I will not venture here a full conspectus of the modernist movement, tracing all the schools through cubism and vorticism and expressionism through suprematism and constructivism and De Stijl, through Valery and Kafka and Gertrude Stein, through Merz and Blast and Transition, describing the intereactions, the sectarian strife, the manifestos, the denunciations. Nor will I deal with modernism in every fieldâfor instance in music or in architecture (though much of that, unfortunately, seems to be more lasting than bronze). I will, therefore, restrict myself largely to literature, though with reference to broader trends. For all the arts were deeply affected; and it is even the case that painters like Picasso, for example, wrote a number of âpoems.â Moreover, the condition of painting may sometimes illuminate that of the other arts. For painting is, in its very nature, more dependent than the written word on the apparatus of culture-pushersâpatrons, galleries, and so on. Again, it is probably easier to inflict a striped rectangle on the consumer, who only has to give it a casual look, than to make the same consumer read a damned thick book or even a fourteen-line poem. And this is apart from the perhaps partisan estimate made by Auden, that,
those who feel most like a sewer
Belong to painting not to literature.
More broadly, in dealing with modernism, any approach is bound to be a reflection of the reading, viewing, and experience of the lecturer: yet I do not think that any other selection of experiences would lead to general conclusions different from what I suggest.
But first let us consider our terms. When one speaks of movements and of modernism, one is using great general words. In practice there are individual books, written by men with their own characters and idiosyncrasies, not mere ectoplasm of the Zeitgeist. But I take it that I will not be held to any precise definition of modernism; in this sort of sphere above all we are surely entitled to rely on Aristotleâs dictum that words should be used with the precision or generality suitable to the field. With that in mind, we may start by defining modernism in an illustrative rather than a formal way: modernism is what makes the Tate Gallery buy and exhibit a pile of bricks.
Now, when some supposed novelty of this sort is criticized, one finds to this day the rhetoric put forward that the critic is evidently a shocked and uncomprehending fuddy-duddy faced with something beyond his ken. But of course this is, generally speaking, nonsense. Modernism has been with us for some seventy years. In 1913, to take an example from poetry, Marinetti published the following lines of a type which has long since become so tediously familiar that none of us would be surprised to see them today in a state-subsidized âlittle magazineâ:
plombs + lave 300 + Puanteurs + 50 parfums
pave matelas detritus crottin charognes
flic-flac entassement chameaux bourricots
tohubohu cloaque.
No, the critic of modernism is criticizing a tradition which has been established now for generations, which has been boringly familiar to all of us since childhood. It long ago received the seal of academic approval, which Housman calls âthe second deathâ; its lumpish sculpture has been taken to the heart of the most establishmentarian corporations and government departments; its half-dimensional stripes and squares masquerade as paintings on the mantlepieces of New York stockbrokers, It is a paradox unique to our time that a traditionalism which has long lost its energies and spirits should yet contrive to pose as ânew,â so that we still have to insist that it is a post-modernist rather than a pre-modernist generation which now points out its deficiencies. It is the younger and fresher writers in the architectural journals who are now insisting that American Victorian architecture is better than the post-Gropius stuff. It is Tom Wolfe, from the heart of the New York art world, who (in The Painted Word) destroys the pretensions of the cycle of schools of pseudo-art which followed theâalready bad enoughâAmerican neoexpressionists. And likewise with literature, I should perhaps add that you can check my own case in The Penguin Book of Surrealism and Verse, where a poem of mine, written in my teens, is displayed for all to see.
+++
Delimiting Modernism
Modernism does not spear to be a literary movement in the older sense. The relation between it and the sensibility of the age seems quite different from anything that has preceded it. A special disjunction has taken place. But at what point does this occur?
I think we can, if only roughly, set up a criterion by asking ourselves whether the changes in scope as seen in the novels of Proust, James, Lawrence, Svevo, and the early Joyce were broader and more radical, or even as broad and as radical as, those of the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as compared with their predecessors. We must surely answer no. So let me first of all distinguish between the âmodern,â naturally different from the art of previous periods, in reflecting a different sensibility, and the âmodernistââsomething, in principle, total and revolutionary, which in prose one may associate with Finneganâs Wake and Gertrude Stein. In painting, I would place it at Kandinsky and Picasso, at the point they had reached in 1914, (when they were so nominated by Pound)âor, possibly a little earlier, with Braqueâs first formulation of the idea of painting without content, around 1910.
