Richard Pine (Auth.) - The Dandy and The Herald - Manners, Mind and Morals From Brummell To Durrell-Palgrave Macmillan UK (1988)

THE DANDY AND THE HERALD
By the same author

OSCAR WILDE
THE DUBLIN GATE THEATRE 1928-1978
THE DIVINER: THE ART OF BRIAN FRIEL (forthcoming)
The Dandy and the
Herald
Manners, Mind and Morals from
Brummell to Durrell
Richard Pine
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
© Richard Pine 1988
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 978-0-333-39369-7
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First published 1988
Published by
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Pine, Richard
The dandy and the herald: manners, mind
and morals from Brummell to Durrell.
1. Manners and customs--History-19th
century 2. Manners and customs--History
-20th century
I. Title
302 GT146
ISBN 978-1-349-08055-7 ISBN 978-1-349-08053-3 (eBook)
DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-08053-3
IN MEMORIAM
Leslie Gilbert Pine
Father and Friend
Born 22 December 1907
Died 15 May 1987
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: Paris 1937-38 1
1 The Dandy and the Herald 11

I Introduction: Heraldry 11
II The Dandy 14
III The Classic Literature of Dandyism 16
IV Modern Commentaries 25
V The Heraldic Dandy and the Modern World 35
2 The English Renaissance: Art and Politics 1840--95 39

I Introduction 39
II The Mediaeval Character of the Victorian Era 43
III Aesthetics and Society 51
IV Art and Politics 58
V Oscar Wilde 68
VI Towards Democracy 75
3 Vortex: 1895-1920 83
I Le theatre de la merde 83
II A Necessary War 94
III The Herald as Enemy 98
IV 'The age demanded ... ' 113
4 The Children of the Waste Land: 1920--30 124

I The Handful of Dust 124
II If . . . 129
III Brief Lives 140
IV At the Hotel Byzantine 156
5 The Winter of Artifice: 1930--40 166

I The Frozen Sea 166
II The Axe 170
III China 173
IV Hotel Chaotica 186
V The Heraldic Universe 196
vii
vili ~n~~
6 Into the Inner Landscape 209
Notes and References 224
Index 248
Acknowledgements
Extracts from The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell are reprinted by

permission of Faber & Faber Ltd, London, and E. P. Dutton, New
York.
Extracts from Lawrence Durrell's letter(s) to the author are reprinted

with permission of Curtis Brown on behalf of Lawrence Durrell ©
Lawrence Durrell1984.
ix
Introduction: Paris 1937-38
During a short passage of time, from late 1937 until mid-1938, three
young writers, from very different backgrounds, came together in
Paris and established a rapport which was not only deeply personal
but which characterised their monumental literary achievements. I
believe the work and, perhaps more important, the outlook, of these
writers, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and, particularly, Lawrence
Durrell, offers a special focus on the development of modern
literature in its concern for the relationship of the individual to
society and in its exploration of our consciousness and our moeurs.
This book is an attempt to locate that focus.
In 1935 Miller began to correspond with Lawrence Durrell, an
expatriate Anglo-Irishman born in India in 1912 - the son of a
British engineer - who was then living in Corfu. The
correspondence originated in Durrell's admiration for Tropic of
Cancer, published by Miller in 1934. It resulted in Durrell joining him
in Paris in 1937. This was a critical stage in the development of each
of the three, since they were in the process of creating the works
which were seminal to their whole later development. Moreover,
there is a distinct inter-relationship and mutuality between them.
Henry Miller was born in 1891 in New York. He was almost forty
when he came to Paris in 1930, remaining there until the outbreak of
the second world war. In Paris he met Anais Nin, who was born in
1903. Miller was the son of a German-American tailor, and had
worked in a telegraph company; Nin, a Parisian by birth, was
cosmopolitan by experience, and artistic by family. But the obvious
contrast in their background and ages was not important. They
recognised each other as writers with a common purpose: to
dismantle what they regarded as a complex and bogus literary
apparatus which concealed and impeded their understanding of
themselves and their culture. Since childhood Nin had explored her
consciousness analytically in her diary in a series of attempts to
relate to her father, the distant dandy-figure, composer and pianist
Joaquin Nin. Miller set out to rewrite history and aesthetics in terms
of his own experience in a brutal onslaught on language and
aesthetic forms.
By 1937 Miller had completed Black Spring, and was working on
R. Pine, The Dandy and the Herald 1

2 The Dandy and the Herald
Tropic of Capricorn which appeared in 1938. Nin had published House

of Incest in 1936 and began to write Winter of Artifice. House of Incest
relates closely to Durrell's key work, a prose poem entitled 'Asylum
in the Snow'. Durrell had also written (under the pseudonym
Charles Norden) a novel, Panic Spring, published by Faber and
Faber, and was trying to persuade Faber to take his next work, The
Black Book. Like Miller's own savage demolition of codes and idioms
which had proved to be illusory and hurtful, The Black Book is 'a
savage charcoal sketch of spiritual and sexual etiolation', 1 the
'English death' of a whole civilisation, 'the proverbs, practices and
precepts of a dead life in a dead land'. 2
Durrell, as will become evident throughout this book, was
reacting against both personal circumstances (his father was also
distant and difficult to relate to) and the uncongenial English
environment in which his family had attempted to educate him. In
Nin's case, the father is described as 'congealed into an attitude' 3
and in Winter of Artifice this father-figure is assassinated.
What were these writers trying to achieve in their assassination of

the dandy? What tactics did they use, and what did they seek to
employ as idioms in place of the dominant 'mandarin'? Durrell
provided the answer- a 'Heraldic Universe' concentrating on the
re-creation of the inner person. This new ego of the artist is
preoccupied, 'tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness
in the world'; 4 in order to re-establish faith and love, he seeks an
inner landscape in which all the received impressions of time and
space are dismantled. Somehow, although he is not sure of his
course, he feels he must explore the reasons for the death of
tenderness, whatever it is which has turned the dandy to stone, and
this in turn emphasises the incisive compulsion towards the inner
landscape, the insistence on self, to the exclusion of this apparatus
which the fathers have erected. Allied to this is a sense of what
Alfred Nobel called 'the destitution of modern man' and a
determination, through saving oneself, to save mankind. This is the
dual purpose of the 'Heraldic Universe'.
Durrell tells Miller:
I chose the word 'heraldic' for a double reason. First because in the
relation of the work to the artist it seemed to me that it expressed
the exact quality I wanted. Also because in heraldry I seem to find
that quality of magic and spatial existence which I want to tack on

to art . . . . What I am trying to isolate is the exact moment of
creation, in which the maker seems to exist heraldically. 5
At the same time he explains:
To have art you've first got to have a big personality, pass it

through the social mincer, get it ready for misery. Art nowadays is
going to be real art . . . . IT IS GOING TO BE PROPHECY, in the
biblical sense. What I propose to do, with all deadly solemnity, is
to create my HERALDIC UNIVERSE quite alone . . . . I AM SLOWLY
BUT VERY CAREFULLY AND WITHOUT CONSCIOUS THOUGHT
DESTROYING TIME. 6
This imaginative realm therefore simply refuses to deal with the

conventions of time and space, whether it is Nin's dreamlike
auto-analysis, Miller's ostensibly Rabelaisian account of his street-
life, or by comparison Durrell's almost scholarly reconstruction in
language of metaphysical speculation and sexual curiosity. Miller
greeted The Black Book as an heraldic achievement in 'emotional
engineering', which gave the quietus 'to the fluttering corpus of
egomaniac literature in which we have been bogged down for the
last few generations', a book 'for those who have staked out a new
womb in which to continue the creative life'. 7
Similarly, Durrell writes to Miller about Tropic of Cancer:
Not only is it a literary and artistic smack on the bell for everyone,
but it really gets down on paper the blood and bowels of our time.
I love to see the canons of oblique and pretty emotion mopped up;
to see every whim-wham and bagatelle of our contemporaries
from Eliot to Joyce dunged under . . . . It's the final copy of all
those feeble, smudgy, rough drafts- Chatterly, Ulysses, Tarr, etc. It
not only goes back, but (which none of them have done) goes
forward as well. It finds the way out of the latrines at last ... the
copy-book of my generation. 8
Durrell's reference to a backward look is very significant, not only

because, as I hope to show, the roots of their own 'copy-books' are to
be found in the 'rough drafts' of earlier generations, going back to
romanticism, but also because it tells us something about Miller. The
prevailing view of Miller is of a destructive, foul-mouthed
sensualist. For example Nin says of him 'he makes everything ugly
... to sneer, to rebel, to revolt; that has been his only work so far
[1932]. 9 And not to care .... Henry with his clowning, whips the
world into a carnival10 . . . . A sensualist, an anarchist, an
adventurer, a pimp, a crazy genius' .11 But Miller sees himself at the
same period as more than this: 'A necessary monster. A divine
monster. A hero. A conqueror. A holy destroyer. A destroyer of
dying rhythms. A maker of living rhythms' .12 And, like Nin and
Durrell, 'everything which the fathers and mothers created, I
disown' . 13 Like Don Quixote his behaviour, in Nabokov's words, 14
is likely to be 'cruel and crude' rather than genteel and whimsical.
And this made him the victim of his own style, and obscures two
elements in his writing: firstly, the tenderness and compassion with
which we find he is capable of expressing himself (for example in the
conclusion to Black Spring); and secondly, the erudition of his critical
work, not so much from a scholarly, textual standpoint as from an
intellectual grasp of his subject. This second quality is evident, for
example, in his books on Rimbaud, 15 Lawrence 16 and Hamlet. 17
The tone of Durrell's letter to Miller is obviously effusive and
adulatory, but it clearly identifies the task of the contemporary
writer as one of demolition; to dissect and at the same time
disembowel the verbal universe so that one can see where one came
from, and decide where one is going.
The emphasis however is not simply on deconstruction, but on
reconstruction, and here the pervasive influence of Eliot can be
detected. Eliot himself was moving at this time from the
deconstruction of The Waste Land towards the pillars of faith which
he reconstructed in Four Quartets (1935--42).
Durrell's inclusion of Eliot among 'our contemporaries' is
indicative of the ambivalence with which he, and other authoritative
figures of the older generation, were regarded by the young thirties
writers. Although, as Spender observed, The Waste Land was 'about
the end of western civilization', it appeared to offer no political
solution to the impending problem. 18 This posed a dilemma because
the political role of art was acutely highlighted in the 1930s. It was
necessary to 'shrug off' doubts about Eliot's opinions in order to
appreciate his greatness as a poet. The Waste Land 'excited us as
poetry and yet it evoked a landscape across which armies and
refugees moved'. 19 It is almost as if the words themselves, the
signals of 'undisciplined squads of emotion' were rampaging over
the aesthetic landscape.
For Durrell, however, as for Nin and Miller, this reconstruction

took place in the planting of new signposts, writing out a new
copy-book. Once the dandies have been assassinated, the heralds of
the new universe must take their places, in a cyclic process. Perhaps
the tranquillity of the 'asylum in the snow' is necessary for the
re-collection, since time and place are not only subverted in the
imagination (for example by means of stream-of-consciousness) but
also re-collected, re-established; as Eliot says:
Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice. 20
The 'asylum in the snow' is an imaginative realm in which the

heraldry of a new age is conceived. For some writers this took the
form of a distant country - 'China', 'Ireland', 'Byzantium' - for
others an appeal to time past, illo tempore, in order to regain time.
Auden and Isherwood, and Harold Acton, typify the former; Yeats
'sailed to Byzantium' in order to arrive where he started,
recognising it as Ireland; and Durrell himself has used 'Ireland' as a
metaphor representing a state of mind in which his imagination can
try to make contact with his own Anglo-Irish background. 21 This
metaphysical travel can thus be employed to subvert time and place,
and it can also represent the 'Peter Pan syndrome' of boys who
refuse to grow up into the world their fathers have created.
The 'asylum in the snow' is thus an emotive metaphor which
recurs through much of twentieth-century literature- it is especially
evident for example in Durrell's Tunc/Nunquam and the 'Avignon
Quintet': the correlation of 'snow' with a psycho-therapeutic
function, an isolating, localising metaphor which anaesthetises and
floats the damaged, jeopardised ego, in order to release it on a
metaphysical plane into this Heraldic Universe - one of pristine
modernity.
In thinking about this book over a long time I have been concerned
to establish the provenance of these three writers, Durrell in
particular. This seems to me important because they were not
simply cutting themselves - and by extension all modern artists -
free from the dead world. They were freeing themselves from the
incestuous world in which their dead ancestors were continuing to
exert a proprietorial and affective control on their emotions,

consciousness and identity. But the rebellious and revolutionary
books of these three, and of contemporaries such as Djuna Barnes
and Samuel Beckett (who were also in Paris at this time) descended
from a stream of aesthetic experience embodied in the works of
Pater, Wilde, Eliot and Aldington for example.
There are in fact intimate connections between the literature of the
1920s and 1930s and that of the nineteenth century. The dandyism
of the Regency itself was derived from the beaux of the Restoration,
and the gothic-romantic preoccupation of the eighteenth century
(and the revival of interest in chivalry in the nineteenth) was rooted
in remnants of medievalism which survived until Don Quixote
eventually fell on the field of Paschendaele.
The clearing-house for these connections is the decade of the
1890s, as typified by the periodicals The Yellow Book and The Savoy.
While the 1890s have been regarded as decadent, populated by
effete, meaningless, insincere poseurs, these years in fact present us
with a picture of renewal and modernity which characterise the
heraldry which we are seeking. 'New' was a label attached to every
social and aesthetic model in the 1890s: 'the new woman', 'the new
spirit', 'the new individualism', 'the new paganism', even 'the new
hedonism' and 'the new remorse' were discussed in such a way that
non-conformity as a way of life became a possible means of averting
the stagnation which is the natural autumnal source of decadence.
As Wilde said, 'not to conform is simply a synonym for progress.
Progress is simply the instinct for self-preservation'. 22 And this
meant placing a premium on modernity as novelty and artificiality-
the age of invention coming into its own, in ideas as much as in
machines; democratic, volatile, extrovert. Yet in this process there
was an unconscious reaffirmation of the cyclic life of society: as
Holbrook Jackson observed 'the decadents were romantic in their
antagonism to current forms, but they were classic in their
insistence upon new'. 23
The Yellow Book and The Savoy provide an index to the interaction
of French, English and American aesthetics at this period and to the
'genealogy of aesthetics'. Yellow was the colour of the Regency-
alive, expansive, vibrant; whereas mauve, or purple, was the colour
of the simultaneous decadence. The Yellow Book was both the
metaphor and the medium of the 1890s, characterising a crossroads
between an age whose provenance is in the gothic-romantic
imagination of the middle ages, and another whose destiny lay in
the vortex of futurism, expressionism and modernism. And it is

exactly in these -isms, or rather in their perpetrators, that we find an
admiration for the insincerity of Wilde, which amounts to a serious
acceptance of his aesthetic code. Wilde as the nexus between
eighteenth-century thought as developed by Pater, and the post-
Paschendaele era, is a key figure in the descent of modem concepts
of the relationship of art to politics. It can therefore be argued that
the cultural and social transition from ancient to modem thus
preceded the political transition by approximately a quarter of a
century.
When I describe the works of Durrell, Miller and Nin as
'monumental' I refer not to the considerable volume of their work,
but to the fact that this corpus of literature, especially their writings
post-1945 - Miller's 'Rosy Crucifixion', 24 Nin' s Cities of the Interio,Z 5
and Durrell's three major sequences, The Alexandria Quartet/6
Tunc!Nunquam 27 and the Avignon Quintef8 - testifies to the
development by each writer of a particular and also a general
response to the tensions which they had collectively identified. In
that crucial period before the second world war, as 'children of the
waste land', they realised that the social and political crisis
enveloping European life was also an aesthetic crisis, the roots of
which lay much further in the past than was generally supposed.
Their work is monumental because it represents an advance on the
established literary idioms - it was both cognisant of the past (in
acknowledging its origins) and aware of the crisis, its causes and its
solutions; clearly conscious of the need for heraldry to replace effete
dandyism.
This does not mean, however, that there was any collusion
between the three writers in question; the fact that after their
dispersal by that war they seldom met, and certainly sought no
common form of expression, underlines their individuality and
their integrity. The conjuncture in Paris was symbolic of the fact that
they were severally pursuing different conceptions yet found a
common ground in their intentions. As Durrell has recently said:
We are all such different writers. How to explain our sound

solidarity and affection? . . . It was not because of any identity of
ideas on style, philosophy, art, etc., etc. I was often irritated by
Anai:s and she by me; also Henry didn't like my 'literary'
style . . . . YET DESPITE RESERVATIONS WE WERE QUITE
UNSHAKEABLE FRIENDS AND WOULD HAVE GONE THRU FIRE FOR EACH
OTHER! It is most curious. We disagreed violently on details but on

the grand lines we were quite solidly linked. 29
In a sense they were on a war-footing: as Durrell has recently said

'une grave crise psychique et morale [The Black Book] . .. m'a donne
le sentiment d'entrer dans une confratemite. C'est un peu comme
lorsqu' on va a la guerre'. 30
While there was no joint propaganda, there was a prospectus: the
right and responsibility of the individual artist to bum in the
contemporary hell, to go through it as much as to see through it, in
order to discover the inner secrets and weaknesses of the psyche,
the betrayal of false logic and the down-treading of a lost
generation, believing that from its own inner resources it could
reconstruct a map by which to gain its orientations in a new world.
The works of Durrell which will be especially studied in the
present book are the two early prose poems 'Zero' 31 and' Asylum in
the Snow', 32 The Black Book and one work from the 1950s which casts
a light on the transitional period I have identified which is both
characteristic of Durrell himself and typical of his age, the lectures
entitled The Key to Modern Poetry. 33 Indeed it is instructive that in
these lectures, in which he discusses the change from Victorian to
modem sensibility in terms of the events of the 1890s, Durrell
spends the first half discussing key psychological and scientific
traits; his titles, before he comes to address the poets of the nineties,
the Georgians and Imagists, Eliot and Hopkins, are: 'The Limits of
Criticism', 'Space, Time and Poetry', 'The World Within', and
'Beyond the Ego?'. The way he pursues his themes- the impact of
communism, relativity, evolutionary theory and archaeological
discovery on Victorian stability and certainty - has all the zest of
Pater, Wilde or Beardsley pursuing a new aesthetic.
There is, I believe, a continuous process in which we can see, for
example, that the most conspicuous dandy of the modem age -
Oscar Wilde- was obviously rooted, imaginatively, in the Regency
era, a child of a confused age. As I shall describe in Chapters 1 and 2,
the essence of dandyism and of heraldry is to exist at the critical but
confusing point between two cultures, the dying and the emergent.
As a result we obtain in art (whether it is visual and graphic or
literary or musical) an acute image of the moment transfixed, an
epicurean insistence on a point. Baudelaire and Pater are the chief
exponents of this momentary sensation, and it is no surprise
therefore to find a younger generation of artists exploring it at a
more critical point in social and aesthetic history; as Durrell says, 'to
isolate the exact moment of creation'.
Exploring his 'Heraldic Universe', he declares 'I am a man . . . . I
am an artist . . . . I am God!' 34 Hardly original; the romantics,
Nietzsche pre-eminently, had killed God and simultaneously had
confirmed history by enthroning a new deity rooted in their inner
consciousness.
This book is therefore about the determination of Durrell,
encouraged by Nin and Miller, to explore the tension between a
known, thoroughly charted heritage, which had ceased to offer any
hope or security, and a dark but inevitable future.
As Miller says,
The map of Europe is changing before our eyes, nobody knows

where the new continent begins or ends . . . . I have forgotten
my own language, and yet I do not speak the new language . . . .
I am in the dead centre of a changing reality for which no language
has been invented. 35
This is clearly both a political and an aesthetic quest. It is little

wonder that, at this time, Miller says 'Hamlet is in the dead
center'. 36 That changing reality, requiring a language and a mode of
perception, is as yet a semantic and conceptual waste land,
populated by lost children, stateless orphans whose destructive
passion comes from the innocence of childish barbarity which is
born of despair, abandoned and made destitute not only by
generation but by time itself. To reflect this, as I attempt to do
in Chapter 5, we must first trace the umbilical cord to the heart of
the nineteenth century, and examine the confrontation of the
dandy and the herald, one a stereotype, one the precursor of the
unknown.
Once we understand this dichotomy, and the forces which led to
the instability and breakdown of the dandy, we will clearly see the
tensions of the modem world. In preparation for this study, I wrote
a psychological biography of Wilde37 who, like Baudelaire and
Beardsley, was dandy of mind, morals and manners, arch-modem
and yet destroyed by his time, embalmed by a later age and yet a
continuing puzzle. What happened to the dandy in 1895? If he was
admired (and admired for his inconsistency, for proclaiming the
'truth of masks') by artists such as Klee, Kandinsky, Picasso,
Nabokov, and Barthes, 38 then he must have some enduring
validity. Did he submerge because the age did not need him, to
re-emerge in a more sympathetic age?
Artifice was insufficient: when an artist like Durrell cries out 'It is
God who does not care: and not merely that he does not care, he does
not care one way or the other', 39 the dandy has failed, because the
emphasis in modernism has been placed wholly on form, to the
neglect of content - the standard misrepresentation and
misconception of the dandy from Brummell to Beerbohm. Having
established the milieu in which dandies like Wilde, Beardsley and
Jarry flourished in their re-emergence from Victorianism, we must
try to see what happened next, what failure of the modern spirit led
to the distortion of dandyism, from symbolism to narcissism.
1
The Dandy and the Herald
I INTRODUCTION: HERALDRY
The Heraldic Universe is proclaimed because the world of the dandy

has become congealed- frozen into an attitude. My principal task is
to explain how that happened in the case of Lawrence Durrell. My
thesis is that, as with political history, so with the history of modern
literature and aesthetics, we will find in the evolution of the
nineteenth century the origins of modern theory as it emerged from
the eclipse of the old world - feudal, aristocratic, liveried - by the
new individualism, moral inversion, deicide, technological
development and the growth of economic theory.
Durrell's roots lie in the dichotomy between the romantic
imagination and the modern spirit which acknowledges - and
grieves for- the death of romanticism. A genealogy of aesthetics can
be traced back from the 'children of the waste land' to the emergence
of the modern novel, the development of Victorian society, and the
debate on the relationship between aesthetics and politics which
resulted from the art movements and 'liberal revolution' of the
mid-nineteenth century.
Durrell, due to personal circumstance, wrote a 'black book';
Miller, out of his own context, described a 'black spring'; Nin
called her own inheritance 'winter of artifice'. Many other young
writers in the 1930s experienced similar dismay and disaffection.
Yet although certain writers - particularly the partnership of
Auden and Isherwood, together with Spender, Harold Acton,
Cyril Connolly - adopted a position which William Pritchard has
called 'seeing through everything', 1 no group, or individual, offers
a metaphor as powerful as these three friends, or as successful
in revealing the phobia, sensibilities or inhibitions of their
generation.
When I speak of dandies and heralds, I have in mind a crude
distinction between the heraldic proclamation of a new republic and
the dandiacal world it sought to replace. But such clear-cut fields are
difficult to maintain and the subtle, shifting relationships between

the dandy and the herald continually interrupt any attempt at rigid
divisions.
Nevertheless, in presenting the dandy and the herald I must
attempt some form of definition in order to make sense of what
follows. Later in this chapter, in exploring the dandy as defined by
Barbey d' Aurevilly, Baudelaire and Camus, I shall set out the
argument in favour of the rebel-artist- much of which, as we shall
see, is also applicable to the herald.
Here, however, I offer a brief description of the heraldic dandy in
so far as he is relevant to this present study: this creature is the
dandy whose characteristics are also present in the herald, the
poseur whose pose is not limited to style, and who is capable of
rising above the fact of his own death in order to salute the Heraldic
Universe.
The herald is an eponymous hero, who, by virtue ofaction related to
thought, makes possible a liberation, a revalorisation, of the great
gestures and the metaphors of the tradition within which he exists.
It is essential to realise that his own beau geste is a physical action
founded on metaphysical speculation and resulting in an answer to
that speculation. This is the essence of the heroic, of the heraldic,
and, in its fullest form, of the dandy- the translation of dreamer into
man of action, a rescue operation firstly for the self and then for the
universe.
That the heraldic dandy is bound by his own 'great tradition' does
not mean that his imagination is limited to his own place or time: one
of the essential qualities of aesthetic rebellion is that it reaches out to
other imaginative realms to restore its own. It is within his own
tradition that the rebel finds himself, but he often does so by
reference to another matrix, bringing into creative conjunction two
apparently irreconcilable elements - to bring the new world into
existence to redress the balance of the old. In order to inherit myself,
I must invent myself.
This is the critical point at which the dandy and the herald part
company. The dandy is concerned with style, and for the pure
dandy the accomplishment of manners, the aristocracy of taste,
results in sublimation. For the herald the principal concern, beyond
style, is with identity, with an accomplishment of mind and morals,
with renewal of self-knowledge rather than the mere proclamation
of an ego. Where the dandy affirms, the herald needs to attest, where
dandyism is born out of ennui, heraldry is the child of despair or
The Dandy and the Herald 13
outrage, a child often savage in defence of the identity it has just

proclaimed. Dandy into herald equals artist into autist. The
difference is due to the social purpose the herald knows because he
is dandy not only of manners but also of mind and of morals. Where
the dandy tells society about himself, the herald tells society about
itself. The dandy acts out the comedy of manners; he conceals and
refines; today's heralds have lived through the theatres of cruelty,
despair and the absurd; they proclaim in crudity.
The heraldic dandy therefore exhibits a special type of dandyism,
which we can describe as follows:
-he has greatness, and the ability to command people's minds,
their respect and, ultimately, their lives; he is able to engage society
on his own terms; (Disraeli said 'I am only truly great in action';
Wellington was nicknamed 'the Dandy'; Chateaubriand said 'le
dandy doit avoir un air conquerant';)
- he is heroic, which is proven in the courageous display of inner
strength;
-he is prophetic and inventive, in a creative way; his poesis is both a
vision of the future and a mise-en-scene of that vision;
- his sincerity springs from the essentially private quality of his
vision and the fact that he engages society with his personal
landscape;
-he is absurd in that the vision which he enacts seems meaningless
to his own society (obscene, heretical, seditious), and therefore sets
him apart from it, a spectacle of fun, then of pathos, and, eventually,
perhaps of tragedy (d. Miller 'I am an anomaly, a paradox and a
misfit. Most of the time I live en marge' 2 ).
The herald's chief difficulty lies in deciding when, if at all, to meet
this tragedy. Yeats says that we only begin to live when we conceive
life as a tragedy and it may be that this provides us with a further
distinction between the simple dandy and the herald. This is
possibly a more acute question for the contemporary herald than for
those in earlier times: the issue of embracing tragedy must have
seemed more compulsive for Durrell in the 1930s and, before that,
Wilde in the 1890s, or Baudelaire in the 1860s, than it was for the
beaux of the Restoration or the Regency, still caught up in the
charade of the commedia dell'arte which personified the rogue,
aesthete and naif respectively as Pulcinella, Harlequin and Pierrot.
More than an aphorism-on-a-stick, they were required to cast
themselves in the role of executioner and victim- the children of
Kafka determined to demonstrate that the essence of rebellion is the

acquiescence by the victim in his own fate, a deicide who wants to
become god so that he can be killed, again.
II THE DANDY
The search for definitions of the dandy is unsatisfactory: those we

shall encounter in a preliminary survey of the classic literature of
dandyism and of modem commentaries serve their authors' needs,
but they do not serve mine. The thread which I am trying to follow
from the death of Brummell to the death of Joaquin Nin brings us
through a minefield of sensibilities because, particularly from the
1890s onwards, a succession of social crises (crises with aesthetic,
moral and political dimensions) threw together artists and
politicians in reciprocal distrust and embarrassment.
In this the passage of time plays a treacherous part. Figures like
Baudelaire, Wilde and Jarry whom I discuss in Chapters 2 and 3,
were heraldic in their time- heralds of new movements in art, politics
and aesthetics - but are now perceived predominantly as dandies.
Furthermore our reading of some key texts such as Carlyle's
attention to sartorial matters, or d' Aurevilly's account of Brummell,
adds to this confusion by suggesting that the predominant
characteristic of the dandy is his elegance, an external, visual
concern with form, which in its tum suggests that, by contrast, the
herald's appearance is the result of a carefully thought out
intellectual act - an epiphany concerned more with content, with
essence, than with outline.
There is no straightforward image or iconography. Beerbohm's
caricatures, like those of Brummell's period, do not define, they
merely suggest superficiality, even though in Beardsley's heraldic
hermaphrodites, the epicene images do offer a remarkable index to
the clash of romanticism with modernity. Picabia's cartoon for
Litterature (1923) does seem, however fortuitously, to offer several
dandy types - the aesthete, the rogue, the naif, the clown, the
narcissus, the children of perplexity and of cruelty.
As I. K. Fletcher said of Ronald Firbank, 'elements of grace,
wisdom, wit, reserve, nervousness, masochism and perversion
mixed in strange but attractive proportions' ;3 and as Diaghilev
described himself, a mixture of 'charlatanism, charm, cheek, logic,
lack of principle'. It is this combination within the heraldic dandy of
intelligence, bravado, defiance and, ultimately, abandon and

criminality, that places him- or her- on the borderline of morality,
legality, conformity and domesticity.
The subtitle of this study- manners, mind and morals- attempts to
restore some wholeness to both the dandy and the herald. To
distinguish between them is in fact less important than to
understand their mutual relationships. The literature of heraldry, in
this sense, remains to be written, so that comparisons on a textual
level are difficult: however, as I shall show in Chapter 2, the herald is
celebrated in nineteenth-century literature and this offers us the
opportunity to understand more easily the fearful conflicts of the
period 1890--1920, which, I believe, contains all the problems of our
modern age.
The preoccupation with the mannerly qualities of the dandy is not
simply a nineteenth-century misconception. The beau of the
seventeenth century, serving inactive courtly requirements, was
projected onto the dandy of the Regency court of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. But this serves in its own way to
obscure the state of mind which bred attention to form at the expense
of content. In a sense this partitioned the original concept of the beau
-the Renaissance man whose wholeness united mind and manner.
Micheal mac Liamm6ir's discussion of Wilde as 'dandy of dress,
dandy of speech, dandy of manner, dandy of wit, dandy even of
ideas and intellect' 4 re-establishes the wholeness of thought,
appearance and behaviour, rescuing the dandy from accusations of
mindless foppishness and re-asserting the intellectual discipline
which distinguishes the heraldic from the purely sartorial.
Baudelaire, as we shall see, was the first modern writer to
appreciate this- modern, that is, in the sense that he recognised the
essential combination of mind and body, content and form, which
makes it possible for the dreamer also to be a man of action. It has
been said that the chief characteristic of decadence is 'afterthought
... reflection ... the virtue of meditation upon life, its emotions
and incidents; the vice of over-subtilty and of affectation'. 5 This
tendency towards morbid introspection, of treating the past as if it
were the present, is naturally self-defeating. And it allows us to see
the distinction between those dandies who are in a congealed
attitude, that of decadence or narcissistic nostalgia, and the heralds
who hold two cultures, the dying and the emergent, in creative
congruence- to make, and to announce, the future.
It is little wonder that the application of dandyism and heraldry to
the modern world has been principally political - attempting to

reunite the state of mind within the cult of elegance, with the state of
society, within which the conflicts appear to be destructive rather
than creative. Camus implicitly bases L'Homme revolte on
Baudelaire's declaration' dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid
decadence'. 6 This is a query, a refusal to kill off dandyism without
first examining its debt to romanticism, its possible contribution to
the modern world. It demands that the study of the rebel, whose
heraldic statement, non serviam, is entirely of its own moment, must
be based on psychological considerations - the historical
development of states of mind and their dual significance both as
history and as moments in time.
That Anai:s Nin must kill her father in her fiction, that Durrell
must destroy the world of his father, by celebrating it as a dead
world, that Miller condemns 'egomaniac literature', is entirely
natural. Nature, as Baudelaire reminds us, is entirely savage. The
cyclic process of history- as Camus says 'to kill God and to build a
Church is the constant and contradictory purpose of rebellion' 7 -
demands that the dandy give way to the herald. While we fear our
murderer, we also welcome him, we are fulfilled in the hour of our
death. This again is nothing new: Frazer's The Golden Bough has
provided for our own age the model of the priesthood of the sacred
wood, the physical as well as the psychological place within which,
having fulfilled our destiny, we await our brother,- mon semblable,
mon frere. 8
That the father, or the brother, must be killed in no way
invalidates his previous achievement. The destructive element in
modern literature is necessary so that a re-creation can be performed
-a priestly celebration of death so that life can then be lived, staking
out the new womb, in Miller's words. The dandy, in fact, is the
father of the herald, he engenders his own parricide. The symbiotic
tension between the weight of history and the freedom of the future
is expressed in the moment when we wield the knife as both victor
and victim.
III THE CLASSIC LITERATURE OF DANDYISM
Carlyle, whose Heroes and Hero-Worship appeared in 1840, the year of

