The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. - book reviews

Reason, July, 1994 by Donald N. McCloskey

JOHN CAREY'S READABLE BOOK, WHICH was successful in Britain and is now issued over here, assaults what is known in English departments as "modernism." Modernism was best summarized by the poet Philip Larkin, who was also a jazz critic, as the "Three Ps": [Ezra] Pound, Picasso, and [Charlie "Bird"] Parker, the three artists who in Larkin's view destroyed modern art. Modernism's main shtick was and is obscurity. When T.S. Eliot versified in The Waste Land about the vulgar suburbanites coming to work--"Unreal City,/Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many"--he required two footnote references, one to Baudelaire and the other to the Inferno, III, 55-57.

In 1924 Virginia Woolf, who along with Eliot was one of the chief modernist baddies, declared: "On or about December 1910 human character changed." You bet. What did change on or about December 1910, give or take a decade, all over Europe, was the artistic theory of the avant garde. It was a burst of artistic-isms, from Italian futurism, French cubism, and German architecture to American imagism in poetry and Russian formalism in literary theory.

Carey's wider point, which brings the book out of the Department of English, is that the avant garde was in this way fleeing its bourgeois origins and keeping clear of the proletariat masses. It was making itself, at any rate in its imaginings, into a new aristocracy. "The intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy. But they could prevent them from reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand." The obscurity of modernism kept literature (and music and painting) in the hands of cultured chaps. It kept it out of the hands of clerks, suburbanites, Eastern European immigrants, and the other nasty creatures growing in such numbers.

NUMBERS. THE SPECTER THAT HAUNTED Europe and America circa 1910 was Malthusian numbers of vulgar clerks and dirty proles and foreigners, as in Eliot: "And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,/Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp." Says Carey: "Rewriting or reinventing the mass was an enterprise in which early twentieth-century intellectuals invested immense imaginative effort." The masses were Them; we were the New Aristocracy, who could read Ezra Pound and listen to 12-tone music.

It was a European obsession, tied up in European fears of a Malthusian crisis, which was adopted after a lag by American writers such as H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis. Baudelaire and Nietzsche were the pioneers, leading their followers to an aristocratic contempt for democracy, capitalism, bourgeois values, and the United States of America. Baudelaire had spoken for example of "a knave in Benjamin Franklin's style, the rising bourgeoisie come to replace the faltering aristocracy." A nostalgia for aristocracy bubbled up in the century after 1848, a treason against the liberal polity. Modernism, says Carey, is a literary theory of fascism. One finds it still among certain literary intellectuals, many of whom think of themselves as politically progressive.

Carey's hero is Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), who wrote novels that clerks could read. Bennett was aware he stood apart: "Bennett's whole quarrel with intellectual contempt for the masses is that it is a kind of deadness,...a dull, unsharpened impercipience shut off from the intricacy and fecundity of each human life." Bennett, like Dickens or the Bronte sisters, "did not see why what the masses liked should automatically be accounted trash." He wrote in 1901 that "everyone is an artist, more or less," in their lives and perceptions.

The modernist baddies are Nietzsche (Great Satan to all baddies) and his English-writing progeny Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Russell, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene. The tiny band of bourgeois goodies down to the present includes Bennett, G.K. Chesterton, Conan Doyle, George Orwell, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes.

The clerks around 1910 read Shaw and H. G. Wells, too, though Shaw and Wells, lucid in their writings and nothing like modernists in literary theory, preached an apocalypse in which supermen would run the show. Wells in particular, who figures as both a goodie and a baddie in Carey's book, grew pessimistic in a Malthusian way. The sheer bulk of the masses would overrun the earth, he lamented, spoiling the trout streams. (The contribution of Malthus to the social experiments of our century--eugenics, Lebensraum, extermination camps, urban renewal, and zero population growth--needs to be looked into.)

"All those damn little clerks," says a character in a Wells novel of 1901, with "no proud dreams and no proud lusts." The "swarms of black, brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people...have to go." George Bernard Shaw wrote the same way in 1910: "Extermination must be put on scientific basis." And D.H. Lawrence, who in Aaron's Rod (1922) advocated "a proper and healthy and energetic slavery," in 1908 had written presciently, "If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly. Then I'd go into the back streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed."