that Watts would have invented the loco-
motive, any more than a Tasmanian or an Esquimaux” (53).
8 One should not make too much of Eliot’s approval of the maintenance
of order by “every means.” Apart from the Bolshevik Revolution ten years
earlier, the most prominent uses of violence to maintain order in 1927

were the suppression of the Spartacus uprising in Germany in 1919, the
suppression of Hitler’s Beerhall Putsch in 1923, the murder of Giacomo
Matteotti by fascist thugs, in 1924, and the British General Strike of
1926. Of these instances of the use of violence by the state, only the sec-
ond last is clearly reprehensible, and it could hardly qualify as intended
to maintain order, since Matteotti’s murder was prompted by a speech in
the legislature denouncing the 1924 Italian election, which overwhelm-
ingly returned fascists, as a fraud.
However, in Notes Toward a Definition of Culture, with the example of fas-
cist and Nazi order before him, Eliot defends the British rule in India on
similar grounds: “no ruling nation has less to be ashamed of than Britain
in these particulars; corruption, brutality and maladministration were
too prevalent in India before the British arrived, for commission of them
to disturb the fabric of Indian life.” However, he adds that British rule
was a failure because “there can be no compromise between the
extremes of an external rule which is content to keep order and leave
the social structure unaltered, and a complete cultural assimilation. The
failure to arrive at the latter is a religious failure” (90–1). In short, order
is not a sufficient condition for cultural health. Presumably Eliot
believed that the British could have succeeded in India only by convert-
ing all the residents of the subcontinent to Anglicanism!
9 Of course, “Paideuma” is just the German form of the Greek word paidea
or “teaching” from which we get “pedagogy.”
10 The Einsatzgruppen were army units mandated to seek out and murder
Jews – mostly in Russia after 1941. They did not typically round them up
for shipment to death camps, but murdered them on the spot.
11 It is true, of course, that among Zionists assimilation was regarded as a
betrayal. But as Lindemann points out, very few German-speaking Jews
were attracted to Zionism (330). And prominent French Jews such as
Julien Benda, Emile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, and Daniel Halévy were
thoroughly assimilated into French culture (210). The historian and
resistance hero Marc Bloch is an emphatic case in point. Before his tor-
ture and execution by the Gestapo, he wrote a “Testamentary Instruc-
tion” in which he asked not “to have read above my body those Jewish
prayers to the cadence of which so many of my ancestors, including my
father were laid to rest ... A stranger to all creedal dogmas, as to all pre-
tended community of life and spirit based on race, I have, through life,
felt that I was above all, and quite simply, a Frenchman” (177–8).
12 Ronald Bush argues in “The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Think-

ing/Literary Politics” that Eliot’s interest in anthropology was first
aroused by his visit to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1908. While that is no
doubt true, Eliot resisted the necessarily humanistic view of culture ani-
mating anthropology until very late.
13 In the lecture itself, Eliot was more cautious:
I have, in all probability, made this lecture difficult by keeping your
attention upon two points at once: the nature of metaphysical poetry
in general involves both the resemblances and the differences between
Donne and Dante. The differences involve a certain theory of the dis-
integration of the intellect in modern Europe. Therefore I would
remind you that I am here concerned primarily with poetry, not with
modern Europe and its progress or decline; but that if and when I
speak of “disintegration,” “decay,” or “decline,” I am unconcerned with
the emotional or moral co-efficient of these terms. The “disintegra-
tion” of which I speak may be evitable or inevitable, good or bad; to
draw its optimistic or pessimistic conclusion is an occupation for
prophets and makers of almanacs, of whom I am not one. (Varieties of
Metaphysical Poetry, 158–9)
14 For a discussion of the “Volkisch” movement in Germany see Anderson
Arajuo, Into the Vortex: The Cultural Politics of Eliot, Woolf, Lewis, and Pound,
1914–1939.
15 Eliot does not mention what it was that civilization had deprived the
Melanesians of. Rivers is not so squeamish. The Melanesians were head
hunters. That they sunk into a cultural funk because deprived of such a
barbaric cultural practice rather complicates the issue – which was much
the point of Rivers’ essay. Eliot found it in W. H. R. Rivers, Essays on the
Depopulation of Melanesia.
16 While it is widely believed that the democracies turned away would-be
Jewish refugees, Rubinstein maintains in The Myth of Rescue that although
“barriers to the entry of refugee Jews to most countries did exist ... these
barriers came down once it became apparent, following Kristallnacht, that
Hitler intended to expel virtually all Jews from Germany and brutalize
unmercifully virtually all who remained.” He adds that probably “the
most important single reason for the failure [of Jews] to emigrate is that
most German Jews assumed that Nazi anti-Semitism would ... ‘blow-over’
once the Nazi government became institutionalized.”(20).
17 Once again Rubinstein offers some perspective on the contemporary per-
ception of Nazi anti-Semitism: “With post-Holocaust hindsight, there is,
of course, virtually no country which cannot be criticized for erecting