In poetry . . . but first let us remember the deplorable state of English poetry in the first decade of this century. While the freshest prose reading, or seeing, of the man of cultural fashion was Wells and Bennet, Ibsen and Nietzsche and Shaw, in our poetry the leading names wereâWilliam Watson and Stephen Phillips.
A specific modernism set prior to World War I: the conscious setting up of Imagism around 1913, and the imported impact of Futurism (founded around 1907, but reaching Britain in 1912). All the ideas which were to infest poetic modernism for generations were present. Above all, what Wordsworth speaks of as a âdegrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.â Thus, from all these dates, it will be seen that modernism was not the product of a violent period, but of a peaceful period seeking violence.
So much for its birth. What about its life and, I would argue, its recent death? But, you will say, is it yet time to have an inquest? Modernism is more pervasive than ever among a huge semi-educated class. At the Tate, in the English Departments, its momentum is not yet spent. Yet it is dead, or nearly dead, as a live idea inspiring worthwhile work.
Modernism is sometimes distinguished from other movements in literature by its greater programmatic self-consciousness. This might be disputed: one could put forward such documents as the Introduction to the Lyrical Ballads, to say nothing of the poetic manifestos of French and other schools long preceding MallarmĂ© and Rimbaud. We may feel, rather, that it is not so much the existence as the totality, the omnipresence of the programmatic side of modernism, that makes the difference. In Ortegaâs extraordinary essay âThe Dehumanization of Artâ he takes the line that the urge behind modernist visual art was to deny the public any pleasure but the purely aesthetic. But once such over-conscious ploys are adhered to, a great change has taken place. Neither Cezanne nor Van Gogh painted according to theory. It was the complex unarticulated directions given them by their own psyches which formed their work, rather than any program.
The role of the explanation of the painting became more and more important. The aim in the first place was to stop painting from having any âliteraryâ appeal. First, of course, story and situation were removed; then human beings; then any physical object whatever. And so on, until in the world of neo-expressionism it was thought that some colors were more sentimental than othersâso only harsh shades were permitted; then it was felt that the texture still gave a sentimental resultâso only smooth brush strokes of a single uninteresting color were permitted. As Tom Wolfe says, these paintings gradually became nothing more than illustrations of verbal instructionâin fact, paradoxically, âliteraryâ to an infinite degree. This sort of enterprise implies a knowledge we do not have. It follows that theory must base itself on what we do know; which is, on comparatively superficial aspects of the subject.
Readers of poetry too often seemed by long training to have suppressed their direct responses and replaced them by an unnatural set of automatisms drawn from critical theory. However, no critical machinery has yet been devised which can take over from the intelligent sensibility the job of deciding which poems are goodâreadable, moving, and felicitous. If you go on wearing a straitjacket long enough you lose the use of your arms. At any rate, theory became the main driving force. Critics abounded. That ours is an age of criticism and at the same time of frigid inventiveness is surely no coincidence.
One new phenomenon of our time was the establishment of English schools and English departments in the universities, at about the same time as modernism arose. For the first time we had a specific and separate group certified as exceptionally qualified to judge literature, as against that larger, more heterogeneous set of people constituting the cultural community.
Academic critics claimed to be the only people competent to discuss poetry properly and indeed to prescribe its forms, methods, and contents. This is as if a claim should be put forth that cricket should only be discussed by professors of ballistics. The American poet Karl Schapiro remarks that though he has known scores of poets, he has almost never heard from them the adulation of Eliot that is found in the textbooks. His awesome reputation may be the result of a vast effort by academics and others rather than by his colleagues and reasonable admirers.
If I may quote a recent book of mine:
In the old days no one paid much attention to the low-level critics. They knew their place: Grub Street. But in the first decades of this century the foundation of English schools and departments in the universities suddenly gave them status. Alf Shagpen, wheedling the price of a pint of porter from the editor of Blackwoodâs, became Doctor A. Shagpen, D. Litt., author of Texture and Tension in Thomas Traherne. The increase in sophistication was not accompanied by any improvement in taste, and the greater systematization of his delusions was far from representing an improvement in sanity, but the fellow was now an Authority.
