Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901-1918 (review)

Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901-1918. Paul Peppis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 236. $59.95 (cloth).

In an earlier form Paul Peppis's study of the English avant-garde included "Wyndham Lewis" in its title. The earlier title was perhaps more accurate given that the book's purpose is largely to clarify Lewis's avant-garde fiction and polemics by recovering their contemporary context. This effort is important because the understanding of Lewis as a "reactionary" or even a "fascist" has as much to do with "the way we construe the politics of modernism, as it has with what 'reactionary' modernists originally thought and wrote" (2). And so this study rightly cautions against reading militant statements made just before or during World War I as if they were made in peacetime, concluding that "early politics and aesthetics were, in effect, always already fascist" (3). Thus Fredric Jameson's Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis the Modernist as Fascist (1979) "discovered" a writer who retained what Jameson called the "antisocial" animus of the original modernists (3). If only for the sake of variety, the academy needed a Fascist fictionist, although he (despite the title of his book) had to settle for calling Lewis a mere "protofascist." Peppis recommends a "responsible historicism" to moderate such claims (166). He does not deny the argument that Lewis's prewar political views anticipate postwar reactionary politics; however, he does argue that Lewis is "not simply a 'protofascist,'" but also "anti-fascist, committed to the radical anti-statist politics of anarcho-libertarianism" (12).

Peppis places Lewis's anarchistic and libertarian politics into a historically responsible context by showing how they reflected the politics of the journals he first published between 1901-1915: Ford Madox Ford's The English Review, A. R. Orage's The New Age, and Dora Marsden's The Egoist: An Individualist Review. The interesting chapter on Ford's cultural ideals demonstrates how Arnoldian liberalism survived into modern England without Matthew Arnold's faith in a cultural cosmopolitanism that could rise above politics. In the prewar era no one could rise above politics--or claim that culture transcended it. In The English Review, England is portrayed as threatened both by its colonial subjects and by the English masses. To Ford, England is "culturally urbane because it is imperially supreme" (29). In The New Age, Peppis finds a similar attraction to international culture combined with a contradictory fear of threats from abroad.

Peppis argues that avant-garde writers such as Lewis reflected this same "conflicted" commitment both to internationalism and, in threatening times, to a defensive nationalism. When he finds this conflict in Lewis's avant-garde BLAST (two issues, 1914 and 1915), however, I believe that he may overemphasize the incoherence of Lewis's perspective. His term for Lewis's wartime perspective is "anarcho-imperialism," which is meant to sound paradoxical but is finally so contradictory that it is meaningless. Leaving aside the issue of anarchism, he exaggerates Lewis's nationalism through selective citations from BLAST (1914). For example, his principal evidence for what he calls Lewis's "blunt nationalism" and "bold-faced advocacy of empire" is one of the editorial "BLESSES": "BLESS ENGLAND." With conventional patriotism, Lewis claims that the "Modern World is due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius" (5). In addition to forgetting his own caution against overinterpreting wartime proclamations, Peppis does not interrogate (despite his appreciation of Lewis's "oppositional" imagination) how this "BLESS" is affected by a "BLAST" of England's provincialism on BLAST's first page. Moreover, Lewis explicitly writes in a BLAST (1915) editorial entitled "The European War and Great Communities" that "the War is raising many perplexities as to the future of these Empires. . . . World-Empire must be momentarily dropped, just as 'ruling the waves' in spite of all neighboring nations, must be abandoned. . . . "¹

Peppis's claims about Lewis...