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Two Strong Reactionary Men of Letters
| Article
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12377 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1987 |
4,788 Words |
| Author
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Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk is the author of more than thirty books,
including The Conservative Mind, now available in its seventh
revised edition. |
Twenty years ago, a belligerent book was published entitled The Reactionaries by John Harrison, a British critic of sorts. Somewhat more attention was paid to it by reviewers than the book deserved, but it is now forgotten. In his pages Harrison scourged W.B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence for not celebrating the march of egalitarian progress in the world; if only he might demonstrate that these men of letters were political reactionaries, Harrison seemed to think, he would undo their literary reputations.
Yet, as the lyric poet Roy Campbell once wrote, a human body that cannot react is a corpse; and so it is with a society, or with a literary culture. Most really important writers of this century, especially in the English language, have reacted against the leveling tendency of our age and against that disorder of the soul and that disorder of the commonwealth into which we have fallen; they have been neither liberals nor democrats. Some, indeed, have declared their reactionary convictions and prejudices quite shamelessly - notably, Allen Tate, in the first collection of his essays, Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936).
Lionel Trilling was somewhat painfully aware of this rejection of liberalism by writers of great talent when, in 1950, he published The Liberal Imagination. Trilling wrote:
Our liberal ideology has produced a large literature of social and political protest, but not, for several decades, a single writer who commands our real literary admiration....Our dominant literature is profitable in the degree that it is earnest sincere, solemn. At its best it has the charm of a literature of piety. It has neither imagination nor mind.
And if on the other hand we name those writers who, by the general consent of the most serious criticism, by consent too of the very class of educated people of which we speak, are to be thought of as the monumental figures of our time, we see that to these writers the liberal ideology has been at best a matter of indifference. Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Mann (in his creative work), Kafka, Rilke, Gide - all have their own love of justice and the good life, but in not one of them does it take the form of a love of the ideas and emotions which liberal democracy, as known by our educated class, has declared respectable.
Just so. Oscar Cargill wrote in The Nation four decades ago that, unless T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost should mend their
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