Soon he found himself envying the other âdisciplines.â Perhaps he too could be a scientist and achieve rigour. Perhaps he too could imitate the philosophers and speak for the ultimate springs of human life. The trouble was that he was trained in neither the scientific nor the philosophical disciplines.
We may thus feel that a central fault in all the various attitudes of modernism lay in pursuing an aesthetic half-truth, or quarter-truth, to extremes. As a result, Philip Larkin pointed out some twenty years ago, poetry:
lost its old audience, and gained a new one, This has been caused by the consequences of a cunning merger between poet, literary critic and academic critic (three classes now notoriously indistinguishable): it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the poet has gained the happy position wherein he can praise his own poetry in the press and explain it in the classroom, and the reader has been bullied into giving up the consumerâs power to say I donât like this, bring me something different . . . if the medium is in fact to be rescued from among our duties and restored to our pleasures, I can only think that a large-scale revulsion has got to set in against present notions.
+++
One great delusion which has added to our troubles is that every country and every period now believes itself entitled to its share of great poets, authors, painters, and so forth. This is obviously untrue. There have been important periods in important countries which have produced nothing worthwhile. The rationing of talent is grossly unfair. Two great poets and one pretty good one in a century in the tiny Duchy of Ferrara and nothing to match them in the whole of Italy put together over the next two or three centuries is a typical story. Today the United States in particular feels entitled to itsshare of Great Creativity, so we get Jackson Pollock and de Kooningâand I say nothing of the painters that follow themâtreated as though they were Rembrandt and Cezanne.
A further point is the mere proliferation of âartists.â There are now, for example, more professional painters in the West than have existed in the whole world throughout previous history. None, unfortunately, is up to art apprentice of an assistant of Fra Lippo Lippi. When it comes to poets. . . .
By about 1920, modernism had become fashionable. Modernism in the visual arts was overwhelmingly institutionalized by 1929âthat is exactly half a century agoâwhen the New York Museum of Modern Art was founded in John D. Rockefellerâs living room, as Tom Wolfe puts it, âwith Goodyears, Blisses, and Crowninshields in attendance.â Soon the Container Corporation of American was commissioning Leger and Henry Moore, and then undertook a long-running advertising campaign in which (as Wolfe says) âit would run a Great Idea by a noted savant at the top of the page, one of them being âHitch your wagon to a starââRalph Waldo Emerson. Underneath would be a picture of a Cubist horse strangling on a banana.â
We finally reached the absurdity of alienation being rewarded by the establishment: Picasso, the Lord Leighton of the period, approved by academics and patrons alike; of big-time Bohemianism; of knighthoods accepted by anarchists and surrealistsâSir Herbert Read, Sir Ronald Penrose.
+++
Modernismâs Audience
At first it had been only the academics and the duchesses who admired the new art. Jose Ortega y Gasset remarks:
Modern art . . . will always have the masses against it. It is essentially unpopular; moreover, it is antipopular. Anyof its works automatically produced a curious effect onthe general public into two groups: one very small, formed by those who are favorably inclined towards it; another very largeâthe hostile majority. (Let us ignore that ambiguous faunaâthe snobs.)
But this description is no longer recognizable, or alternatively the âsnobsâ have proliferated to an inordinate degree. Starting about the twenty-five years ago came a second phase of modernism. Surrealism found a new audience: this time not an innovative elite but a mass-culture phenomenon. It need hardly be said that its quality catastrophically declined in the process.
A.E. Housman decries the soul which âcommands no outlook upon the past or future, but believes that the fashion of the present, unlike all fashions heretofore, will endure perpetually, and that its own flimsy tabernacle of second-hand opinions is a habitation for everlasting.â Nor should we imagine that even the most impressive-looking Kulturtraeger are exempt from the appeal of mere fashion. As ever, they are the product of their time and their experience. If they can go wrong even more spectacularly than their predecessors, it is because modernism, and in particular modernist pseudo-aesthetics, opens up such a wide range of pointless or meaningless effort.
The crux, the main and major disjunction in all fields, was when the artist took the decision to abandon the laity.