pointlessly high barriers for those faced – it transpired – with certain
death. Such a view is profoundly ahistorical, for no one at this time –
that is, until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 – could fore-
see genocide as the end result of Nazi anti-Semitism” (41).
On the infamous refusal of Cuba, the United States, and Canada to
accept the 930 German-Jewish passengers on the German liner ss St.
Louis, made famous in the movie Voyage of the Damned, Rubinstein points
out that they were eventually offered sanctuary in Britain and France.
While most of those landed in France perished in the Holocaust, Rubin-
stein has harsh words for those who construe their acceptance by the
French as tantamount to a death sentence, for it assumes that “the lead-
ers of France (with a standing army of 1.5 million men) Belgium and the
Netherlands ... were blindly moronic (if not somehow anti-Semitic) for
not realizing: (1) that Germany would overrun and conquer their coun-
tries; (2) that the Nazis would fundamentally reverse their policies from
exiling Jews to imprisoning and killing them; (3) that, beginning three
years later, the Jews of western Europe would be deported to extermina-
tion camps in Poland, something unimaginable by anyone in 1939”
(62).
18 Lewis does not cite Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace on this
point, but two later books – G. E. R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions (London: Gol-
lancz) and C. E. M. Joad, Why War? (Harmondsworth: Penguin (1939) –
were both critical of the Versailles Treaty as too severe on Germany and a
leading cause of German aggression.
Keynes’ book was published in 1919. It had special authority since he
had been a member of the British delegation to Versailles and had
resigned in protest over the terms imposed on the Germans. Robert
Skidelsky, Keynes’ biographer, details the book’s enormous success and
defends Keynes’ pillorying of the Treaty, against his critics (John Maynard
Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920, 392–400). Margaret MacMillan
records that “public opinion in Britain and the United States increasing-
ly swung round to the view that the peace settlements with Germany
were deeply unfair.” However, she points out that the reparations Ger-
many actually paid to France – which are often cited as contributing to
the rise of Nazism – amounted to “slightly less than what France, with a
much smaller economy, paid Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of
1870–71” (1919, 479–80). Germany regularly defaulted on its payments,
and in the end paid much less than was required by the Treaty.
19 Kant’s “practical reason” was the instantiation in mankind of universal

laws that governed the cosmos. In saying that his position was the reverse
of Kant’s practical reason, Lewis is denying any such harmony between
man and the cosmos.
conclusion
1 It is true that the drama and symphonic music possess the same traits of
being collective productions. However, the dramatist and composer
retained their pre-eminence in the creation of symphonies and plays.
The scriptwriters for radio drama and movies typically had no such pre-
eminence. Indeed, both media were parasitic on the existing body of lit-
erature, which they re-packaged for the new media. Although there were
original radio plays and movie scripts, they were the exception rather
than the rule – and even then, the directors and players were more
prominent in the public mind than the authors.
appendix
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appendix
Index
Académie Française 47 126, 127; and Eliot 193, 232,

Action Française 68 233, 240, 250, 255, 259–61,
Adorno, Theodor W. 41, 43, 263, 326; Eliot’s affinity with 127;
305 Eliot on 164, 327; influence
Aestheticism 29 126; Lewis on 127, 282; and
Aiken, Conrad 22, 34 Pound 25, 243; and religion
Akin, William A. 321 164
Aldington, Richard 83, 84, 106 art: as politics 63; as diagnostic 33
American culture 43 Asher, Kenneth 162, 165, 310n5,
Angell, Norman 14, 17, 92, 93, 326n19
114, 184, 209, 211, 259, 293; Atlantic Monthly 71
Can Government Cure Unemploy- Atlee, Clement 195
ment 14; The Great Illusion 14; Austria 56
Lewis on 15; Pound on 14, 15
Angioletti, G. B. 49 Badoglio, General 328n7
anti-Semitism 28, 30, 89, 107, Baldwin, Stanley 131
179, 212, 213, 220, 237, 254, Barrès, Maurice 37, 87
263–5, 267, 279, 283, 316n7, Bedford, Duke of 107
329n10, 330n18, 332n3, Belgion, Montgomery 47, 309n24,
335nn17, 18; Italian anti-Semit- 310n5
ic laws 57 Benda, Julien 82, 118, 183,
appeasement 201, 219 315nn3–5, 334n11; Belphégor
Arendt, Hanna: Totalitarianism 86, 90, 91, 94, 152, 315nn3, 4;
139, 149, 150, 323n7 Bergsonisme, ou une Philosophie de
Arnold, Matthew 89–90; and athe- la Mobilité 87; Eliot on 87–91,
ism 155; Culture and Anarchy 94, 95; La Trahison des Clercs 13,
354 Index
47, 89, 94, 95, 152, 315n6; Chisholm, Lawrence 72