Brummell's death, is responsible for two misconceptions about the
dandy. Firstly he says in Sartor Resartus (1833) that
a dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and

existence consists in the wearing of Clothes9
Secondly, Carlyle, having thus confined the dandy to the role of, at
best, arbiter elegantiarum, dismisses him from the world of thought
and action. As Max Beerbohm commented, such a definition
reduces 'to a mere phase that which was indeed the very core of his
existence'. 10 To rely therefore on Carlyle as providing any more than
a sartorial definition is to miss the wholeness of the dandy.
There is some justification for Carlyle's having missed the point.
Brummell, like the rest of the beaux, became celebrated not because
of his mots, but because of his fashion as the wearer of clothes. Yet
even here Carlyle, if only by implication, concedes an intellectual
quality, or at least the virtue of a concept, to the dandy, for he
suggests that wearing clothes is not merely a physical achievement,
as with modelling at the behest of a designer, but actually combines
the roles of designer and mannequin. In fact if Carlyle had had the
wit he might have included the dandy in his catalogue of heroes:
the fundamental characteristic of the hero, he claims, is greatness. 11
Greatness and heroism being for Carlyle synonymous suggests that
the social role of the hero is to lead. Dandy-as-hero, therefore, with
its identification of the dandy as man of action, would place the
dandy in the forefront of fashion, where fashion is the vanguard of
society.
Barbey d' Aurevilly, in his account Of Dandyism and of George
Brummell does exactly this. Criticising Carlyle for omitting the 'Hero
of elegant idleness' 12 - the Hero-as-Dandy, we might say- he states
that
Dandyism is social, human and intellectual. It is not a suit of

clothes, walking about by itself! ... It is the particular way of
wearing these clothes which constitutes Dandyism. One may be a
dandy in creased clothes . . . . Dandyism is a complete theory of
life ... it is a way of existing. 13
Those 'clothes', we might add, can be social, human, or intellectual

ways of making statements about mind and morals. However,
d' Aurevilly identifies Brummell as the expression of a social
tendency 14 [my emphasis], suggesting that Brummell was not
entirely the leader of such a tendency, but typical of it: 'one whose
celebrity was due to his elegancetl 5 rather than his intelligence, but
one whom we are obliged to treat 'with all the seriousness due to a
conqueror of the imaginations of men'. 16 Nevertheless, the serious
attention paid to Brummell by a French author (whom Baudelaire
included in his own catalogue of dandies) marks the beginning of a
theory of dandyism which permeates French literature and by
which it reintroduces itself to English aesthetic theory thirty years
later: 'what gives value to the sentiments [of dandyism] is their
social importance'. 17
It remains in fact to Douglas Ainslie, the translator of the 1897
English edition of du Dandyisme, to provide a commentary on
d' Aurevilly's work. Ainslie writes with all the circumspection of the
post-Wilde era, but also with the acute sense of the enduring value
of aesthetic thought which Pater, Morris, Ruskin and Wilde had
developed. Ainslie found it necessary to distinguish between the
parvenu of the 'smart set' and the souls who were 'superb and apart' 18
- a direct reference to the contrast between a camp frivolity with
which Wilde and the giddier elements in his circle had been
associated, and the 'Souls', an intellectual circle founded by George
Curzon, Margot Tennant, Balfour, Asquith and Meredith, which
represented the aristocratic initiative in the novelty on which the age
insisted.
Ainslie furthermore states that dandyism is characterised by
'sharp wit ... a keen sense of social perspective ... that rare faculty
of classifying at a glance the members of a company ... wide
knowledge of human nature'. 19 In his approach to beautiful things
'he will hold them, as it were, in the palm of his hand, and by so
doing, add to them a particular lustre, an elegance all his own.
Dandyism may be taken as the art of selection, practised by a lover of
the visible world'. 20 The elements in this statement relevant to the
1890s - the adoption of the Wildean aesthetic of the critic-as-artist,
and the open reference to those 'pour qui le monde visible existe'
will be pursued in the next chapter. Here, however, we should note
the way in which Ainslie, commenting on the work of another
commentator, finds it necessary to add to the work which he is
translating. Of d' Aurevilly himself he says, by way of rectifying a
fault which he detects in the Frenchman, 'Dandyism charmed him,
but rather on the intellectual than on the positive side. He loved the
isolation, the aristocratic reserve, the impertinent self-concentration
of the Dandy, and transferred to thought what, with such as
Brummell, reveals itself in action'. 21
Brummell appealed to d' Aurevilly because unlike other dandies
such as Sheridan or Byron he was content to be a dandy, not finding

it necessary to reach out for anything more:
Brummell did not possess that something which with some was
passion or genius, with others high birth or great wealth. He
profited by this want; for reduced to that force alone, which
distinguished him, he rose to the rank of an idea, he was
Dandyism itsel£. 22
And therein lies the difficulty of identifying what exactly 'Dandyism

itself' contains, since d' Aurevilly says that it does not essentially
require wealth, genius or high birth to distinguish it. Moreover we
tend to see dandyism as exhibited in one or more attitudes, like an
animated version of the familiar cartoons of the genre: aristocratic
disdain, plutocratic indifference, the hauteur of intellect, must be
exercised by those who wear them as manners, before they can be
appreciated by the external world. The parade therefore becomes
not only a mannerly event but also a statement of an idea.
D' Aurevilly adds a further element to his definition of dandyism
in reference to another dandy, Prince de Kaunitz, speaking of his
'calm, nonchalance, indifference ... ferocious egoism' 23 and
adding '(he used to say with magnificence "I have no friend")'. That
magnificence, we might reasonably suppose, accommodates
humour, sarcasm, and a deep sense of tragedy.
We begin to understand the French interest in English dandyism
when we find d' Aurevilly remarking of Byron that such dandyism
can exist 'only through a kind of exquisite originality', to which a
footnote adds 'it is only in English that this word can be used. In
France originality has no country'. 24 Earlier he has alleged 'the
country of Richelieu will never produce a Brummell' ;25 and that the
English 'differ by all the physiology of a race, by all the genius of a
society'. 26 This, he believes, is due to the 'vanity inherent in every
English heart, to which originality successfully appeals' 27 and also
due to 'the ennui that eats the heart of English society, giving it the
sad pre-eminence in suicide and vice over all other societies
devoured by this disease. Modem ennui is the child of analysis; but
for English society ... there exists ... the Roman ennui, child of
satiety'. 28
This exercise in social psychology need not detain us. The fact that
dandyism was able to flourish in France, after the French fashion, is
due, if we follow d' Aurevilly's argument, to the effect of whatever
'French disease' and ennui prevailed in the society of Baudelaire. An

Englishman would never have had the same reaction of originality
which permitted Gerard de Nerval to lead a live lobster, or the
decadent imagination of Des Esseintes to encrust a tortoise with
jewels. And as Ellen Moers points out: 'Distressingly personal in
England, the dandy ideal in France could become an abstraction, a
refinement of intellectual rebellion'. 29
That flourish of dandyism in France is best expressed not by
d' Aurevilly but by Baudelaire. In Le Peintre de la vie moderne he took
the argument of dandyism a step further. The subject, 'the painter of
modern life', Constantin Guys, is in fact a pretext for Baudelaire to
air his views on modernism and the aloofness of the artist. Like
d' Aurevilly, Baudelaire asserts the social significance of the dandy,
but goes further in giving the dandy a positive and, we might think,
sinister social role:
The word 'dandy' implies a quintessence of character and a subtle

understanding of the entire moral mechanism of this world; with
another part of his nature, however, the dandy aspires to
insensitivity . . . . The dandy is blase, or pretends to be so, for
reasons of policy and caste30 [my emphases].
Having established that toiletry and material elegance 'are no more

than symbols of his aristocratic superiority of mind', 31 Baudelaire
claims that the perfection of the toilet is the achievement of 'absolute
simplicity'. The absolute quality, we must assume, is necessary more
than the simplicity, is indispensable in fact, because the true mark of
the dandy is the cult of the self; while one delights in astonishing
others (the outward and visible sign of the dandy) one is also
required to display a Spartan ability to suffer - 'the proud
satisfaction of never oneself being astonished'. 32 This Spartan
behaviour, however, is more than an appearance, since its ultimate
display is to the self- the triumphs of the toilet and of the field are
'no more than a system of gymnastics designed to fortify the will
and discipline the soul'. 33
Moreover, where d' Aurevilly credits the dandy with a bored
reaction to society, Baudelaire sees him in a positive and dangerous
role, that of 'opposition and revolt' based on pride and originality,
which results in 'combating and destroying triviality'. 34 (It will
immediately be seen how successfully this perception was re-
introduced into England through the skilful medium of Wilde and

his iconoclastic aesthetic.)
Baudelaire then, in a series of breathtaking declarations,
establishes a sociology of dandyism which embraces a range of
types and gives it an historical significance: the 'characteristic
quality of opposition and revolt' is discovered in 'exquisites,
incroyables, beaux, lions and dandies' who are united in the need to
destroy triviality. 'It is from this that the dandies obtain that haughty
exclusiveness, provocative in its very coldness'. 35 Coldness, we
imagine, is a temperament resulting from uncompromising
calculation rather than natural indifference. Then Baudelaire
introduces the concept of dandyism as the inevitable factor in the
collapse of societies:
Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when

democracy is not yet all powerful, and aristocracy is only just
beginning to totter and fall. In the disorder of these times, certain men
who are socially, politically, and financially ill at ease, but are all
rich in native energy, may conceive the idea of establishing a new
kind of aristocracy36 [my emphases]
Baudelaire continues to express a kind of eternal truth on which his

own philosophy of evil is based, and from which much of Wilde's
(and thus Beerbohm's) theory of the superiority of aesthetics to
ethics derives. This is contained in the section of 'The Painter of
Modern Life' entitled 'In Praise of Cosmetics'. First, Baudelaire tells
us that 'Nature teaches us nothing, or practically nothing', 37
'everything beautiful and noble is the result of reason and
calculation' 38 while 'Nature can counsel nothing but crime . . . .
Crime ... is natural by origin'. 39 'Evil' says Baudelaire, equating
'evil' with 'crime', 'happens without effort, naturally, fatally',
whereas 'Good' which he equates with 'beauty', 'is always the
product of some art'. 40 Baudelaire can then announce:
'I am thus led to regard external finery as one of the signs of the
primitive nobility of the human soul' 41
-a brilliant extrapolation of the outward adornment of the dandy as

the sign of an inner 'beauty' or 'goodness' which is a noble
superiority of man to nature. We are therefore compelled to realise
the inevitable tendency in ourselves to despise nature- 'in their naif

adoration of what is brilliant . . . the baby and the savage bear
witness to their disgust of the real'. 42 To have no taste 'for anything
but nature unadorned' is therefore a mark of degeneracy. 43 Fashion,
Baudelaire can therefore safely assert, is 'a permanent and repeated
attempt at the reformation' of nature: artifice 'cannot lend charm to
ugliness and can only serve beauty'. 44 And 'to confine ourselves to
what today is vulgarly called "maquillage"', 45 the use of powder
legitimately serves 'to rid the complexion of those blemishes that
Nature has outrageously strewn there'. 46 Artificial colouring not
only improves on Nature, it also serves 'to satisfy an absolutely
opposite need'. 47
Baudelaire has thus inverted the accepted model of the dandy as
the paragon of nature, and has asserted that that which is unnatural,
against nature, is beautiful, while that which is natural, and
unimproved by man, the 'philosopher-artist', 48 is the breeding
ground of evil. This inversion has become a commonplace by the
time it is processed by Wilde and Eliot and accepted as an orthodoxy
in the 1920s.
Baudelaire also makes two unrelated points which have
considerable significance for modern aesthetics and psychology:
early in the essay he refers to 'the perfect flaneur': 'he is an "I" with
an insatiable appetite for the "non-I"'. 49 This forerunner of
Rimbaud's ']'est un autre' and of Beckett's 'Not I' is interesting not
only because Baudelaire says it at such an early date (1860) but
also because he says it in the context of the dandy- the flaneur, the
idler or trifler, who deals in aloofness and in paying attention to
trivia rather than to the grand design of nature or of life.
Secondly Baudelaire puts considerable emphasis on 'childlike
barbarousness' 50 - a way of looking at 'original sin' or the
congruence of the baby and the savage which admits the
inevitability of evil, its inherent innocence. Once again we re-
encounter this idea in his disciples more clearly and accessibly than
in his own work - Wilde's stress on Uranian innocence, for
example. 51
One further characteristic of dandyism needs to be explored here:
the stress laid on vanity, particularly by d' Aurevilly:
Vanity seeks the approbation of others, an amiable impulse of the

human heart, which ... may yet explain all the affectations of
Dandyism. 52
D' Aurevilly seems to think this behavioural trait in the dandy is

'cold, sober and mocking' 5 3 - an attitude which has a sinister social
significance: it is as if the dandy's aloofness is not due to any shyness
or inherent inhibitions so much as to a calculated behaviour vis-a-vis
the rest of society, a display of disdain which nevertheless has to
struggle ('I' and 'Not I') against the equally basic tendency to seek
confirmation, acceptance, ratification, even in ostracism and defeat.
Moreover, the use of the word 'affectations' in this context means
that d' Aurevilly sees the dandy's behaviour as much more than
superficial mannerisms. But it is not only that he sees it as a
thought-out pose, as we have already noted: he also sees it as a
means of achieving a statement against nature, of proclaiming that,
if anything, he is more natural than the society he disdains.
Baudelaire would fully support d' Aurevilly's accent on the effect
of the dandy's behaviour: his entire manner and mind, his raison
d'etre, is due to the conjunction of two apparently irreconcilable
matrices, (as d' Aurevilly puts it, 'the unending struggle between
propriety and boredom'); 54 the result of the behaviour- indeed both
the behaviour in itself and the effect it produces on society - is
therefore bound to be creative. As d' Aurevilly says
accordingly one of the consequences and principal characteristics

... of Dandyism is always to produce the unexpected, that which
could not logically be anticipated by those accustomed to the yoke
of rules. 55
Yet dandyism itself, once it has been manifested, creates its own
rules:
Dandies, of their own authority, make rules that shall dominate

the most aristocratic and the most conservative sets, and with
the help of wit, which is an acid, and of grace, which is a
dissolvent. . . . Every Dandy dares, but he dares with tact, and
stops in time at the famous point of intersection ... between originality
and eccentricitt6 [my emphases].
Baudelaire agrees:
Dandyism, an institution beyond the laws, itself has rigorous

laws which all its subjects must strictly obey, whatever their
natural impetuosity and independence of character . . . . What
then is this passion, which, becoming doctrine, has produced

such a school of tyrants? What this unofficial institution which has
formed so haughty and exclusive a sect? It is first and foremost the
burning need to create for oneself a personal originality, bounded
only by the limits of the proprieties. 57
Moreover d' Aurevilly warns against the dangers of excessive

eccentricity (which, we have seen, is, in appropriate measure, an
essential ingredient in the creation of daring): eccentricity is 'the
revolt of the individual against the established order, sometimes
against nature', whereas Dandyism 'while still respecting the
conventionalities, plays with them ... suffers from and revenges
itself upon them ... dominates and is dominated by them in
turn'. 58
In fact we must deduce from this that the dandy, particularly the
heraldic dandy, is the creature of society; born out of boredom and
propriety, he rebels against society only in so far as he needs to
proclaim his differences. His attitude towards society is equally as
important as his attitude to himself, because both are proclaimed in
his style. 'Dandyism will perish the day the society which produced
it is transformed' says d' Aurevilly, 59 and with this we find the key to
the reason for dandyism and a guide to its life-span.
Baudelaire, for example, explains his interest in modernity as
the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent ... this transitory,

fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid 60
adding, somewhat cryptically, 'almost all our originality comes from

the seal which Time imprints on our sensations'. 61 In this expression
of modernity, we have, I believe, the essence of dandyism but, much
more importantly, the essence of the heraldic. The ephemeral nature
of modernity is its vulnerability to history, since that which is
essentially of the moment in which it is conceived begins to stale and
to congeal as soon as that moment passes: from the hour of our birth
to the hour of our death, the two sure points which stake out our
vitality, there is a series of moments at each of which the Heraldic
Universe might be proclaimed, but all of which together amount
merely to history.
The contingency of the modern results from its dependence on the
society which breeds it: it is the creature, and sometimes the master,
of the known world, but always in symbiotic relations with it. It is
transitory because it attempts to effect a transition, from the known

world into the imagined world, from the world as it is to the world as
it is not, to celebrate the 'I' in terms of the 'Not I', and, in fact, once
its particular truth has been proclaimed, it cannot avoid making
such transitions, and thereby ordaining its own demise.
So the apparently cryptic remark about time ceases to be cryptic:
the perspective of history serves both to emphasise our
ephemerality and to reduce the import of our metamorphoses. It
tends to cast light on the dandy, the stereotype of manners and
attitudes, to stress the continuance of style, and to obscure the
crucibles of intensity where heraldic genius declares itself. In its
insistence on the slow passage of history, time tries to assert the
superiority of evolution over revolution, consigning the rebel and
the herald to mere poses in the niche of some continuing cathedral.
IV MODERN COMMENTARIES
Modern commentaries continue and compound the confusion of

the dandy and the herald. Few of these commentaries need concern
us here, but our attention turns now to Sontag's 'Notes on Camp' and
Green's Children of the Sun. The most important work, for the
purposes of the present study, however, is Camus' L'Homme revolte
(The Rebel) which I shall consider below.
First, however, a further clarification of terminology is necessary
before we can definitively distinguish the essential dandy from the
essential herald. Ellen Moers, in The Dandy (1960), quotes this jingle
in her search for the origins of the term:
Yankee Doodle came to town

Riding on a pony
Stuck a feather in his hat
And called it Macaroni! 62
By 1859 'macaronyish' had come to mean 'characteristic of

dandyism' (by George Augustus Sala's definition 63 ), no doubt
springing from this American gesture, not yet sartorial but
connecting a mode of outward behaviour with a state of mind. In the
seventeenth century, however, 'macaronic' referred to mixed
jargon or medley and the macaronic style, a conjunction of two
original languages to create a new literature, was originally not the
'mish-mash' we think it today, but a genuinely perceptive use of two

elements to conceive a third: not an evolution of style, such as the
gradual development of modern English which we can witness in
the work of Chaucer or Gower, but an instanter epiphany. Like the
emergence of 'franglais', the macaronic represents the advent of a
new culture by combining previously unacquainted elements from
two others of distinct racial, or qualitative, bases- like, as we have
already noted, the French adoption of English dandyism resulting
in dandyism itself taking a new direction. And, as we shall see in
Chapter 3, the age itself between the 1890s and the 1920s becomes
macaronic in its inability to come to terms with the conjunction of
decadence and modernism in a mixed metaphor of international
culture.
We become alarmed at the variety of terminology employed in the
attempt to reach definitions of dandyism - terminology and
definitions which I shall shortly suggest are irrelevant and
dangerously misleading. Adjectival nouns such as decadent,
symbolist, aesthetic, narcissist, egoist, camp, become almost
adverbial because they not only describe a state of mind but also
suggest a way of living. The rebel, the outsider, the Soul, the enfant
terrible, the sonnenkinder, add to this confusion, demanding to be
defined not only on their own terms but also in respect of those
other terms or ideas from which they derive their existence or in the
context of which they take on extra meaning. Contingency,
representing both cause and effect, and implying both close
relationships and the distances between them, bedevils this search-
the whole problem of meaning and non-meaning of the integrated
but fragmented mosaic.
It might seem strange, therefore, to turn now to Susan Sontag's
'Notes on Camp', since camp is one of the most misleading of these
contingent epithets. But Sontag regarded it (in 1964) as a 'sensibility'
which had never been described. 64 Starting from the fact that camp
is unnatural, esoteric, dealing in artifice and exaggeration, Sontag
finds the essence of camp in 'the triumph of the epicene style ... the
convertibility of "man" and "woman", "person" and "thing"' 65 -
obviously a macaronic, and, I would argue, heraldic, style. She
further defines it as 'a mode of aestheticism' which can be described
'in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization'. 66 Sontag's Note 45
gives us the reason for contemporary culture's concern with this
style:
Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the

nineteenth-century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of
culture, so Camp is the modem dandyism. Camp is the answer to
the problem: how to be a dandy in an age of mass culture.
Camus, as we shall see, suggests a different answer. Sontag, like

d' Aurevilly and Baudelaire, attributes one of the causes of Cainp, or
dandyism, to boredom, and, like Baudelaire, asserts that 'camp
taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or
circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence'. 67
But I believe she fails to see the relevance of this psychopathology
and of the uses of modernity when she affirms that 'the Camp
sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized or at least apolitical' 68 - a
judgement she seems to reach from the argument that 'to emphasize
style is to slight content'. In fact she defeats her own argument in
note 10:
Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It is not a lamp but a

'lamp'; not a woman but a 'woman'. To perceive Camp in objects
and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the
farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as
theatre.
But that metaphor, or transitus, establishes precisely the

correspondence we seek between the political and the aesthetic
dimensions. To place any idea within quotation marks, to allow that
things are, or might be, other than they seem, is to recognise that
role-playing is the polite, the public, stage on which discrete
psychologies and differences are rehearsed and resolved. If camp is
indeed a distinct idea, rather than a degree of stylisation of some
other idea, then it has its own way of adding to the ways in which
this assertion has been made in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
aesthetics, and continues to be made today in the development of a
counter-culture.
Sontag makes no effort to find the etymological or the social root
of camp, beyond suggesting (in Note 13) that it emerges in the
eighteenth-century accent on artificiality (Gothic novels,
chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins). However, in an otherwise
unremarkable study Mark Booth points out that beyond its
lexicographic introduction to English in 1909 as a 'Victorian' adjective
of exaggeration, it was current as a French verb (se camper) in the

mid-nineteenth century and is used of the theatrical and
provocative attitudes of the seventeenth. Booth suggests69 that the
development of the European city gave rise to the need for
insincerity which reached its pinnacle in the court of the Sun King.
Sontag accepts the verbal use of the term without realising its full
implication: 'flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double
interpretation; gestures full of duplicity'. 70 Her suggestion that
'camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it' 71 fails
to admit to the discussion the vital point of Baudelaire's argument,
that the philosopher-artist makes beauty out of an inherently
corrupt innocence.
Nevertheless, Sontag does recognise that 'camp involves a new,
more complex relation to "the serious"' , 72 and that, almost in
d' Aurevilly's terms, it 'is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral
indignation'. 73 But she is wrong in insisting that its essential
non-seriousness lies in its frivolity. Even though camp, in its
modern gayness, may be frivolous to the point of absurdity, it does
not, cannot in my opinion, divorce itself from its origins as reaction
or rebellion. Punk, transvestitism, performance art, like rock-and-
roll or pop art, are not only aesthetic phases and aesthetic modes
with historical antecedents, they are also statements about society
made by citizens who want to make those statements both to
themselves and to society at large.
When therefore Sontag says 'there is the kind of seriousness
whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement ... a disparity
between intention and result', 74 she must go further than her
admission that 'another kind of truth is being revealed' in this
'unresolvable subject matter': she must ask why it is being revealed,
why Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka and Artaud (whom she uses as
examples of this trademark) are failing in their resolution. And to do
so would be to discover the very historical antecedents which she
appears to deny to the ephemeral nature of camp sensibility. To say
that 'the old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, the
lover of camp, appreciates vulgarity' 75 is again insufficient. Firstly,
because it ignores that this is a cyclic phenomenon: d' Aurevilly also
recognised that the dandy is not content with elegance alone, that it
has its mirror-image in inelegance ('to have their clothes torn, before
wearing them ... so that they became a sort of lace- a cloud. They
wanted to walk like gods in their clouds!' 76 ). Secondly, because it
overlooks the fact that there are no 'bearers' of camp taste- that it is a
reaction, as I have described, which temporarily goes to the margin

of society in its elitism, and is gradually accommodated until, as it
achieves the transformation of society, it expires.
Following a line of enquiry which seeks to find the essential
qualities of aesthetic rebellion, we can, however, abstract from this
confusion the concept that camp, as a form of dandyism, represents
the ultimate frivolity on the scale of seriousness, in which it runs the
danger merely of caricaturing itself. Taking in view Sontag's
substitution firstly of dandyism for aristocracy, and secondly of
camp for dandyism, we can regard modern camp as an attempt at an
elite of taste- but to credit it as the characteristic sensibility of the age
is to compare it with yet another term we shall examine shortly, that
is, narcissism. To constitute oneself an aristocracy is not merely to
wish to rule the world, but to have the means to do so- the essential
self-knowledge of the slave in rebellion. Camp, despite the military
metaphors of its fieldwork, is uninterested in deposing a ruling
sensibility, and remains content with its role as the dark side of the
sun. Narcissism, although it is self-defeating in its confusion of self
with the world, nevertheless seeks to re-draw the world's outlines
in terms of its own physiognomy.
We are helped a little further in our search by Martin Green's
study of the sonnenkinder of the twentieth century, Children of the
Sun, subtitled 'a narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918', 77
told through the personae of Harold Acton and Brian Howard. The
chief merit of Green's book, for our purposes, is the perceptive
definition of the dandy in the context of rebellious behaviour and
attitudes. Green associates the aesthete with the rogue and the naif
Green's narrow definition of dandyism is that
the young man loves his own beauty and makes that love
insolently manifest in his clothes, posture, manners,
conversation, judgements, imposing on everything a style that
defies the 'mature' values of his father and mother 78
- a definition that comes closer than Sontag or even d' Aurevilly to

associating 'manners, minds and morals' with a social purpose. The
related but separable mode of aestheticism is described as 'the
worship of art seen as fantasy triumphant over reality'. 79 Most
valuable in Green's analysis is the identification of the naif,
The image of the sun-bronzed young man . . . bringing the

radiant candour of his gaze to bear on the mess the fathers have
made of the world80
(which is 'at the core of Thirties' Marxism'), and of the rogue,

'probably a Tory radical in politics' 81 yet chiefly a hoaxer who 'often
seems better ... as a mock adult than as the real thing'. 82 Green
suggests that in the period in question 'the one organised
movement clearly intended to mobilise these three types was Sir
Oswald Mosley's New Party' 83 which included dandy-aesthetes like
the Sitwells and Cecil Beaton, nalfs like Isherwood and rogues such
as Mosley himself- the rogues subsequently going on to form the
British Union of Fascists. Green brings the social and political
dimensions of rebellion into focus in pointing out that the New
Party crystallised these various sensibilities: 'the historical
connection between them seems paradoxical until they are studied
from this point of view of temperament'. 84
I offer no apology for subverting these suggestive definitions with
further suggestion: the aesthete, the rogue and the naif can be
further characterised as the aesthete-rebel, the rogue-criminal and the
naif-fantasist. The whole dandy, and usually the whole herald, is to
be found in a combination, an integration, of these three elements.
Furthermore, the naif often displays chivalric qualities, and this
points us in the direction of heraldry.
Narcissism, Green suggests, 85 is the sexual root of dandyism,
particularly in the basic characteristic he stresses of the aesthetic
adoration of an older for a younger man. This can best be explained
by the following formula: love of self leads to love of others when the
self's preoccupations (or aesthetic values) are identified in the other
or excited by the other; love of art is the result of mutual
preoccupation, where each partner perceives the other as his or her
alter-ego and art is seen as both the context which created them and
the fruit of their association. Homosexuality is less important here as
a keynote than the epicene style of the association and the
recognition of otherness in the aesthete and the art.
Harold Acton, who would not have regarded himself primarily as
a dandy, says (at the opening of his first volume of memoirs) that
aesthetes are 'citizens of the world . . . neither famous nor
spectacular'. 86 Love of beauty entails the recognition that 'beauty is
the vital principle pervading the universe . . . . By contemplating
the myriad manifestations of this vital principle we expand into
something greater than we were born. Art is the mirror which
reflects these expansions' 87 Writing his memoirs 'does not mean

that I shall undress in public', but the cold wind of western
civilisation makes Acton 'don [his] Chinese quilted coat'. 88
A mirror and a coat: the two essential properties of the dandy. Yet
Acton seems at pains to diminish the dandiacal element in his
contribution to modem aesthetics - 'Down with the followers of
Bun thorne! ... We wanted Dawns, not Twilights'. 89 His account of
his friend Brian Howard, however, bears out much of the analysis of
the dandy which we have read so far:
Brian would extract fantasy from a casual meeting and elaborate it

into a scheme over which he became so serious that he would flare
up and insult one if one were not in a sufficiently receptive mood.
During the process he would lay down laws of his own about the
arts; he was always intensely dogmatic . . . . Beginning with an
impromptu suggestion as light as thistledown, he developed his
conceits aloud . . . . And there was often sound sense and acute
criticism running along the margin of his arguments and a
sensitiveness to beauty underneath them. 90
This, we can reasonably suppose, personifies the three-fold dandy:

aesthete and rebel, embracing the romantic-artistic spirit; naif and
fantasist, finding ingenuous, alternative, distant forms in simple
ideas; and a certain roguery, a criminal element in the forceful
reaction to opposition, a hint of the bully in matters of the mind, but
still in the service of that original idea.
Ellen Moers, who has already been quoted, makes the same kind
of analysis with reference to Brummell, emphasising the simplicity
of the dandy, the lack of trappings, the insistence on style
absolutely:
The dandy ... stands on an isolated pedestal of self . . . . The

dandy has neither obligations nor attachments . . . no
occupation, and no obvious source of support .... The dandy's
achievement is simply to be himself. 91
Achievement- or obligation, or compulsion? The psychology of the

dandy leaves this much in question and, in so far as these words
apply to Acton himself, they suggest that aesthete and dandy are
synonymous- if, that is, the definitions of the dandy which we have
been following are, in fact, accurate.
However, these definitions are not at all satisfying, particularly in

the light of modern preoccupations with narcissism, rebellion and
disaffection. They tell us of this century's concern with the comedy
of manners, as performed by characters of the 1890s and their
imitators, but not of the tragedy which subsequent history,
enveloping those characters and their playfulness, has brought into
our latest fin de siecle.
So much of the foregoing discussion of dandyism could equally
well be applied to the heraldic; conversely, a great deal of dandyism
is missing in the herald. Perhaps one basic distinction is that while
the dandy might not be a heraldic type, whether he wanted to or
not, a herald has no need whatsoever of dandyism. What interests
us in this discussion is the coincidence of the two, as in the
characters and behaviour of Baudelaire, Wilde and Jarry, who are
discussed in the following chapters.
It is quite easy to be a dandy and yet not to be a herald- Brummell
himself, Beerbohm, Disraeli - and this is said with no disrespect or
disregard for the conduct we have been examining. And as for
heralds who have lacked all dandyism, we have only to look at
Marx, Luther and Darwin. As I hinted in the introduction to this
chapter, the qualitative distinction of the heraldic gesture is the
psychological weight of circumstances which makes a certain course
of action inevitable, and which simultaneously with this revelation
presents the moment in which the opportunity must be taken.
I shall now develop this theme by means of Erik Erikson's account
of the young Martin Luther:
I could not conceive of a young great man in the years before he

becomes a great young man without assuming that inwardly
he harbours a quite inarticulate stubbornness, a secret furious
inviolacy, a gathering of impressions for eventual use within some
as yet dormant new configuration of thought . . . . The counterpart
of this waiting, however, is often a fear of an early death which
would keep the vengeance from ripening into leadership; yet the
young man often shows signs of precocious ageing, of a
melancholy wish for an early end, as if the anticipation of
prospective deeds tired him . . . . A young genius has an implicit
life plan to complete; caught by death before his time, he would be
only a pathetic human fragment. 92 [my emphases]
I have quoted this analysis extensively because it excellently

expresses the dilemmas which give rise to the proclamation of a

Heraldic Universe, whether it be the republic of protestant liberty,
the wealth of communism, or Durrell's destruction of time. This
'new configuration of thought' must remain dormant until the time
comes to transform the 'pathetic human fragment' into a herald,
master of the universe.
I have already suggested that much of the description of
dandyism could equally be applied to the heraldic. But that is true
only so far as the concept of dandyism is one of action. There is no
room in the Heraldic Universe for the dandy of motionless pose,
because it is precisely this congelation which the herald's ice-axe has
come to shatter. It is this distinction which bedevils Ellen Moer's
attempts to define dandyism, since she says
The dandy does not preserve his integrity by living in retirement,

but goes purposefully among the romantics, pedants, athletes,
bailiffs and other bores of the world to remind them of his
superiority.
And yet she continues
To call him heroic would be too emphatic, and would imply more
effort and activity than his pose allows .... He maintains his
position by the use of a wit which transcends verbal flourishes to
involve all the resources of his being. The dandy's wit has
reference always to a situation: it triumphs over an actual risk. 93
The use of the word risk is interesting, in the light of Erikson's

remarks on the brooding anxiety of the 'young great man' who
becomes the 'great young man'. And Moers' difficulty in gauging
exactly where the dandy stops and the hero begins is caught up in
the question of whether or not the whole being of the actor is at stake
in meeting that risk. Elsewhere she says:
What the utilitarian middle class most hated in the nobility was
what the court most worshipped in the dandy- a creature perfect
in externals and careless of anything below the surface, a man
dedicated solely to his own perfection through a ritual of taste. 94
The correct adjective is surely not careless, as Moers uses it, but
assured. The appearance of the dandy (which disguises his real
achievement) is not necessarily the result of foppish mindlessness,

but the dandy's ability to conceal the real effect required to
overcome whatever obstacles get in the way of establishing his style
- this is the risk he takes. The ritual involves a rite of passage, a
transitus from one state to another, a transformation and growth of
consciousness: its significance cannot be diminished without
reducing the status of the dandy from pioneer to imitator. It is in this
way therefore that we come tq realise definitively that there are two
types of dandy- one who engages in social discourse and combat in
order to meet challenges, to overcome them, to establish and
maintain integrity, to experience the rite of passage; and another
who is content to adopt a pose which locates him outside society.
Then there are a complex set of imitators. Moers, intrigued (and not
entirely impressed) by the effortless detachment of this$econd type,
therefore insists:
The epitome of selfish irresponsibility, he was ideally free of all

human commitments that conflict with taste: passions,
moralities, ambitions, politics and occupations. 95
But Baudelaire, Wilde and Jarry, like Durrell, Miller and Nin, were
dandies who quite deliberately (and of course quite selfishly) took
on commitments for the very reason that they did conflict with taste,
with sensibility: and became involved with the new republic of the
emotions which political and aesthetic circumstances, together,
were bringing into existence. Moreover, Moers misses the
important historical distinction between the various phases in which
dandyism becomes a focus of social concern. Even though she
recognises that
dandyism as a social, even political phenomenon, with

repercussions in the world of ideas, was the invention of the
Regency96
her definition, without context, is meaningless - the role of

self-assurance, carefully thought out and painstakingly achieved,
challenging and offering a solution to whatever current social unrest
throws it into high relief and threatening to expel it, differs from one
society to another. Thus the dandyism which was, according to
Moers, 'a product of the revolutionary upheavals of the late
eighteenth century' 97 becomes in itself an ennui by the time of
Brummell's death. Therefore although Moers continues 'when such

solid values as wealth and birth are upset, ephemera such as style
and pose are called upon to justify the stratification of society', this is
not necessarily true, since the purpose of dandyism in other
'upheavals' may be (as in the case of Wilde) to emphasise the
breakdown of social differences.
V THE HERALDIC DANDY AND THE MODERN WORLD
Leaving aside the dandy whose style is not only self-absorbed but
also limited to the self and exclusively a matter of manners, we can
now look at the ways in which the heraldic dandy, the creature and
slave of unrest, is evoked, incarnated, described and comes into his
own.
Moers says
That Albert Camus should be able to find in the dandy an

archetype of the human being in revolt against society ... is the
first irony of Brummell's definition98
- that is, of the arbiter elegantiarum. It is also the proof, following

Baudelaire, of the role of aesthetics in modem life. Just as Barbey
d' Aurevilly says that Brummell's type of dandyism could appear
only in England, Herbert Read says of Camus' L'Homme Revolte that
'it is a kind of book that appears only in France, devoted, in a
passionate intellectual sense, to the examination of such concepts of
liberty and terror'. 99 The reason for Camus' inclusion of the dandy
in the discussion is that 'the nature of revolt has changed radically in
our times' into 'a metaphysical revolt, the revolt of man against the
conditions of life, against creation itself. 1100
Society, Camus argues, needs to 're-examine [its] position in
regard to the sacrosanct. We live in an unsacrosanct age' 101 -
perhaps an age of heresiarchs, in which Camus seeks to resurrect
romanticism. Like d' Aurevilly and Baudelaire he seeks to affirm the
unifying role of dandyism:
Man's solidarity is founded upon rebellion, and rebellion can only

be justified by this solidarity . . . . In order to exist, man must
rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself
- limits where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist. 102
Dandyism, he says later, 'of whatever kind, is always dandyism

in relation to God . . . . Every blasphemy is, ultimately, a
participation in holiness'. 103 The metaphysical rebel, Camus claims,
attacks a shattered world to make it whole 104 • • • • The slave

begins by begging for justice and ends by wanting to wear a
crown . . . . Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It
progresses from appearances to facts, from dilettantism to
revolutionary commitment. When the throne of God is
overthrown, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility
to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within
his own condition and, in this way, to justify the fall of God. Then
begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of sin if
necessary, the dominion of man. 105
And in the dosing passage of his study, as affectingly tender as that

of Miller's Black Spring, Camus says
In this noon of thought the rebel thus disclaims divinity in order to

share in the struggles and destinies of all men . . . . Each tells the
other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism. 106
Camus speaks of 'a curious reversal peculiar to our age' in which

'innocence ... is called on to justify itself' 107 - a reversal in which
Baudelaire has recognised and promulgated an innocence full of
original sin and one in which, Camus perceives, 'the poet, the
genius, man himself in his most exalted image, therefore cry out
with [Milton's] Satan: 'So farewell hope, and with hope farewell
fear, farewell remorse . . . . Evil be thou my good'. It is, Camus
says, 'the cry of outraged innocence'. 108
In proclaiming this outrage, and in seeking to create a new
world-order in which a further reversal can take place, the herald's
heroism, while totally individual and of himself, is, Camus thinks,
rooted in common psychology:
Rebellion is the common ground on which every man bases his

first values. I rebel- therefore we exist. 109
We must surmise from this that the same reversal which makes
innocence inherently evil and in which the romantic seeks to
produce beauty from evil, also puts all outraged innocence- all the
oppressed, all people in fact who are not God - on the outside of
society. This surmise is based on Camus' view that the dandy, one
of the sons of Cain, is the arch-rebel, standing aloof from society. In
fact this aloofness itself is part of the role-playing imposed by
reversal, because it is a pose adopted in order to protect the dignity of
outraged innocence, to disguise the fact that it is outlawed by
society's choice, not by its own. There is thus a race to find names for
the distance which one puts between oneself and the world, before
the world finds a name for the distance by which it has sent you:
'barbarus hie sum quia non intelligor ulli'. no
As Camus puts it:
Romanticism, at the source of its inspiration, is chiefly concerned

with defying moral and divine law. That is why its most original
creation is not primarily the revolutionary, but, logically enough,
the dandy . . . . Much more than the cult of the individual,
romanticism inaugurates the cult of the 'character'. It is at this
point that it is logical. Hoping no longer for the rule or unity of
God, determined to take up arms against an antagonistic destiny
. . . romantic rebellion looked for a solution in the attitude it
assumed . . . . The dandy rallies his forces and creates a unity for
himself by the very violence of his refusal. 111
Living in an age acutely aware of absurdity and the dangers of

nihilism, we find it necessary to affirm (in the dandy) and to attest
(in the herald) some positive values. Thus, in aesthetics- that is, the
system by which we give common, shared meaning to our
perceptions- we and the world mutually put distances between
ourselves to account for the differences in interpretation of those
perceptions. This, in Camus' terms, in the political arena, explains
how 'man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is' n 2 so that
'rebellion arises from the spectacle of the irrational coupled with an
unjust and incomprehensible condition'. 113 It is this which
distinguishes the dandies who, in d' Aurevilly's phrase 'live impaled
upon the idea of dignity' [my emphasis] 114 from those who live
consumed by acts of vanity.
We can see in this modem subversion of aesthetics the result of a
century of social manoeuvre in which the dandy - at least, the
heraldic dandy- moves from the edge of the stage to the centre. As I
shall suggest in the following chapters, the dandy moves into
literature because he has no further social relevance- and as such he
is a disappointment to our own time, because he stirs nothing except

a few words on the page. He comes out of literature and back into
society when he stirs up moral indignation, and imposes his
macaronic personality on the first three decades of this century.
For this reason we can recognise in the Heraldic Universe of
Lawrence Durrell not only the exasperation and revolt of the young
great man taking the moment to throw off indignity, but also the
rebellious dandy of manners, mind and morals, who seeks to
re-establish, out of the injustice and upheavals of the 1930s, a new
republic, in his own compulsion to find the inner landscape where
his singular rebellion can give others a new existence. And it is easy
to see how, in such a context, it is less important to look for
beautiful, flamboyant gestures, than to learn how to recognise those
gestures which spring from despair, outraged innocence no longer
able to cope with narcissism as a form of relief from a world which is
not what it seems.
2
The English Renaissance:
Art and Politics, 1840-95
The hero is a messenger sent from the impenetrable infinite,

bearing news for us. - Carlyle 1
I INTRODUCTION
The mediaeval spirit persisted, and flourished, in England: in the

early Victorian age we see a new period, the modern, self-
consciously coming into existence as it celebrates the final gestures
of the old. This self-consciousness is exhibited in attitudes to art,
such as Pre-Raphaelitism, the renewal of interest in chivalry, and in
a confusion in the minds of artists and politicians as to their mutual
relationship (evident in the novels of Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton);
furthermore, it becomes obvious in the way in which the new age
developed its own particular style- for example in the emergence of
three apparently unrelated elements, art-criticism, the urban
middle-class, and religious doubt.
Among the new breed of critics, Arnold, Ruskin and Pater stand
at a crucial point between the mediaeval and the modern worlds:
temperamentally aligned to the pre-Renaissance world of sense (as
distinct from the Renaissance world of intellect) they nevertheless
greeted the new, finding a novelty in the conjuncture. The passing
of one world, and its creative influence on the new order which
succeeds it, is the point where dandyism meets heraldry. That
distinction between mediaeval sense and Renaissance intellect is
repeated in the transition from the Victorian to the modern
world-view.
The death of Brummell in 1840 marks the eclipse of one kind of
beau and the slow birth of another. As Monckton Milnes (himself a
disciple of ancient manners and an apostle of modernity) said, 'there
is something about the reign of William the Fourth which inexorable
chronological fact alone prevents one from calling fin de siecle'. 2

Simultaneous with the aesthetic development was a series of

political reforms such as Catholic emancipation, universal suffrage
and the elimination of the 'rotten boroughs'. But, in a century
which, in Milnes's terms, seems to have experienced two fins, we
also see a renewed interest (pace Pugin and Gilbert Scott, and of
course Ruskin himself) in the Gothic style, and an artificial, but
serious, resurgence of the form and purpose of chivalry. Popular
novels, like those of the eighteenth century, took historical themes
from much earlier ages- W. Harrison Ainsworth, G. A. Henty,
Manville Penn- and it is only with the close of the century that the
contemporary society novel comes into its own. Even then, some of
the most popular novelists, Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, Ouida and
Baroness Orczy, often used historical settings to illustrate 'modern'
themes. It is as if the eighteenth century was given a new lease of life
by the Regency so that it refused to die until the middle of the
nineteenth, and bore the essence of mediaevalism into the heart of
the new age.
It is for this reason necessary to take our inquiry back fifty years
beyond the 'decadence' of the period which is generally considered
to be the source of modern aesthetics, in order to see the connections
between the mediaeval forms (for example of the pointed arch, the
cloister and the iconography of the trecento) and the passions which
those forms aroused; and, furthermore, to trace the dismay which
those passions continued to arouse in the minds of the moderns.
Durrell himself advocates this approach in The Key to Modern
Poetry. What, he asks, can account for the 'great divide' between
Tennyson's 'Ulysses' of 1840 and Eliot's 'Gerontion' of 1920?3 'The
problem' says Durrell, in hallmarking the central critical difficulty
with which this book is concerned, 'is ... how to persuade people
to become their own contemporaries'. 4 For Durrell, the difference is
explained by the advent of 'the new hypotheses concerning the self
or psyche and the new theories about the make-up of the universe
we are inhabiting'. 5
Durrell's analysis of the difference between 'Ulysses' and
'Gerontion' dwells on the contrast between the simple syntax, clear
thinking, precision and activity, of the former, in which Ulysses is
master of his fate and dominates his world, and the haphazard,
ungrammatical passivity of the victim Gerontion who' disclaims any
right to be considered a hero'. 6 The effect of Darwinism, in
particular, he believes, has been to 'dethrone' man:
The English Renaissance 1840-95 41
He was no longer the noblest animal . . . . The history of man

was suddenly expanded into a region of time so remote that the
Victorians might be forgiven for finding the idea terrifying . . . .
When you think that the art and morality of Europe was based
upon the Bible you can imagine how deep a shock this was. 7
Moreover the rise of archaeology meant that 'ancient cultures were

coming to the surface and the chill wind of religious scepticism was
blowing hard'. 8 As a result 'the characteristics of the Victorian age
centred about this intellectual battle between the forces of reason
and the forces of revelation'. 9
There is also, as will become evident in Chapter 3, a strong
continuity or tradition in such developments. Although The Origin of
Species changed the Victorians' view of their noble origins, and Das
Kapital threatened the basis of social organisation (they were
published in 1859 and 1867 respectively) they had become
acceptably 'contemporary' by the time the Russian Revolution
actually took place. Similarly Einstein's theory of relativity
(proposed in 1905) and Freud's revelation of psychoanalysis had to
wait for society to become ready for them. Einstein's impact was
equal to Freud's. Lawrence called it 'the life or death of all
morality'. 10 In fact traditions tend to leap-frog generations, their
validity and continuity only becoming apparent between
generations separated by doubt and insecurity. Wilde's use of the
gothic-romantic spirit to produce the 'English Renaissance'
represents such a crystallising of the slow process of maturity in
English art and letters in the intervening fifty years.
A self-contained but highly significant example of such continuity
is evident in the iconography of Pre-Raphaelite art, which is
inspired by that of the trecento and carried over by the Pre-
Raphaelites into their secular art. But beyond this is the inspiration
provided by the femme fatale of the later (post-1860) Pre-Raphaelite
art to Aubrey Beardsley. John Dixon Hunt has brilliantly
demonstrated the direct influence of, for example, Rossetti's La Pia
de' Tolomei on Beardsley's 'The Kiss of Judas' 11 among many other
instances, although I am not sure that the motive in Beardsley's case
was merely one of mockery as Hunt suggests. There is, I think, too
much resemblance between the Pre-Raphaelites' epicene figures
(Millais' 'Isabella', Burne-Jones' 'The Garden of Pan') and
Beardsley's hermaphrodites (as we see in particular in his
illustrations for Salome), and too much suggestion of a development

from one to the other.
It becomes easy to understand Duchamp' s remark that the
Pre-Raphaelites 'lit a small flame which is still burning despite
everything'Y In fact this 'school', together with that of William
Morris, the fashion painters of the tum of the century (especially
Sargent and Lavery) and similar European developments such as
the Vienna Sezession, carried over into the twentieth century a
mediaeval religiosity which continues to characterise surrealism.
Moreover, the Pre-Raphaelite icon was not only adopted and
modified by Beardsley, as Hunt describes: Jan Toorop's 'Fatalism'
and 'The Disintegration of Faith' reproduce the profiles and full-face
to be seen in many 'Pre-Raphaelite' works, while Femand
Khnopff' s work ('I lock my Door upon Myself', and 'The Offering')
especially derives from this genre. Moreover the work of two very
different and quite unconnected artists, the Norwegian Edvard
Munch (compare his 'Madonna') and the Irish illustrator and artist
in stained-glass, Harry Clarke, is full of the same iconography which
we find in mediaeval and mid-Victorian painting. It is as if the
secular art of the baroque and neo-classical periods had simply been
erased from modem aesthetics.
The chief characteristic, however, of the nineteenth-century

'renaissance' in England was aesthetic rebellion, and its chief
exponent was Oscar Wilde, the author of the term 'English
Renaissance' (and of the chief prose works of the English decadence
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome and The Importance of Being
Earnest). Wilde himself (whom I shall discuss further at the close of
this chapter) exhibits all the symptoms of an age ill-at-ease with
itself: a profound religiosity combined with an insistence on
individual freedom in conscience and behaviour; a veneration for the
romantic movement and its emphasis on the past (Chatterton, for
example), and a passion for artificiality and modernism; fascinated
by society and social form, etiquette and degree, yet obliged by his
own iconoclasm, anomie and antinomian behaviour to mock,
challenge and subvert society.
The decadence into which it seems the 'renaissance' of the
mid-century almost naturally followed, was not, however, a decline
or dead-end so much as a period of death inextricably accompanied
by re-birth. Possibly this is due to the fact which we have already
noticed, that Victoria's accession ushered in a new era, almost a new

century; while her death and that of Wilde marked not so much
the end of that era as a watershed in its development from
mediaevalism to modernism.
II THE MEDIAEVAL CHARACTER OF THE VICTORIAN

ERA
The passage- one might easily talk of a 'rite of passage' -from

mediaeval to modem is not unique to any century, civilisation, or
culture. The acute consciousness of an age, that its own powers are
waning, that its people stand at the threshold of a new age, is
demonstrated in the nineteenth-century's uncertainties, particularly
in the revolutions throughout Europe in 1848, which are in many
ways the natural successors of the French and American revolutions
sixty and seventy years earlier. It is also evident in the transition of
mediaeval Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the
ceremonies of chivalry and hierarchy to those of humanism; from an
open, ritualised practice of eroticism and cruelty to a more implicit,
'civilised', celebration of art and thought.
It is no accident that the nineteenth century rediscovered the
mediaeval forms of knightly contest, banquet, and dance which
embodied the qualities of chivalry, gentility and dignity. The nexus
between one civilisation and another is shown in the way their own
distinct characteristics find a macaronic accommodation between
them, but they require a metaphor from another age to provide the
transitional medium in which those characteristics can meet and
become fertile. In this way it was possible to bring into sharp relief
(the sculptural, architectural reference is intended) the qualities
which distinguished the mediaeval mind, and to juxtapose them
with those of the modem gentleman, the educational system and
mercantilism as affected by the industrial revolution. The contrast
was as stark (and, I believe, was intended to be such) as that
threshold between sacred and profane, represented by the
tympanum at the door of the mediaeval cathedral.
As a result an age becomes creative: as Huizinga says of the
waning middle ages, the age tended 'to invent a style for
everything'. 13 Style becomes the hallmark of thought, since the high
relief achieved by this decadent introspection emphasises form
(although not necessarily at the expense of content). Huizinga
draws attention to 'the outward signs of ... divergences: liveries,

colours, badges, party criestl 4 - the ultimate stage of heraldry.
Similarly, he notes, there was 'a marked tendency of [religious]
thought to embody itself in images'. 15 This, Huizinga proposes, is a
form of symbolism- 'mystery seemed to become graspable by the
mind when invested with a perceptible form' 16 and symbols become
'a cathedral of ideas' Y
Nineteenth-century symbolism was the idiom eventually chosen as
that most appropriate to transfer the whole burden of the age's
concern with aesthetics and decadence; it was the metaphor
providing the nexus between the sense of unreality felt by the dying
age with that of illusion known by the coming age; it is also the
means by which our own aesthetic, the expression of the age from
Pound to Durrell, finds itself.
At every point of transfer, where the sensibility of one age
encounters that of the next, and hands over its vital characteristics,
there is an absence of subtlety and of tact, but an omnipresence of
wisdom and self-knowledge and a curious belief both in the end of
the world as it has been known, and in the beginning of a new world
as it is yet to be known.
We have already noted that dandyism is born of ennui, and it is
inevitable that boredom with the outworn modes of one age will
hasten the excitement of novelty. The most exacerbated ennui of
course is that of despair, that is, a boredom not only of manners, of
behaviour, of the outward show which fails to excite the mind, but
also of mind and morals, an ennui which causes aesthetic, social and
politic despair and which demands a new world-order so that the
dis-ease of society can be put right, doubts can be resolved and
vacillations quelled.
In such a melting-pot, the past, by which one means an age prior
to that which engendered one's own, is the key factor. As Huizinga
notes 18 the heroic and bucolic themes together provide a sense of
the past, by means of which one can sing the praises of a previous
culture and, thus fortified, leap into the future. In fact the need for
a sense of the past is the hallmark of a civilisation consumed by
self-doubt, lacking either direction or motive, unsure of its origins
and already threatened by the uncertainty of its future. The
Victorian era was threatened by four factors: the complete difference
between the exotic culture of the Regency and the urbanity of its
own tendencies in bourgeois, industrial profiteering; the need of the
court to reconcile its aristocratic and theocratic origins with its
relatively new constitutional mandate; and the twin factors of a

growing popular aesthetic, thrust forward by the romantic writers
(poets and novelists alike) and the concomitant demand for
self-determination evident in the progress towards universal
suffrage.
As Huizinga points out, such an age realises the need for both
allegory and symbolism. As he says, 'symbolism expresses a
mysterious connection between two ideas, allegory gives a visible
form to the conception of such a connection. Symbolism is a very
profound function of the mind, allegory is a superficial one'. 19 As
with the fifteenth, so with the nineteenth century. The development
of symbolism in the works of poets such as Yeats, for example, and
the critical attention paid to it by writers like Arthur Symons, was an
attempt to give the age what a modern writer has called 'symbols
adequate to our predicament'. 20 It was a conscious search for a form
of literature which would not only express the artist but also unite
him to his age through the common meaning to be found within the
image he provided. As Huizinga notes:
to the men of the Middle Ages the coat of arms was undoubtedly
more than a matter of vanity or of genealogical interest. Heraldic
figures in their minds acquired a value almost like that of a totem.
Whole complexes of pride and ambition, of loyalty and devotion,
were condensed in the symbols of lions, lilies, or crosses, which
thus marked and expressed intricate mental contexts by means of
an image. 21
In the same way the Pre-Raphaelites provided, firstly by means of

their religious pictures, and then through the persona of the femme
fatale, images for their private psychologies and also for the public
culture. Again the architectural metaphor comes to mind: this role of
the artist makes him a medium between discrete and public
cultures, a tympanum through which they are translated for each
other. This is as true of politics as it is of art and helps to explain the
apparent dichotomies between various sections of the whole
civilisation - that artists, because they saw things as they are not,
should occasionally be punished for transgressing social codes
which insisted on not seeing things as in fact they were. The most
frequent example of such confrontation is of course in the area of
artistic morality and the 'puritan' reaction to the poetry of Rossetti
and Swinburne, to the development of aestheticism, to the art
criticism of Pater, and eventually to the posing of Oscar Wilde, was

one distinct strain in the history of English society in the nineteenth
century.
And, as we shall see in Chapter 3, the role of the artist in society in
the transitional period from the 1890s until the aftermath of the
'Great War' was exceptionally acute, not only because the
relationship of art and politics was once more painfully in question
but also because the artist was trying to express himself in new
media, to create both new forms and new content, and all this in
terms of a society itself in an amorphic condition.
Durrell draws attention to this in The Key to Modern Poetry in
referring to 'the gradual subjective curve taken by poetry and prose
during the past hundred years' 22 (he has already said that he is
'anxious to avoid the dangers in thinking along straight lines in a
universe which science tells us is curved' 23 ). Durrell says:
The drama which used to be precipitated outside, became the

personal drama of the artistic life - hence the interest in his
biography. The artist became an autist ... he became a Selfist. 24
Moreover, this transfer of the artist from the public external sphere
to the private internal area of consciousness marks the transition
from certainty to doubt which we have already noted. I have
referred to the artist-as-medium or tympanum; the painful status of
the artist in Victorian society was, I believe, due to his inability to be
true to both himself and his 'public', his difficulty in choosing which
to serve, in circumstances which made impossible a reconciliation
between the competing claims of prevailing sensibility and the
modern sensitivity which challenged it. And this applies equally to
politicians: the dilemma of Gladstone over the continuing debate on
the Irish question, for example, represents a comparable problem in
political morality or culture.
The Victorian age was not a puritan age. It was an age
endeavouring to provide itself with an image of coherence and
hierarchy imbued especially with knightly virtues. 'All aristocratic
life in the later Middle Ages is a wholesale attempt to act the vision of
a dream'. 25 Victorian society, moving into the age of the masses and
their liberation by science, sought to represent things as they were
not, consummately typified in the icon provided by Landseer, of
Victoria and Albert, re-presented as Queen Philippa and Edward III
at the bal costume of 1842. The Victorian age, by reintroducing the
forms of the mediaeval age, sought also to reintroduce 'the fiction

that chivalry ruled the world' 26 - the concept which, for the
mediaeval mind, rested on the aesthetic ideal of pride aspiring to
beauty and honour. 27
The irony of this for the Victorian era- as indeed for France in the
fifteenth century - was that chivalric and elitist ideas were being
applied to a society which was increasingly bourgeois and
democratic. And the irony consists not only in the fact that the
momentum of society was a levelling force (rather than hierarchic)
but also in the consequence that the eventual test of this education of
the whole society in knighthood, gentlemanliness, and service, was
the European war in which the whole population, led by its
monarchs, engaged on a scale hardly seen (with the exception of the
Napoleonic wars) since the middle ages. Once again centuries of
civilisation and its particular culture seemed to be set aside so that
the British public school spirit could have its day.
The confusion is also expressed in aesthetics: due partly to the
way in which the cultural debate was increasingly highlighted by
social comment, and partly, we must assume, to an internal
momentum of its own, the aesthetic development became a
'decadence' which hostile commentators found synonymous with
'degeneration', and which became polarised and countered with an
'anti-decadence'. Wilde was the symbol of the first, W. E. Henley
of the second.
Yet within such a polarisation is a host of irregularities which
simply do not fit the crude definitions which have furnished literary
history with its contrasts. Henley himself was originally on friendly
terms with Wilde, and can be said to have belonged to an 'aesthetic'
school of poetry, if such existed at all. William Watson has been cast
into a puritanical role because he insisted that John Lane withdraw
Beardsley's pictures from The Yellow Book if he, Watson, were to
continue to publish with him; in later years he actually came to
believe that in righteous indignation he had prevented 'the
publication of those filthy sodomistic designs', whereas his
biographer reveals that he was at the time friendly to Beardsley, was
in fact far from 'virtuous' himself, and had uneasy and anxious
relations with the Establishment which could both give and take
respectability. 28
There was indeed a narrow dividing line between the purely
artistic sensibility and the form and content required of art when it
came into contact with external social values. The arch-decadent of
English verse, Swinburne, himself eventually accepts that his

aesthetic rebellion should be kept within limits, and develops a
moral consciousness. 29 There is yet another irony in the fact that the
Frenchman whose work he championed in 1862, and who heavily
influenced his own first collection, Charles Baudelaire, should have
been reviled as the author of 'filth' and 'putrefaction' when in fact
his work carried within it not only the flowers of decadence but also
the seeds of regeneration: he believed that one must descend to the
depths not for the purpose of enjoying depravity but in order to
experience it as a catharsis which could then lead one up again
towards the light of a better world. Beardsley, too, was seized by
some form of remorse, uttering a plea which we could reasonably
regard as apocryphal if it were not attestably true- 'Jesus is our Lord
& Judge. By all that is holy [destroy] all obscene drawings .... In
my death agony' .30 There is in fact a continuous debate within the
Victorian artist, which is called over into the present century, as to
the use to which art is to be put, or whether, as Wilde insists, in
self-contradiction, all art is useless.
The confusion of the age, its prevarication and its setting of
arbitrary boundaries, on one side of which artistic endeavour could
be rewarded, and on the other had to be calumniated and
ultimately eradicated, was eventually summed up in one of Yeats's
greatest poems, 'Vacillations'.
The ultimate irony of the Victorian rediscovery of chivalry in both
form and content, then, is that the activities it undertook were
essentially quixotic- tilting at windmills, seeing things as they were
not, acting the dandy, the fantastic and useless modern form of
Knight-errant, enshrining the Queen in a mariolatrous frame when
Burke, fifty years earlier, had already acknowledged in his
apostrophe to Marie Antoinette the death of that kind of civilisation:
'the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and
calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished
for ever'. 31
The handbook of Victorian - and, by descent, of Edwardian -
chivalry, The Broad Stone of Honour, by Sir Kenelm Digby, first
appeared in 1822, but the author revised it frequently until it finally
reached five volumes in 1877. Chivalry, a positive rather than an
historic virtue, is 'that general spirit or state of mind which disposes
men to heroic and generous actions, and keeps them conversant
with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral
world'. Addressed to 'the young gentlemen of England', it asserted
that 'every boy and youth is, in his mind and sentiments, a knight,
and essentially a son of chivalry'. 32 It will be evident that this
sentiment remained in force within the educational system and,
paradoxically, confronted the young Lawrence Durrell when he was
sent 'home' to the seat of chivalry in 1923. Digby's panegyric
continued: 'As long as there has been, or shall be, young men to
grow up to maturity, and until all youthful life shall be dead, and its
source withered for ever, so long must there have been, and must
there continue to be, the spirit of noble chivalry'. And it was the
death of that young life, the withering of its source, which Durrell
celebrated in the agon of The Black Book.
The reduction of the chivalric ideal to the gentlemanly code of
conduct by a predominantly bourgeois and democratic age in itself
served to make the modem knight-errant into a ridiculous figure.
The mediaeval spirit became reduced (by imitation), stereotyped (by
standardisation), multiplied (by popularisation), and rationalised
(by institutionalising it). It is instructive to note that in 1829 Thomas
Arnold declared: 'if I were called upon to name what spirit of evil
predominantly deserved the name of Antichrist, I should name the
spirit of chivalry'. 33 Mark Girouard makes the point that almost one
century later, near the close of the first world war, Sir Henry
Newbolt approvingly remarked on the way in which the English
public school had adopted the chivalric code. Arnold's objection to
chivalry was rooted in his opinion that 'it set personal allegiances
before God, and the concept of honour before that of justice'. 34
Arnold's view is instructive: we can hardly call it prescient, since the
importance of the individual had been heightened since the French
Revolution, but he pinpoints the fact that, within the overall
structure of mediaeval belief, the devotion of page to master, of
knight to lord, of knight to lady, the significance of order (whether
religious, chivalric or trades guild) reduced the importance of the
absolute while emphasising the need to adhere to the particular- a
totemic rather than a horizontal culture. Bishop Stubbs supported
Arnold: to him chivalry was 'the gloss put by fine manners on vice
and selfishness and contempt for the rights of man' 35 - exactly the
process by which the middle ages dignified the cruelty and passion
of their culture.
The British model - like most chivalric texts on which society
placed a Christian gloss- was the Arthurian legend. It was brought
into popular literature by Tennyson (Idylls of the King 1855-59),
Arnold's own son, Matthew ('Tristram and Iseult', 1852), Charlotte
Yonge (Heir of Radclyffe, 1853) and William Morris (The Defence of