It may be argued that artistic alienation had been around for a century ever since the âsuperfluous manâ of Lermontov, the Byron of continental imagination, the romantic idea of the mad or maddish poet, grandly isolated from the rest of mankind. With this notion of artistic alienation came the similar, but logically distinct element of the existential human in his condition; and with the twentieth century, though deriving from earlier thought, came Angst.
It has often been said that the decline of religion led to the idea that art could undertake, in some obscure way, the salvation of mankind. This is an idea which preceded modernism, and which was not in this form generally accepted by modernists. Nevertheless, they did regard their work as in some sense transcending any other. And this could not but add to their self-importance.
At a less pretentious level, it is natural that an artist becomes bored with doing what he can do, and goes on to try to do what he canât do, or what canât be done at all. But the writer and artist pressed his autonomy too far, into the direction of almost total independence from an audience.
Even if Modernismâs proponents did not say that all obscurity is profoundâand they came near to saying thatâthey certainly said that all profundity is obscure. But a muddy puddle may pretend to any depth: a clear pool cannot. Coleridge writes somewhere that he read one of Danteâs shorter poems every ten years, always finding more in it. This did not mean that it lacked comprehensibility at first reading; merely that in this comprehensibility there were resonances which did not immediately declare themselves.
MallarmĂ©, the first true Modernist, did not write poems âdifficultâ as to meaning. They have no meaning, in any ordinary sense, beyond what is there, given, in their words. They have, it is true, other effects, but these are effects which are also seen, in addition to, or fused with, ordinary meaning in poems of all types. His poetry is, in fact, ordinary poetry with one of its components omitted. This is not, in itself, to say that it is inferior. And the MallarmĂ©an argument would, of course, admit the point, claiming that its poetry is âpureââclaiming, that is, that the extra content of ordinary verse constitutes a dilution.
Even on this argument, it cannot be said that his poetry has some extra level of meaning, as against an omissive technique which may or may not give some different illumination. âSymbolismâ is a misleading word. Something like Penumbrism, or Obliquism, should have been selected.
The point in favor of these procedures is that a different and possibly rewarding effect may be gained by looking from a different angle at the object of oneâs attention. The counter argument is obviousâdo both.
MallarmĂ© provided velleity, but further development of the principles which the next generation drew from his work led to Marinetti and worse, to poets of whom it could be complained, in Housmanâs words, âyou treat us as Nebuchadnezzar did the Chaldeans, and expect us to find out the dream as well a the interpretation.â Modernism often got by on the simple argument that people had (or so modernists said) laughed at Beethoven. There is of course a logical fallacy involved. But more to the point is the fact that people with the highest reputation as innovators at a given periodâKlopstock for exampleâare often regarded with horrified boredom by posterity. But it is also relevant that the âcontroversialâ side of a ânewâ artist often has little to do with any real quality he may exhibit. Indeed, when the novelty is little more than novelty pure and simple, reputations die with astonishing speed. An example is Epstein, whose once immensely famous âGenesisâ is now lying in a rubbish heap in one of the keeperâs compounds in Battersea Park.
When the modernist mode began the most visible talker and writer was Ezra Pound. In examining his supposed novelty we find two main components. First, verse which is apparently âfreeâ but which is usually a sort of resolved Whitmanesque hexameter: (and right through his career we find his allegedly ânewâ artifacts crammed with âthouâ and âdidstâ and all that). On the other hand (leaving aside economic and other nonsense), the main run of the more admired portions of the Cantos is little more than that Imagism which Hilda Doolittle and others developed from their notion of Japanese verse. The original conception was clearly limited to fairly unified lyrics, and would have been better if it had been left there.
As to free verse, once it had established itself in the 1920s in England it became pervasive. No more than a decade later school magazines of expensive girlâs schoolsâalways keener on âcreativityâ than boyâs schoolsâwere full of vague pieces of chopped up prose with vaguely emotional content. This may remind us that one notoriously bad effect of âfreeâ verse is that large numbers of people educated during the last half century no longer understand the structure of real verse.
