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

By now our response to the distorted political views of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis has become largely instinctual, hovering somewhere between distaste and revulsion. In his recent study, Leon Surette surveys this now familiar scene, focusing specifically on Pound, Eliot, and Lewis and their charged reactions and contributions to the often bewildering and always polemic ideological turmoil that characterized their era. Warning against any programmatic response on our part, Surette reminds readers that during the interwar period, Pound, Eliot, and Lewis ‘[f]ound themselves in the midst of unprecedented political and military upheavals,’ whose outcomes were uncertain and devoid of the illuminating perspective afforded by hindsight. Hence, ‘it was very difficult to see one’s way clearly.’ In part, Surette’s study positions itself as an intervention into the now formidable narrative wherein the modernist avant-garde is impugned, if not dismissed outright, for its complicity, both naïve and wilful, with the principles and practices of twentieth-century Fascism. Context, Surette suggests, is everything, and after reading his comprehensive account, he hopes readers will ‘cut his subjects some slack.’ While conceding that Pound, Eliot, and Lewis decried ‘the liberal democratic capitalist countries in which they were born,’ Surette argues that that reaction must be understood within a context where the prevailing sense of liberal democracy was one of decline, failure, and bankruptcy and where the chief ideological menace was not the emergent strains of Fascism but rather the emboldened Communism of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, as standard-bearers for the modernist avant-garde, the three men saw in popular democracy, and its links to mass culture, a tangible threat to a privileged model of cultural production upon which they depended for their success. Thus it was that they came ‘to place their faith in fascism/nazism as an ideology that would preserve high culture against the ravages of the masses.’ So cast, Pound, Eliot, and Lewis become something like Fascists by default, who, having ‘abandoned liberal capitalism and rejected both socialism and communism, […] were ineluctably drawn toward fascism as the only remaining political alternative on offer.’

But to read Surette’s book as merely an extended apology for the perceptive shortcomings of these ‘men of 1914’ is to do both it and them a significant disservice. Underpinning Surette’s reading of how and why Pound, Eliot, and Lewis responded to the siren song of Fascism in the way that they did is an extended and provocative reflection on the question of historical determinism and individual agency, as seen both by them and by their contemporary readers. Having ably demonstrated their views to be in part a product of the tumultuous period through which they lived, Surette reminds us that ‘Eliot and Pound, at least, saw themselves as ushering in a new age,’ a function of ‘their belief that artists were architects of social change.’ Thus they simultaneously ‘believed that historical 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.’ In raising the issue of historical determinism, Surette successfully transforms his study from a mere defence of modernism’s more unsavoury dimensions into an examination of the ways in which modernism situated the individual with respect to the historical forces which he sought to transform. And it should be seen as no lasting indictment of the value of his work to note that Surette seems as uncertain as to how we might resolve that question as do his subjects themselves.

The ultimate value of Surette’s study comes in large part from its breadth. Throughout he skilfully weaves connections not only among the works of Pound, Eliot, and Lewis themselves but also among those of contemporary figures – both notorious and lesser-known – whose multifarious views modulated debates over liberalism, totalitarianism, and Fascism as they waxed and waned over the course of the twentieth century and beyond...