Guenevere, 1858). Malory'sMorted'Arthurwasrevivedin 1858, while
much use was made of it in G. A. Lawrence's Guy Livingstone of
1857. 36 Simultaneously the Pre-Raphaelites began to portray both
the chivalric and the erotic aspects of the legend: Watts's 'Sir
Galahad' (approximately 1855); Holman Hunt's, Rossetti's and
Maclise's illustrations for Tennyson (1857); Walter Crane's 'The
White Knight' (1870). Beardsley's own illustrations for the Morte
d'Arthur, even more than those already discussed, exemplify the
transition from aesthetic art - the Pre-Raphaelite icon - to an art
nouveau which maintained its currency into the modem period.
All of these carried the concept of devotion in two distinct but
related modes: erotic devotion to the lady and fraternal devotion to
one's companions in arms. Together they added up to the honour
and nobility which constituted the whole knight. But - and here
both Arnold and Stubbs may have been particularly perceptive -
they also contained the seeds of subversion, since the erotic
undertow of the Christian gloss of mariolatry, or 'reginolatry' as we
might call it, was also capable of quickly becoming the cult of the
femme fatale, with the consequent dangers of the 'romantic agony'.
Meanwhile fraternal association led throughout Victorian England
to that homoerotism, particularly within the universities, public
schools and the army, which was dealt such a public blow by the
revelations of the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889 and of the trial of
Oscar Wilde in 1895.
Finally we shall note another problematic product of the 'new
chivalry' as it came to be recognised towards the end of the
nineteenth century (together with other expressions of the age of
modernity such as 'the new woman', 'the new hedonism' and 'the
new spirit'): this was the emergence of the knight-errant, as
opposed to the fellowship knight, 37 almost as a maverick, a quixotic
figure whom we will meet in the perplexed gaze of the naif, the
traveller and fantastist seeking foreign places in which to transform
his experience. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Gordon Aubrey Herbert ('the
man who was Greenmantle') 38 are of this type. The danger they
represented as far as the system which produced them is concerned
was that they refused to stay within that system's bounds, because
they knew neither fear nor moral restraint. Blunt for example
upheld the system's ideal while subverting its basic reality; he
explained his support for the anti-landlord Land League in Ireland,
directed against his own class, by saying, with total naivete, 'I
thought to do a deed of chivalry'. 39
Deeds of chivalry came to seem extremely silly: one-man
crusades, the last cavalry charge, dribbling a football into the
German trenches, are the extreme and absurd result of pursuing an
elitist, hierarchical concept in an age of populism, an age which is
eroding mystery with science and diminishing religion with
humanism. Ultimately the system defeats itself; the heraldry
withers, congeals into mere dandyism. An unclothed emperor
serves to remind us that the true herald has no model to follow,
since, in order to face the future he has to put all civilisation, the
whole past, at his back. Only thus can he overcome time.
III AESTHETICS AND SOCIETY
Brummell left England in 1816 under the cloud of disapproval which

his defiance of the Regent had provoked. Thereafter he knew the
come-down which reduces a pre-eminent dandy to an ordinary
human being suffering physical want and loss of dignity. Wilde left
England in 1897 after two years imprisonment with hard labour,
brought on himself for social misdemeanours which broke the
dandy's code of behaviour. His own downfall is piteously recorded
in horrible detail. The similarities are very strong, especially since
Brummell's defiance- an aesthetic rebellion- embodied much more
than a dandyism of manners; but, quite apart from the fact that there
are still significant differences between their individual brands of
dandyism, the society which sent Wilde into exile was enormously
changed from that which expelled Brummell.
That the dandyism of which Wilde was eventually convicted- one
might call it total dandyism in the coherence of manners, mind and
morals- could become so public, debated in all sectors of society,
the gossip-matter of the popular press, an issue which concerned
the government itself as much as the moralists and the literary
journals, 40 is indicative of a change in the relation of art to politics in
the intervening eighty years.
Nevertheless, the changes which took place came, mostly,
gradually; the significant exception was the promulgation of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848: the aesthetic revolution which
compensated for England's otherwise failure to match the general
European movement of intellect. It is entirely due to this graduation

of change that we can see, in the development of nineteenth-
century aesthetics, the emerging identity of the twentieth-century
dandy, and the perplexity with which the naifs of the 1920s and
1930s viewed the Armageddon of world war (I am thinking
particularly of Waugh's Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, who summarises
all the tendencies I mentioned in the previous section, which
characterise the silliness and the roguery of incongruous chivalry).
As Ruskin writes of Turner:
about the year 1835 he shows clearly the sense of a terrific

wrongness and sadness, mingled in the beautiful order of the
earth; his work becomes partly satiric, partly reckless, partly- and
in its greatest and noblest features - tragic. 41
And these are the precise sentiments which perplex Durrell's own
anti-hero, Pursewarden, in The Alexandria Quartet.
But the 'dandy novels' which began to appear after Brummell's
departure - one of which, Pelham, contains a portrait of the
arch-dandy in exile- do not exhibit this quality in their heroes. They
do not concern themselves with the agonies, the doubt, the social
awareness of a Dorian Gray, an Iris Storm or a Death Gregory, even
though they are highly conscious of the changing social and political
environment. They are still too much caught up with the effect of ton,
of political opportunism and of the supposed horrors of the rising
bourgeoisie and the advent of equality.
Neverthless, Disraeli's Vivian Grey (1827) and Bulwer Lytton's
Pelham (1828) are of considerable note, because they do furnish us
with the first examples of dandy novels whose purpose was more
than purely manners. They are transitory narratives of the Regency
fin-de-siecle.
Pelham is particularly interesting because it is told in the first
person, while Vivian Grey is so palpably autobiographical both in its
attention to finesse and in the political opportunism of its hero as to
be so in every other respect. Ellen Moers says of Pelham's author
he took pains to conceal the novel's serious purpose, an attack on

the excesses of exclusive society, with casual effrontery. Readers
... could not decide whether Bulwer was for his dandy hero or
against him, whether Pelham was the author's self or the author's
villain. The confusion was in the author's mind, as well as in his

novel. 42
Moers convincingly argues that while Bulwer personally

contributed to the downfall of the Regency world by supporting the
Reform Bill, he complicated his argument in Pelham by making the
hero a dandy, that is, a creature of the rotten social and political
system.
Yet this is to obscure the changing role of the dandy himself.
Moers says earlier in her study that while the age tended towards
equality,
the dandy stood for superiority, irresponsibility, inactivity.

Inexcusably, in all his ghostly elegance, he haunted the Victorian
imagination. 43
But this continues the ambivalence which runs through Moers'

attitude to the quintessence of the dandy - that he embodied
inactivity as though to be a dandy is to be condemned exclusively to
langour. Moers defeats her own argument by emphasising
Thackeray's difficulty in imagining 'either heroism without
dandyism or a truly heroic dandy'. 44 That ambivalence, as I have
already suggested in Chapter 1, can be overcome if we consider the
dandy in two distinct modes - the heraldic dandy who has to act
without precedent, leading the vanguard, with nothing but the
future (which in many respects he invents) before him: and the
imitator, the dandy who reflects and marches in the squadron of
that heraldry.
It is extremely significant, as Moers observes in her clever
reconstruction of the first and subsequent editions of Pelham, that
Bulwer substantially rewrote his novel, by toning down the
dandiacal content. (Disraeli, embarrassed perhaps by his excesses,
did the same with the 1853 re-issue of Vivian Grey.)
A principal- and surprising- omission in the revision of Pelham is
the 'Preface' in which Bulwer announces his hero as
a personal combination of antitheses- a fop and a philosopher, a

voluptuary and a moralist- a trifler in appearance, but rather one
to whom trifles are instructive, than one to whom trifles are
natural. 45
The real purpose of the dandy may not be certain but his principal
strategy must be to dissemble and, on the same principle that ars est
celare artem, Pelham therefore adopts the age-old practice of making
things - mainly himself - appear as they are not. The promise of
Pelham, however, is not sustained - the ultimate purpose in
concealing his more subtle motives beneath the shallow exterior of
the dandy is no more than a typical eighteenth-century society novel
of political intrigue in the changing 'interests' of ministries,
combined in a confusing way with the revelation of a noble character
bent on rescuing persons in distress. Nevertheless, Ellen Moers
reports Planche's opinion that the novel was regarded in France as
'le manuel du dandysme le plus pur et le plus parfait'. 46
Vivian Grey, published the year before Pelham, suffers from similar
confusion. However, Moers makes the valuable point that 'Pelham
is a dandy who conceals a serious moral purpose behind his
affectations' while 'Vivian is a dandy whose lust for power defies
concealment, and whose dandyism is a pose to gild immoral means
used for an immoral end ... Pelham is absorbed by dandyism,
Vivian uses it'. 47 It is difficult to know which is the more significant-
Pelham, because it develops the theme of the beau towards the
wholeness and 'perfection' of the dandy (the 'parfit gentil knight')
or Vivian Grey because it emphasises the knight-errant, hulling the
world (Moers compares Vivian to Sorel, 'another adolescent
parvenu in a dandy world' 48 ). While Pelham may be a more
significant guide to the later development of the dandy in fiction,
Vivian Grey, if only because of the career of its author, affords us
some interesting insights into the mind of one so determined to use
dandyism rather than surrender to it. Robert Blake's brilliant
biography of Disraeli gives due attention to Disraeli the novelist,
and reveals the following admission:
In Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition, in

Alroy my ideal ambition. [The 'Psychological Romance', Contarini
Fleming] is a development of my Poetic character. This Trilogy is
the secret history of my feelings. 49
The consonance of this secret history with Wilde's revelations of his

relationship to the personae of Dorian Gray is hardly accidental, so
determined are the personalities of the authors concerned:
Basil Hallward is what I think I am. Lord Henry what the world
thinks of me. Dorian what I would like to be - in other ages,

perhaps . . . . In so vulgar an age as this we all need masks. 50
And that reference to masks of course throws us back onto the entire
question of 'that which is not what it seems' which sustained the
middle ages and which is implicit in the preface to Pelham examined
above.
Furthermore, Blake quotes Disraeli's reaction to the reception of
Contarini Fleming:
With what horror, with what blank despair, with what supreme
appalling astonishment did I find myself for the first time in my
life the subject of the most reckless, the most malignant, and the
most adroit ridicule. I was sacrificed ... I am ridiculous. It was
time to die _51
Again, the similarity between this author's circumstances and those

of the author of Dorian Gray are remarkable 52 but in this case their
reactions were quite different. Disraeli retired in the face of
calumny; Wilde, discovered as the perpetrator of a homosexual
novel, defended himself with inverted virtue, making his defence
the central standpoint of his artistry: art is above moral censure. But
Disraeli' s 'it was time to die' is absolutely revealing- it spells out the
recognition that must have come to Don Quixote on the field of
Paschendaele, to Joaquin Nin as he read Winter of Artifice.
A final point of interest in Vivian Grey is the observation by Robert
Blake that as a result of this book, Disraeli 'acquired a reputation for
cynicism, double dealing, recklessness and insincerity which it took
him years to live down', 53 that 'all his life Disraeli ... dwelt in the
long shadow of the Byronic myth' 54 but at the same time 'his great
object ... was to be someone, to attract notice, to cut a dash'. 55
Those observations are perfectly natural: Disraeli did reveal
something in Vivian Grey which he later preferred to diminish. And
it directs us to a feature of later popular novels which is announced
in Vivian Grey, the question of profiteering. Disraeli, although he
was probably not acting fraudulently himself, was directly involved
in a haphazard form of speculation in that he wrote pamphlets
containing 'an elaborate puff' for mining companies of questionable
reputation in Mexico and South America. 56 The theme re-appears in
E. F. Benson's Mammon & Co. (1899). Although Disraeli only uses
dandyism, he makes explicit the total dandy: besides the need to
dissemble outwardly, it is clear that the dandy will not deceive

himself, which mere narcissism might encourage him to do. Vivian
Grey tells himself:
I have the mind for the conception: . . . the human voice to make
those conceptions beloved by others. There wants but one thing
more: courage, pure, perfect courage; and does Vivian Grey know
fear? 57 [my emphasis]
Mind, voice, courage: mind, manners, morals. We shall see later how
Wilde will have taken many of Disraeli's lessons to heart. At
present, we need to recognise that a future Prime Minister and,
more immediately, a successful and significant novelist, had begun
the slow process of rescuing the society novel and of making it a social
novel.
Pelham, despite the relative inconsequence of its author, who
became more renowned with later productions such as Last Days of
Pompeii, Rienzi, and Eugene Aram, also helps us to perceive this
transition from the age of Brummell to that of Wilde.
Within Pelham itself there is a distinct change from the easy-going,
irresponsible art of a dandy as man-about-town with a nonchalance
central to his entry on a political career, to that of a man concerned
about his social role using his dandyism in a newly discovered
dimension. Pelham, like Vivian Grey, is marred as a social narrative
by the superimposition of a melodramatic, exotic, almost gothic,
story which distracts us from the personality of the central
character.
The change occurs at a psychological point in the story when
Henry Pelham decides to deliver a lecture to his tailor on the
unimportance of dress- anticipating Carlyle, as it were, with a kind of
sartor rescissus. Pelham has been reflecting that
beneath all the carelessness of my exterior, my mind was close,

keen and inquiring; and under all the affectations of foppery and
the levity of manner, I veiled an ambition the most extensive in its
objects and a resolution the most daring in the accomplishment of
its means. 58
To the tailor's, the man-maker's, assertion that 'we shall never be

done justice to, if we do not live for effect', 59 he therefore delivers a
series of twenty-two maxims. 60 These attack the narcissism of
common dandyism ('always remember that you dress to fascinate

others, not yourself'); and the lack of moral courage in foppery
('none but those whose courage is unquestionable can venture to be
effeminate'). He asserts the purpose of external dandyism to be
something more than appearance- 'dress so that it may never be
said of you "What a well-dressed man!" but "What a gentlemanlike
man!"'; that external appearance may be a means to an end (which
is also beyond the beholder's immediate perception)- 'there is no
diplomacy more subtle than that of dress'; that decisions in dress are
proof of mind- 'a fool may dress gaudily, but a fool cannot dress
well: for to dress well requires judgement'. And Pelham sees it as
necessary that that mind should declare itself: 'he who esteems
trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the
conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they
can be put, is a philosopher'. Finally he distinguishes between the
discrete and the public personae - he re-asserts the need to
dissemble, not only for effect but because, in order to preserve
vigour as well as privacy, we need masks: 'Dress contains the two
codes of morality- private and public. Attention is the duty we owe
to others, cleanliness that which we owe to ourselves'. The Wildean
consequence is obvious.
The other main element in Pelham's personality is the fact that he
is 'discovered' by his admirer, Lady Roseville:
While you seem frivolous to the superficial, I know you to have a

mind not only capable of the most solid and important affairs but
habituated by reflection to consider them. You appear effeminate,
I know that none are more daring; indolent, none are more
actively ambitious; utterly selfish, and I know that no earthly
interest could bribe you into meanness or injustice. 61
But Lady Roseville also underlines the exceptional problems of the

'dandy discovered' - that he becomes thereby untrustworthy,
because he proclaims his independence:
there was a certain fierte and assumption, and . . . independence

about you, which could not but be highly displeasing in one so
young; ... that it was impossible to trust you; that you pledged
yourself to no party. 62
Both Pelham and Vivian Grey assert the need to master life: in Pelham,
Sir Lionel Garrett 'cared not a straw that he was a man of fortune, of
family, of consequence; he must be a man of ton, or he was an atom,
a nonentity, a very worm, and no man'. 63 Bulwer thus implicitly
reviles the attention to form, while Disraeli, the politician dormant-
soon to be rampant- proclaims, through Beckendorff, the German
minister, who is the real dandy of mind in Vivian Grey, 'Man is not
the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of
men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter' 64 -
a significant statement, voiced before the death of George IV, which
firmly embodies the determinism characteristic of the 'Victorian' age
of twenty or thirty years later; a statement which, bearing out my
point about ideas leap-frogging generations, will emerge again in
Jarry' s Le Surmale as it had previously been voiced by Alberti's 'Men
can do all things they will'. 65 But in the meantime we see how the
satisfactory relation of aesthetics to society has been turned into the
uneasy rapprochement of mutual distrust between art and politics.
IV ART AND POLITICS
There is a pronounced difference between the 'society' novel of

Vivian Grey (and even Pelham) and the 'political' novels of Disraeli's
later period- such as Coningsby and Sybil. Similarly there is a distinct
shift in subject and emphasis from social portraiture and landscape
painting in the same period to the Pre-Raphaelite art we have
already discussed, as if its inner significance were being freshly
examined from the point of view of the artist's own subjective
preoccupations.
Between the 1820s and the 1840s art, after a period of uselessness,
became once more political, serving, in the broadest sense, a
political purpose or having a distinct political dimension. It might
not at first seem that the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood have any political significance: but because it rejected
established practice, advocated new freedoms (and responsibilities)
for the artist, and because it was associated with a 'sensual' school of
poetry, it suggested a 'psychological' basis for its activities which
was classical in its material but modern in its application.
That Walter Pater should have saluted this, in an essay on
Morris's work entitled 'Aesthetic Poetry' which was published in
1868, is very significant. Even more so is the fact that from the
beginning Pre-Raphaelitism was championed, in spirit if not in

detail, by Ruskin, whose crusade, until ended by madness, was
essentially social and political, and overt where so much of the
development of aesthetic criticism, until the advent of Wilde, was
covert.
Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy (1869) said 'wherever the free play
of our consciousness leads us, we shall follow'. 66 The appearance of
so many works with a similar message in the 1860s and 1870s laid the
basis for the artistic (and social and political) revolution of the
following two decades: Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866),
Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), Pater's Renaissance (1873),
Symonds's translations of Michelangelo's Sonnets (1878) and his
Studies in the Greek Poets (1873 and 1876). But these, in their tum,
were the result of the freeing of individual thought in the later 1840s.
It is ironic that England was one of the few countries to remain
untouched - in terms of national security - by the European
revolutions of 1848 and yet was profoundly affected by the
intellectual content of the age.
The intercourse of French and English aesthetics which ultimately
led to a new aesthetic for the modem age in fact began in the 1830s
with the export, from England to France, of the manners of dandyism
as a matter of style (which exercises the mind of French fashion to
this day in its anglomania). This was accompanied by the advent in
France of the English fashion novel, and by a corresponding interest
in romanticism, for example in the works of Scott. In return France,
in the person of Baudelaire, took dandyism and made an essentially
English phenomenon into a leader of 1848, giving him his political
spurs.
By 1862, five years after its publication, Swinburne was
introducing Les Fleurs du Mal into England and thereby
characterising his own, and the Pre-Raphaelite, attitude as 'sensual'.
From this conjuncture springs all the aestheticism, symbolism and
'decadence' which so exasperated and bewildered the 'English
Renaissance' of the 1880s, because it was not yet prepared to
understand sensuality as a fit subject for 'art'.
The movement of the 1840s was not confined to Europe: as with
the revolutions which celebrated the freedom of man in the
eighteenth century, America also contributed a distinct genealogy
of aesthetics from Jefferson, through Thoreau, Poe and Whitman, to
Eliot and Pound. Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience (1849) asserts:
The logical end of 'that government is best which governs least' is

'that government is best which governs not at all' 67
and
the only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any

time what I think right. 68
Proclaiming himself, Henry Thoreau, a free agent, the author

announces:
I wish to refuse allegiance to the State: to withdraw and stand

aloof from it . . . . In fact, I quietly declare war with the State69
... There never will be a really free and enlightened State, until
the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and
independent power, from which all its own power and authority
are derived, and treats him accordingly. 70
In art this freedom and superiority is celebrated in the superman of

Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855).
In France and England at exactly the same time, Baudelaire and
the Pre-Raphaelites were exploring parallel avenues to freedom.
While Pre-Raphaelite painting was involved in the development of a
new aesthetic, in France, in his review of the Salons, Baudelaire, ten
years before the appearance of Les Fleurs du Mal, was calling for a
painter to celebrate the heroism of the modern life. As one of his
biographers says:
Baudelaire is the product of an age which had witnessed the

collapse of established guidelines to truth and morality. It was a
period when the leadership traditionally provided by monarchy,
aristocracy, and the church was spiritually bankrupt. Art had
begun to take over the functions these elements had once
fulfilled, it became both religion and political creed. 71
That Baudelaire himself did not invent the political role of the
modern artist single-handed is established by the following
assertion made in 1845 by La verdant in his De la mission del' art et du
role des artistes:
Art, the expression of society, manifests in its highest soaring, the

most advanced social tendencies: it is the forerunner and the

revealer. Therefore, to know whether art worthily fulfills its
proper mission as initiator, whether the artist is truly of the
avant-garde, one must know where Humanity is going, know
what the destiny of the human race is . . . . To lay bare with a
brutal brush all the brutalities, all the filth, which are at the base of
our society. 72
The social mission of Baudelaire - and also of Eliot and Miller and
Durrell: the paradoxical point about attempting to fulfil such a
mission being that the artists who expose the filth and brutality are
themselves calumniated as 'decadents' in the sense of 'degenerates'
although their own purpose is one of revival, of re-generation in a
degenerate world.
How can such a sense of purpose be reconciled with the idea of
'art for art's sake' as pronounced by Gautier (in the preface to
Mademoiselle de Maupin in 1835)? (Baudelaire says that 'Ia puerile
utopie de 1' art en excluant la morale et sou vent meme la passion,
etait necessairement sterile'. 73 ) The answer lies in Baudelaire's (and
Pater's and Wilde's) insistence on finding beauty in the object and on
the importance of self-knowledge, the cultivation of the senses in
the process of self-into-object. Purely in terms of artistic technique,
this can be described as symbolism- the perception of the object as it
really is in itself, and the identification of the perceiver with the
object, the construction of the symbol. From this descends the
theory of the mask, and the whole of modern poetry. In terms of the
public, political world, it requires a further description, which
lodges somewhere between aesthetics (the organisation of
perception) and decadence (the action of temperament on
knowledge).
In both artistic and political terms- in cultural terms, that is- this
can be catastrophic. As Baudelaire says 'Every revolution has for its
corollary the massacre of the innocents'. 74 In his Journals In times
Baudelaire recalled 'my wild excitement in 1848 ... natural pleasure
in destruction . . . a legitimate pleasure if what is natural be
legitimate'. 75 But in the same breath he says '1848 was amusing only
because of those castles in the air which each man built for his
Utopia. 1848 was charming only through an excess of the
ridiculous'. Standing between Carlyle's heroes and Yeats's 'images
for the affection'/6 he couples the 'eternal superiority of the
Dandy' 77 with 'but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the
warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create'?8 Therein, we

can surely affirm, is the agony of the dandy, what Baudelaire calls
'the mark of the neurasthenic idler', between the 'conflicting
sensation ... the horror of life and the ecstasy of life'. 79 To kill god,
to build a cathedral, to enthrone oneself as god, is the agon and
anagnorisis of the modern artist.
That one can perceive rottenness and brutality around one and
realise oneself to be incapable of reforming it, of releasing its
inherent beauty, is the dilemma; to embrace that inherent beauty,
the fleur du mal, is the artist's way of resolving that dilemma.
Baudelaire is the great heraldic dandy of France in proclaiming this,
just as Wilde is the great heraldic dandy of England for making a
similar assault on Victorian morality. And Jarry is the herald of
international modernism, for creating the 'pataphysical' kingdom of
Ubu.
To be incapable of such heraldry is to be forced inwards on the
persona, to emphasise l'art pour l'art to a painful degree. This was
the general tendency of the artist-in-dismay during the later
nineteenth century, until liberated by the savage frenzy of the
artist-in-despair. Writing in 1952 Durrell, in a continuation of the
discussion of 'Selfism' quoted above, says:
If we follow the curve through until we come to our own times we

see that yet another change has come about, in the wake of the
balance and harmony which seem to be the artist's objectives
today. He has become aware of the necessity to transcend
personality - and he is indicating clearly enough that this is the
solution for which the Western civilization to which he belongs is
more than ready. The poetry of the moment is deeply moralistic in its
implication. The artist has turned his eyes away from art, and
appears to be studying for a new role- that of saint. [my emphasis ]80
There is much in this passage to give us thought: firstly, Durrell's

identification of the need to pursue self beyond personality;
secondly, in the moralism of art and what that implies; and thirdly
the artist's transcendence not only of personality but of art itself, in
order to achieve sainthood- as Baudelaire says, 'dandyism borders
upon the spiritual and stoical'. 81
Here, too, we encounter the duality of artistic production: on the
level of technical achievement we see the critic re-creating the work
of art as he himself sees it in his own mind (Baudelaire does this in
the Salon de 1845, anticipating Pater by a quarter of a century); on the

public level, however, the artist is re-creating the world itselfaccording
to his conscience (the spiritual aspect of his aesthetic).
It transpires that the decadent artist is at the crucial point between
two cultures, two ages. This makes his art seem to one age too
brutally new and, to the other, too conditioned by its history. It also
makes the artist himself intensely conscious of the need to act as a
medium for the transmission, or translation, of culture: in such a
way can the situation be saved, and, although we cannot avert fin de
siecle, we can prevent fin de globe. And it is the role- inescapable
and ineluctable- of the modern artist not just to paint heroism, but to
be heroic. 'Dandyism', as we have already noted in Baudelaire
appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not

yet all powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter
and fall . . . . Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid
decadence. 82
The decadent artist therefore is a regenerate, a herald of the new,

redeeming culture, a religionist, and, as Durrell calls him, a saint.
In his acclamation of Baudelaire in 1862, Swinburne was bound to

raise moralist hackles:
not the luxuries of pleasure in their simple first form, but the
sharp and cruel enjoyments of pain, the acrid relic of suffering felt
or inflicted, the sides on which nature looks unnatural, go to make
up the stuff and substance of this poetry . . . even of the
loathsomest bodily putrescence and decay he can make some
noble use; pluck out its meaning and secret, even its beauty. 83
The assertion that beauty resides in putrescence was not one to

merit much credence in 1862, although Baudelaire himself has
explained this clearly enough in his commentaries. But Swinburne,
despite the objections of his critics, had obviously grasped
Baudelaire's spiritual purpose when he observed:
There is not one poem of the Fleurs du Mal which has not a distinct
and vivid background of morality to it. 84
And in discussing the Litanies de Satan he says:
Here it seems as if all failure and sorrow on earth, and all the
cast-out things of the world- ruined bodies and souls diseased-
made their appeal, in default of help, to Him in whom all sorrow
and all failure were incarnate85
- a sentiment which had become commonplace by the turn of the

century. The hallmark of this sentiment, it seems to me, is
tenderness or compassion, but that kind of tenderness which is born
not of naivete or innocence but of bitter and painful experience, the
kind of martyrdom to which the heraldic spirit in dandyism is
sentenced for its refusal to follow petty emotion.
Swinburne's Poems and Ballads of 1866, and the Pre-Raphaelite
spirit generally, was savagely attacked by Robert Buchanan, who
alleged that Swinburne was 'deliberately and impertinently
insincere' and 'unclean for the sake of uncleanness', with
'sensuality paraded as the end of life'. 86 In his main essay, 'The
Fleshly School of Poetry' (1871) Buchanan asserted that the Pre-
Raphaelites saw the poet as 'an intellectual hermaphrodite', 87 a
surprisingly perceptive remark although the significance was
probably lost on its author. Buchanan attacked Rossetti as both
painter and poet, commenting on his 'thinness and transparence of
design . . . [his] combination of the simple and grotesque . . .
morbid deviation from healthy forms of life . . . weary, wasting yet
exquisite sexuality', and concluding, again with considerable but
unconscious insight: 'nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing
completely sane'. 88
I introduce the disapprobation of Robert Buchanan not because he
represents in himself any significant stage in the development of
either dandyism or aestheticism in general but because his
antagonism is typical of the general Victorian reaction to this
development. On one side we could say that open hostility of this
kind, which finds its ultimate expression in Max Nordau' s
Degeneration (1895), or the gentler forms of attention such as parody
and satire (the Punch cartoons and Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience are
the chief examples) is incapable of perceiving the serious purpose
and sincerity of the movement as a whole. Praise of its 'arts and
crafts' aspect (such as William Morris's Kelmscott workshops)
displayed a superficial mentality which failed to realise the
significance of the concomitant literature and painting which took
mediaevalism as its subject for 'psychological' reasons. On the other

side we could criticise the pioneers of aestheticism or decadence for
not relating properly to their age, for taking the too easy option of
disclaiming responsibility for their actions, of adopting an 'artistic'
pose which in a sense disqualified them from pursuing a moral
purpose through their art.
This central difficulty encapsulates the confusion which
surrounded the aesthetic crisis of 1895 and its aftermath. The critic
who attempted to steer a cautious middle path between
irresponsibility and sensuality on one side and didactic purpose on
the other was Walter Pater. He failed because his caution
suppressed his sympathy for the fullest expression of I'art pour I'art-
for the epicureanism of living for the moment, but he succeeded in
spawning a tradition of criticism and creative work which produced
first Wilde and then Aldington and DurrelC and one of the greatest
of epicureans, Samuel Beckett.
Pater's is the first stage in the development of Victorian aesthetics
before the climactic year of 1895. Appleman89 notes that Pater went
up to Oxford in 1859, the year that Darwin published his Origin of
Species, and that his critical style is shaped by post-Darwinian
questions. He refers, for example, to Pater's conscious use of words
such as 'evolution' and 'origins' and particularly to the concept of
relativity as conveyed by his examination of conditions: a document
should be located 'as far as possible in the group of conditions,
intellectuaC sociaC materiaC around which it was actually produced
if we would really understand it'. 90 Appleman argues that faced
with the dilemma of having to give up either his impressionism or
his historicism in order to resolve the dilemma of their mutual
embarrassment, 'Pater could not choose ... this indecision was a
natural result of his Darwinian conditioning'. 91 This, I believe,
points us towards the real 'maladie du siecle', the problem of
understanding decadence, and it explains why Pater's suppression
and disguise of sensuality bears directly on the political aspect of
culture.
Pater's middle path employed the concept of style in order to
establish the importance of personality- hardly an original thought
since it post-dated Buffon' s dictum 'le style c' est l'homme meme' by
over a century. There seems little that is 'new and daring' 92 in his
idea that 'it doesn't matter what is said as long as it is said
beautifully'. 93 But we should not allow ourselves to be misled by the
fact that Pater's philosophy was muted, to obscure the more
significant fact that it was muted because of the powerful

institutional forces of academe and church lined up against him each
time he attempted to formulate a more powerful version of that
philosophy. And behind this again we must seek the reason for such
institutional objections which were stronger and more significant
than any of the comparatively superficial objections to Swinburne or
even Beardsley.
The establishment crushed Pater twice, once in refusing him
ordination and once in the publication of his collected essays, The
Renaissance, with the well-known 'Conclusion'. There were two
reasons: firstly, his insistence on the end of transitory life being the
end of everything - the denial of an after-life; secondly, his
questioning of the modus vivendi of the age itself, his assertion of
the superiority of classical cultures because their quality of thought
allowed life to be more satisfactorily organised. Beside these, the
problem of his homosexuality was a minor irritant.
Pater's apparent insouciance and his deceptively seductive
innocuous prose belie the extraordinary power of what he really
wants to say. Thus in the essay on Style, in referring to the
distinction between the writer's transcription 'not of mere fact, but
of his sense of it', Pater puts on the back of the statement that there
can be no merit or craft without truth, the perverse rider that 'all
beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call
expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision
within'. 94 It is one thing to observe as an exercise of the critical
function, that the individual writer has the power of choice in the
representation of fact or truth- an observation acceptable to those
who agree that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'. It is quite
another matter to use this idea to slip in the note about 'translation
from inward to outward' 95 which anticipates Steiner in its attention
to the subjective role of thought and which proposes, ultimately,
that the individual artist- or critic- is the guardian or, as we would
say today, gatekeeper, of truth as he sees it.
In his equally well-known description, or metamorphosis, of the
'Mona Lisa'- identified by Yeats as 'the first modem poem' 96 - Pater
is even more audacious, since here he says that an image has no
explicit meaning, a proposition absolutely contrary to the
established spirit of the age and yet equally absolutely akin to the
spirit of Pre-Raphaelitism and supported by the growing literature
of 'Selfism' - Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859) being probably the
most popular example. In his first published essay on Coleridge
(1866) he says 'to the modem spirit, nothing is, or can be rightly
known except relatively, under conditions'. 97 Pater was, in fact,
completely at one with the Victorian world in identifying 'a new
analysis of the relations of body and mind, good and evil, freedom
and necessity' 98 in that he was in tune with Darwin's theory of
evolution. Yet in this sentence and in the following ('hard and
distinct moralities are yielding to a more exact estimate of the
subtlety and complexity of our life') he was not only referring to
the still violently divisive Oxford debate occasioned by Newman's
(and Manning's) conversion to Roman Catholicism, but also
foreshadowing the 'subtlety and complexity' which would bedevil
Victorian certainty with the advent of Einstein's relativity and
Freud's psychoanalysis.
Yet none of this should surprise us if we look at the opening
statement of the essay on Coleridge:
forms of intellectual and spiritual culture sometimes exercise their

subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from
them .... Nature, which by one law of development, evolves
ideas, hypotheses, modes of inward life, and expresses them in
tum, has in this way provided that the earlier growth should
propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the whole of its
forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the spectacle
of the reserve of the older generation exquisitely refined by the
antagonism of the new .... Weaker minds fail to perceive the
change: the clearest minds abandon themselves to it. To feel the
change everywhere, yet not abandon oneself to it, is a situation of
difficulty and contention. 99
Pater thus not only signals, at an early date, the problems of late
Victorian aesthetics but summarises the paradox of decadence in the
midst of life. Applying the perfectly 'natural' suggestion that one
season follows another in 'an unbroken continuity of life' he also
makes it clear that seasonal change is relative, not absolute, because
some surrender themselves to it while others cannot recognise it,
and some, while recognising it, refuse to accept it; it is this 'situation
of difficulty and contention' exemplified by Pater, which gave the
chief characteristics to the last decade of the century and the first
decade of the next and which is summed up in his most spectacular
pupil, Oscar Wilde.
V OSCAR WILDE
Wilde has rightly been described as a paradox or enigma, the

creature of his age who also invented, and destroyed, that age. But
the really significant paradox of Wilde's life and career is an ironic
one: that his flamboyance, his dandyism, succeeded in highlighting
the very triviality which he condemned and, to the present time,
obscures the genuinely sincere and profound views on the
relationship of art and society behind a mask which, however
cleverly crafted it may appear, gives the impression of nonchalance,
frivolity and epigrammatic wit as its chief characteristic.
That the mask was a necessary ploy in concealing the artist's true
'intentions' only serves to heighten the irony. Wilde never properly
knew when to conceal and when to come out in the unequivocal
blazon of heraldry. He never fully appreciated the use of the symbol
in its relationship to the persona. In fact Wilde was probably quite
wrong in saying 'I have put all my genius into my life, and only my
talent into my work' since he thereby confused the art of being with
the act of becoming- seeing the emphasis, as his public saw it, in the
dandyism of manners rather than in the process of working out
his aesthetic relation with society in the dandyism of mind.
Furthermore he misinterpreted the meeting place of those two
modes of behaviour- the moral sphere- inasmuch as he was unable
to detach the form of his behaviour from its content. In an early letter
he contrasts his mother's work with that 'of her degenerate artistic
son. I know', he tells his correspondent, 'you think I am thrilled by
nothing but a dado. You are quite wrong, but I shan't argue'. 100
Later he is exercised in Paterian fashion by the problem of coming
down on one side or another:
what is to become of an indolent hedonist like myself if Socialism

and the Church join forces against me? I want to stand apart, and
look on, being neither for God nor for his enemies. This, I hope,
will be allowed. 101
This of course gave rise to that confused document The Soul of Man
under Socialism, in which Wilde cries out for the comfort and safety of
Socialism as a doctrine of freedom and yet recognising that in
Individualism as 'a disturbing and disintegrating forced 02 lay the
real seeds of fin de siecle. And even in the letter just quoted we can
detect the same tone of insincerity that flaws the essay on Socialism;
after the words 'this I hope will be allowed', which reads like a
condemned man making a finat noble plea for something he knows
to be impossible, Wilde picks up the thread of his letter with the
damning words 'seriously speaking, however ... '. Wilde's
inability to take himself seriously in fact led him to believe that his
charm lay in its facility, and thereby that his naturally spontaneous
and informal style of personality was his true method of expressing
himself.
This makes it difficult for us to reconcile the dandy with the truly
heraldic in Wilde's work - the great set-pieces of the English
decadence, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest
and Salome. Much of what Wilde said - or the way his thought
affected his behaviour- comes from Pelham and Vivian Grey, but
what he thought and wrote, from the perspective of his inner
landscape, was drawn from Arnold and Pater. As Peter Ackroyd has
written with brilliant insight in his Last Testament of Oscar Wilde:
I caught sight of my name on placards and newspaper boys cried

it out in the gutters. It was as if I were driving through the
landscape of my imagination, full of strange sights and haunted
by the voice which calls out 'I! I!' without understanding the
meaning of its cry. 103
This reminds us of Lytton's portrait of Brummell in exile, as