W. H. Auden was to remark in his later years âI cannot settle which is worse, / The anti-novel or free verse . . .â The truly astonishing discovery made by free versifier and anti-novelist alike was how much they could get away with. People have taken seriously, in recent times, novels consisting of loose pages in a box which the reader is invited to shuffle in any order he likes. It was of such things, and the many worse ones which will be familiar to all of you, that Philip Larkin writes, âThe adjective âmodern.â when applied to any branch of art, means âdesigned to evoke incomprehension, anger, boredom or laughterââ and defines modernism as âtending towards the silly, the disagreeable and the frigid.â
In a fuller context the same writer tells us:
I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound or Picasso: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power.
+++
The Influence of Freud and Marx
No account of modernism can be complete without some reference to Freud. The extent to which Freudianism was taken as the last word on the human mind, the huge influences of the psychoanalytic myth, may surprise us nowadays. Yet it is worth remembering how freshâand indeed shockingly soâwas the Freudian concentration on sexuality. In particular every âadvancedâ young man and woman was able to point to what were still viewed as disreputable motives in all the actions of their elders or rivals. The idea of the Unconscious as a majorâin fact seniorâpartner in the personality led directly, of course, to surrealism. But it also led in a less doctrinaire way to a treatment of images, in verse and prose, on a far more self-conscious basis than had yet been seen.
And then there was Marxism, which purported to give more or less final and definite answers to all matters of human society and behavior. To this attraction was added the fact that (like Freudianism) its mechanisms were so flexible that anything whatever could be fitted in somehow,
Is there then a connection between political radicalism and the aesthetic radicalism we call âmodernismâ?
The appeal of Marxism and in general of theories implying that âhistoryâ was on the verge of its final conclusion in the form of a perfect order, exhibited a certain parallel with the views taken by sponsors of modernist aestheticsâthat an entirely new form of liberated art was now available, and that there would be no looking back. In both cases the predictions were false, and false for similar psychological reasonsâa taste for novelty raised almost to a metaphysic, and a failure to consider that the intellectual fashions of any period, including oneâs own, eventually give way to something else.
Except for satire in its narrowest sense, there is remarkably little good political poetry in English. Even really good causes, far from being productive of good poetry, seem to have been sources of bathos, and this is true even of our greatest poets. As J.C. Furnas remarks in his scholarly and sensitive study of slavery, The Road to Harpers Ferry, âWhen touching on slavery, Cowper, Blaek, Wordsworth and Southey produced drivel.â Less good, or at any rate less straightforward causes, handled by greatly inferior poets, are more characteristic of our own time.
Few English poets have much experience of the political. They have generous impulses, no doubt, and well intended concern for humanity. These can be expressed in various ways and are not sufficient for a poem involving facts. On political issues it is extremely rare for the facts to be so clear, and the human involvement so direct and simple, as to approach the immediacy and undeniability of experience.
Even those few poets with some political knowledge and experience find it difficult to produce political poems. Laurence Durrell, one of those few, has dealt directly with political events in prose, in Bitter Lemons. But in the poem which concludes this book, as soon as he approaches the subject he has the modesty, a sense of the subjectâs intractibility, to write: âBetter leave the rest unsaid.â Excellent advice, for several reasons.
The Mexican painters like Rivera well illustrate one aspect of political modernism. And it is clear that an important part of the impact and the effect of their ânewâ art was due far more to the political type of content than to the quasi-cubism involved in the forms chosen. In the palace at Chapultepec, one may see romantic revolutionary paintings of a century ago, showing liberators like Juarez and Diaz crushing venomous foes, etc., to the applause and enthusiasm of romantically conceived peasants and of âThe Peopleâ in general. The difference between these and the more modern Mexican paintings is not great: and indeed the later generation owes a good deal not merely to this political inheritance but also to an element of primitivism already seen in their predecessors.
In fact, art with a ârevolutionaryâ component of the political sort is very much a traditionalist form. The only exception I have come across, where a genuine new impulse seems visible, is in the strange statuary of Kemalist Turkey with its earthy New Turks pushing up out of the soil. Here, perhaps, the novelty may be due to the absence of any previous representational art.
