"Doing Business with Totalitaria": British Late Modernism and the Politics of Reputation

For many years—
They've been in floods of tears
Because the poor little dears
Have been so wronged and only longed
To cheat the world
Deplete the world
And beat
The world to blazes
This is the moment when we ought to sing their praises.

—Noël Coward, "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans" (1943)

Even if the Second World War necessitated being beastly to the Germans, it didn't sanction being beastly about them. Noël Coward's song is a magnificent send-up of the liberal softies and their buoyant platitudes, that "[i]t was just those nasty Nazis who persuaded them to fight," that "[t]heir Beethoven and Bach are really far worse than their bite." Coward's target was what he saw as a prevailing meliorism bent on euphemizing war guilt into invisibility: "Let's be sweet to them / And day by day repeat to them / That 'sterilisation' simply isn't done."¹ The argument and reception of the anthem speak revealingly of the insecurities of public debate in mid-war Britain. If its ironic use of recognizable anti-propaganda clichés suggests their prevalence, the song's notorious banning by the BBC on the literal-minded assumption that it was pro-German demonstrates, albeit bizarrely, the official refusal to approve these clichés. Of course the German establishment had no anxiety about which side Coward was on, and when the Gestapo prepared its blacklist in preparation for the German invasion of Britain, Coward found a place on it along with someone who had become literally synonymous with beastliness to the Germans, Lord Vansittart. A diplomat, screenwriter, playwright, and poet, Coward's old friend Vansittart was vilified in Britain for saying that only wishful thinking could make Nazism seem a historical aberration. His belief that German culture was strongly predisposed towards totalitarian rule and aggressive militarism became known as "Vansittartism" and was widely unpopular: by the mid-thirties Vansittart was arguing that the Nazis were publicly and popularly rearming for Germany's fifth aggressive war in seventy-five years, "And many people were angrier with me for saying it than with the Germans for doing it."² This unlikely pair found themselves writing not only against a totalitarian regime that had already identified them as enemies but against what they thought of as a high-minded refusal to consider the nature of its appeal.³

Even if Coward and Vansittart are hardly names that would blow to bits all existing definitions of modernism, their attack on what they identified as a political Pelagianism finds echoes in writers that their contemporaries took more seriously. This paper argues that a consideration of how 1920s survivors engaged with the public debates of the Second World War and its aftermath elicits a more historically complex idea of modernist politics in Britain than is available when modernism is read solely in relation to the Great War, a war whose imperial origins and catastrophic effects most writers found easy to denounce. Though the First World War has always been used as modernism's founding event, Vincent Sherry has recently argued that the relation between the two isn't self-evident. In a virtuoso demonstration of why the Great War remains at the heart of modernist studies, Sherry makes the case "historically responsible" by reading modernism in relation to the tortured Liberalism of London in 1914.⁴ In addressing how modernist writers responded to the wars that followed, I'm going to emphasize here their relationships to the political in its old parliamentary and diplomatic senses. Looking at the writers who dissented from the prevailing model of partisanship, international and domestic, I'm proposing another answer to the question, newly restored to critical view, of where British modernism ended up.⁵

I. When Authors Don't Take Sides

Conventionally the first stop after the high modernist 1920s, the Spanish Civil War allowed its most vocal participants to perform an influential version of the end of modernism. Although a familiar document, the Left Review survey rewards further study because it simultaneously created the...