Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics (review)

In this new volume, Leon Surette historicizes the troubling political commentaries made by T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound between the run up to World War I and the years following World War II. Surette’s methodology represents a departure from prior studies of these authors, which, according to Surette, have suffered from the biases of changing literary debates or from excessive derision for their subjects. While insisting these authors must be held to account for supporting authoritarian movements, Surette believes a historical account can spare these men reputations for “malign intentions” (283). Although often foolish, Eliot, Lewis, and Pound were, Surette suggests, quite conventionally skeptical of democratic capitalism in the years that bore witness to trench warfare, the Depression, and the expansion of mass culture. Their turn, toward the royalism of Charles Maurras in the case of Eliot, and toward Italian and German fascism, respectively, in the cases of Pound and Lewis, was consistent with the reformist fashion of the era’s critical output. And like many of their peers, writes Surette, they harboured no fundamental predilection for authoritarian power. They did, however, feel an understandable antagonism for the rise of a modern democracy they saw as defined by oligarchy, industrialism, and the influence of popular culture. As Surette puts it: “The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the social and political 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 political status-quo in which they found themselves” (4).

Surette identifies two “principal factors” responsible for the particular shape of commentary by Eliot, Lewis, and Pound: the perceived need for an avant-garde that would break with the past and, simultaneously, an awareness of how the period’s rapid changes in technology and mass culture threatened the European cultural tradition (274). In focusing on such factors, Surette engages that which continues to fascinate readers of modernism: authors like Eliot, Lewis, and Pound pioneered a new mix of aesthetic formula that today still feels radically invented, yet they often resisted key revolutions in cultural production. Further, they championed the collective but resented the collectivity’s new popular forms. Their works are fragmented responses to kitsch, but they desired for themselves the role of the master-artist who might provide clear cultural orientation. Surette quite lucidly unravels these knotted interests, which do not always accommodate plain or easy explanation.

Surette parses the various critical strains in which Eliot, Pound, and Lewis participated by labeling each author a Pollyanna or a Cassandra depending upon their attraction to theories of cultural ascension or decline. In the years before the first war, he shows his three subjects navigating between Cassandras like Oswald Spengler, who “perceived an endemic malaise in European culture and civilization” (37), and Pollyannas, often communists, who expected next-stage progressions in political economy to move away from failed institutions. It appears both Eliot and Pound were optimistic Pollyannas. Pound came to Europe to pursue an energetic new art that lay latent but unexplored in America. Eliot, forever cool to his home country, embraced British manners in order to separate himself from American experience and its cultural deprivations, even while noticing widespread cultural diminishment among the British. Lewis, although later a Cassandra who feared a second war, objected to Spengler’s aggressive historicizing of cultural phenomena and labeled him a relativist hostile to essential truth. In sum, “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—however much they may diverge on just whither society is headed or toward what it should strive” (40). It is thus no wonder that Eliot had concerns over what type of human beings would be in control of the world’s new destiny. Here we...