One should also note a sentiment which is not exactly political but is strongly linked to attitudes on politics: the attraction avant-garde art had for those among the rich and privileged who felt guilty about their status. Just as with supporting or appeasing enemies of the bourgeoisie from Lenin to the Viet-Cong, there was (as Tom Wolfe puts it) âa peculiarly modern reward that the avant-garde artist can give his benefactor: namely, the feeling that he, like his mate the artist, is separate from and aloof from the bourgeoisie, the middle class.â
This enmity of artists to âcapitalismâ and the âbourgeoisieâ is a projection of mere temperament. (The notion that âcapitalismâ is hostile to art is in itself absurd. In fact, capitalist or bourgeois patronage has often marked a great flowering of art: the Medicis; Venice and Holland; or, to go further back, the great merchant-republic of Athens.)
In the first and second decades of this century there was an immense ferment of revolutionary-sounding attitudes and these attracted some of the aesthetically radicalâMarinetti into Fascism, Mayakovsky in Bolshevism. Lenin himself disliked the futurists, and referred to Mayakovskyâs views as âhooligan communism,â but his cultural Commissar Lunarcharsky supported them. It is hard to remember now that political posters by Chagall were plastered on the trams in Vitebsk after the revolution. And outside Russia, a rather typical figure of the time was Ernst Toiler, modernist playwright and revolutionary prisoner.
The revolutionary temperament emerged vis-Ă -vis a pre-revolutionary society, and this involved sharp and continual criticism of everything. But when a revolution comes, the ruling party is committed to a single truth, and thus to the destruction of the hitherto powerful critical faculty within its own ranks. So it was of course wholly misleading when the Nazis denounced modernism as Kulturbolschewismus: official Soviet art, by the mid-â20s, had become clearly Victorianized. Even so, some Soviet attraction remained.
Surrealism, of course was, in its origins, a highly doctrinaire and tight little movement, and one with a political commitment to communism. Andre Breton, as its chief theorist, led the movement in a more Trotskyite, anti-Soviet direction. But many of its adherents turned to Stalinism, in particular Louis Aragon but also to some degree Eluard.
And, even though orthodox communism repudiated modernist principles, there were plenty of âmodernistsâ from Picasso to Neruda, who happily went along with it even in its most Stalinist phase.
On this issue, Brecht, whose intense artistic commitment to extremes of honesty is spoken of in the most lachrymose fashion in the drama departments of universities around the West, was totally dishonest at every level when it came to politics. No one, not even Sartre, has such a despicable record: and yet, politics formed a decisive element in his aesthetics. There is a certain paradox in the comparison between the subtlety and complexity sought by such writers in the structure of their prose and verse, and the complete crudity of the politics they embraced.
+++
A Concluding Assessment
And what good came of it at last? When we look back we can surely say that the great revolution that the modernists thought they were bringing about simply failed.
But that is not the whole story. First of all, even if they were not as world-shaking as they imagined, they may still have left us some valuable, if peripheral, work. Such a modest contribution, after all, is all that Mallarmé claimed.
It is a remarkable fact that despite the opposition of well-established academics (a real priesthood of modernism) the more recent works which have against these odds forced themselves on the educated mind as the best writing of the last two or three decades are almost entirely ânon-modernist.â In Britain the novels of Anthony Powell and Graham Greene have little resemblance to Finniganâs Wake or To the Lighthouse. The poetry of Eliot, Auden, Larkin, is almost ostentatiously âunmodernâ and mostly in traditional forms. But is there something of value that these writers of our generation have after all inherited from modernism?
I think there is,
Our rhythms have been loosened; our rhyme and assonance scheme has broadened; obliquenessâin verse or proseâis available on those occasions where it seems to work.
Such things as the attempt, in painting, to disentangle pattern from content may have its point in providing some sort of partial insight into why a great painting of the Quattrocento produced its effects, even if it failed as a prescription for present work.
The inventiveness sometimes produced charming or interesting results as with a âpoemâ of Arpâs consisting of a square or oblong with, instead of pictorial detail, the words describing each part of a presumed painting, nicely phrased.
There was also an element, and often a very attractive one, of joking in the early avant-garde. Dada showed this to a very high degree. But the Dadaists for the most part went on to Surrealism. And although the latter contained an element of rather heavy-handed wit, this was largely a matter of aging charlatans like Salvador Dali, embraced by, instead of shocking, the bourgeois taste. On the whole, surrealism and its derivatives were merely solemn. As Auden writes:
With what conviction the young man spoke
When he thought his nonsense rather a joke:
Now, when he doesnât doubt any more,
No-one believes the booming old bore.