Lewis on 96, 90; Pound on 87 Churchill, Winston 65
Bergson, Henri 12, 37, 38, 73, Civilisation: idea of 49; new civi-
117, 118, 220, 320n22, 334n11; lization 52
and Benda 88; and Eliot 47, 89, Cohen, Bela 79
316n9; and Lewis 91, 118, 124, Cohrssen, Hans 228
125, 129, 319n20, 320n22, Collier, Richard 223
323n9; Pound on 87 communism xiii, 6–9, 12; appeal
Bernstein, Eduard 311n6 199, 267; Dennis on 299; Eliot
Bolshevik Revolution 12 on 188, 190, 191, 203; and fas-
Bonaparte, Napoleon 120 cism 146, 292; the International
Bradley, F. H. 12 46; International Brigade 141;
Bradshaw, David 319n21 Mensheviks 110; neglect of 64;
Brailsford, Henry N. 17, 92, 93, Pound on 171; pseudo-religion
114, 184, 209, 211, 259, 293; 216, 263; revisionists 64; schol-
The War of Steel and Gold 14 arly attitudes toward 17, 65;
Braque, Georges 74 Soviet version 276; threat of 53,
British General Strike 54 106, 134; utopianism of 140. See
Browning, Robert 35; Sordello, 77 also individual authors
Bruhl, Lévy 37 Confucius 75
Brzeska, Henri Gaudier 57 Cornford, F. M.: Nietzschean 75
Bush, President George 42, 259 Coughlin, Father Charles 231,
Bush, Ronald 309n23, 314n14; 287
The Genesis of Pound’s “Three Can- Coyle, Michael xi
tos” 314n14; “The Presence of Curtius, E. R. 49, 325n16
the Past” 335n12
D’Annunzio, Gabriele x, 79, 85
Cambridge University 22 D’Aquino, Iva Togari: “Tokyo
Canada 66 Rose” 285
Carpenter, Edward: Pound on 220 Dakin, A. H. 162
Casillo, Robert xi Dante Alighieri 83; Commedia 83
Catholic Church 44 Dasenbrook, Reed Way xi
Chace, Wm. M. xi De Gaulle, Charles 65
Chamberlain, Neville 201 Deleuze, Gilles 24; A Thousand
Charcot, Jean-Martin 33, 34, 73; Plateaus 24
and Nordau 33 Dennis, Lawrence 146, 148, 286,
Childs, Donald 12 292, 317n14; approval of fas-
China 71 cism, Nazism, and communism
Chinitz, David 10 299; on capitalism 297; on
Index 355
Hitler 294; Pound on 295–7; 186, 188, 194, 196–201, 214,

on President Roosevelt 294; 316n11, 319n21, 323n6; Dante
on slavery 298; and technology 89; “Dry Salvages” 179; “East
295; and Wilfrid Pareto 298 Coker” 6, 147, 179, 189, 250;
Depression, The xiv, 12 “For Lancelot Andrewes” 68,
Derrida, Jacques 126, 301n5 161, 325n16; “Gerontion” 128;
Dial, The 60 “Hollow Men, The” 128; “Ideal-
Dobrée, Bonamy 87 ism of Julien Benda, The” 95;
Doolittle, Hilda 83 “Metaphysical Poets, The” 35;
Douglas, Major 16, 121, 137, 168; “Minor Metaphysicals, The” 185;
in Cantos 176; Eliot on 179; J. “Modern Dilemma, The” 190,
M. Keynes on 174, 175; Lewis 263; Murder in the Cathedral 12;
on 178, 179; at New Age 169, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
170; Pound on 16, 78, 170–2, 10; Review of Reflections on Vio-
177 lence 166; The Rock 10; Sacred
Durkheim, Emile 37 Wood, The 87; “Sweeney Ago-
nistes” 5, 6, 10, 276, 306n11;
Eagleton, Terry: on Eliot and fas- This American World, Preface 26,
cism 143 27, 41, 44; “Thoughts After
Edison, Thomas 223 Lambeth” 131, 187, 243, 262;
Edwards, Lyford P.: on Lewis and “Tradition and Individual Tal-
fascism 105, 106 ent” 31, 50, 88, 258; Use of Poet-
Einstein, Albert 60, 194; Lewis on ry and the Use of Criticism 89; Vari-
38, 124 eties of Metaphysical Poetry, The 36,
Eisenhower, President Dwight D. 335n13; Waste Land, The 18, 38,
15; on military industrial com- 49, 91, 128, 145, 162, 257, 263
plex 302n6 Eliot, Vivien 47, 203, 313n11;
Eliot, T. S. passim, x; agrarianism flees to Rome 202, 203
5, 188–90, 193, 198 200, Elizabeth I, Queen 120
327n4; baptism 36; disassociat- Engels, Friedrich 41
ed sensibility 35; isolated as Epstein, Jacob 72
expatriate 198; on Lewis 197, Europe 20; Union of 51
198; on the mythological
method 60, 61; on Sacre du Fabianism 27
Printemps 60; on Spanish Civil Faguet, Émile 37, 306n13
War 196, 197; on Wyndham Fascism passim, 6, 52; American
Lewis 101, 102 response 235, 243; appeal of 7,
works: Clark Lectures 35, 257; 12, 17, 52, 93, 97, 98, 199, 211;
Criterion, The 13; “Commentary” Baldwin on 131; and Commu-
356 Index
nism 149, 150; Corporatism 273, 286, 292; declaration of