'Russelton' in Pelham, 104 but here a distinction must be drawn
between Brummell, who continued as a dandy in the slow and
miserable decline of his French exile, and Wilde, whose squalid last
years are of importance in his biography but of no significance to his
development as an heraldic dandy, because he not only gave up his
dandyism but also died as a herald five years before he died as a
man.
Wilde claimed (in a recently discovered letter) that 'the idea of The
Ballad came to me while I was in the dock, waiting for my sentence to
be pronounced'. 105 If that statement can be believed, it signifies that
Wilde's conversion to realism - the acceptance that he should not
have flaunted himself in front of society and then asked for its
protection- was more significant than has hitherto been supposed.
It means that he decided at that moment- when his 'guilt' had been
established but before the cruel sentence had been imposed - to
abandon the decadent idiom in favour of the traditional, and it was,
again ironically, because of this that the Ballad was greeted as
breaking new ground. But from that moment Wilde as an artist

ceases to interest us.
In abandoning his pose, the mask of craftsmanship, Wilde at last
accepted disillusion and oblivion. It was the same realisation which
he had hinted at ten years earlier as an earnest reviewer and as
editor of The Woman's World:
The fashionable and brilliant young dandies, in whom Disraeli

and Bulwer Lytton took such delight, have been entirely wiped
out as heroes of fashion by hard-working curates in the East
End. 106
The ironies here are numerous: firstly, that in the same year this was
written (1889) Wilde was ridiculing, in Dorian Gray, the do-gooders
in the East End, but that only three years earlier, when casting about
for regular employment, he had seriously applied for the
secretaryship of just such a charity. 107 Secondly, that his own heroes
-Dorian Gray, Lord Goring, Thomas Wainewright- superseded the
'fashionable and brilliant' qualities of Pelham and Vivian Grey in
making a philosophy- that is, a dandyism of mind- out of an extrovert
sense of morals. Thirdly, that Wilde himself displays a keen
appreciation of Disraeli and Lytton and transposes much of the pure
dandyism of their novels into his life rather than into his work. Thus
Lytton's 'Imitation is the sincerest form of flatterydos becomes one
of Wilde's bon mots and almost a trademark. But it originates not
even with Lytton, it is a commonplace of literature which Wilde
suborns and converts to his own use.
As we have already noted Pelham is superior to Vivian Grey in its
account of dandyism in relation to politics, despite the greater
interest of Disraeli in the light of his subsequent career; and we
should not overlook the fact that Lytton himself was a member of
parliament 1832-41 and 1852-66, a member of the government and
elevated to the peerage in 1866. Lytton in fact, in Pelham, announces
some of the great themes of the nineteenth-century debate. How
can he do this? The answer lies in the point emphasised by Pater
(and later Leavis), the continuity of tradition. Lytton refers, for
example, in the 'Maxims' already examined, to the fact that 'nature
is not to be copied, but to be exalted by art'; 109 we know that that
becomes one of Baudelaire's maxims and, inevitably, one of
Wilde's, but it stems from the eighteenth-century preoccupation
with artificiality, in which not only Gothic ruins, but also a Gothic
sensibility, or imagination- almost a psychology for the age- were

created.
Furthermore Lytton repeats (and examines) what he calls
Rousseau's 'manie commune': 'denier ce qui est, et d'expliquer ce
qui n' est pas' - to deny that which is, and explain that which is
not' no- a concept taken up by Whistler and Wilde in the 1880s. But
Lytton's visionary use of the dandy culminates in the connection of
this echo of the 'Age of Reason' with the words he puts into
Pelham's mouth:
We wander about like the damned in the story of 'Vathek', and we

pass our lives, like the royal philosopher of Prussia, in
conjugating the verb, Je m'ennuie. 111
Lytton, in a remarkable use of the dandy's capacity for boredom,

thus anticipates (perhaps precipitates) the nature and function of
decadence as expressed by Baudelaire, and pre-dates Axel by
sixty-five years.
Wilde himself made this same connection between the classic and
the romantic, during his tour of America in 1882, the most important
period of his career as far as the formulation of an aesthetic is
concerned. His lectures, under the general heading of The English
Renaissance', offer us the only clear unequivocal statement of his
artistic beliefs which is uncomplicated by his later decadent moods.
'I am working at dramatic art because it's the democratic art' he says
in 1880n2 and that spirit, in one form or another, informs everything
he wrote from his early homo-erotic poems up to and including the
Ballad.
In his American lectures Wilde identified the change in English
society which the Pre-Raphaelites had inaugurated and which was
manifestly both aesthetic and political. He described the 'new birth
of the spirit of man' which had an 'exclusive attention to form' and
which succeeded in uniting with the Greek clearness of vision and
the mediaeval 'variety of expression and mystery of its vision' the
'intricacy and complexity and experience of modem life'. llJ
Identifying 'the Hellenic spirit and the spirit of romance' as the basic
elements of the English intellectual tradition, n 4 he connected these
with the idea of progress as embodied in social movements such as the
French Revolution; and yet he regarded Keats rather than Byron ('a
rebel') or Shelley ('a dreamer') 115 as the absolute incarnation of the

English Renaissance and 'the forerunner of the Pre-Raphaelite
school'.
Wilde elevated the Pre-Raphaelites because they celebrated 'the
impress of a distinct individuality, an individuality remote from that
of ordinary men.' 116 He identified 'the two most vital tendencies
of the nineteenth century' as 'the democratic and pantheistic
tendency' and 'the tendency to value life for the sake of art'. 117 But
there is a distinct paradox within this latter observation, and another
between it and the view of Pre-Raphaelitism. Democracy implies
collectivity, yet Wilde uses it not only in this sense but also in
relation to Socialism, as the apotheosis of individualism, the
antithesis of collectivism. But he posits democracy as a form of
pantheism- to each man a personal god- while 'to value life for the
sake of art' must in these terms means to value one's own life for the
sake of one's own art. This becomes a difficult proposition to
reconcile with the idea of 'movements' in art.
I began my original study of Wilde as an attempt to see whether he
really stood 'in symbolic relations' to his age. This of course means
much more than asking whether or not Wilde typified certain
tendencies of his age. When it is persuasively argued, for example,
that he 'summed up and impersonated ... some of the vital
tendencies of an epoch', 118 we must ask if he did not in fact invent
some of the characteristics of that epoch, projecting them onto his
time through the force of his personality and the readiness of the age
to accept whatever novelty he had to offer. I am left now with the
realisation that such questions cannot in fact be reduced to such a
simple formula. Wilde, although he summed up these tendencies,
also, in the words of the same writer, pursued a career of
'conspicuous madness'. 119 The madness was also typical of its age-
an alienation from norms which had been proved unreliable.
Influenced by Wilde, Durrell was to write (in 1952): 'Art does not
reason. It manhandles you, and changes you. Art, after all, belongs
to its age. Indeed, the greatest art creates its own age' .120
Mac Liamm6ir calls it 'a mood rather than a movement'- 'a mood
that was at once indolent, voluptuous, bizarre, witty and
deliberately artificial'. 121 It is important to note the tendency to
describe the age in adjectives rather than adverbs. Within it we can
easily locate Wilde's view of 'fin de siecle':
All that is known by that term I particularly admire and love. It is

the fine flower of our civilization: the only thing that keeps the
world from the commonplace, the coarse, the barbarous. 122
Thus Wilde, one in a long tradition, spells out the by now orthodox
indictment of degeneracy, noting the vital distinction between
degeneracy and decadence.
In this Wilde was displaying the qualities which in fact made him
an important decadent author, particularly in the acute sense in
which he perceived the 'democratic' (that is, individualistic)
function of drama. As Beerbohm observed, Wilde was not a 'born'
dramatist, his approach to drama was 'a kind of afterthought; he
brought to it a knowledge of the world which the lifelong playwright
seldom possesses . . . . He came as a thinker, a weaver of ideas,
and as a wit, and as the master of a literary style'. 123
This is because Wilde conceived the drama neither naturally nor
naturalistically. The drama, a presentation of pretence, was simply
the vehicle by which, at one remove, he could scorn society and
propose revolutionary ideas. The drama was for Wilde the mirror in
which he showed Nature all its faults, its bestiality, greed, sloth and
absurdity. He did this with The Picture of Dorian Gray, with its clear
descent from Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: but the Victorian
literature is full of 'doubles' and dual personalities124 which deal
with the themes of self-recognition, self-knowledge and the use of
masks and mirrors. Behind all this, however, is the simple way in
which Wilde regarded art: 'all art is at once surface and
symbol .... A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also
true'Y 5 This stands in a tradition which includes Odilon Redon's
statement 'The essence of mystery is to remain perpetually
ambiguous' and even Taine's observation on Carlyle, that his
distinguishing feature was 'his ability to see a double reasoning in
anything and everything'.
In Wilde, Rousseau's 'to doubt what is, to explain what is not', as
Lytton conveyed it to us in Pelham, is united with Pater's 'to see the
object as in itself it really is'. Furthermore, Wilde, accompanied by
Beardsley, unites literary criticism with visual practice; his advice to
the art students of 1883, 'to paint things as they are not' was, as we
know, borrowed from Whistler. It finds its further expression in
Beardsley's epicene hermaphrodites which illustrate Salome among
his other work. And it is not too great a flight of critical fancy to
suggest that the cubist rotation of planes also derives in part from
the need to explain that which has no reality except in appearance.
At the close of Chapter 1, I referred to the idea of the dandy

moving from the periphery to the centre of the stage. Wilde's
personal tragedy- and the point of difficulty as far as the aftermath
was concerned- was that he made this transition as a decadent but
was forced to abandon it once more as a degenerate. That he
combined both functions is equally paradoxical: the decadent-
degenerate proved that art and life were separate, since what Wilde
wrote was quite uninfluenced by the way he lived; while the
degenerate-decadent persuaded society of the dangerous
conjunction of life and art since in its eyes Wilde's behaviour (what
he so erroneously called his 'genius') proved the evil of his work.
Wilde therefore sums up, in a painful spectacle, the attempt of the
inner and outer personae to communicate.
The Wilde who wrote Salome, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The
Importance of Being Earnest was related only by an accident of birth
and education to the Wilde who wrote 'De Profundis' and 'The
Ballad of Reading Gaol', who loved Lord Alfred Douglas, Robert
Ross, Harry Marillier, Andre Gide, who went to prison not because
he offended the morals of the Establishment, but because he made it
impossible for them to cope with their manners. But just as these
personae overlap at certain points in his work- in the 'Phrases and
Philosophies for the Use of the Young' for example, or some of the
more sincere passages of 'De Profundis' - so the confluence and
confusion of the visible world and the inner landscape runs
throughout his work. Much of Wilde's writing, that it to say, is an
autobiography; much of his abhorrence of triviality, vulgarity and
insincerity is a protest against the trivial, vulgar and insincere in
his own behaviour; and much of his chivalric championing of
individual liberty - in manners, mind and morals - falls into the
tradition in which 'civil disobedience' and individual conscience
meet and politicise critical theories. The emergence of the critic in
Wilde masks the transition of art-politics from Pater to the 'blasting
and bombardiering' of the cultural war we shall examine in the next
two chapters.
The world which was discovered to be other than it seemed was
the world which bewildered Wilde as the dandy-naif, but which he
knew well as the herald, the knight-errant, precisely because he had
invented it. Wilde impersonates his epoch because, in thatJanuslike
confusion, he sums up both the heritage - the Regency, the
artificiality of the eighteenth century, the advances of Victorianism
towards modernism - and the future, the ways in which those
diverse elements would be put to use in the twentieth century. It

remained to one of Wilde's most brilliant disciples, W. B. Yeats, to
exemplify and to master that diversity in the theory of opposites.
VI TOWARDS DEMOCRACY
In concluding this brief survey of the interplay of art and politics, of

aesthetics and society, in Victorian Britain, some indication should
be given of the extent to which the confusion which characterises
the 'vortex' leading up to 1920 is in fact the product of the 1890s.
As I have said Wilde epitomises both the past and the future.
Since he himself said that he invented his age he must have been
peculiarly conscious of the psychological problems this presented.
His downfall brought a halt to the social emancipation of
homosexuals for which the groundwork was being quietly laid by
pioneers such as Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, whose title I
have appropriated to introduce this section. 126 The importance of
this history lies not so much in relation to the recognition of
homosexuality as in its revelation of the uses of art. Wilde made
visible the ways in which 'art', a seemingly social concern with form,
could be applied to social criticism, and could reveal states of
society, and states of mind, which were also being voiced by
reformers and crusaders in other forums.
Thus while the dandies with whom The Importance of Being Earnest
begins are charmingly stupid, and therefore acceptable, and
concerned wholly with form, the tone of this play changes
immediately upon the entrance of Lady Bracknell, whose dandyism
is of the mind and concerned with morals, with the Victorian
preoccupation with status and wealth, and whose macabre
utterances are used to turn Victorian morality and respectability on
its head. In Lady Bracknell and in Sir Robert Chiltern (who, in An
Ideal Husband, asserts that it requires courage, not weakness, to yield
to temptation) Wilde has supplied his age with the mirrors in which
to recognise its own degeneracy. If cubism would very shortly
demonstrate how the 'inner surfaces' of an object could be rotated
and displayed, Wilde had shown that society could be treated in the
same way. Moreover he had, both in his life and work, established
that the dandy was not merely an outward show of manners but also
had 'inner surfaces', ideas and sensations which registered in the
mind and were reflected in behaviour.
Elsewhere have described the tradition of ambivalence in

Victorian literature and society towards both homosexuality itself
and the celebration of 'Hellenism' and classical paiderasteia. 127
Wilde experienced this ambivalence fully but his dilemma, which,
as he put it himself, meant that he was 'a problem for which there
was no solution', 128 was equally caused by the other social factors I
have mentioned. When he writes
But strange, that I was not told

That the brain can hold
In a tiny, ivory cell,
God's Heaven- and Hell 129
he is addressing not only Lily Langtry and the problem of his

sexuality, but the youthful impulse towards socialism,
republicanism, and artistic and religious freedom, all of which he
knew were socially and politically problematic. His own ultimate
embrace of anarchism was the result of his frustrated attempts to
produce 'democratic' art from 'dramatic' art, from the time of his
very first, naive, melodrama, Vera, or the Nihilists; and it also
stemmed from his discovery of 'the many prisons of life- prisons of
stone, prisons of passion, prisons of intellect, prisons of morality',
recognising finally that 'all limitations, external and internal, are
prison walls, and life is a limitation'. 130
Camus acclaimed this Baudelairean kind of heraldry but there
were less conspicuous and less dramatic instances arising not so
much from despair as from hope - as we have seen in the case of
Pater. Yeats provides us with another example: growing up, as he
says, in 'the last phase of Pre-Raphaelitism' he displays many
similarities with Wilde, who profoundly affected him in 1888 with
his essay 'The Decay of Lying' and the way in which he presented
the younger man with a scheme of masks - 'I think a man should
invent his own myth'. 131
Yeats turned this to advantage in mastering the art of symbolism
because in fact he succeeded in reconciling, at least in later
life, antinomies of violence/civilisation, words/action, physicaV
metaphysical, personaVperennial which he summed up in
'Vacillations'. As MacNeice puts it in his masterly study of Yeats 'It
is easy to be Irish/It is difficult to be Irish'. 132 Yeats resolved this by
applying the formula 'We make out of the quarrel with others,
rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry'. 133
The English Renaissance 1840--95 77
As we shall see in Chapters 3 and 4, these quarrels intensified as

the social and political problems themselves became more bizarre. It
was not until 1928, with the publication of The Tower, that Yeats
emerged, at the age of 63, as a voice for the younger generation of
poets.
Although it took Yeats 40 years to resolve the conflicting claims
and identities of mask, symbol and allegory, he was already at the
turn of the century offering in prose some indication of how his own
'Heraldic Universe' would be ordered. In 'The Symbolism of Poetry'
(1900) he says
We would seek out those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms

which are the embodiment of the imagination, that neither
desires nor hates, because it has done with time, and only wishes to
gaze upon some reality, some beauty [my emphasis]. 134
Denis Donoghue reaches the heart of Yeats's success with

symbolism when he suggests 'even if we continue to think of
symbols as nouns, we think of symbolism as a verb, a rival act of
creation which subverts the original one'. 135 Yeats, in fact, creates a
living symbol, one with its own momentum and motivation, from
the conjunction of two paradigms, which may be opposite or
antinomial or at least of different qualitative natures. At the point of
intersection, as Donoghue explains in the essay from which I have
quoted, we experience something quite unknown to either quality
which exists in time-space. At this 'still point of the turning world'
time and space become unreal, in the reality of this particular
beauty.
That Yeats inherited this from Pater will be clear from the earlier
part of this chapter; its derivation from Mallarme who wrote
'instituer une relation entre les images exacte, et que s' en detache un
tiers aspect fusible et clair presente a Ia divination' 136 is also evident.
As Donoghue says Yeats sought 'a dynamic relation between time
and timelessness' in which 'the imagination mediates between the
two worlds because it has the rights of a citizen in each'. 137 I stress
Yeats's role in this genealogy of modern aesthetics because it is an
early indication of the time-theories which were to fascinate Durrell:
the correlation between Yeats's 'because it has done with time' and
Durrell's 'I am ... destroying time' will be obvious. Yeats offers
a way of constructing a quincunx, the fifth province in which
antinomies are resolved which, as I have demonstrated
elsewhere, 138 Durrell reflects, albeit unconsciously, both in the

general terms of his writing and explicitly in 'The Avignon Quintet'.
Moreover Yeats in 1928 was able to resolve more than the
contemporary dilemma of young poets such as Spender, Au den and
Isherwood. He represented a generation which had experienced the
1890s, had inherited both Pre-Raphaelitism and French decadence
and, unlike Wilde, had survived it. If Yeats, even in old age, could
write like Wilde, 139 he also paved the way for Beckett - the 'last
romantics' were also the first modernists.
Wilde of course represented a cul-de-sac at the time of his
downfall simply because it put a temporary stop to the self-assertion
of aesthetic behaviour in the public domain. Yeats and his close
associate in the period 1895-1899, Arthur Symons, found it difficult
to avoid this cul-de-sac: wallowing in the inconsistencies of the
Celtic Twilight, the competing claims of symbolism and decadence,
the interconnections of life and work of the poets of the Rhymers
Club, such as Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, all made the
chances of forging a new style and persona from the welter of
available heritage that much more difficult. It was the same
difficulty which in their various ways Nin, Miller and Durrell
encountered in their similar circumstances thirty years later.
But Yeats for some astonishing reason fails to become spectacular.
He blows no trumpets, offends no moral code, transgresses no laws,
and yet implicit in all his work there is the throwing down of a
gauntlet, a muted championing of the heraldic in others. His
creation of new literatures in the 'Anglo-Irish' drama of Synge and
the Euro-Japanese of Pound are Yeats's curious achievements. An
example of this muteness can be seen in the transition, from 1893 to
1899, of Symons's seminal work on modern poetry, which began at
the earlier date as an essay entitled 'The Decadent Movement in
Literature1140 and was completed under Yeats's influence in the
latter year as a book entitled The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
The attitude to decadence itself provides the key to the power of
artists to identify, as we saw in the case of Baudelaire, the sickness in
society. As Suzanne Nalbantian says, 'decadence is a dynamic
narrative recording process of change rather than a static designation
of a state'. 141 In closing this narrative of the period 1840-95 we are
concerned with the reactions of Symons- and, by implication, Yeats
-to Wilde and one of his predecessors, Huysmans. (Not only was
Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans' A Rebours, a model for Wilde's
Dorian Gray; he also makes an appearance in Yeats's Rosa

Alchemica. 142)
In 1899, in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Symons
repudiated his earlier (1892) essay on Huysmans. 143 Moreover he
attempted to jettison the concept of 'decadence' (which he had
earlier championed) in favour of symbolism, suggesting that
decadence was an external quality as distinct from the internal
significance of symbolism. In 1893 Symons had written:
Both Impressionism and Symbolism convey some notion of

that new kind of literature which is perhaps more broadly
characterized by the word Decadence. 144
He called decadence:
an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an

over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and
moral perversity ... interesting, beautiful, novel ... a new and
beautiful and interesting disease. Healthy we cannot call it; and
healthy it does not wish to be considered. 145
He also identifies it as 'unreason of the soul, . . . unstable

equilibrium ... maladie fin de siecle' and argues that it is a natural
state of over-civilised society:
For its very disease of form, this literature is certainly typical of a

civilization grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for
the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or
in conduct. It reflects all the moods, all the manners, of a
sophisticated society; its very artificiality is a way of being true to
nature. 146
But Symons also recognises that this leads to new departures: he

sees Goncourt (and also Verlaine)
inventing absolutely a new way of saying things, to correspond

with that new way of seeing things which he has found. 147
We encounter this in Eliot and Pound and Lewis, and later Henry
Miller who wanted to forge a new language, a new syntax; while in
the idea of 'over-inquiry' and 'the relief of action' we see the advent
of psychology and the idea of war as a necessary blood-letting of a
morbid and effete culture.
In 1893 Symons sums up the psychic vacillation of Huysmans'
creation by saying:
In the sensations and ideas of Des Esseintes we see the sensations

and ideas of the effeminate, over civilized, deliberately abnormal
creature who is the last product of our society: partly the father,
partly the offspring, of the perverse art that he admires. 148
A year previously, in the repudiated essay referred to, Symons

admired Huysmans insofar that
It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the

intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of
the sublime, into the very expression of his disgust. 149
Perhaps the realisation of life as 'a matter of nerves-1 50 sets the tone
of Symons's genuine admiration for Huysmans, whom he then
abandons as too dangerous an influence. Could it be that the
Huysmans whom in 1892 he hails as the 'discoverer' of Odilon
Redon ('no literary artist since Baudelaire has made so valuable a
contribution to art criticism') is regarded differently, simply as 'a
pessimist whose philosophy is mere sensation', 151 because the
critical perspective has changed in the intervening seven years? In
1892 it was possible to admire Huysmans because 'no one before
him [although we should except Baudelaire] had ever so realised the
perverse charm of the sordid, the perverse charm of the artificial' ;152
in 1899 the whole subject of decadence has become 'a straying aside
from the main road of literature'. 153
The change is substantially, but not entirely, due to the caution
enforced on critics by the fall of Wilde. Certainly in the instance of
Yeats, who significantly influenced the course of Symons's
approach to symbolism, the Wilde case seems to have held no
intimidation. Yeats was able both to take a relatively humorous view
of the affair 154 and to continue championing Wilde within the
complex scheme of his psychic universe. 155 The change must
therefore lie in the discovery of Symbolism itself. Symons says, after
his dismissal of decadence, that in Symbolism
art returns to the one pathway, leading through beautiful things

to the eternal beauty . . . perfecting form that form may be
annihilated. 156
He calls it:
an attempt to spiritualise literature, to evade the old bondage of

rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority. 157
(We can see here Yeats's influence in still resisting the 'quarrel with
others' which results in rhetoric, as opposed to the 'quarrel with
ourselves' which leads to poetry.)
Huysmans is not the only casualty in Symons's change of
direction. Gerard de Nerval, as we might expect, is also rejected as a
guide to the future because 'the tragedy of his life lay in the vain
endeavour to hold back the irresistible empire of the unseen, which
it was the joy of his life to summon about him . . . . Graceful and
elegant when he is sane, but only inspired, only really wise,
passionate, collected, only really master of himself, when he is
insane'. 158 (It is interesting to note Nabokov' s comment in his
lectures on Don Quixote: 'as a thinker Cervantes's mind is both
directed and shackled by the classical and academic ideas of his age.
As a creator, he enjoys the freedom of genius'. 159)
It may seem astonishing that in 1893 Symons could include
Henley among the important decadents of the age. Comparing
Henley's London Volunteers to the work of Whistler he says:
He has written verse that is exquisitely frivolous, daintily

capricious, wayward and fugitive as the winged remembrance of
some momentary delight.
Henley is
nearer than any other English singer to the ideal of the Decadence:
to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul. 160
He thus ranks among Goncourt, Huysmans, Verlaine, Maeterlinck,

d' Annunzio, Ibsen. But this need not astonish us when we discover
that Durrell, too, finds something admirable among the writers
today commonly identified as the anti-decadents.
Durrell, who in his early childhood in India was frequently

treated to recitations of Kipling's Il 61 and who unequivocally
admires Kim, 162 noted three influences on the poetry of the 1890s:
firstly, the imperial, 'a conviction that the English mystique was built
upon chivalry and a taste for adventure', secondly, the symbolists
and decadents, and thirdly the ironists, among whom he numbers
Housman and Hardy. 163 Of Kipling he says,
The virtues and attitudes which Kipling extolled were, in their

own kind, deserving ones. There is a magnificent barbarism about
the Victorian period which reminds me of the age of Elizabeth; a
certainty and directness of principle which was touching and
uplifting. 164
Durrell's view of the decadents is instructive because it reveals his

distaste for the' gentlemanly' code which has become divorced from
the 'manly', as if 'gentleness' betokens impotence. As a pre-echo of
Durrell's genocidal attack on English letters, I offer his summing up
of the decadents:
For the most part the poetry of the nineties rings hollow today.
The truth is perhaps that the English poet tends to suffer from a
deficit of sexual and emotional experience. His life is not raw
enough. He is sealed up among the prohibitions and anxieties of a
puritan culture and this makes it difficult for him to react to real
experience. Baudelaire's subject-matter, despite its garish
presentation, is always real experience, real anxiety. His writing
connects with his life at all points, while his dandyism is a genuine
expression of both. 165 . • • This must be compared with the
decadents whose dandyism as a code of behaviour could only
offer a watery hedonism to put against their gentlemanly world-
weariness. 166
The reaction to this world-weariness will be examined in Chapter 4

in the literature of the 'golden age' or the 'secret garden' in which the
children of the decadence refused to grow up.
3
Vortex: 1895-1920
I've had too many fathers ... and I am not sure if not too many
mothers
Nina Bursanov in Gerhardie's Futility 1
I LE THEATRE DE LA MERDE
The period I am now attempting to describe, through the

characteristic of roguery, and the metaphor of the vortex, is
bedevilled by the continuing problem of decadence. The figures of
Baudelaire and Wilde dominate the imagination, psychology and
behaviour of succeeding generations. Camus and Sartre, for
example, find it necessary to re-examine Baudelaire's legacy, while
Wilde emerges, in the view of critics and artists, as a central figure in
the development of aestheticism. This should give us the clue as to
the difference between decadence and degeneration, since it is the
prospect of regeneration from the flowers of evil which explains the
compelling interest in Baudelaire on the part of modern society. A
society as yet bewildered by the failure of the world to come to an
end (despite climactic events such as the trials of Dreyfus and Wilde,
the first world war and the publication of The Waste Land) is likely to
find points of contact with the 'modern' figures of previous ages
whose problems had been equally apocalyptic. The world after 1900
was perhaps better equipped to recognise the significance of
Baudelaire's work since it had access to psychological insights
which were not so obviously available previously, when interest in
the literature of sex had been regarded as simply dangerous,
morally and socially reprehensible.
Of the three great decadent plays produced in the years 1894, 1895
and 1896, Axel celebrated the apotheosis of symbolism; The
Importance of Being Earnest, (like Durrell's Black Book, a 'savage sketch
of etiolation') heralded the English death; but the third, Alfred
Jarry's Ubu Roi, premiered in Paris on 10 December 1896 by