Still one finds the saving note of the comic not only in e.e. cummings, but also in Dylan Thomas for exampleâeven at his most portentous he seems to fit LautrĂ©amontâs description of Byron: âLâhippotame des jungles infernalesâ: more sympathetic, even as a monster, than the tyrannosaurs then infesting the continental countries.
Then we are (of course) much freer on sexual themes, and in the use of obscene wordsâwhich are to be found even in such works as A Dance to the Music of Time. But it is hard to believe that the uptightness which came into its own round at the end of the last century and went on in publishing circles for another 30â40 years, would not have given way to a more liberal view as previously puritanical episodes have always done. In fact the âmodernistâ contribution proper, whether associated with Freud, with radical anti-bourgeois notions, or with verbal theory, seems if anything to have been comparatively harmfulâin that a gross excess of obscenity was thrust upon us in such things as the works of William Burroughs.
When it comes to a general consideration of modernism, was there another way open, back in the years following the turn of the century? Perhaps not. The arts were, it seems, driven in new directions at least in part by the mere exhaustion of the old at that particular time.
I think we should recognize the freshness and the excitement that affected the young as they came in contact for the first time with these new works that there elders found shockingly imcomprehensible. I still recall, while in my teens, the first surrealists, the first copies of New Verse and Twentieth Century Verse. (It is true that one found almost equal excitement in science fiction and jazz, both of which reached on through more ordinary channels: Wells and Verne preceding Astounding Stories, ragtime preceding swing.)
Of our reading of the time, what has survived? First of all, I think one should say that the victory of modernism in the minds of the young was never that total, that totalitarian sweep envisaged by its true believers. We (along with Auden and Eliot) continued to read Housman and Kipling.
But who would we regard as a âmodernistâ poet in English? To us, today, Eliot, Yeats, and Auden appear traditionalists. With Dylan Thomas one may perhaps think that something wholly novel has been achieved. His poems, or many of them, are indeed the declamatory output of images scarcely connected at any conscious level. Still, there is nothing new in this idea of merely incantatory poetry, with little obviously ârationalâ content. It was no less a product of classicism that Gibbon himself who spoke of the alternative aims of poetry being to âsatisfy or silence our reason.â Moreoever, incomprehensibility and pointlessness are not the same thing. There is nothing âincomprehensibleâ about a pile of bricks or a âconcreteâ poem.
What I am suggesting is that many writers claimed as modernist were merely modern. This is not to say that they were not affected by modernism, or experimentalism, proper, to various degrees. Thomas can properly be regarded as at least heavily charged with modernism: and we can add that it is his more âmodernistâ verse (âaltar-wise by owl-lightâ) which fades most quickly from our viewâtogether, to be fair, with some of his slacker and later poems. Yet much remainsâas can also be said of that true surrealist Kenneth Allott, though it may be noted that in both these cases disjunction of sense is matched by considerable rigor of form.
We have indeed been enriched by modernism; though, as I have suggested, the damage its attitudes have done in deadening both audience and mass sensibility by mere excess remains with us still.
In 1960 Pasternak, himself a modernist of the Russian Silver Age, said that
all this writing of the twenties has terribly aged. . . . our works were dictated by the times. They lacked universality. . . . I have never understood those dreams of a new language, of a completely original form of expression. Because of this dream much of the work of the twenties which was stylistic experimentation has ceased to exist. The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say. Then he uses the old language in his urgency and the old language is transformed from within.
That seems a very good summing up. Modernism was above all an attempt to create something which was not merely new in the sense that previous movements have been new, but rather a commitment to total and endless modernizing and remodernizingâa Permanent Revolution.
When what this produced was the pointless and the meaningless, it became the main mission of the modernist type of mind not so much to produce or even procure this rubbish, but to explicate endlessly on its supposed value. The small benefits of modernism have long since been absorbed into the main body of the arts. What remains, claiming always to spontaneity, sensitivity, and liveliness, appears merely forced, apathetic, and moribund.