112; defined 139, 141; Dennis war 267; Dennis on 293; Eliot
on 287, 290–2; Eagleton on on 256, 264; fall of 329; and
143; Eliot on 42, 48, 96, 131, fascism 216; German repara-
158, 159, 161, 167, 197, 203, tions 336n19; imperialism 69,
205, 251; Era Fascista 85; Fascist 85, 92, 93, 150, 239; Jews in
Party 70; Ferguson on 97, 98; 336; Lewis on 17, 212, 215,
Gasset on 183, 184; Griffin on 283; occupation 164; Pound on
139, 140; Horkheimer on 41, 78, 87, 230, 241, 244; reac-
263; Jameson on 150, 152; and tionaries in 83, 86; Spanish Civil
Lewis 28; Lewis on 57, 100, War 196; Vichy government 47;
104–6, 110, 122, 156, 267, 268, war industry 238
270; Mussolini on 85, 96, 159, Frederick, J. George 321n1
194; and Nazism 7, 28; New Freikorps 46
York debate on 85, 97; Pound Freud, Sigmund 33, 34
on 222, 229, 233, 243, 248, Frobenius, Leo 39, 75, 121, 226,
278, 279, 296; and Sorel 111; 251; and Spengler 37, 307
Sternhell on 141, 142; Vincent Fukuyama, Francis: The End of
Sherry on 53; and William Dud- History 44
ley Pelley 287, 288. See also indi- Futurism 24, 28, 57, 59–61, 66,
vidual authors 70, 72, 73, 104, 109, 122, 123,
Fenollosa, Ernest 71, 75, 121, 146, 242, 276, 314n16, 325n17;
305n9, 313n12 “Futurist Manifesto” 56, 66,
Fenollosa, Mary 314 304n5. See also Marinetti
Ferguson, Niall x, 84, 85, 97, 98,
217, 219, 225; on Hitler and Gandhi, Mahatma 223
FDR 225; Nazi Sympathizers Gasset, Ortega Y 8, 23, 182–6,
107 188, 191–3, 199, 208, 210, 211,
Fernandez, Ramon: on Eliot 87, 221, 258, 259, 274; Eliot on
88 261; Revolt of the Masses 8, 182,
Ficino, Marsilio 77 322n5, 327n2
Fischer, Klaus P. 219, 224, 329; Germany 15; Spartacus revolt 45,
Nazi Germany: A New History 201 46, 54, 79, 333n8; Third Reich
Fisher, Irving 228 31; Weimar Government 47. See
Fiume 79, 85, 111, 314nn15,16 also Hitler
Ford, Ford Madox 21 Goebbels, Joseph 11
Ford, President Gerald 285 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von 39
France, Anatole 37 Gorbachev, Mikhail 42
France 46, 49, 56, 73, 89, 97, 216, Gordon, Lyndall 34, 165, 326n19
Index 357
Gourmont, Remy de 12 206, 232, 250, 260; English