Lugne-Poe (who also presented Salome in 1897), marks the birth of a

new literature, which I have called 'le theatre de la merde'.
Jarry was one of the first to decide that the world needed a new
way of expressing its changing circumstances. He ushers in a new
age with the first word, the opening declaration of Ubu Roi: 'Shit!' He
wants to create a vortex, a whirlpool to flush through the outworn
system of manners, mind and morals, and he goes about it in a
roguish way. He also provided it with a new country, a new
imaginative realm called 'Poland'- an ironic annexation of a land
which had become the plaything of nineteenth-century diplomacy.
And in his novel Le Surmale Jarry deals with the future; where
Nietzche's and Wagner's supermen had still celebrated the gods,
their twilight and their death, Jarry's assess the ubiquitous machine
of the mass age, the bicycle.
Above all, Jarry encompasses that other recurring problem of the
transition from mediaeval to modern, the question of appearances.
Everything about Ubu is false, and yet the spectacle of Ubu is true.
Ubu fails as an entity in all his relations with the world and in all his
statements about the world, but he succeeds in persuading us that
he himself is. We are entering the period ushered in by Wilde's
Intentions when authors will examine themselves as ego and id, in
autobiography or in speculative dialogue with a 'self', such as
Yeats's 'Ego Dominus Tuus', Nin's diaries or Durrell's
'Conversations with Brother Ass'. 2 We are already well placed in the
universe in which Rimbaud, who asks that we be 'absolutely
modern', declares ']e est un autre'.
Whereas the dandy conceals, the herald proclaims: Jarry the
herald stands at a long crossroads in time-space. Cyril Connolly
called him 'the Santa Claus of the Atomic Age'. 3 Jarry is both a
mediaevalist and a Surrealist. His blazonry enables him to carry the
banner of his theory of 'pataphysics' into the theatre: 'pataphysics'
itself then emerges as a novel and incisive way of looking at the
world in the machine age. It is not known exactly how Jarry chose
the term 'pataphysics' but he said somewhat ambiguously that its
etymological spelling should be' t::ra (jtt:ra ra (jlvmxa) and in actual
orthography 'pataphysics'. 4 (Jarry might have known sufficient
Greek to say that his new term was derived from the Greek verb
narayt:w, to chatter, or clap hands, or beat drums, or gnash teeth; or
from the noun for 'chatter' or 'clatter', narayo~; or the word for an
impostor or mischief-maker, narwxtwv- all suitable sources for the
Ubuesque culture he proclaimed. But he didn't.) He said that
Vortex: 1895-1920 85
pataphysics 'will describe a universe which can be - and perhaps

should be - envisaged in the place of the traditional one . . . the
science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the
properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their
lineaments', 5 while in the same place he elaborates on the identity of
opposites under the heading Gsar-Antechrist, 6 an idea which Yeats,
under Wilde's guidance, was developing simultaneously.
Yeats recorded after attending the premiere of Ubu Roi 'I am very
sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once
more. I say, after S. Mallarme, after Verlaine, after G. Moreau, after
Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after the faint mixed tints
of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God'. 7 Pere
Ubu is the first father figure on the modern stage to be made not only
ridiculous but also dangerous, to be used as a basis for an
antithetical philosophy. We do not see any children in the Ubu
plays: Ubu is more an enfant terrible than a pere terrible, but that is
part of Jarry's upside-down plan to expose the senior part of society,
that which causes wars, extorts tax, murders, lies, steals, converts
the truth, but which succeeds in maintaining an irrational grip on
reality and on survival. Twenty years later Eliot, while he was
preparing the ground for his first major published work (Prufrock),
was exploring the various avenues of sensuality and belief,
including an epic on which he continued to work for many years,
'King Bolo and His Great Black Queen', which, Peter Ackroyd tells
us 8 involves 'the minutiae of Bolovian theology and religious
practice, with its fundamentalists and its modernists' besides a
considerable degree of obscenity. As Peter Ackroyd says of him at
this time (1912) he is both 'philosopher and dandy'. 9 I think we can
see in this type of imaginative writing a conscious attempt to make
sense not so much of this world (the world of the fathers) but of the
next, the world of the future, so that a response can be made to the
world of the fathers. It is in this respect a realistic attempt, because
although one may be located imaginatively in the future, one
remains rooted culturally in the past.
A further development is of course the emergence of ego-ism in
its full flowering - the declaration of the republic of the ego,
repudiating all earlier colonisations, all paternity, all inherited
authority which might legitimate its actions. But as Ackroyd
observes of Eliot at the turn of the century (in tones reminiscent of
his remark on Wilde already quoted) 'there are perhaps intimations
here of the suffering of a young man who felt himself to stand apart,
who cried out 'I! I! I!' without yet understanding the meaning of that
cry'.1o
Jarry's 'pataphysics' sums up all the -isms of the next twenty
years. His novel Les Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll,
Pataphysicien (written in 1898 but not published untill911) explains
pataphysics as the 'science of imaginary solutions' which examines
'the laws governing exceptions' and explains 'the universe
supplementary to this one'. The provenance is obvious: besides
anything he may have learned from Baudelaire or Villiers de Lisle
Adam, this philosophy or science is the answer to Wilde's
exceptional antinomianism, calling into existence the new world in
which aesthetics takes the place of ethics. 11 'It will never be so, and
so I look forward to it', Wilde had said. 12 (This is reminiscent of the
universe nevrose of Goncourt and Huysmans.) In answer to that
world Jarry emphatically sweeps in with a land 'beyond
metaphysics'.
Ubu says 'le mauvais droit ne vaut-il pas le bon?' ('Isn't injustice
just as good as justice?') 13 and he proves it. 'Tu massacres tout le
monde' ('You're butchering the whole world'), 14 Ma Ubu tells him,
while in Ubu Cocu he retorts, with the same self-defeating but logical
rubbish that we will find in Wyndham Lewis's Arghol, 'Nous
pensons que cocuage implique mariage, done que le mariage sans
cocuage n'est point valable' ('We are of the opinion that cuckolding
implies marriage and therefore a marriage without cuckoldry has no
validity'). 15 Finally in Ubu Enchaine the free-wilVdestiny argument is
brought to its 'logical' or absurd conclusion: 'L'indiscipline aveugle
et de tous les instants fait Ia force principale des hommes libres'
('Blind and unwavering indiscipline at all times constitutes the real
strength of all free men'). 16 'C' est ainsi que nous nous rencontrons
comme par hasard tous les jours pour desobeir ensemble, de telle
heure a telle heure' ('so that's why we keep meeting by accident
every morning - so that we can all disobey together as regular as
clockwork'). 17 Barbara Wright says:
One senses in Faustroll the search for a new reality, a stupendous

effort to create out of the ruins Ubu had left behind a new system
of values- the world of Pataphysics. Beneath the double talk and
ellipsis, its formal definition seems to mean that the virtual or
imaginary nature of things as glimpsed by the heightened vision
of poetry or science or love can be seized as real. 18
Vortex: 1895-1920 87
And in his supermen Jarry places his heroes so far beyond mankind
that they become gods - thus paving the way for Durrell's
declamation in the Heraldic Universe, 'I am a man, I am an artist, I am
a god!' Jarry's hero in L'Amour Absolu (1899) is Emmanuel Dieu:
Barbara Wright notes that in Cesar-Antechrist (1895) 'he asserts that
one has to be God in order to be a man', while in L'Amour en Visites
(1898) he says 'man must amuse himself in the image of his creator.
God has amused himself savagely ever since he has been God, only
he isn't going to amuse himself much longer, because I am here. A
good God always dethrones another God'. 19
It becomes easy to see where Camus derives his admiration for
the dandy-as-revolutionary, or, as I have argued, herald-as-
revolutionary. And we can equally easily understand Yeats's
bewilderment because here Jarry is saying: Before us the Savage
God, now the Savage Ego. Yeats recognises, by implication, Jarry's
deicidal achievement of godhood.
Jarry can also, therefore, give the age of the machine and of
science its own credo; 'human capacities have no limits' says
Marceuil, the hero of Le Surmale. 20 It is possible to go beyond the
beyond, to overcome death, as the engineers prove in establishing
'the claim that the human mechanism was superior to the machine
over long distances' ;21 when one of the five cyclists in the perpetual
motion race dies, chained into position on the five-man-bicycle, the
event of death and of rigor mortis is overlooked, so that under the
badinage of 'friendly insults', 'Jacobs' death sprint was a sprint the
like of which the living cannot conceive'. 22 However, Le Surmale is
flawed by the climax, in which Marceuil himself becomes greater
than the machine, 'the first of a new race' 23 but, like Frankenstein's
monster, also becomes the victim of science's inability to keep faith
with its new metaphor: Marceuil is burned up on his own electric
fence, as so many of the 'heroes' threw their lives away against the
guns of war.
Marceuil bounded down the stairs . . . . The three men

understood how lamentably tragic can be a dog with a pot tied to
its tail. When they reached the steps, all they could see was a
grimacing, pain-racked silhouette rushing at superhuman speed
down the driveway, then grasping the gate with a grip of steel,
with no other purpose than to flee or struggle. 24
Something seemed to break in Winterbourne's head. He felt he

was going mad, and sprang to his feet. The line of bullets smashed
across his chest like a savage steel whip. The universe exploded
darkly into oblivion. 25
The first quotation is from the conclusion toLe Surmale, the second
from Aldington's Death of a Hero. Jarry's mediaeval-surrealism
makes him the medium, the passage-ritual, from the baroque
constructions of Huysmans to the savagery of Artaud. His distortion
of the Faust mythos places him culturally with Marceuil's and Des
Esseintes' ancestors26 but his modernism - the recognition of
Marceuil, 'the beast' within himsel£' 27 -locates him in the society of
those who were waiting for some healthy blood-letting, an agon.
Symons, like Yeats (and no doubt influenced by Yeats) expresses
bewilderment in his essay on Jarry (written in 1898):
A generation which has exhausted every intoxicant, every soluble

preparation of the artificial, may well seek a last sensation in the
wire-pulled passions, the wooden faces of marionettes, and, by a
further illusion, of marionettes who are living people. There one
sees, truly, the excuse, the occasion, for an immense satire, a
Swiftian or Rabelaisian parody of the world. . .. Ubu Roi is the
gesticulation of a young savage of the woods, and it is his manner
of expressing his disapproval of civilisation . . . . Just as the
seeker after pleasure whom pleasure has exhausted, so the seeker
after the material illusions of literary artifice, turns finally to that
first, subjugated, never quite exterminated, element of cruelty
which is the brutality out of which we have achieved civilisation,
and those painted, massacring puppets the destroying elements
which are as old as the world, and which we can never chase out
of the system of natural things. 28
I have cited Symons at length because he epitomises the failure of

the dandy-decadent to recognise the world whichJarry had created.
It might seem astonishing that Jarry could have conceived the
physical properties of his superman (just as Forster's conception
of the electronic cellular world of 'The Machine Stops' seems a
remarkable prescience for its time, 1908) but this is because we look
to those physical properties rather than the metaphysical, or
'pataphysical', concept of beyond ness which annihilates the known
world with a single word. 'Shit' is both a description and a
valediction. (Durrell will later call it 'the pregnant and magnificent
Vortex: 1895-1920 89
word - the summa of all despair', 29 and in The Black Book he speaks
of 'complex, inhibition, fetish, trauma - the whole merde-ridden
terminology of the new psychology.' 30) And as Tzara was to declare
in Zurich in 1916:
DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses,

it's still shit but from now on we want to shit in different colours so
as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of the consulates. 31
It is part of my contention in plotting the heraldic assassination of

the dandy that the 'necessary war' of European states - which
become a 'world war', the 'war to end wars'- is exactly paralleled by
a conflict in art. Although these two conflicts touch, and while the
language used to promote artistic revolutions displays the same
jingoism as the political and military, they were independent
developments, with the same origin in the uneasy relationship
between art and society which we have traced back at least to
1845-48, and which had already erupted in the prosecutions of
Baudelaire and Wilde and the protests at the production of Ubu Roi.
Thus it was possible for Tzara to write in early 1918 in the manner of
a communard, in the second Dada manifesto:
Every page should explode, either because of its profound

gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness, eternity, or because of its
staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its
typography. On the one hand there is a world tottering in its
flight, linked to the resounding tinkle of the infernal gamut; on
the other hand, there are the new men. Uncouth, galloping,
riding astride on hiccups. And there is a mutilated world, and
literary medicasters in desperate need of amelioration. 32
When Symons refers to sensation-seeking and 'the system of

natural things' he is dearly limited in his understanding of
contemporary events by a fin-de-siecle, fin-du-monde mentality, a
conservative vision of the end of civilisation. His 'criticism' marks
the end of the nineteenth century as surely as Jarry himself utters
the battle cry of the twentieth. On the revolutionary side this is
matched by a nihilistic view of the necessity of destruction.
Mayakovsky says 'I write nihil on anything that has been done
before' 33 and immediately begins to build a new cathedral because
he is in the avant-garde of a new religion. Tzara says:
I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social

organisation: to sow demoralisation everywhere and throw
heaven's hand into hell, hell's eyes into heaven, to reinstate the
fertile wheel of a universal circus in the Powers of reality, and the
fantasy of every individual . . . . Every man must shout: there is
great destructive, negative work to be done. To sweep, to clean.
The cleanliness of the individual materialises after we've gone
through folly, the aggressive, complete folly of a world left in the
hands of bandits who have demolished and destroyed the
centuries. With neither aim nor plan, without organisation:
uncontrollable folly, decomposition. 34
It is not simply that he should have said this: it is the inheritance of

the aesthete accumulated with compound interest over half a
century. Nor is it surprising that so many individuals, singly and
collectively, in 'movements' such as vorticism, futurism, dadaism,
surrealism and imagism, were saying the same thing. As we shall
see, Wyndham Lewis was simultaneously 'blasting and
bombardiering' in almost identical messages. But it is remarkable
that so few contemporary commentators recognised that in the
destructive elements there was inevitably the seed of reconstruction,
that what was totally new reflected the total novelty of previous
avant-gardes.
This incomprehension was due mainly to the simple fact that each
of the participants- or protagonists- in this holy war for the survival
of aesthetics believed that he, and he only, had the true gospel of art
for the modern world. A situation as complicated as the competing
claims of the disparate bands of early crusaders to liberate the Holy
Sepulchre characterises the issuing of manifestos and broadsides.
Vorticists, surrealists, futurists, imagists and dadaists produced
manifestos which we can today see as sharing a common descent
from Jarry's pataphysics but which viciously condemned each
other, repudiated the influence of genealogy, and displayed all the
aggression and lack of clear purpose which the waning European
nations tried to formalise in their actual killing, redrawing of
boundaries, and suppression of national cultures.
To the aesthete who wanted so completely to be rid of his
inheritance that he was prepared not only to kill aesthetics but to
deny the name of aesthete (who saw in Wilde, for example, the
degeneracy of mind which the generals of the world war were to
display in their moral disregard for the lives of masses) the idea of a
Vortex: 1895-1920 91
descent from Pater, Ruskin or Arnold, or of continuing their

'tradition', would have been the ultimate insult to his already
degraded humanity. The freedom of conscience in aesthetics, and
the concomitant freedom of society and its politics, had been proved
a prison- European youth was locked into a morbidity which could
only be corrected by wholesale destruction.
Perhaps we can only appreciate this now with the advantage of
hindsight. That perspective, for example, demonstrates the
development of Durrell's 'inner landscape' over half a century of his
writing, from Pied Piper of Lovers to 'The Avignon Quintet'. In that
period yet another cycle seems to have turned, with another world
war, a 'war for civilisation' which was also a 'war against
civilisation'; a United Nations where previously there had been a
League of Nations; a new 'counter-culture' (in Roszak's terms
'beyond the waste land' 35 and in Lasch's terms a new 'culture of
narcissism' 36). But the world's own world-weariness is cyclic -
while the 'great war' may have been an attempt to satisfy the
'mysterious need' the continuing world war in which we are all now
engaged proves that the need can never be satisfied. As a minor
character in Mountolive suggests of Germany in 1939 'the only hope'
was the destruction of the 'dark angels which hovered over the
European subconscious . . . . So pleasing to a part of the mind is
the prospect of total destruction' 37 Durrell adds. The war was not, as
one might hope 'the end of the so-called civilized world' as he
discovers in Clea, the post-war volume of the Quartet: 'it was to be as
always simply the end of kindness and safety and moderate ways;
the end of the artist's hopes, of nonchalance, of joy'. 38 It seems to us,
therefore, that to be 'absolutely modern' is to conform absolutely to
type. 'Poland' as a patria for a homeless state of mind can become
'China' for Henry Miller or 'Byzantium' for Yeats; 'psychology' is
modernism's tool after the 'age of Reason'. We are still treading shit
in our drug culture and our street-riots as they did in the Dada
manifestos and the trenches of the Somme.
Miguel de Unamuno was one of the few contemporary writers to
see clearly what was happening: the final chapter of his Tragic Sense
of Life (1913) entitled 'Don Quixote To-day' asserts that 'the
individual is the end of the Universe' 39 and that 'Quixotism is
simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance'. 40 'The real Don Quixote', Unamuno
pointed out,
'continues to invite us to make ourselves ridiculous. 41 • . . The

greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people,
can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how
to make oneself ridiculous, and not to shrink from the ridiculeY
That identification of the individual was the hallmark of the modern

age, but it was in itself nothing new: the idea that the only reality is
the uniqueness of the ego-individual is found in Max Stirner's Der
Einzige und sein Eigentum ('The Ego and his own') of 1844, which was
'rediscovered' in 1898 and went through 49 editions in the next
thirty years. 43 This, as I have already noted, involved not only a new
way of looking at the individual's relationship with the world, but
also the evolution of the Ego's knowledge of the Id, the I/Not I
relationship. M. H. Levenson refers to 'the progressive centrality of
self as a register of meanings . . . and the dependence on
consciousness as the repository of value'. 44 For this a new language
was required, a new syntax to achieve the translation of consciousness
into meaning (or of myth into narrative).
I believe that the reason for the 'difficulty' that this period
presents to us, even with our perspective, is the fact that while this
psychological understanding was taking place there was a
simultaneous rejection of decadent aestheticism. The most severe
example of this rejection is Cyril Wilde's repudiation of his own
father, which resulted in his death in the British trenches in 1917:
I became obsessed with the idea that I must retrieve what had
been lost . . . . All these years my great incentive has been to
wipe away that stain; to retrieve, if may be, by some action of
mine, a name no longer honoured in the land . . . . First and
foremost, I must be a man. There was to be no cry of decadent
artist, of effeminate aesthete, of weak-kneed degenerate . . . . I
was no wild, passionate, irresponsible hero. I live by thought, not
by emotion. 45
Conversely, and ironically, the next generation embraced the

lessons of the nineties. As Arthur Balfour said in his lecture on
decadence in 1907, 'all great social forces are not merely capable of
perversion, they are constantly perverted' 46 and 'we cannot regard
decadence and arrested development as less normal in human
communities than progress'. 47 But the age in which he spoke was, in
the uncertain years before the war, in a state of psychological
Vortex: 1895-1920 93
alienation, which, as Marx had earlier said, was 'caused by a process

of social degeneration, an ineluctable crisis of a society at once
unable to die or to renew itself'. 48
Meanwhile Eliot, noting that 'the 'nineties are nearer to us (1927]
than the intervening [literary] generations', 49 stressed the relevance
of Baudelaire for his own time:
The important fact about Baudelaire is that he was essentially a

Christian, born out of his due time, and a classicist, born out of his
due time . . . . Baudelaire came to attain the greatest, the most
difficult, of the Christian virtues, the virtue of humility. 50
We must not forget that Eliot is here going against the stream of
twentieth-century decadence, in the sense that he is arguing from
the standpoint of the author not so much of The Waste Land but of The
Sacred Wood and Ash Wednesday. Both Yeats and Eliot attempted-
Eliot with much greater success - to establish a new system of
contemporary culture to take the place of the inherited system
which was demonstrably unsatisfactory. Yeats sought this unity of
feeling inside himself, raping the external world in order to forge a
perennial culture and saying, with terrible, realistic reservation,
'Never give all the heart'. 51 Eliot, despite the labile tendency of mere
words sought, and found, his solution in the precepts and practices
of orthodox religion as celebrated in the incantations of his new
poetry.
But Eliot's (and indeed Yeats's) attitude towards continuity is the
counter-balance to the nihilism and repudiation of the past which
we have noted. Ultimately Eliot and Yeats find some form of
acceptance within the general trend towards modernism in art. In
Yeats's case, as we have seen, it was not until1928 that the younger
poets- those who became 'the poets of the thirties'- found anything
helpful to them, symbols for their predicament. In Eliot's case it was
probably not until the completion of Four Quartets in 1942 that the
challenges he had initiated with Prufrock and The Waste Land found
any satisfying resolution.
The important point to note here is that the vortex we are
discussing exhibits two parallel trends- those who heraldically and
unerringly strike out with the new, the unprecedented, such as
Jarry and those to whom the individual talent has a perceived and
vital base in tradition, such as Yeats, Pound, Proust and even Joyce.
This is not to say that these latter figures did not contribute to that
heraldry and in some cases impersonate it - Joyce of course

provided it with a new way of describing both ideas and experience,
a contribution to that new language. But there is a distinction
between those who used, or developed from, established, inherited
forms, and those whose invention was a novelty which appears to
be entirely out of context, out of its time. I therefore place Joyce in
the 'traditional' camp because his work represents a progression
from the narrative treatment of psychology in Dubliners and The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the new syntax of myth in
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; whereas all of Jarry's work is new,
unrelated to time or place.
The distinction is important because it gives us one indication
of the reasons for the artistic and psychological war which
accompanied the political and military: where Wilde had thrown the
relationship of art and politics into high relief, the theatre de la merde
forced artists to reconsider the purpose of civilisation itself. It
succeeded in differentiating those like Symons who intended to go
on with established aesthetic mores, from those like Jarry who
simply discounted those mores, and were prepared to usher in the
'fantasia of the unconscious' 52 which was inevitably free from such
distinctions as 'good' and 'evil'. It made war necessary.
II A NECESSARY WAR
'When a great war or great revolution breaks out, it is because a great

people, a great race needs to break out, because it has had enough,
particularly enough of peace' wrote Charles Peguy in 1910. 'It
always means that a great mass feels and experiences a violent need,
a mysterious need for a great movement'. 53 In the case of both the
European war (eventually the world war) and the artistic conflicts of
the early twentieth century the cause, the 'mysterious need', is to be
found in European and American unease with the problems of
illusion, dis-illusion and the explanation of behaviour.
Failing to reconcile its need for progress with the kind of progress
which had been initiated by the father-figures; failing to come to
terms with the intellectual and spiritual heritage which it saw as
dishonest and empirically suspect; puzzled therefore by the role of
history itself; frightened by its inability to recognise, accept or
render due service to the 'primordial images of the human psyche'
to which psychology was beginning to draw attention; dismayed by
Vortex: 1895-1920 95
the disparity between the emotions felt towards the future and the
intellect with which it perceived the past; unable to express itself
with clarity in a language and syntax which no longer matched the
landscape of fact; 54 oppressed by the increasing intervention of the
State into social life which was at odds with the expression of
individual liberty; lost in the noise and impersonality of the machine
age- youth felt that it had to test itself, the father-figures, the whole
of civilised tradition, time, space and mind, in the agon of war.
In Blast 2 (July 1915) the death in action of the sculptor
Gaudier-Brzeska was announced, together with his final letter from
the trenches: 'This war is a great remedy. In the individual it kills
arrogance, self-esteem, pride'. The parallel trends I discussed at the
close of the preceding section in fact enabled the first world war to
take place since it depended on 'a spirit that combined respect for
authority with the cult of spontaneous creation'. 55 Action was a
resolution in itself: 'better that war should come, than to go on with
this perpetual waiting'. 56 Not everyone agreed: the enigmatic
Rupert Brooke, in 1911, believed that the Ballets russes 'if anything,
can redeem our civilization'. 57 But this was hardly a serious point
of view; Wyndham Lewis, for example, despite his 'Blast first
England' 58 rejected both the indigenous and the exotic unless it
satisfied the needs of a hungry generation of artists, and its greatest
need seemed to be for conflict.
Rennato Poggioli, in his study of the avant-garde, describes
agonism as an extension of 'the tragic sense of life':
derived from the modern historical pathos, it represents the

deepest psychological motivation not only behind the decadent
movement, but also behind the general currents culminating in
that particular movement and not exhausted by it, since they were
destined to outlive decadence and reach back in time to
romanticism itself . . . . Agonism means sacrifice and
consecration; an hyperbolic passion, a bow bent towards the
impossible, a paradoxical and positive form of spiritual defeatism
... a sacrifice to the Moloch of historicism. 59
This helps us to make sense of Rimbaud' s injunction to be

'absolutely modern' - conquering time through time, reaching
beyond time in order to contain, and be contained by, new
experience. The inevitability of 'progress'- the mere happening of
history- therefore forces change upon us: we sacrifice ourselves to
history which betrays us, makes us pathetic, gives us that 'tragic

sense of life' which Yeats considers is our raison d' etre and our
salvation. It is in this sense that Durrell has perceived the artist as
saint.
If we see art as the manhandler of our sensibilities, the creator of
its age, then we see history as art: our agon, therefore, is to come to
terms with ourselves as part of the total correspondence of the
universe, because the only other way out is the explosion into
oblivion. Artists therefore had no alternative but to describe the
world in terms of machines, noise, chaos, interior monologue,
because anything else would have been arebours, against the age.
The development of individualism, then, has to be seen in the
same paradoxical way as rehearsed by Wilde in The Soul ofMan under
Socialism. As Barres, the author of the 'ideological' trilogy Le Culte du
Moi 60 emphasises, the self is not autonomous and isolated but part
of a larger whole. 'Enlightened individualism must transcend
self'. 61 This is paradoxical because the individual, as a behaving
being and as an isolated subject of study, needs, and attracts,
society, while he rejects and repels restrictions to his freedom. From
such conflict, therefore, we can deduce that European (and
American) youth in the early twentieth century had lost the ability to
make the necessary adjustments between emotion and intellect
which social stability requires.
To be modern therefore meant both to be in the vanguard of one's
age and to be a danger to that age. As Hugo von Hofmannsthal said,
modernism meant both 'analysis of life' and 'escape from life'. 62
Russell, Wittgenstein, Saussure, came to see logic as displacing
reason, as sociology replaced political science itself, and psychology
superseded metaphysics. Language, as 'a map of the mind', became
fragile and inadequate as experience expanded to meet the
possibilities now available. People lose their way, meaning is
fragmented, life seems to be the enemy of common culture, yet
culture itself is being massified into ignorant blocks of behaviour. As
Aragon wrote: 'Life is a language; writing is a completely different
one. Their grammars are not mutually interchangeable'. 63
While futurism declared that 'we will sing of great crowds
agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-coloured and
polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal
vibrations of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent
electric moons', the vorticists rejected this surrender to the machine-
age because of those non-interchangeable grammars. We are
Vortex: 1895-1920 97
therefore presented with the paradox that while one must surrender
to one's age, one cannot so easily translate experience of life into
artistic experience, cannot equate machine-song with a perception
of machines. It is thus that we achieve the ironies of the stone car
sculpted on the 'Levassor Monument' by Camille Lefebvre in Paris.
In another sense to be modem meant to be mediaeval. Freud, for
example, identified the aims of life - modem life - as honour,
power, wealth, fame, and the love of women. And the early years of
the twentieth century do indeed resemble a culmination of the
mediaeval spirit: chivalry, erotic and mystical love, the cult of youth,
asceticism, even the massification of society and culture and the
propagation of machine-age messages through a lingua franca of
modernism, have their parallel in the middle ages.
Much of the ground had been prepared by the' chivalric' literature
of the Malory revival, and by Henty, Marryat, Doyle, Rider
Haggard, and Buchan, in which the mediaeval courtly virtues of
both chivalry and love were promoted under the joint mantle of
gentility. In his study of anti-modernism in American society at the
tum of the twentieth century, K. Jackson Lears discusses the
ecstatic and ascetic elements in mediaeval society which he suggests
were also present in late nineteenth-century America. 64 He quotes a
psychiatrist in 1896 to the effect that 'men went mad in packs ... the
mediaeval man was in a state of light hypnosis' to which modem
man was also susceptible. One can obviously regard the
metaphysical notions of figures such as Jarry, Satie and Apollinaire
as a form of mediaeval askesis, union with the divine; and askesis also
offered an 'escape from life' which might cure the sickness of society
through the redemption of a crusade.
Human sacrifice was actually portrayed in art: man was subjected
to modem circumstances in the machine-age portraiture of
Vorticism and surrealism; and in cubism he was eliminated; in the
ballet, from which Brooke expected an indefinite redemption,
Stravinsky provided the post-Wagnerian world with Firebird (1910),
Petrushka (1911) and Le Sacre du Printemps (1912) which was not only
pagan but ritualistically destructive of humanity. Nietzsche's
'Insatiable as a flame, I burn and consume myself' seemed to sum
up Nijinsky's achievement in this ballet, as well as providing the
assassin of Sarajevo with his keynote. 65
Anarchism was not merely political terror and disorganisation: it
too was a response to much deeper needs than the merely
contemporary frustrations. Intellectual anarchism, as espoused by
Wilde, was part of the almost commonplace breakdown of

traditional authority. In fact Beatrice Webb divided society into As
(aristocrats, artists and anarchists) and Bs (benevolents, bourgeois
and bureaucrats). 66 The description of Vaillant, the anarchist
bomber, or his predecessor Ravachol, as 'a philanthropic murderer
who raged against mankind out of love' becomes an apt reflection
on the inability of 'progress' to alleviate suffering or oppression.
To be at war with authority and tradition therefore meant to be at
war with the past and of course with oneself. To kill the past was to
kill oneself. It is doubtful if the publication of Jung' s Modern Man in
Search of a Soul (1931) or Freud's Civilisation and its Discontents (1930)
at any earlier point would have done anything to avert the
intellectual and artistic blood-letting which transpired. The
contradiction of cultural continuity and intellectual secession made
it necessary to find some kind of agreed ground on which
civilisation could continue or simply to abandon civilisation
altogether: either to reconcile illusion and dis-illusion, mask and
non-mask, or to reverse the psychology on which the theory of
masks is based, to portray marionettes as Jarry does by means of
humans.
As Hesse wrote in Demian:
However strongly the world's attention appeared to be focused

on war and heroic deeds, on honour and other old ideals ... all
this was merely the surface . . . deep down, below the surface of
human affairs, something was in process of forming. Something
which might be a new order of humanity. 67
What that might be, we will now examine through the work of two
writers who immensely influenced Lawrence Durrell: Wyndham
Lewis and T. S. Eliot; Eliot because he was a visionary, Lewis
because he was a rogue.
III THE HERALD AS ENEMY
Percy Wyndham Lewis knew he was The Enemy but he was never
completely sure whose enemy he was: even in his 'play', Enemy of
the Stars, published in Blast 1 (1914), while he identifies the ultimate,
perhaps the only, crime against society as selfhood, it is unclear
whether or not he regards himselfas his own enemy. But 'Selfism', as
Vortex: 1895-1920 99
Durrell calls it, makes Wyndham Lewis important to us in our

present quest for Durrell's antecedents, particularly since he
provides a model for 'Percy Pursewarden', the 'enemy' in The
Alexandria Quartet.
Lewis as enemy was not in fact trying to replace one society with
another. Like Jarry he was in this respect a nihilist. Lewis has no
clear vision of the 'new order of humanity' but he knows that the
ground needs to be completely cleared so that no vestige of humbug
remains. Lewis argues not from the particular to the specific, as
world-builders do, but from one absolute to another. His plea is for
tenderness. In his demand for a vortex he will make himself the
principal sacrificial victim.
Moreover Lewis was resolute in his determination not to belong
to any one -ism, claiming that he was
partly communist and partly fascist, with a distinct streak of

monarchism in my marxism, but at bottom anarchist, with a
healthy passion for order. 68
The healthy passion for order was also a respectful passion: Lewis's
aim was 'to define the social and political conditions in which art as
he envisioned it could flourish' 69 and in this he came close to
satisfying Breton's surrealist requirement that one must 'avoid
considering a system of thought as a refuge'. 70
Lewis's lesson for Durrell will be clear from the 'Blast Manifesto',
written by Lewis and signed also by Aldington, Gaudier-Brzeska,
and Pound.
Blast first England. Curse its climate for sins and infections.
Dismal symbol . . . of effeminate lout within Victorian
Vampire . . . . Curse the flabby sky that can manufacture no
snow . . . . May some vulgarly invective but useful person, arise,
and restore to us the necessary BLIZZARDS . . . . Curse with
expletive of whirlwind the Brittanic Aesthete cream of the
snobbish earth rose of sharon of god-prig of simian vanity, sneak
and snot of the school-room .... Imbarb-Pedant, practical
joker, dandy, curate . . . . Curse snobbery (disease offemininity)
fear of ridicule (arch vice of inactive, sleepy) play, stylism, sins
and plagues of this lymphatic finished . . . vegetable
humanity . . . . Blast years 1837 to 1900. Curse abysmal
inexcusable middle-class (also Aristocracy and Proletariat). 71
Cursing also 'heavy stagnant pools of Saxon blood', 72 the second

