The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult by Leon Surette (review)

HUMANITIES 167 Leon Surette. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult McGill-Queen's University Press 1993. xi, 320. $44.95, $18.95 paper Leon Surette's project in The Birth of Modernism is an ambitious one: to correct the received reading of modernism by bringing 'the occult provenance of portions of literary modernism into a harsher light than literary scholarship has so far permitted.' According to Surette, critics have uncritically accepted modernism's 'skeptical' and 'positivistic' selfrepresentation while eliding its occult origins; his thesis is that modernism is not so much a critical and sceptical-departure from romanticism as a reaffirmation of its 'mysticism and emotionalism.' The occult is distinguished from other varieties of mystical thought, explains Surette, by its 'belief that throughout human history certain individuals have had intimate contact with the divine and from this contact have gained special knowledge (wisdom, or gnosis), which they have preserved in a Ionn comprehensible only to the already enlightened and which is passed on in texts whose esoteric interpretation is preserved by secret societies.' Modernism engaged both these occult features: not only did it borrow occult topoi for 'special knowledge' (the underworld descent, the l1ieros gamos or sacred marriage, palingenesis) but it fOWld in the underground counter-histories of the occult a precedent for its own distinctive attempts to rewrite history. In his first chapter, Surette argues that 'legitimate' disciplines - the anthropology of Frazer and the Cambridge group, Nietzschean philology, Jungian psychology - shared the occult belief in a buried knowledge awaiting recovery. '[TJhe notion of an insight or wisdom surviving in some occluded or secret form from a remote historical, cultural, or genetic past' occupied the very mainstream of thought 'from the 1880s to perhaps as late as the 19308.' The idiosyncratic intellectual history of The Cantos can be attributed to Pound's familiarity with such occult and masonic speculation. In chapter 2, Surette details how Pound's allusions to Eleusis, the troubadours, and the Albigensians were infomed by readings in Denis de Rougemont, G.R.5. Mead, Allen Upward, and Josephin peladan. Although Surette's primary concern is with the occult sources and content of modernism, he also notes here, briefly but suggestively, the rich literary potential of an occult method: JThe Cantos are a ransacking of the written record, seeking the "gists and piths" which only the initiate, or enlightened one, can recognize as pieces of the puzzle.' The notorious difficulty of The Cantos reflects Pound's own attempt to create an esoteric occult history. In chapter 3, 'Nietzsche, Wagner, and Myth,' Surette contends that the modernist interest in myth originates not in the positivistic or euherneristic approach of Frazerian anthropology but in Nietzsche, Wagner, and the 168 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 occult. Nietzsche's discussiqns of secret societies and Dionysian rites in The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals were popularized by Edouard Schure and Josephin Peladan and transmitted into Symbolisme and modernism. The Nietzsche of the modernists, Surette explains, is not the sceptical relativist of poststructuralism, but the proponent of myth, mystical gnosis, and secret genealogies of 'blond beasts.' In his final chapter, on Pound's editing of The Waste Land, Surette maintains that Eliot solicited Pound precisely for his expertise in occultism. Pound proceeded to foreground the poem's pessimism by reducing 'the palingenetic and erotic representations of transcendence that Eliot seems to have adapted from {Jessie] Weston's characterization of the ancient initiation rites in Ritual to Romance.' More provocative is Surette's contention that the poem's debt to Weston was meant, not as a 'straight' incorporation of occult materials, but as an ironic 'symptom of the spiritual decay that Eliot's poem ... evokes and bemoans.' Although familiar with the occult, Eliot emerges, not surprisingly, as a more cautious figure than either Pound or Yeats. The occult is a difficult concept to define (Surette regards it as a less mediated, less institutionalized, less communicable form of religious experience), and it often threatens to open into too capacious a category. Indeed, in his conclusion Surette comes close to defining the occult simply as the antithesis of Enlightenment reason. As a contribution to literary history...