Graves, Robert 135 admirers of 107; fear of Bolshe-
Greaves, H. R. G.: Eliot on 194, 195 viks 330n18; Final Solution
Griffin, Roger 111, 139–41, 143, 330n19; and Futurism 146; and
154, 317n14 Franco 323n8; on French and
Guattari, Felix 24 English 50; and Heidegger 181;
Guest, Haden 203 and homosexuality 329n12; Jew-
ish perception of 335n18;
Haldane, J. B. S. 113 Kristallnacht 202; and Lawrence
Halifax, Viscount 107 Dennis 290, 292, 294, 299; Lewis
Hall, Donald 25 on 6, 15, 16, 107, 136, 181, 200,
Hanel, Wolfgang: on Rauschning 211–15, 217, 219, 220, 263–5,
289 268–270, 277, 311n7; Lewis’s
Harding, Jason 143, 254, 309n21, support of 144; Mein Kampf
310n5, 319n21, 325n16, 330n16; nationalism 92, 239;
326n19, 328n6 and Nietszche 181; paganism 28;
Hardt, Michael 23; Empire 23 painter 329n13; personal ruler
Harrison, Jane: Nietzschean 75 233; popular leader 11; Pound
Harrison, John xi, 310n5 on 221, 241, 244, 245, 249;
Harvard University 22 racism 5; and Rauschning 288,
Heidegger, Martin x, 65, 125, 289; rhetoric of 70; and Roo-
327n1; Nietzschean 75; Sein sevelt 225; and Spanish Civil War
und Zeit 181 141, 196; and Stalin 323n8
Herzl, Theodor 31 Horkheimer, Max: Dialectic of
Heydon, John 77 Enlightenment 41
Heyman, C. David xi Housman, A. E.: A Shropshire Lad
Heymman, Katherine Ruth 76 21
Hinkle, Eleanor 22 Hughes, H. Stuart 307n14
historicism 5, 26, 39, 41, 304n6 Hulme, T. E. x, 21, 40, 42, 55, 57,
Hitler, Adolf xiv, 6, 52, 65, 120, 58, 65, 72, 82, 83, 108, 118,
122, 150, 198, 249, 273, 316n6, 129, 130, 131, 308n18;
323n8, 329n12; anti- Communist “Humanism and the Religious
200; anti-Semitic Laws 201; Beer- Attitude” 130
hall Putsch 333n8; and Catholi- Hutchinson, Mary 47
cism 265; chancellor 168, 224; Huxley, Aldous 112, 113; Lewis on
Charlie Chaplin on 269; com- 113, 194
pared to Stalin 98; and democra- Huxley, Julian: Lewis on 327n3
cy 273; democratically elected Huysmans, Joris Karl 30; Là Bas
331n25; election 97; Eliot on 30; A Rebours 30
358 Index
Ibsen, Henrik 30 Laski, Harold 195; Eliot on 163,

ideogram 71, 73 188, 232
industrialism 14 Lasserre, M. 87, 315n2
internment 289 Lawrence, D. H. x, 34, 147,
Ishiguro, Kazuo: Remains of the Day 148
107 Le Bon, Gustav 301n5
Italy 13, 16. See also Mussolini, fas- Left Wings over Europe 215, 217,
cism 218
Lenin, Vladimir Ilych 6, 7, 16, 70,
James, Henry 20; Portrait of a Lady 106, 115, 152, 233, 249, 273,
21 276, 309; birth date 65; Dennis
James, William 35 on 149; Lewis on 110, 118, 156;
Jameson, Frederic xi, 150–2, 155 Pound on 180, 225, 229
Janet, Pierre 33; “disintegrated” Lentricchia, Frank xii
personality 34 Lewis, Wyndham passim, x; 3–5, 6,
Japan 17, 48, 50; Pearl Harbor 10–12, 14, 15, 18, 28, 30, 31,
72 38, 41, 50, 51; aesthetic views
Jaurès, Jean 46 53; agrarianism 206; art and
Joyce, James 308n18, 311n7; birth politics 63; and fascism 70;
date 65; Eliot on 32, 60; Lewis futurism 57; hubris 53; on
on 123, 134, 275; Ulysses 32 Pound 61; on technology 102;
Joyce, William, Lord “Haw Haw” Vorticism 59, 62
285 works: The Apes of God 30, 105,
Julius, Anthony 309n24, 328n6 128, 182, 281, 282; The Art of
Being Ruled 28, 90, 100, 116,
Kahn, Otto 223 143, 144, 146, 158, 167, 209,
Kandinsky, Wassily 27, 61 211, 280, 301n5, 323nn5, 9,
Kautsky, Johan 110, 115 324n15; Blast 61; Blasting and
Kenner, Hugh xi Bombardiering 57, 58, 130, 135,
Keynes, J. M. 92, 174, 175; The 136, 185, 219, 220, 269, 311n7;
Economic Consequences of the Peace Count Your Dead 207, 215,
46, 336n19; Theory of Employ- 217–20; Doom of Youth 207, 214,
ment, Interest and Money 178 215, 265; The Enemy 38, 106,
Kojecky, Roger 167, 326n19 121, 318n17; Hitler 151, 178,
Kolakowski, Leszek 7, 110, 111, 207, 211–13, 218, 220, 265,
140, 309n19; Main Currents of 281, 282; The Hitler Cult 15,
Marxism 27 308n18; Left Wings Over Europe
Krutch, Joseph Wood; Eliot on 15, 207, 215, 217, 218, 220,
194 331n25; The Jews, Are They
Index 359
Human? 15, 16, 254, 264, 267, Pound on 61; and speed 49, 59,
303n7; The Lion and the Fox 10, 60; and technology 123;War:
102, 163, 197, 198, 207, 232, The World’s Only Hygiene 56. See
247, 249, 333n7; Time and West- also Futurism
ern Man 28, 30, 38, 59, 70, 90, Maritain, Jacques 47
91, 101, 105, 109, 115–17, 122, Marx, Karl 41, 73, 115, 118, 119,
125, 130, 133, 136, 168, 181, 141, 152, 265, 277, 293; Com-
210, 271, 273, 280; The Writer munist Manifesto 64; and the
and the Absolute 17, 86, 113, Depression 192; Eliot on 163,
125, 275, 327n1 232; The German Ideology 118,
Liebnecht, Karl 46 119, 124; and Lenin 276; Lewis
Lindbergh, Charles: Hitler Admir- on 135, 137, 156, 213; on reli-
er 217 gion 55; on technology 123,
Little Review, The 21 124
Lobb, Edward 326n21 Marxism 5, 7, 12, 119, 255; in the
Loisy, Alfred 37 Academy 64, 65; alienation 251;
Londonderry, Lord of: Ourselves Eliot on 251; levelling 9; Lewis
and Germany 107 on 106, 117, 317n14; Pound on
Longenbach, James xii 277; utopian 9
Lope da Vega: Las Almenas de Toro Massis, Henri 47, 49, 52, 309n22;
77 Defence de l’occident 47; Eliot on
Luxembourg, Rosa 46; birth date 47, 48; Les Idées restent 48; Lewis
65 on 50; on Western decline 49, 50
Matisse, Henri 37
MacDiarmud, Lucy xi Matthews, T. S. 67; Great Tom 67
Machiavelli, Nicolo 11; The Prince Maurras, Charles 47, 92, 94, 130,
11 151, 155, 202, 204, 216, 221,
MacMillan, Margaret 54; Italian 242, 249, 270, 310n5, 315n5,
Futurist Party 56; Paris 1919 325nn16, 18, 326n19; and
54 Action Francaise 68, 166, 167;
Margolis, John D. 162, 165, Eliot on 137, 159, 161–5, 167,
325n18, 326n19 232, 326n22; and fascism 250;
Marinetti, Emilio Filippo Tomma- and Julien Benda 89; Lewis on
so 24, 25, 48, 103, 146, 276; 167, 168; Papal condemnation
breaks with Mussolini 57; and 161; Pound on 68; “Prologue to
fascism 28; Futurist Manifesto an Essay on Criticism” 165, 166;
24, 55, 56, 66, 67; Italian Futur- and religion 164; Royalism 198,
ist Party 70; Lewis on 38, 57, 206, 250
123, 132; non-combatant 58; McClure, S. S. 85
360 Index
McLuhan, Marshall 44, 312n9 nationalism 92, 239; Oswald