Manifesto asserted 'the artist of the modern movement is a
savage'. 73
As the steppes and the rigours of the Russian winter, when the
peasant has to lie for weeks in his hut, produces that
extraordinary acuity of feeling and intelligence we associate with
the Slav; so England is just now the most favourable country for
the appearance of a great art. 74
As Marx had expected the communist revolution to take place in

England, so Lewis believed
a movement towards art and imagination could burst up here,

from this lump of compressed life, with more force than
anywhere else/5
but the first world war interrupted the blasting process by which
this might be achieved. Lewis himself is ambivalent on the question
of whether or not his artistic purpose had a political dimension. In
Wyndham Lewis the Artist (1939), in which he looked back at the
debut of vorticism, he recorded:
We all of us went over into the war, and lost our 'Vortex' in it.
When we came back into art out of life- desperate life- again, we
had no appetite for art-politics. 76
But in his autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering he said:
I might have been at the head of a social revolution, instead of

merely being the prophet of a new fashion in art. Really all this
organized disturbance was Art behaving as if it were Politics. But I
swear I did not know it. It may in fact have been politics. I see that
now. Indeed it must have been. 77
But the essence of Vorticism was to negate the effect of 'England':

'all English training', Lewis's Tarr asserts, in a foretaste of Durrell's
Death Gregory,
is a system of deadening feeling, a stoic prescription- a humorous

stoicism is the anglo-saxon philosophy. Many of the results are
Vortex: 1895-1920 101
excellent: it saves from gush in many cases, in times of crisis or

misfortune it is an excellent armour. The english soldier gets his
special cachet from that. But for the sake of this wonderful
panacea- english humour- the english sacrifice so much. It is the
price of empire, if you like. It would be better to face our
imagination and our nerves without this drug. And then once this
armature breaks down, the man underneath is found in many
cases to have become softened by it; he is subject to shock,
over-sensitiveness . . . our core is soft, because of course our skin
is so tough. To set against this, it is true you have the immense
reserves of delicacy, touchiness, sympathy, that this envelope of
cynicism has accumulated .... The time seems to have arrived
in my life, as I consider it has arrived in the life of the nation, to
discard this husk. I'm all for throwing off humour: life must be
met on other terms than those of fun and sport now. The time has
come. Otherwise - disaster!' 78
This was of course only one element of rejection, one which is highly
reminiscent of Jarry at his most cynical. Another, which brands
Lewis (and Vorticism) as an epicurean of the Paterian school is his
dismissal of time. Much critical bewilderment has been spent on
Lewis's relationship to the space-time concepts which developed
during this period: G. S. Fraser tells us at the beginning of his study
that Durrell was considerably influenced by Time and Western Man,
but fails to elaborate any further on this important point. 79
However, Lewis's attitudes to time are not hermetic and while Time
and Western Man is oblique and diffident, it is not a major philosophy
or even a history so much as a part of his blasting. The insistence is
on the now: 'we stand for the Reality of the Present - not for the
sentimental Future, or the sacripant Past'. 80
Time is both public (history past and future) and private
(fragmented, isolated, the present); life was public, art was private.
Therefore, the isolated private moment of now was the moment of
art in which life could not interfere but which would feed on life.
Life is the Past and the Future. The Present is Art .... There is
no Present- there is Past and Future, and there is Art . . . . The
Past and Future are the prostitutes Nature has provided. Art is
periodic escapes from this Brothel. 81
And the need for this 'brothel' is that the Past will 'mop up our
melancholy' while the Future can 'absorb our troublesome

optimism'. 82 The vortex is the point through which ideas and life
itself are rushing in all its energy: 'WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF
HUMANITY - their stupidity, animalism and dreams', Lewis
declares. 83 'WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to feel it's [sic]
crude energy flowing through us'. 84
This Vorticism approximates to imagism as expressed by Pound, at
that time Lewis's ally. Both owe a debt to Jarry: 'we want to make in
England not a popular art, not a revival of lost folk art, or a romantic
fashioning of such unactual conditions, but to make individuals,
wherever found. We will convert the King if possible. A VORTICIST
KING! Why not?' 85 An Ubuesque conception, who would no doubt
be King Percy rather than King George.
The imagists and vorticists were equally adamant in denouncing
both futurism (the worship of machines and the pace of modernity)
and the yellow nineties dandyism which they saw as one of the
ancestors of futurism (pace Wilde's 'the future belongs to the
dandy' 86):
that debile and sinister race of diabolical dandies and erotically

bloated diablesses and their attendant abortions, of Yellow Book
fame, that tyrannized over the London mind for several years. 87
Some of the confusion which has subsequently surrounded the

relationship of vorticism, imagism and futurism is due to the fact
that inevitably imagists took the same subject matter as futurism for
their pictures. As Lewis said in later life:
In the case of Vorticism ... the 'inner world of the imagination'

was not an asylum from the brutality of mechanical life. On the
contrary it identified itself with that brutality, in a stoical embrace,
though of course without propagandist fuss. 88
And writing on Picasso he says that 'a destructive force ... a

"decadent" principle, . . . social dissolvent, is not art. It is
politics'. 89 Obviously Lewis has some difficulty distinguishing the
vortex in itself, as the crucible of art, from the vortex in discussion as
a universe having relations with the 'brothel' of history past and
present.
Pound and Lewis were not alone in wanting to change things,
although Lewis's renunciation of civilisation and Pound's 'I want a
Vortex: 1895-1920 103
new civilisation' 90 were beyond the aesthetic ambitions or

intentions of aesthetes such as Harold Acton and Rupert Brooke.
Nevertheless a further confusion may have arisen because those
very 'aesthetes' who could be expected to have carried some kind of
banner for the nineties were in fact denouncing dandyism in much
the same terms as Lewis. Brooke, who had openly flirted with
dandyism and aestheticism, writes 'I denounce England', 91 and
declares, on the verge of war, 'we're all going to wake up
England'. 92 After that war Acton, whose autobiography is very
much concerned with describing the 'arbiters of taste' such as Peter
Quennell, Brian Howard and Jean Cocteau, records:
back to mahogany was my battle-cry. The war had severed us from

the eighteen-nineties . . . . Down with the followers of
Bunthorne! ... The eighteen-nineties, which I could appreciate
for their own sake and as a distant phase, became intolerable
when I beheld them on every side of me as a faint but flickering
tradition . . . . We wanted Dawns not Twilights. We must blow
the bugles and beat the drums and wake the Sleeping Beauty. 93
But as one of Lewis's biographers observes 'The "Men of 1914"-

Lewis, Pound, Eliot and Joyce - belonged to a confident future
that failed to materialize'. 94 That failure, and the inevitable
disappointment, is due, I believe, to two factors; firstly as I shall
discuss in Chapter 4, the war, both politico-military and socio-
aesthetic, did not solve the problems which caused it; secondly, the
vigour with which the 'men of 1914' repudiated the events of the past
and denied them a role in the future, also implicitly repudiated the
idea of the 'confident future' itself. Gerhardie quite accurately sees
Proust as 'the foreman of a demolition squad pulling down a
condemned building, condemned alike by God and man, chilly,
deceptive, and, behind an imposing facade, unhealthy, verminous,
cruel, uncomfortable and, in the last analysis, fatuous' ;95 but we
may aptly subvert Camus and ask what use this is if he demolishes a
cathedral without proclaiming a new God.
Lewis's epicurean stance is basically unrealistic, because he
cannot see the inevitable political consequences of his actions. 'The
Men of 1914' he asserts,
represent an attempt to get away from romantic art into classical

art, away from political propaganda back into the detachment of
true literature: just as in painting Picasso has represented a desire

to terminate the Nineteenth Century alliance of painting and
natural science. 96
But he has to admit that:
as a result of the War ... artistic expression has stepped back

again into political propaganda and romance, which go
together . . . . The attempt at objectivity has failed. 97
The attempt at objectivity itself as the future project was bound to

fail, we must say, precisely because it belonged to that future which
Lewis had so decisively rejected. The attempt at subjectivity as a form
of symbolism, which Pound pursued under the heading of
imagism, is purely Paterian both in its aesthetic and its political
connotations. Pound, echoing Pater, says his primary aim is 'to
paint the thing as I see it'. 98 And in an essay on 'Vorticism' written
on the eve of the war he defines the image as 'that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'. 99
Extending this epicureanism from the image to the vorticist himself,
Pound continues:
There are two opposed ways of thinking of a man: firstly, you may
think of him as that toward which perception moves, as the toy of
circumstance, as the plastic substance receiving impressions;
secondly, you may think of him as directing a certain fluid force
against circumstance, as conceiving instead of merely reflecting
and observing. 100
Thus, we may suppose, there are two ways of thinking about time
itself: as an inexorable force flowing over mankind, or as a series of
moments in or out of which we may locate ourselves. This is
important for our understanding of Eliot's The Waste Land, in which
blocks of history are subverted and reconstructed, and of course
Durrell's attitude to time.
'In the "search for myself", in the search for "sincere self-
expression'" says Pound in the same essay, 'one gropes, one finds
some seeming verity. One says "I am" this, that, or the other, and
with the words scarcely uttered one ceases to be that thing'. 101 In the
same way, I think it needs to be pointed out, Pound and Lewis must
therefore acknowledge that Wilde and Pater themselves were
Vortex: 1895-1920 105
vorticists and imagists. Lewis particularly seems to be confusing the

idea of tradition with the events of tradition, thereby denying both
the validity of the transition from one culture to the next and the
validity of an artistic expression to the artist who expressed it.
Pound himself was more susceptible to tradition than Lewis. In
fact in Blast 1 he traces the genealogy of imagism:
- 'All arts approach the conditions of music' - Pater [sic]

- 'An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time' - Pound
- 'You are interested in a certain painting because it is an
arrangement of lines and colours' - Whistler
To which Pound adds the telling phrase 'Picasso, Kandinsky, father

and mother, classicism and romanticism of the movement'. 102
'The movement' itself, however, like the Pre-Raphaelite
'movement', marked one absolutely modern development which
was significantly simultaneous with the evolution of Einstein's
relativity but not directly connected with it. As the Pre-Raphaelites
rejected Renaissance logic in favour of the symbols and attention to
nature of mediaeval painting, so the cubists abandoned the three-
dimensional Renaissance geometry of perspective. As Siegfried
Giedion remarks, 'the essence of space as it is conceived today [that
is, in post-Euclidean geometry] is its many-sidedness', while 'a new
conception of space leads to a self-conscious enlargement of our
ways of perceiving space' . 103 We begin perhaps to see why the
surrealist Duchamp hailed the achievement of the Pre-Raphaelites.
And this development has not only its visual or pictorial
significance, but also a political dimension. Aesthetics is about
perception, how we see the world, and how, as a result, we agree on
our perceptions and consequently organise the world. This
superceding or discarding of Renaissance perspective therefore
signified a rejection of the form of authority. As John Berger has
argued in Ways of Seeing, that perspective was a form of political
control since it enforced a particular focus on appearance as reality:
'perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world'. 104
Cubism however 'views objects relatively ... from several points of
view, no one of which has exclusive authority' .105 Consequently it is
not surprising that the 1911 Salon des Independants was considered
'a menace to the public peace'. 106 And as the Soviet film director
Vertov said of the cinema in 1923, 'I'm an eye ... freed from the
boundaries of time and space . . . . My way leads towards the

creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new
way a world unknown to you'. 107
Another development which took place in the time-dimension
made possible what we might call ways of seeing time. As the German
mathematician Minkowski said in 1908 'space alone or time alone is
doomed to fade into a mere shadow; only a kind of union of both will
preserve their existence'. 108 This new concept of space-time meant
that movement could be regarded not only as movement through
space (as established by the cubists) but also as movement through
time- planes of being. Since there is no longer a single focal point,
elements in a picture take on significances of their own- materials
(as in collage), colour as colour, surfaces which were not surfaces as
they had been seen before: cubist art, in terms of conventional
wisdom, became irrational.
Eventually futurism, so derided by Lewis and Pound but in fact
closely related to their work, came to deal with movement and the
infinite possibilities of the interrelation of planes. The futurist
Boccioni exemplified this in works with titles such as 'Bottle Evolving
in Space' and Duchamp with his 'Nude Descending the Staircase' [my
emphasis]; other Italians took this up, for example Carra's
'Simultaneih~', Balla's 'Speed' and Severini's 'Walking Dog'. As
Boccioni said 'we should start from the central nucleus of the object
wanting to create itself, in order to discover those new forms which
connect the object invisibly with the infinite of the apparent
plasticity and the infinite of the inner plasticity'. 109
Durrell makes full use of these possibilities in The Alexandria
Quartet. Not only do we have different ways of seeing and therefore
of ordering our perception, but we can interrupt the flow of time and
organise it in blocks outside the measured course of history. As
Lewis said in 1914 'we have got clean out of history. We are not
today living in history' .U 0 Only in Clea is the historical perspective
restored, while in Justine and Balthazar Durrell adopts a technique,
which he repeats within the constituents of 'The Avignon Quintet',
of reviewing events in time from the perspective of different
perceptions- setting different planes of space-time against the time
continuum.
Durrell points out in The Key that Plato in the Timaeus says 'we
say was, is, will be, but the truth is that is alone can properly be
used'.m Durrell calls the Einsteinian time-continuum 'a sort of time
which contained all time in every moment of time'. 112 Like the cubists and
Vortex: 1895-1920 107
their followers, therefore, Einstein joins up subject and object and

Durrell emphasises that this provides us with a key to modern
poetry. Closely allied to Jarry's conception of the beyond, he argues
that
the Principle of Indeterminacy ... is founded upon the theory

that we cannot observe the course of nature without disturbing
it . . . . If reality is somehow extra-causal, then a whole new vista
of ideas is opened up on a territory hitherto only colonized by
intuition. If the result of every experiment, of every motion of
nature, is completely unforeseen and unpredictable - then
everything is perpetually brand new, everything is, if you care to
think of it like that, a miracle. Under the terms of the new idea a
precise knowledge of the outer world becomes an impossibility.
This is because we and the outer world (subject and object)
constitute a whole. 113
(This was written five years before the appearance of Justine.)

Durrell then encapsulates a classic argument for the dialectical
reconciliation of opposites in terms of the new space-time:
To think according to the terms of relativity one has to train the

mind to do something rather extraordinary: to accept two
contradictory ideas as simultaneously true. 114
Much of this would have been learned from Lewis whose Time and
Western Man appeared in 1927 and which presents a magnificent
argument for the total correspondence of the universe in space and
time and mind. Quoting Pound's 'The Spirit of Romance'- 'all ages
are contemporaneous ... this is especially true of literature, where
the real time is independent of the apparent' 115 - Lewis points out
the contradiction:
that he will be much more the slave of Time than anybody not so
fanatically indoctrinated . . . . The fashionable mind is par
excellence the time-denying mind - that is the paradox . . . . The
less reality you attach to time as an unity, the less you are able
instinctively to abstract it; the more important concrete,
individual, or personal time becomes. 116
Lewis is on dangerous ground, however, when he argues against

the cyclic nature of history and 'revolution' which he calls

'archeological and historical'- that is, the finding in the past of new
ways forward:
All the most influential revolutions of sentiment or of ideologic

formula to-day, in the world of science, technology, psychology,
are directed to some sort of return to the Past. The cult of the savage
(and indirectly that of the Child) is a pointing backward to our
human origins. 117
Lewis seems to be ignoring the fact that Einstein had established a

totally new theory; he is also denying human origins themselves,
which had been re-examined by Darwin and re-routed by Freud.
'We cannot go on for ever making revolutions which are returns
merely to some former period of history' he complains. 118
Yet the argument in Time and Western Man, which tends towards
the celebration (almost anti-ritualistic) of selfhood and
individuality, is, as Lewis admits in the passage quoted above,
paradoxically subject to Time, while denying it. As Steiner says in
After Babel, 'the slamming of the door on the long galleries of
historical consciousness is understandable. It has a fierce
innocence . . . . But it is an innocence destructive of civilisation ...
Without the true fiction of history, without the unbroken animation
of a chosen past, we become flat shadows'. 119 Or, to look at history
as a relationship of myth to narrative, we might say that while man may
reject those narratives in which he does not recognise himself, he
cannot divest himself of the myth which gives rise to narrative,
however critically he may regard it. 120
Lewis is more certain when he champions the alternative
interpretation of history as an idea rather than as a narrative:
To understand the time he lives in at all, and to take his place as

anything but a lay-figure or infinitely hypnotizable cipher in that
world, [man] must make the effort required to reach some
understanding of the notions behind the events occurring upon
the surface. 121
The clue to Lewis's mood here is to be found in his fear that 'all
initiative has been removed from people'; 122 the idea that
retrospection makes people the prisoners of history forces Lewis
into the untenable position of denying the lessons of the past. It is
Vortex: 1895-1920 109
therefore unclear whether Lewis is attempting irony, or bitter

sarcasm, or triumphalism when he says 'the subject, the ego, is a
sort of primitive King of the psychological world'. 123 There is the
underlying suggestion that to accept this status limits the exercise of
free will, that the King is subject to the primacy of his own
psychology.
The following passage from Time and Western Man sums up the
paradox of the free-will/destiny argument as Lewis saw it:
Human individuality is best regarded as a kind of artificial

godhood. When most intensely separated from a neighbour and
from all other things- most 'ourselves' as we say- we are farthest
away, clearly, from an Absolute, or any kind of Unity. Yet, in
another sense, we are nearest to it. This is the great problem that
has wrecked so many metaphysics: it is this that has divided stoic
from epicurean, nominalist from realist, and indeed every
varying genus of philosopher . . . . If there is a God, we can say,
we have, for this life, our backs turned to each other. This must be
so for things to be bearable at all for us as creatures: for such
unrelieved intimacy as would otherwise exist, perpetual society-
of such a pervasive, psychic, overwhelming kind- would not be
socially possible . . . . As it is, then, our sense of personal reality
is so great that we are not able, at the same time, to entertain the
sensation of the existence of God . . . . It is as thieves only- a thief
of the real - that we can exist, or as parasites upon God. The
Absolute, we think, crushes and is meant by its hierophants to
crush, the personal life. 124
It is from such contradictions as 'the Absolute crushes the personal

life' that of course the Heraldic Universe as expressed by both Yeats
and Durrell derives - to establish a 'fifth province' in which not
only is all time contained in each moment of time, but all mind is
contained in each moment of thinking, and all action (and therefore
by implication, all space) is contained in each act of will.
It has been said that the first world war was a war about time, about
the public dimension of time contradicted by the fragmentation of
private, pluralistic time. If we take Lewis's plea for regarding
individuality as 'artificial godhood' we are forced back to the Titan
struggle against the 'real' gods. Bergson in the Introduction to
Metaphysics argues that in order for the self to endure it must
recognise its own flowing through time- a celebration of the stream
of consciousness. 'The mind has to do violence to itself' he says. 125

Lewis's advocacy of the life of the mind seems to involve a death of
the mind in so far as it requires a reversat in Bergson's terms, 'of the
direction of the operation by which it habitually thinks'. (It is
noteworthy that Bergson adopts a cubist terminology in saying that
the mind will thus become capable 'of adopting the very movement
of the inward life of things'.) But Lewis is intent on finding the 'still
point' of the vortex - maintaining some kind of artistic and
humanistic position at the eye of the storm. This is painful for the
artist himself because it makes him the sacrificial victim for the rest
of society- selfism ultimately annihilates self. The vorticist dilemma
itself can be resolved abstractly by looking for symbols- or images-
through which the still point at the centre of the vortex can be
achieved in metaphysical terms: that is, a way of translating from a
concept of mind to one of the emotions. Despite the fact that it was
no doubt anathema to Lewis, Eliot's final resolution, the fire and the
rose with which Four Quartets opens and closes, offers just such a
translation.
Beyond a certain well-defined line- in the arts as in anything else

- beyond that limit there is nothing. Nothing, zero, is what
logically you reach past a line of some kind, laid down by
nature. 126
That zero provides Durrell with the keynote of one of his works, the
asylum for the homeless mind - an Aristotelian concept which
Lewis seems to desire wistfully, as if 'nature' were a form of
godhood which he wished to deny but reluctantly admitted to exist.
In final consideration of Lewis I want to turn to his use of language
which, like his graphic art, was taut, cold, gleaming, but in a different
language to his age. I referred to the question of translation, of
carrying over from one sense into another the idea of meaning -
perhaps the only approximation we can ever make to meaning itself.
In that sense syntax, imagery, symbolism, all require a language to
carry them over from one individual to another. The aim, of course,
as Pater, Lewis, Aristotle, Yeats, Baudelaire, and Durrell would all
agree, is to establish a realm of pure feeling, an experience of 'total
sensual apprehension'. 127 In this respect time itself is a concept of
transition, carrying over sense and sensation from one moment to
another.
In his 'play' Enemy of the Stars Lewis achieves such a translation- a
Vortex: 1895-1920 111
new grammar for the age of The New Ego, in which selfhood is the
social crime. The 'play' consists almost entirely of stage directions
and is dearly set in a foreign country - the characters Arghol and
Hanp have 'broad faces', 'arctic, intense, human and universal'; 128
'such a strange thing as our coming together requires a strange place
for initial stages of our intimate ceremonious acquaintance'. 129 This
territory has already been marked out in Ubu and is to be resumed in
Waiting for Godot.
If I call Lewis's word-play 'baroque' it is because I see this work in
the same genre as that of Durrell: the establishment of this
sensation-universe by means of syntax and block-building, in which
style is identified and merged with meaning itself. In the words of
L. A. Forkey:
to the baroque mind, the world is not conceived in logical,

Cartesian terms. To the contrary, it is full of contradictions. The
baroque mind, moreover, is acutely aware of the conflict between
illusion and reality, and paradox and complexity are accepted as
almost natural phenomena. 130
With this in mind I will briefly identify the main theme of Enemy of
the Stars, to see how, with infinite tenderness, Lewis treats the
theme of self-defeating selfhood.
Self, sacred act of violence, is like murder on my face and hands.

The stain won't come out. It is the one piece of property all
communities have agreed it is illegal to possess . . . . When
mankind cannot overcome a personality, it has an immemorial
way out of the difficulty. It becomes it. It imitates and assimilates
that Ego until it is no longer one ... between Personality and
Mankind it is always a question of dog and cat; they are
diametrically opposed species. Self is the ancient race, the rest are
the new one. Self is the race that lost. 131 . . . Offences against the
discipline are registered by a sort of conscience, prior to the
kicks . . . . The process and condition of life, without any
exception, is a grotesque degradation and 'souillure' [blemish] of
the original solitude of the soul. There is no help for it, since each
gesture and word partakes of it, and the child has already covered
himself with mire. Anything but yourself is dirt. Anybody that is.
I do not feel clean enough to die, or to make it worthwhile killing
myself.132
(Lewis is here anticipating, with his own version of the theatre de la

merde, Beckett's problem with the inevitability, and inevitable
failure, of utterance as expressed in the 'Trilogy' and Godot.)
Men have a loathsome deformity called Self; affliction got through

indiscriminate rubbing against their fellows. Social excrescence.
Their being is regulated by exigencies of this affliction. Only one
operation can cure it: the suicide's knife . . . . I have smashed it
against me, but it still writhes, turbulent mess. I have shrunk it in
frosty climates, but it has filtered filth inward through me,
dispersed till my deepest solitude is impure. You are an unclean
little beast, crept gloomily out of my ego. You are world, brother,
with its family objections to me. Go back to our Mother and spit in
her face for me! 133
Arghol throws Stirner's 'Einige und Sein Eigenkeit' [sic] out of the
window but it returns in the person of the author 'self-possessed,
loose, free, student-sailor', and Arghol becomes confused as to
whether the book or the mind is parasitic- books are 'Poodles of the
mind, Chows and King Charles; eternal prostitute' whereas the
mind is 'perverse and gorgeous' . 134 Meeting himself as a stranger,
denying his own self-ness, child of prostituted mind,
Arghol, that the baffling requirements of society had made,

impudent parasite of his solitude, had foregathered too long with
men, and borne his name too variously, to be superseded. He was
not sure, if they had been separated surgically, in which self life
would have gone out and in which remained. 135
Arghol' s ultimate reality is that his alternative self is also contained

within the Absolute. He fails in his solitude; attempts to 'accumulate
self' are unsuccessful whereas composite self, in which all other
'brothers' masquerade as self, is preferable- inescapably preferable
-to a sensitiveness which society regards as monstrous. Eventually,
like Kafka's Joseph K., Arghol is forced to acquiesce in his own
suicide in the person of Hanp:
A sickly flood of moonlight beat miserably on him, cutting empty

shadow he could hardly drag along. He sprang from the bridge
clumsily, too unhappy for instinctive science, and sank like lead,
his heart a 'sagging' weight of stagnant hatred. 136
Vortex: 1895-1920 113
This is the ultimate defeat of the VNot I universe, which allows self
to see itself in terms of its otherness. Death of an enemy!
IV 'THE AGE DEMANDED ... ' 137
Whether it is because of some inherent quality or because it

provided the text for a generation, try as we might, we cannot ignore
The Waste Land. All civilisation, and the death of civilisation, is
summed up, predicted and reviewed there, as it had been a quarter
of a century earlier in Ubu Roi. And yet it is not a simple matter of
reading The Waste Land, with the highly important integral 'notes',
in order to understand precisely how important Eliot is as a
transitional figure, carrying over the neurasthenia of the nineties into
the desperation of the twenties. The Waste Land must be regarded as
a rewriting of Eliot's earlier poems, the Prufrock collection and
'Gerontion', while The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday must be seen
as a rewriting of The Waste Land itself, a reconstruction, at least in
terms of hope, of the devastation of modern poetry in which Eliot
had been a participant.
Eliot's ultimate resolution of his (and civilisation's) problem is not
to be found in his early or middle poetry. The reconstruction which
he begins in Ash-Wednesday is not completed, absolved from doubt,
until he reaches the 'fifth province' or ascetic universe of Four
Quartets: the acceptance of time, that all time is contained in each
moment of time (to repeat Durrell), that:
Only through time time is conquered. 138
But although his poem discusses the fragmentation of civilisation

and the death of the mind, with all the attendant psychoses of
anxiety, apprehension, harlotry, abandon and fear, Eliot himself
remains a traditionalist. He seems to have realised that the crisis of
an age becomes evident not in the inadequacy of its symbols but
in the failure of its symbolic system to provide the familiar
interconnections and translations which have held the system itself
together. Like Lewis, Pound, and of course Durrell and Miller, Eliot
was an outsider, beyond his native tradition and an acute observer
of his adopted culture. Not only was he therefore conscious of two
traditions; he knew, in himself, the need to use them with his own
indigenous imagination which stood as it were outside the time
continuum of inherited tradition, to create a persona with its own

voice, vocabulary and syntax. It is central to our understanding of
Eliot that we recognise the completely natural way in which, like
Pound, he apprehended and traduced fragments of a perennial
culture which might represent for him a possible world. It is
therefore not surprising that he allows a text as esoteric as Jessie
Weston's From Ritual to Romance to provide a basis for The Waste
Land, and to integrate rather than incorporate Elizabethan,
Wagnerian, Vedantic and Dantesque concepts of myth and ritual
into a text which succeeds through its inherent (and intended) failure
as a poem - a danse macabre, a totentanz through the corridors of
ancient and modern psychosis. (Edith Sitwell, writing in 1934,
called 'Sweeney Erect' 'a sound as of some laughter heard in
hell' .139)
Of course I am not saying anything new about The Waste Land: my
only reason for discussing it, with reluctance, is to underline the
twin elements of continuity and transition which are essential in
constructing the psychology of the literature of exile which we meet
in Durrell and Miller. Eliot himself was at pains to stress Pound's
roots in the nineteenth century, and yet to see Pound's use of his
material as a transitional strategy in making a literature of his own,
for his own age:
Pound is often most 'original' ... when he is most 'ar-

chaeological'. . . . If one can really penetrate the life of
another age, one is penetrating the life of one's own . . . . He
does see them as contemporary with himself, that is to say, he has
grasped certain things in Provence and Italy which are permanent
in human nature. Only Pound can see them [Arnaut Daniel and
Guido Cavalcanti] as living beings. Time, in such connexions,
does not matter; it is irrelevant whether what you see, really see,
as a human being, is Arnaut Daniel or your greengrocer . . . .
Each generation must translate for itself . . . . Chinese poetry as
we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound. 140
It was the inability of the war generation to translate itself which

created the need for The Waste Land, a text which refused, by means
of deliberate obfuscation in the 'notes', to translate anything for
anybody, even for its own author. The war ought to have answered
the question, resolved the uncertainty, in the minds of both the
leaders and the led, about social purpose. But it raised more
Vortex: 1895-1920 115
questions - about war itself, the nature of capitalism, social

structure, conservatism, the relationship of private to public- than it
could answer. So the war was only a caesura in that debate, but one
which added its own measure to the land of despair. Many writers
saw through the war: Lawrence saw the collapse of the city as 'a
vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and horrors' ;141 Lewis
refers to a 'general paralysis of will and intellect'. 142 Pound took two
viewpoints: he wanted 'to X-ray the modern mind 1143 by means of
this archaeological process which Eliot had identified; and he
simultaneously, but by a parallel path, intended to sing of 'an old
bitch gone in the teeth ... a botched civilization' 144 for which the
young men have 'gone under earth's lid'.
In the years 1918-22 'Gerontion' and The Waste Land, Ulysses,
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Women in Love and Tarr were published.
With the exception of Ulysses the principal characteristic is an
anatomy of misery and pessimism, whether it is caused by the
natural decline of old age, the breakdown of language, or the
meaninglessness of war for the sake of war. An old bitch which is
gone in the teeth is incapable of defending her young. As Lea vis said
of Mauberley, the author 'found his starting point in the nineties,
lived through the heavy late-Victorian years of Edward VII, saw his
friends disappear in the war, and now knows that the past holds
more for him than the future'. 145 The same is true of Eliot. The
dominant mood of The Waste Land is retrospect, future abeyance, a
knowledge of the future before it has been lived, a realisation that it
cannot be lived, because although there will be a future in time, there
can be no future life because there is no present life. The 'backward
look' of Frank O'Connor146 becomes a full-scale retrospective study,
an encyclopaedic anatomy of failure of which the chief element is
the unreality of appearances.
Baudelaire's
Fourmillante cite, cite pleine de reves,

Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passantl 47
has become, Eliot tells us in his notes to The Waste Land, his own
'Unreal City' filled with undead commuters, incapable even of the
genuine neurasthenia of decadence, bored beyond ennui into
mindless sloth. To present reality as unreality, and to see through
that unreality, was the symbolist game with masks. But now the
masks are off, we see through reality itself and recognise only
unreality, that there is nothing except pretence. Eliot borrows again

from Baudelaire, from the preface to Les Fleurs du Mal: 'hypocrite
lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere!'- in smashing the face of the
enemy one smashes one's own feeble identity, but Eliot says that we
lack even such resolution.
'There will be time' Eliot says: that absolute, incontrovertible
statement is all that can be said-
There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. 148
Eliot, in considering time, still believes that there may be some

substance to the mask, some point in considering the
'overwhelming question', if the strength to do so can be found. But
he is incapable of using the moments within time to take possession
of this sense of overall time.
My self-possession flares up for a second; .

