Catching Up with Edward Bellamy

W.H. HALEWOOD Catching Up with Edward Bellamy Looking Backward, 2000-1887 is a 'canon' problem only in its absence from the canon. It is an almost vanished work, interesting to consider as the date draws near that might have validated its prophecies only to take note of the different route we have come - not just our failure to achieve its utopia, but our rejection of it - and our rejection, also, of its kind as a possible kind for serious fiction. Clearly, the contributors to Edward Bellamy Abroad (1962), who hoped that their work would 'promote a reassessment of Bellamy in the literary histories of the United States,l misjudged the depth and firmness of modern indifference.1 This is not a minor eclipse but a major one, for Looking Backward had an immense reputation and influence in its time, and that time extended for decades. It was published in millions of copies and translated into all major languages including Russian and Japanese. It had some sort of effect (fiercely negative in the case of William Morris) on everyone who thought about social questions. It influenced movements of Christian Socialism wherever they appeared. Its positions echo and re-echo in George Bernard Shaw, Veblen, Debs, Nonnan Thomas, and the early Zionists. What happened to leave it so completely without credit at the present time? There have been, to be sure, several changes of intellectual fashion intervening, among them the rise of the specialist, and it would perhaps be surprising if the modem preference in most matters for the expert did not work against Bellamy the amateur political thinker. Earnestness and a willingness to take on the big questions counted excessively with the late Victorians. Self-Help and Chautauqua were typical enthusiasms of the period. Colonel Robert Ingersoll was accepted as a sufficient philosopher by readers and audiences anxious to express themselves against religion. Madam Blavatsky and Annie Besant were thinkers with followers, and Temperance was a cause that engaged the serious and thoughtful. All of these would come to be seen as amateur or local or quaint, if not inept and cranky. Serious thinking among moderns is done along different lines and by people with different credentials. Inevitably, we would turn for our socialism to Marx and abandon Bellamy who, in fact, insisted somewhat timidly that his 'nationalism' was really not socialism at all. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 63, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1994 452 W.H. HALEWOOD We have also lost interest, and confidence, in the dream of the future as a dream of good things. It is a truism, despite the existence of some hopeful Jfuturists,' that the modem dream of the good is focused on the past. Part of the outsize popular appeal of Ronald Reagan is supposed to have lain in his invoking of a cleaner, simpler past America. Nostalgic 'primitivism' is a pervasive cultural attitude expressed in art and in daily life. The steel and glass office tower is a contemporary reality essentially repudiated by boardrooms of ancient elm and chestnut within. Professors are stylish in jeans bequeathed them by cowboys. Polite people drink coffee from hand-made pottery and inhabit living-rooms decorated with African tribal masks. J. Alfred Prufrock is a primitivist's cautionary example. Country music is old-fashioned balm for city hearts. 'Colonial' and 'Cape Cod' and Jranch' houses far outnumber Jmodern' ones in the newest suburbs. Our dream of the future, by contrast, has features of nightmare. A change that has put Bellamy almost beyond reach is vividly clear in Robert L. Heilbronner's An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (1974), which has a similar claim to express the 'mind' of its period, though it has not had Bellamy'S world-wide readership and there are no societies of Heilbronnerite enthusiasts. The fact is that Heilbronner offers nothing for enthusiasm to feed on. His vision of the future is as bleak as Bellamy's is radiant. The question that he puts, bleakly answers, and finds characteristic of our time is JIs there hope for man?' Bellamy, of course, hoped much too confidently to raise such a question, and presented his hope in images of urban paradise. Heilbronner's thin hope...