Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics (review)

Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics. Charles Ferrall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. viii + 202. $54.95.

Not long ago, the authoritarian opinions and flirtations with fascism of some important modernists were a cause for embarrassment. Sympathetic critics would sweep the more reprehensible views of their subjects under the carpet, apologize for them, or deny their importance to understanding the literary work of modernism. Since the rise of the new historicism and cultural studies, however, these formerly embarrassing associations seem to have given the "reactionary" modernists added sex appeal. The links between modernism and fascism give an apparent political urgency to modernist studies. The new fascist studies takes as its subjects not only propagandists like F. T. Marinetti, Gabriele d'Annunzio, or Ezra Pound, or collaborators like Robert Brasillach and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, but also those sometime fellow travelers in England, Ireland, and America. Charles Ferrall's Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics discusses the political views of five significant modernists writing in English who, to varying degrees, expressed sympathy for the extreme right wing: W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. Ferrall argues that these writers shared, paradoxically, both an attraction to rising fascism and an ideal of the autonomous work of art. They subordinated their political beliefs to their aesthetic ideals, which made for rather incoherent politics and also rescued them (except for Pound) from too great an involvement with fascism.

Ferrall deliberately echoes Walter Benjamin's famous claim that fascism "aestheticizes politics" and suggests that "reactionary" modernism does the same (6). He draws a contrast between two aspects of modernity: "aesthetic" modernity, which he associates with the doctrine of the autonomy of the work of art, and "bourgeois" modernity, which he associates with the political ideals of the Enlightenment. The paradoxical tendency of the group he labels "reactionary modernists" was to reject "bourgeois" modernity while embracing "aesthetic" modernity. Although Benjamin associates the idea of aesthetic autonomy with the aestheticization of politics, Ferrall makes a crucial distinction: true fascism ultimately "conflates the autonomous spheres of art, morality and science," but the modernists who interest him generally maintain the autonomy of the work of art (ibid.). They see in "aesthetic modernity" an unrealizable model for the political realm, perhaps a goad to bourgeois society, and therefore maintain a tension between aesthetics and politics that fascism could not accept. On the other hand, Ferrall distinguishes the reactionary modernists from their "progressive" peers by pointing out that they rejected "even the emancipatory aspects of 'liberalism,' 'progress' and 'democracy' while at the same time, paradoxically, being drawn to various kinds of revolutionary politics" (13).

Ferrall's contributions to theoretical debates over the relationship between avant-garde writers and politics are sensible, but his detailed treatment of the political engagements of his protagonists is what gives this book its force. While portraying the hostility of the journal The New Age toward British liberal democracy, for example, Ferrall touches on the opinions of such writers as Hilaire Belloc, T. E. Hulme, Georges Sorel, and A. R. Orage. Most of the book, however, is devoted to his five main figures. In each case, he gives an overview of an entire career, punctuated by readings of relevant texts that illuminate the influence of reactionary politics on the modernists' literary production. Ferrall focuses on what might be called the symbolic elements of politics in the literary works of the modernists, as exemplified by their use of sexual or anti- Semitic stereotypes. He examines the sexualized language with which the modernists wrote about politics: "the rape of Mother Ireland by the English Father" in Yeats's plays; the "homosocial" fantasies of Lawrence's "leadership novels" from Aaron's Rod to The Plumed Serpent. He describes the anti-Semitic elements of Pound's Cantos and Eliot's early poems. Quite correctly, he emphasizes the ambivalence of many such references to Jews or to women.

Ferrall's approach is more biographical than broadly historical. Much of the evidence for...