Medici, Cosimo 73, 120 Mosley on 144; overthrow 233;
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 126 “Political and Social Doctrine”
Meyers, Jeffrey 57, 101, 105, 144, 160, 325n17; Pound discovers
167, 247, 264, 318n16 180, 241, 242; Pound on 222,
Monro, Harold 34 223, 225, 226, 228–31, 248–50,
Monroe, Harriet 71 275, 277, 281, 332n26; Pound
Morley, Frank 67 on interview with 224; Pound
Morrison, Paul xi supports 236, 237, 239; Pound’s
Mosley, Oswald 144, 178, 187, admiration 70, 74; Pound’s first
188, 213, 216, 217, 283; Eliot praise of 221; Pound’s interview
on 203 with 221, 222; and Sorel 108,
Mowrer, Edgar Ansell 26, 41–7, 146; and Spanish Civil War 141,
80, 114, 126, 186, 258, 196; Stanley Baldwin on 131;
308nn16, 17, 327n3; This and technocracy 145, 146; “Voli-
American World 26; Triumph and tionist Economics” 228
Turmoil 26
Munich Agreement 201 Naidu, Sarojini 71, 313n12
Mussolini, Benito xiv, 6, 69, 96, 98, Nänny, Max 312n9
140, 146, 152, 200, 220, 221, Napoleon, Bonaparte 69
233, 237, 273, 287, 290; Ameri- Nazism 15; “Final Solution” 52.
can view of 97; anti-intellectual See also individual authors
241; anti-Semitic Laws 201; athe- Negri, Antonio 23
ist 155; belligerence 150; birth New Age, The 67
date 65; as charmer 223; com- New Historicism ix-x
pared to Roosevelt 224, 225; cor- Nichols, Robert xii
poratism 111, 112, 297; and Nietzsche, Friedrich 30; Birth of
D’Annunzio 314n15; Dennis on Tragedy 75
290, 294; “The Doctrine of Fas- Nitti, Vincenzio 85
cism” 194; Eliot on 194, 232, Nordau, Max 32, 34, 36, 37, 47,
249, 309n22; Ethiopian gas 87, 118, 183; Degeneration 29–31;
attack 328n7; Ethiopian invasion and Eliot 32, 33, 306n10; and
196, 309n22; on fascism 96; Gasset 183; and Lewis 118
Fascist Putsch 85; granddaughter Norman, Montagu 98
303n10; Lewis on 104, 106–8, North, Michael xi, 44; “Eliot,
110, 115, 118, 135, 143, 156, Lukács, and the Politics of Mod-
163, 211, 216, 217, 219, 248, ernism” 65; The Political Aesthet-
249; and Margherita Safarti ic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound 7, 8,
317n12; Milan speech 229; 304n6, 314n17
Index 361
oligarchies 3, 9 Wyndham Lewis 61, 333n5;

