Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward

Capital & Class, Summer 2008 by Faulkner, Peter

David Goodway Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward Liverpool University Press, 2006, 401 pp. ISBN: 1-84631-026-1 (pbk) £20 ISBN: 1-84631-025-3 (hbk) £50

reviewed by Peter Faulkner

This well informed and clearly written book has two main aims: to tell the reader about the importance and extent of the tradition of anarchist or left-libertarian writing in Britain; and to argue for the urgent relevance today of that tradition of political thought, particularly in its pacifist and environmentalist forms. The latter aim is necessarily the more difficult to fulfil, since it may well come up against the reader's existing political prejudices or commitments; and I will consider it later. But in that it provides a great deal of information in a form that is both accessible and suggestive of the importance of the tradition discussed, the book is undoubtedly successful. Eight writers classified by Goodway as anarchists are discussed at length, in historical order as follows: Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, John Cowper Powys, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, Alex Comfort, Christopher Pallis and Colin Ward. In addition, Goodway offers thoughtful readings here of three other writers broadly sympathetic to the anarchist tradition, but with more reservations about it: William Morris, George Orwell and E. P. Thompson. Each writer is carefully placed in his historical context: Morris in that of late-Victorian radicalism; Orwell that of Spain and the Civil War; and Thompson in that of nuclear disarmament and the 'New Left'.

Many readers will have some knowledge of the most of the writers considered here-although the name Pallis meant little to me until now; but this book provides more substance, and concludes with a very extensive bibliography of some forty-two pages plus a thorough index. The only writer to have two chapters devoted to him is the novelist and sage J. C. Powys (one of three brothers who each had a significant literary career). The first of these chapters examines the 'life-philosophy' advocated by Powys in a number of what might be thought of as psychological self-help books; while the second is devoted to his remarkable novels and to the influence on him, from 1937, of the anarchist Emma Goldman. Powys is one of those highly individualistic writers who are admired by a distinguished minority and largely ignored by the wider reading public. Goodway is an enthusiast of his work in all its varied forms, and some of his most enthusiastic writing is to be found in these chapters. The huge novel Porius, published in truncated form in 1951, is held to be Powys's 'supreme fictional achievement' as well as 'his most anarchist novel' (p. 165·). It is typical of its author in its uncompromising commitment to a highly unusual vision, with the action all taking place in North Wales in one week in the year 499, blending history and myth in an extraordinary narrative. Goodway argues that it revolves around the libertarian themes running through the book, which come together to constitute an exhilarating vision of human potentiality. Goodway chooses to end his book with a quotation from Powys's 1933 book, A Philosophy of Solitude. 'Having once aroused in our mind enough faith in our own will-power to create a universe of contemplation and forget everything else, there are few limitations to the happiness we may enjoy' (p. 338). I am not sure that this is well chosen. Although it may suit the position of the creative writer, it seems to place the anarchist at a greater distance from society than Goodway elsewhere implies.

Of the writers we might already know of as anarchist, Goodway necessarily has less unexpected things to say, although he acts as a consistently well balanced guide to their works. Edward Carpenter, whom we might have expected to have come to the fore recently because of his courageous commitment to open homosexuality, still remains, Goodway suggests, on the periphery, and he draws the reader's attention to Carpenter's essays of the late-188Os, which were collected together in the wittily entitled Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure. In the chapter on Wilde, Goodway brings in an important document apparently neglected until now-an article by Thomas H. (Tom) Bell, a Scottish anarchist of significant importance who emigrated to the USA in 1904, and who wrote a book on Carpenter in 1932. Goodway writes that Bell produced, between 1930 and 1938, a 477-page typescript entitled Oscar Wilde without whitewash', which is now in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles. Bell died in 1942 with the book unpublished, and it has Only ever appeared in Argentina, shortened and in Spanish translation', in 1946 (p. 88). That book, we are told, draws largely on a 'real long talk' Bell had with Wilde towards the end of his life, in the summer of 1900. Bell questioned Wilde about 'The Soul of Man under Socialism', classified by Goodway earlier in the chapter as an anarchist work. Goodway shows how, in Bell's discussion, some hitherto unknown influences on Wilde were mentioned. Wilde had evidently read some of the works of Proudhon, and he referred to the novel What Is To Be Done? by the Russian radical Chernyshevsky, and to Walter Besant's 1882 novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men. No future discussion of Wilde's politics will be able to ignore Bell's account, which Goodway has usefully made public.