Orage, A. R. 29, 67, 169, 173, Zeitgeist 74
176, 304n3, 319n21. See also works: “Affirmations” 36, 67,
The New Age, Social Credit 72, 75; “Affirmations II” 63; A
Ottoman Empire 85 Lume Spento 55, 31; “The Art of
Oxford University 22 Being Ruled” 3, 59; Cantos, The
13; Collected Early Poems 21;
Pareto, Vilfredo 293, 299 “Fungus and Dry Rot” xiii;
Paris Review 25 “Gaudier-Brzeska” 72, 74, 75;
Péguy, Charles 37 Here’s Your Chance” 52;
Peter the Great 120 “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” 25,
Picasso, Pablo 27 78; “The Island of Paris: A Let-
Plimpton, George 25 ter” 87; “A Letter from Ezra
Por, Odon 228 Pound” 52; “Moeurs Contem-
Pound, Ezra passim; aesthetic poraines” 21; Patria Mia 20, 29,
views 59, 60, 62, 63; anti-Christ- 22, 23, 43, 69, 126, 145, 304n5,
ian 68; anti-communist 68; 313n12; “Points” 331n20; “Pri-
anti-democratic 69; and anti- mary Form” 62; “The Renais-
Semitism 332n2; archaism 75; sance” 71, 75; “The Revolt of
artist as herald of the future, 67, Intelligence” 79; “Three Can-
71; Blast 28; on corporatism tos” 76; “Volitionist Economics”
297; elitism 74, 75; on D’An- 227; “What America Has to Live
nunzio and Fiume 79; epic Down” 67, 68, 78, 168
ambition 76; Fenollosa notes Principe, Gavril 93
71, 73; and Futurism 57, 59, prohibition 20
60; Gaudier-Brzeska 36; Hamilton Proudhon, Pierre Joseph 105; and
College 76; leaves America 55; anarchism 141; and fascism
on Hobson 330n17; on imperi- 142; Lewis on 109, 115, 122,
alism 80; on Jefferson 332n27; 136, 146, 156, 266, 324n15;
on Kandinsky 61; on logic Pound on 229
331n23; on machines 73; non-
combatant 58; and Olivia Quennell, Peter 32; Baudelaire and
Agresti 332nn2, 3; pro democ- the Symbolists 32
racy 64; radio talks 332n1; reac-
tionary 64, 65; and T. S. Eliot 3, Rainey, Lawrence S. xi
333nn5, 6; and vorticism 58, Rauschning, John Rogge 288–90
59, 61, 62; Wabash College 55; Read Herbert 36, 89, 101, 137,
in Washington 331n22; and 163, 257
World War I 74, 77, 78; and Remarque, Eric Maria 135
362 Index
Renaissance 69 141, 142, 146, 156, 301n5,

Röhm, Ernst 329n12 324n15; birth date 65; on class
Roosevelt, President F. D. R. 11; 111; Eliot on 108; Lewis on
inaugural speech 1933 224; 108, 112; and Mussolini 28,
Lewis on 232; Pound on 231 297; Reflections of Violence 108,
Rowland, Dominic 315nn3, 6 166; syndicalism 111
Russell, George 40 Soviet Union 46, 85
Spanish Civil War 97, 141, 142,
Sarfati, Margharita 28 184, 195, 199, 201; Jacques
Sartre, J.-P. 126, 327n1 Maritain on 199; Lewis on 218;
Sassoon, Siegfried 135 Pound on 239
Schacht, Hjalmar 98 Spengler, Oswald 26, 40, 47, 48,
Schiff, Sydney 101 118, 125, 168, 183, 293, 305n7;
Schönberg, Arnold 74 Decline of the West 23, 37, 86,
Schramek, Abraham 162, 326n20 307n14
Scott, Howard 85 Stalin, Joseph 11; massacre of the
Selassie, Haile: Lewis on 135 Ukrainian Kulaks 54
Seymour-Jones, Carole 47, 203; Steffens, Lincoln 84, 226, 229
Painted Shadow 47 Stein, Gertrude: Lewis on 123
Shaw, George Bernard: and Eliot Sternhell, Zeev 6, 111, 139, 141,
31, 32; Eliot on 96; Lewis on 142, 154, 305n8, 317n14
105, 275; Major Barbara 238; Stevenson, Robert Louis 34; The
and The New Age 169, 313n10; Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
The Sanity of Art 29, 31 Hyde 34
Sheehan, James J. 14 stock market crash 54
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 5 Stravinsky, Igor 60
Sherry, Vincent 53; Ezra Pound, Svarny, Eric xiv
Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Swedenborg 62
Modernism 53 symbolism 29
Siegfried, André 80, 81, 114, 126, Symons, Arthur 32
258, 303n1, 314n17; America
Comes of Age: A French Analysis 80 Tawney, R. H. 195
Silone, Ignazio x technocracy 85, 145, 146, 321n1
Skidelsky, Robert 144, 217, technological developments 66–7;
336n19 delight in machines 73
Social Credit 177–8. See also Dou- Thayer, Schofield 86
glas, Orage Thompson, Neville:The Anti-
Sorel, George xiv, 19, 83, 105, Appeasers 201, 202
108, 109, 111, 112, 115, 118, Toffler, Alvin 117
Index 363
Toynbee, Arnold, 189 Maurras 161–3, 166, 167

Tratner, Michael xii, 301n5 Warhol, Andy 10
Tucker, Benjamin 29 Weber, Mark 289
Turner, Harry 51; Much Ado 51 Weber, Max 73, 81
tyranny 9 Wells, H. G. 27, 313n10; Eliot on
96, 316n11; and fascism 96;
Valéry, Paul 48 Lewis on 275; Mr. Britling Sees It
Versailles, Peace of xiii, 17, 19, 42, Through 93; The War that Will
46, 58, 85, 138, 180, 215, 239; End War 93
“Fourteen Points” 42 Westminster, Duke of 107
Vorticism 57, 58, 61, 63, 72, 109, Whistler, James 20
123 Whitehead, Alfred North 38
Wiener, Norbert 39
Wadsworth, Edward 73 Williams, William Carlos 100,
war: casualties 77; Cold War 17; 172
economic cost 178; futility of Wilson, President Woodrow 42
14; Great War 12, 19, 54; impe- Wittgenstein, Ludwig 65
rial conflict 69; interwar period Woods, J. H. 22
17; watershed 242; World War
II 12 Yeats, W.B.: “The Second Coming”
Ward, Leo 162, 167, 249; and 40; A Vision 40

Dreams of A Totalitarian Utopia - Leon Surette

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Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia

McGill-Queen’s University Press

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011

Legal deposit third quarter 2011

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100%

This book has been published with the help of a grant

McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the

Quotations from The Works of Wyndham Lewis © by

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Surette, Leon, 1938–

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965 – Political

ps310.p6s87 2011 821'.91209358 c2011-901883-7

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Baskerville

Ethiopia, the German Anschluss with Austria, Germany’s invasion of

suspicious of liberal democratic capitalism, and hence interested in

approach to Eliot in whose work his engagement in political dis-

The major political assumption of the modernists is that people

In the following pages I examine the political engagement and

Empire.) Some post-war Right-wing movements – notably the

dreams of a totalitarian utopia

One constant we will find in the cultural and political commentary

lectivity of the present. It is the isolated individual who really rep-

“Sweeney Agonistes,” it has no such sanction. In Eliot’s mind

of the economic organization of capitalist democracies, while

quite the contrary. I hope in this study somewhat to redress the

Europe had rested, it was supposed, on the sturdy intransigence of

democracy in which the oligarchs manipulated the masses through

The thing that it should be far more difficult for us to-day to

... You would not recommend yourself to a sovietic commissar

Scorning the common man and woman, they dreamt of influ-

ents. In short their distrust of universal suffrage was not entirely

geois culture. They were all bourgeois themselves, as were Lewis,

industrialists, since it required nations to buy armaments even if

objectionable hypocrite if I gave myself airs regarding a person who

Italy continued their old rivalries and competing imperial ambi-

Dreams and Nightmares

As democracy and reason develop within peoples and individuals, the

Revolutions closely resemble romantic dramas: the ridiculous and the

The story of literary modernism in English, if viewed from the per-

resented a watershed in the cultural, political, and economic life of

thetically gifted, and ethically challenged Europeans. Typically the

And so forth. Here the robust American – dubbed “The Idaho

Upon learning that the mother wrote verses,

in Europe, he threw in his lot with Mussolini and fascism, thereby

I see … a sign in the surging crowd on Seventh Avenue (New

Here the American who is “against all delicate things” stands in

The triumphalist tone of Pound’s 1910 remarks is not main-

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and

As we will see, Pound retained neither his enthusiasm for Futur-

But both his Pollyanna attitude toward an as yet unrealized

There died a myriad,

But the story is complicated. Pound’s evident contempt for the

is, no doubt, some special pleading in this remark, it nonetheless

The majority of foreigners think either of Americanization as

Eliot was less supportive of Mowrer’s dependence on Spengler,

his reading of Spengler;7 but he is too reasonable to commit him-

pollyannas and c assandras

Pound – definitely a Pollyanna – shared Mussolini’s futurist-

abhorred the changes than there were those who welcomed

By “degenerate” writers, painters, and composers, Nordau meant