My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark. 149
In 1908 Synge had written that 'before verse can be human again it
must learn to be brutal' } 50 Thomas Mann repeats this in Dr. Faustus:
'we should have to become very much more barbaric to be capable of
culture again'. 151 Eliot is saying that man is capable only of a
whimper, not a bang:
Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion. 152
The living mask has become a thing of distaste and fear -
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams 153
- and thus it becomes impossible to carry out the inevitable. The

outward and the inner personae become incompatible, so that when
it is no longer possible 'to prepare a face' one has to resort to the
interior monologue that Eliot calls 'death's dream kingdom'. 154
In a note in The Waste Land to lines 411-416-
I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only
Vortex: 1895-1920 117
We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
- Eliot quotes from F. H Bradley's Appearance and Reality:
My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my

thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within
my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its
elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which
surround it ... In brief, regarded as an existence which appears
in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that
soul. Iss
These two recognitions, firstly that the difference between

appearance and reality is, basically, fraudulent, and secondly that
one is forced in upon the circle of one's own personality, impelled
Eliot to a belief in original sin. This in itself had two dimensions, the
public and the discrete: the 'life' of society was fraudulent,
self-deceiving, not just at that time, or because of that war, but
throughout eternity; this burdened Eliot with a sense of moral
responsibility; but beyond this lay the creator of society, man
himself, who was clearly, transparently bad, so that to be locked in
with both the presence and the continuing memory of one's own
evil, is that much more of an agony. Unamuno solved this problem
of original sin by seeking 'a new and impossible Middle Ages,
dualistic, contradictory, impassioned' . 156 Joyce solved it with a
modern odyssey through the public and private places to establish
some kind of meaning. Eliot sought it in the nihilism of The Waste
Land, a 'poem' against civilisation, against man himself.
Shit makes a literal as well as an implicit appearance in Eliot's early

poetry, in the 'decayed house' of Gerontion-
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds 157
- and the dry detritus of his landscape suggests a shit dried by

moonlight. Is the poem an attempt to make sense of the meaningless
of life or is it a celebration of meaningless through decrepitude,
amnesia, drought? As Joyce was preparing Ulysses, Eliot was

exploring in a similar fashion the uses of language ('He do the police
in different voices' 158) and the relationship of man's existence to
eternity ('HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIMEtl 59). The effete Prufrock asks 'Do
I dare disturb the universe?', an inquiry as pointless as 'Shall I part
my hair behind?' or 'Do I dare to eat a peach?'. Heralds have been
killed off with dandies, it seems: both Prufrock and the singer in
'Portrait of a Lady' have been on the other side of death but neither
can be bothered to mention it. Prufrock asks in a matter-of-fact
teatime conversational tone:
Would it have been worthwhile,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball,
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say; 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead . . . . 1} 60
Yet there is still a mastery of the situation. In 'Preludes' the poet

knows
the other masquerades

That time resumes,
and he tells himself:
You had such a vision of the street

As the street hardly understands. 161
In fact Eliot is still able at this point to roll up the universe into a
figure of pathos:
I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around those images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing. 162
(At the same time Pound was publishing Lustra- poems offered 'for
the sins of the whole people'. 163) But by 1920 both Pound and Eliot
were aware of the fickleness of language itself and of the faces of
mankind that their language was supposed to transform into
Vortex: 1895-1920 119
portraiture. Although in 1912 (Ripostes) Pound can hold the balance

of contradiction -
It is, and is not, I am sane enough 164
- he has already said,
I do not like to remember things any more. 165
For Eliot too, memory becomes a trap- a personal circus locked into
the past:
Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium. 166
The world is turned upside down. Gerontion sees that
Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. 167
Weird juxtapositions make nonsense of both beauty and ugliness:

April's lilacs, with which The Waste Land commences ('The Burial of
the Dead') have already made an appearance in 'Portrait of a Lady'-
with a bowl of lilacs in her room she says that April sunsets recall
'my buried life' and 'Paris in the Spring'- or, as it becomes in The
Waste Land, 'memory and desire', that is, the past and the future. It
is no wonder that the rest of the 'poem', proceeding from this point,
becomes a macaronic admixture of building blocks displaced in time
and country. Ostensibly the opening thoughts reconstitute the dull,
dry tenants of Gerontion' s mind - the 'heap of broken images',
'dead tree', 'dry stone', but things have got worse. Eliot is
deliberately trying to dislocate the reader who, we must assume, is
the object addressed in the text, to dismay and dishearten. The
closing two lines
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata

Shantih shantih shantih
we are told, mean 'Give, Sympathise, Control; ... the Peace which
passeth understanding' but they do nothing to consolidate the
poem or to reconcile the reader to the ruins- Gerontion's ruins, no

doubt- referred to in the line which does sum up the preceding text:
These fragments I have shored against my ruins. 168
We can assume that 'Datta, dayadhvam, damyata' corresponds to

the Greek process of agon, pathos, anagnorisis (conflict, death and
recognition) but Eliot deliberately withholds the means of going
through such a process. He offers only one unifying factor, the
epicene figure of Tiresias, who 'sees . . . the substance of the poem',
and even then it is not clear whether Eliot means The Waste Land as a
whole, or the third section 'The Fire Sermon', or simply the
sequence of lines 215-256. Durrell says 'The Waste Land is his
spiritual autobiography, his search through the junk-heap of
modern culture, for an integrating principle'. 169
In 1920 Pound, in the poem which opens Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
said,
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace:
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase! 170
Eliot, however, replied with a rejection of public memory in favour

of reverie, with mendacious paraphrases of allusions to Greek, Latin
and metaphysical poetry, arcane references to mystical practices
and a series of operatic scenes of London life. Beardsleyesque
imagery ('The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne/Glowed on
the marble') and echoes of both Pound and of nineties verse do little
to persuade us that Eliot is providing the age with anything other
than a grimace by which it could recognise itself. It is almost as if
Pound were acutely prescient in writing this sequel to the lines 'the
age demanded ... '
For this agility chance found

Him of all men, unfit
Vortex: 1895-1920 121
A consciousness disjunct,
Being but this overblotted
Series
Of intermittences
'I was
And I no more exist,
Here drifted
An hedonist'. 171
Where Mayakovsky wrote 'nihil' on everything that went before,

Eliot wrote 'nihil' on everything to come. The Hollow Men of 1925
continues the fragmentation and disorientation, a lesser monument
to a crumbled civilisation, but Ash Wednesday of 1930 begins to offer
some reconstruction of both faith and reality:
Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice. 172
Eliot's strategy is of course Christian redemption:
Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
Redeem the time, redeem the dream

The token of the word unheard, unspoken. 173
Where he had previously believed, or at least said, that death and

birth were indistinguishable, he now admits that there is a moment
which is worth saving:
In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying 174
and the same images are invoked to emphasise the point:
the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel. 175
Eliot's influence on the compilation of The Key was very con-

siderable and it is significant that in asking how 'Ulysses'
became 'Gerontion' Durrell also adds into the equation not only
Einstein but two psycho-philosophers whose work played a part in
orienting both himself and Ana'is Nin. G. W. Groddeck and Otto
Rank figure very substantially in The Key. Quoting Groddeck's
observation:
The assertion 'I live' only expresses a small superficial part of the
total experience 'I am lived by the Itm6
Durrell says that Groddeck 'considered the ego a mere mask which
deluded the human being into thinking he was responsible for what
he was'. 177 If my analysis of The Waste Land is correct, its
heartlessness- heartless in the sense of a text from which every drop
of tenderness and compassion had been relentlessly withdrawn -
would have meant a great deal to Durrell, since it corresponds so
closely to Groddeck's view of the mask as a fraud not only for those
who meet it, but for those who wear it. Eliot realised that the It
which lives the Ego was in fact killing it with its nihilism - stone
images which
receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand. 178
Of The Waste Land Durrell says:
If the puzzled average reader could surrender himself to it as he

surrenders himself to a film he might feel the visual transitions of
the images and the plot for what they are- skilful organizations of
the author's moods. 179
Durrell equates The Waste Land with a film such as Citizen Kane (once
again the junk-heap image):
the camera pans slowly over the whole intellectual and spiritual
battlefield of the twentieth century, picking up here a prayer-
wheel, there a quotation from Tacitus or Baudelaire, stopping to
peep into a medieval missal or to eavesdrop upon the love affair of
a city typist, to wander down a grimy London street, or to remind
itself that the Elizabethans, gorgeously clad, walked this
Vortex: 1895-1920 123
exhausted stage on which the modem man (in search of belief)

wanders. The Waste Land embalms the life of the twentieth
century in a series of images, some disgusting, some beautiful,
some vague, some sharp as crystal. 180
But it is a dead life nonetheless, and walking the battlefield yields

nothing but rotting corpses. Tiresias does not find his integrating
principle. Durrell says that we must supply our own voices for the
subconscious roles that are written into The Waste Land. He asks why
the central significance of the fragmented art, religion, mythology
'of the culture to which we belong' has been lost- 'or at least why do
we feel that they have been lost?'
... Psychology has dispersed the old fixed ego, has disintegrated
it and joined it up with myths. Science and metaphysics have
provided a new attitude to Time and continuity. 181
Durrell means that the images or fragments of our 'cultural

tradition' have been removed a conceptual distance because the
fragmented ego of modem psychology can no longer recognise the
'old fixed ego': the modem cubist ego has leap-frogged mediaeval
and Renaissance civilisation and reunited itself with Greek
thought and action, while Time itself is no longer Absolute but
relative.
Durrell believes that what Eliot calls 'the continual extinction of
personality' has provided the mainspring of modem poetry - 'this
curve of depersonalization'. 182 Eliot's example may have been a
dismal one but it stated, at one extreme, the limits to which, and
beyond which, civilisation and individual man could go. It was
twenty years before Eliot brought himself to redeem fully that
Dantesque vision with the scheme of erotic and ascetic fulfilment in
Four Quartets. In the meantime, however, the children of the waste
land tried to make further sense of their 'fragments shored against
ruin'.
4
The Children of the Waste
Land: 1920-30
Human beings are tiny centers of consciousness in the void, with
only their frail bodies to keep out the overpowering nothing of
infinity which presses in on them - little creatures growing and
building against the annihilation of space and the organic world.
Edmund Wilson 1
I THE HANDFUL OF DUST
This chapter is concerned principally with the child: not so much the
'golden age' of children's books and the 'boy who would not grow
up' as with the boys who did grow up, and found it impossible to
fulfil the condition of manhood; with children of all ages at the
mercy of incomprehensible fate; with the descendants of the Three
Sisters, searching for 'some integrating revelation'; 2 with grown
men and women whose uncertainty about life's signposts sends
them back to re-examine the metaphor of 'the child in the house'. In
order to do this I shall abandon the mainly chronological pattern
adopted so far because I want, however briefly, to consider in one
place one of the most important sub-themes of the mediaeval
question - chivalry, quixotism and manners - which is also one of
the main themes in modern literature. It seems to me that the
question of what happens to the child- and what happens to the child in
the man- is at the heart of the development from mid-Victorian to
late Georgian art and politics. That question is evident in mediaeval
chivalry itself, in the relation of the squire to the knight, of Sancho
Panza to Quixote; in the approach of the Pre-Raphaelite painters to
the treatment of youth; in the growth to manhood of the young
heroes of Henty' s historical imperialism. But there is also a central
issue in the aesthetic concern of, for example, Pater, whose 'The

The Children of the Waste Land: 1920--30 125
House and the Child', subsequently re-titled 'The Child in the

House', was 'the germinating original source, specimen, of all my
imaginative work'. 3
Durrell's own contrast, in his first novel Pied Piper of Lovers,
between 'the garden of the old house' in India and 'London at Night
(Walsh in Bloomsbury)', emphasises this psychoanalytic approach to
the imagination through the environment. 4 Certainly it becomes
evident in writers such as Nin, Miller and Durrell, as in Beckett and
Nabokov, that the exploration of childhood, of ourselves when
young, rooted in the relatively new awareness of psychoanalysis,
helps to explain the continued interest in the nineteenth-century
origins of modern malaise and the continuation of that malaise
itself. It is therefore entirely natural that the parallel between the
Pre-Raphaelites and Beardsley, already noted, is further underlined
by the faces of his acolytes, as indeterminate and insecure as any of
Rossetti's or Burne-Jones's pageboys or fair damosels.
There are two parallel strands - one military-social, concerned
with the outer life of contacts and conflicts, the other aesthetic-
spiritual, reflective and self-exploratory, which together express the
anxieties of the age for the survival of youth.
The passage from the publication of The Water Babies (1862) and
Alice in Wonderland (1865) to Bevis (1882) to Peter Pan (1904) to
Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) mirrors the development which we have
noted in Chapters 2 and 3: religious doubts, logic and nonsense,
appearance and reality, the breakdown of the external world, the
poverty of the interior world. The children's literature is not only
concerned with providing signposts for those growing up, it also
concerns itself with the psychology of those retreating into the
innocence of amnesia.
The transition was coincidental firstly with the introduction to
England of Baudelaire and the ensuing debate on the social role of
art, and then with the increasing prominence of dandyism and
critical theory; and lastly with the search for a new grammar of
aesthetics to express or reflect a shattered, fragmented world and to
give a new meaning to life. We can see here the gradual eclipse of the
heraldic and its replacement with a matter-of-fact insistence on the
validity (to mix two closely related metaphors) of a secret garden in a
golden age. Whereas the adventures of Alice provide us with a
two-dimensional heraldic world similar to that of the Tarot, the
children's literature of the waste land era is devoid both of heroes
and of novelty: as Eliot looks back to the fragmented culture and
psychology of modern man, so modern children are encouraged to

think that there was once a world in which original sin was
unknown.
But it is not only a matter of children of a certain age reading books
designed for them alone. There is a lesson to be learned from the
development of the popular novel which, especially where the
treatment. follows the baroque method, illustrates very clearly how
rapidly the refined measures of decadence can become current in
the cheap editions of best-selling authors. The heroes and heroines
of E. F. Benson's Dodo (1894) and Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan
(1895) are children of the decadence; 'popular decadents' they may
be, but they are spectacularly children; as are Arlen's Iris Storm, the
young men of Aldington' s anti-war novels, the 'young things' of
Waugh's Vile Bodies and Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned,
the Sitwells themselves, and the 'lost' daughters of Chekhov for
whom, in Futility and The Polyglots, Gerhardie provides a translation
into the twentieth century.
The prevailing characteristic of these 'heroes' of popular fiction,
after the first world war, is their naivete. While Benson's Dodo rebels
in rejecting the conscience of conventional morality, and Lewis's
Tarr becomes a rogue, burgling the minds of his comrades and
embezzling their emotions, the cast of Death of a Hero and The Green
Hat are paralysed: their will is suspended, their expression is one of
dismay, the mood surrounding them is merely one of futility. There
is nothing heraldic here. Where we have previously seen the
heraldic-dandy emerging in Baudelaire, Wilde, Jarry and Wyndham
Lewis, figures to challenge their age and create an age of their own,
the 1920s, as a decade, singles itself out by its silence. This is partly
because Lewis himself was overcome by his own weapons, partly
because Eliot had wiped out the hope of a generation. These are the
first to realise that the war had done nothing to save civilisation -
that the death of civilisation was still in the balance.
The children of the waste land inherit the 'handful of dust'.
Durrell suggests in The Key that 'the insecurity which beset the
Victorians', 5 and which provides the unstable basis for modern
poetry, is due largely to 'how our ideas about Time changed ...
how our ideas about the ego were first formed'. 6 That is only partly
the answer. On the question of time Durrell continues 'if time is, as I
believe, the measure of our death-consciousness, you cannot
reverse your concept of it without affecting our ideas of death and
life'. 7 That takes us nearer to understanding Aldington perhaps,
The Children of the Waste Land: 1920-30 127
and it certainly provides us with a key to Durrell's own attitude to

the relation between time and death, especially in the gnosticism of
the Quartet and the Quintet. But the novels I will discuss in the
following sections cannot be explained solely by recourse to
psychology, relativity or the time continuum, however much these
may underline the economic, social and cultural distress and
malaise of the period.
The emotional distortion experienced by artists during this period
is not however a purely psychic disorder. Although, as Joad
observed in his examination of Decadence, men had lost their way,
the emergence of Freud and Einstein served to highlight this but not
exclusively to explain it. The revolt of sons against fathers, the desire
to change the world, the rejection of bourgeois values, the
phenomenon of ennui itself, are recurring facets of western culture.
Durrell (in The Key) quotes Otto Rank, the psychiatrist who played a
significant part in Anai:s Nin's development:
Artistic creation has, in the course of its development, changed

from a means for the furtherance of the culture of the community,
into a means for the construction of personality. 8
Whereas, it seems, the dandy had been able to dress up in manners,

the exposure of his true personality meant that a 'clinical
assessment' of mind and morals became de rigeur. This generation
did not pass the test, it did not have the 'big personality' required by
Durrell9 to pass through 'the social mincer' and come out on the
other side as great art. In fact the sense of futility, instead of fuelling
dismay and disgust until they became a savage form of desperation,
became languid and alienated from all social forms and indeed from
life itself. The resurgence of the aesthete/rebel under the leadership
of Harold Acton failed to 'wake the sleeping beauty'; the rogue/
criminal, sustained by the war, carried on the irresponsible knight-
errantry which eventually petered out in the black humour of which
Waugh became the master. In these circumstances the dandy
fluttered helplessly, unable to change posture or make any
worthwhile pronouncement- a scarecrow in the waste land.
Why then is it necessary to chart such a landscape? Because its
children express the fact that the combination of orphanhood and
anarchism can result in an autistic savagery, a brutal onslaught on
the icons of a failed church. We see this in the thirties. It can also
(and more often does) result in hysteria, as we see in the twenties.
Through hysteria we can study, however painfully, the reaction of

pathos on despair. In the twenties we see no agon but we see an
outpouring of anxiety in the house of babel. The hotel, the cafe, the
house, the asylum, are the locations of much of the literature under
revision in this chapter and the next. As the subject of the artist
narrowed from the public to the private world of the individual
himself, so the arena in which his mind operated focused on the
close locale of the familiar meeting-place.
Leopold Bloom's discourse and Mrs Dalloway' s monologue are
confined to the chamber, the shop and the narrow street; stream-of-
consciousness takes place within stream-of-activity. Gerontion's
dull thoughts are born in a decayed house identical with his dry
brain. The psychological implications of the cafe syndrome are
important here: so too are the social implications; political
anarchism, like Dadaism, was born in a cafe society, a polyglottal
changing-room of minds.
The hysteria of such junctions and transitions distinguishes the
naivete of this period from the self-conscious efforts of writers like
Waugh and Fitzgerald. And as Susan Sontag says in Notes on Camp
'the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails'. 10 We
can detect failure on many levels: Arlen's failure of seriousness
(with the possible exception of Man's Mortality) occurred because
popular acclaim overtook whatever sincere intentions he had
employed in the creation of Iris Storm; Gerhardie's seriousness
failed because he did not achieve that acclaim, perhaps; Aldington's
collapsed because he tried to bring society with him through the
mincer instead of going it alone; Yeats's because although he
achieved a personal reconciliation of the opposites in his particular
world, the collapse of the public side of that world, and of his plans
for it, made him mad. But in all of them the child takes precedence
over the man. And this failure is due simply to the fact that the child
is not sufficiently grown to know how to turn its experience to
advantage; its own tenderness blinds it to the lack of tenderness in
others; it is drugged on compassion.
We are attracted to the spectacle of disorder because our own
compassion recognises the frailty identified by Edmund Wilson -
the 'tiny centers of consciousness' in a void. There is no more pitiful
spectacle than a little child wandering, motherless, in a market-
place, wondering at a world for which it has lost the familiar
metaphor. Hiroshima, Vietnam, African famine have made us
acutely aware of this but it is due to more than the effect of perennial
war and disaster. We can read the pathos in this orphanage not only
because we have the incisive tools of psychology to decode the
preoccupations of Barrie and Milne but also because, for the first
time in western culture, we recognise their subject-matter, the child
as child, not as small adult. Mediaeval and Renaissance humanism
has given way in the face of successive disasters to a new
humanitarian concern: we now respect the failure of will which has
been masked by these disasters, precisely because in the serious
efforts of the child simply to be, rather than the child-man to become,
that will has been defeated. Our 'love' for our children is a mixture of
protection and encouragement on one side and, more importantly,
of respect and envy on the other: we can at last recognise the 'right to
be' as a pure insistence on the present, not as a complicated refusal
(non serviam) to grow up into a rotten world of which the child may
as yet know nothing.
II IF ...
The if-conjunction offers two possibilities, the 'analysis of life' and

the' escape from life'. Kipling's If is a modern version of the chivalric
ideal, based on the conditional: if you can keep your head, serve your
apprenticeship, maintain a vigil, then you will win your spurs,
become a man, thus ensuring that the world, our shared culture,
continues. But the subjunctive offer contained in 'if only' is
concerned merely with stopping time, with dismantling culture, in
search of pure experience itself, reconstructing the nursery. Both ifs,
the conditional and the subjunctive, are in fact subject to time; one is
prospective, seeing the future as a golden age successfully colonised
by the past; the other is retrospective, wishing future time to be
re-enacted in terms of the golden age which has passed. As Edmund
Wilson said:
To stand on the perilous verge of time- smothering in the past,

brought up against the blankness of the future - to confront the
gray abyss which lies beyond the limits of the world - the little
world, the nursery of an ignorant and mischievous childhood. 11
Wilson thought of himself as a prospective, an Ubuesque creature,

'master of the solar system and eventually of the whole universe'. 12
Such a mind is mischievous, roguish, unlike the innocent in-
habitants of Tolkien's Shire, or Grahame's riverbank, who do not

want to know about 'the Wide World'. It is not the immediate past
that attracts, but an age beyond recent memory; the past of one's
father's generation has an urgency as much as that of one's own
children. Nostalgia, however, inhabits an imaginative time always
just beyond the reach of exact memory - the most effective
transmission of lore is between the very old and the very young.
Of course the golden age is just as highly structured as that of the
'real' world because it offers to transform not its institutions but its
values. Therefore hierarchy and rules are stressed: Humphrey
Carpenter offers a convincing but restricted social reading of The
Wind in the Willows and of Alice in his study Secret Gardens: for
example, he suggests that Toad's irresponsibility in the former may
be a moral lesson in good behaviour- particularly artistic freedom-
and its limits, while the latter creates 'types rather than characters'-
'The Duchess, the cook, and in effect the baby'. 13 Carpenter, quoting
C. S. Lewis, also makes the point that while The Wind in the Willows
'has nothing to do with childhood or children' it is 'a perfect example
of the kind of story which can express things without explaining
them ... crammed full of experience of human character, almost
unfailingly wise and mature in its judgements, and yet largely
accessible to children' and yet' does not frighten in the way that Alice
does'.
But Alice, frightening though it may be, does perform an equally
valuable function, in introducing the reader, younger or older, to
the twin concepts of sense and non-sense. Lewis Carroll (or Charles
Dodgson) achieves this in two ways: firstly, through the use oflogic,
and the demonstration of its limitations:
'Then you keep moving round, I suppose?' said Alice.
'Exactly so' said the Hatter, 'as the things get used up.'
'But what happens when you come to the beginning again?'
Alice ventured to ask.
'Suppose we change the subject' the March Hare interrupted,
yawning. 14
This kind of sense or consensus can be enjoyed by both parties to the
discussion, but as soon as it reaches what we would colloquially
call its 'logical conclusion', logic itself is cut off rather than pursued
into the rabbit-hole of illogic. Secondly, Carroll/Dodgson uses
comic juxtaposition- a form of surrealism- to create absurd irony.
This is the meeting of opposites in a setting which establishes its
own 'logic' and which cannot be interrupted by another's- the 'one

fine day in the middle of the night two dead men got up to fight'
variety.
Durrell uses both these forms in The Alexandria Quartet. In fact
Carpenter's remarks about The Wind in the Willows apply to Durrell's
middle period, while the 'types' of Alice frequently appear in his
early writing such as The Black Book: Tarquin, Gracie, even Gregory/
Lucifer himself, are very largely cardboard dominoes moving about
the corridors of this hotel, whereas in Justine and Balthazar Durrell
'expresses things without explaining them', cramming them with
the suggestions, rather than the explicit descriptions, of experience.
Just as C. S. Lewis makes the point that the child is impressed for
ever by the inhabitants of Grahame's animal kingdom so an
adolescent 'on the perilous verge' is drawn into the Alexandrian
world- a realistic fantasy based on a credible fiction (the city itself) of
which people themselves are the creatures: 'the city which used us
as its flora- precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which
we mistook for our own'. 15
In Balthazar one character, Clea, refers to another, Nessim, as 'the
tall dark figure which drifted unresponsively round the corridors of
society' and who needed a task: 'how could a knight of the order
born acquit himself if there were no castles and no desponding
maidens weaving in them?-1 6 Durrell's own view of Kipling's If is
helpful here, particularly since he has told us that he shares Eliot's
enthusiasm for Kim; 'je suis toujours reste un enfant de Kim. C'est
un livre extraordinaire impregne de bouddhisme'. 17 He says of If
our distaste for the rawness and banality of If comes perhaps

from the post-war feeling of guilt, the feeling that we have never
managed to live up to the sentiments expressed in it. But as
sentiments the recipes for right-minded detachment expressed in
the poem seem to me to be above reproach, while the promise that
if one carried them out one would be a 'man' is to the last degree
illuminating. By 'man' Kipling of course means a 'gentleman'-
that mysterious and compelling symbol which haunts the average
Englishman to this day [1952] and is responsible for the way he
thinks and dresses- and all too often the way he talks. Nobody can fully
understand the peculiar structure of the British temperament
unless he has an idea of what the symbol stands for in the
unconscious of the race. It is of the utmost significance for us to do
so, for the shape of English society has always been, and
presumably always will be, in essence aristocratic, monarchist

and quixotic . . . . Why then should we react so violently against
If today? ... It is that the essentially 'gentle' qualities implied in
the word 'gentleman' have changed their shape and assumed a
bourgeois form. 'Gentleman' has given place to 'gentility' as a
form of codified behaviour which no longer comes from a spiritual
attitude so much as from a gross and banal prejudice. 18 [my
emphasis]
Durrell is here of course addressing an audience of South American

teachers from the standpoint of a British colonial (he was lecturing
for the British Council in Argentina) and his perceptions are
themselves somewhat prejudiced and distorted, but central to his
argument is the fact that at the heart of the modern problem in
British letters is an embarrassment because the quixotic element in the
national psyche has been bastardised through the failure of war as a
noble and essentially 'gentil' pursuit. This has inevitably affected
our mind, manners and morals, cheapening the value of 'spiritual
attitude' because behaviour no longer connects with 'the
mi.conscious of the race' and its symbols. Durrell's characters are
therefore engaged, from his first work to his last, in working out of
such embarrassment towards 'some integrating revelation' - a
conjunction of sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation. 'To
work here at all', Balthazar tells the supposed autobiographer,
Darley,
one must try to reconcile two extremes of habit and behaviour

which are not due to the intellectual disposition of the
inhabitants, but to their soil, air, landscape. I mean extreme
sensibility and intellectual aestheticism . . . . It is the national
peculiarity of the Alexandrians to seek a reconciliation between
the two deepest psychological traits of which they are conscious.
That is why we are hysterics and extremists. That is why we are
the incomparable lovers we are. 19
One might say that it is from such reconciliation of extremes that we

achieve not only irony but absurdity, and indeed Balthazar says
elsewhere 'we are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the
absurd',2° something which, in Carroll/Dodgson's terms we can
invert as 'we are all hunting for absurd reasons for believing in the
rational'. But while in their 'metaphysical speculation' Durrell's
Alexandrians are mingling the absurd with the rational, in their

'sexual curiosity' they acknowledge the limits of logic: 'omnis
ardentior amator propriae uxoris adulter est'- 'passionate love even
for a man's own wife is adultery'. 21
Durrell in fact expresses compassion for 'the child' while using it
as a metaphor. The opening of justine sets the author within one
powerful metaphor- the island- while giving him protection of
another, a child.
Today the child and I finished the hearthstone of the house

together, quietly talking as we worked. I talk to her as I would to
myself if I were alone; she answers in an heroic language of her
own invention. 22
The passage in Clea in which 'the child' (the child of Nessim and
Melissa) is 'restored' to the father she has never met is magical and
painful at the same time, because the child-orphan on the island
seems so determined to embrace not only a warped reality in place
of the father of her imaginings, but also a world which, although she
believes it to be beautiful, we know to be ugly:
As for the child I had conducted the whole rehearsal of this

journey (of her whole life, in truth) in images from a fairy story.
Many repetitions had not staled it. She would sit staring up at the
painting and listening attentively. She was more than prepared
for it all, indeed almost ravenous to take up her own place in the
gallery of images I had painted for her. She had soaked up all the
confused colours of the fanciful world to which she had once
belonged by right and which she would now recover- a world
peopled by those presences . . . . There had been no other way to
explain it to her, except in terms of myth or allegory- the poetry of
infant uncertainty. I had made her word-perfect in this parable of
an Egypt which was to throw up for her (enlarged to the size of
gods or magi) the portraits of her family, of her ancestors. But
then is not life itself a fairy-tale which we lose the power of
apprehending as we grow? 23
'Look' I said, not without apprehension. 'Here he comes at last,

your father'. She watched with wide and frozen eyes following
the tall figure until it stood smiling at us . . . . A silence seemed to
fall upon my mind as the child stepped out upon the plank. She
walked with an air of bemused rapture, spellbound by the image
rather than the reality. (Is poetry, then, more real than observed
truth?) And putting out her arms like a sleepwalker she walked
chuckling into his embrace. 24
One can easily understand how, in such a child, the potential for
savagery might explode to counter the barbarism of the universe it
experiences. Bertrand Russell's autobiography contains a passage
which is thoroughly illuminating of his late career which in itself
displays the controlled savagery of autism. He describes a visit of his
great-uncle, Lord Minto,
at the end of a day of continual sunshine, every moment of which

I had enjoyed. When it became time for me to say good-night, he
gravely informed me that the human capacity for enjoyment
decreases with the years and that I should never again enjoy a
summer's day as much as the one that was now ending. I burst
into floods of tears and continued to cry long after I was in bed.
Subsequent experience has shown me that his remark was as
untrue as it was cruel. 25
I do not think it is any accident at all that the victim of this experience
should have set about examining the relationship of appearance and
reality, of ethics and aesthetics, searching for meaning and truth.
Nor is his early work as a mathematician out of place. As Carpenter
says apropos Alice 'the study of mathematics is closely related to the
invention of Nonsense, for each depends on being literal-minded
. . . . Mathematicians are able, when making calculations, to adopt
whatever word or symbol they like as representative of the things
they are dealing with. Einstein was under no obligation to express
his theory of relativity as E = m2; he might just as well have said,
had he chosen different symbols, that Cheese= Jam Mustard 2 '. 26
Passages in Russell's An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth would bear
this out, and it is instructive to note that Russell not only proves
himself a superb epistemologist, he also writes philosophy as great
literature, thereby, in my opinion, establishing that he is writing
from the standpoint of that child in the garden, of the child sui
generis, who is only prepared to grow up provided he can assure
himself of life's nasty surprises. He thus conjoins the conditional'if'

and the subjunctive 'if'.
Humphrey Carpenter says: 'that the Alice books should consist, on

their deepest level, of an exploration of violence, death and nothing-
ness, is not in itself very surprising. Comedy tends to lead in that
direction'. 27 But Carroll/Dodgson takes this, as Carpenter observes
of the 'Drink me . . . . Eat me' episode, 28 to the point of parodying
the Holy Communion and subverting Christian belief. This, of
course, is not only because of the literal parody noted by Carpenter,
of the body and blood of Christ, but also because the rite of passage
thus afforded Alice in her passport to and from Wonderland
parallels the askesis of mythical union through Christ with God- the
looking-glass as both tympanum and image of Christ also provides
us with a treasury of further subversions.
It is important that we should understand that it was possible to
write (at however deep a level) of 'violence, death and nothingness'
fifty-five years before The Waste Land, at a time of relative stability,
certainty and prosperity. Is it only a troubled psyche that constructs
paradise in un-reality, providing itself with a transitory ritual into
arcadia - 'having to construct something/upon which to rejoice'?
It seems that parallel to the pedagogic public literature
demonstratively urging boys to take their place in the world (Henty,
Hughes, Newbolt) there was an introspective, discrete celebration
of an inner landscape, due partly to the depredations of science and
industry Oeffries's Bevis) and partly to the need for reassurance
about more personal matters. Carpenter quotes Kenneth Grahame' s
description of a recurrent dream of 'a gradual awakening to
consciousness in a certain little room, very dear and familiar . . .
always the same feeling of a home-coming, of the world shut out, of
the ideal encasement' 29 which might be Pater projecting his own
vision of 'the child in the house' onto his Marius.
Carpenter says that all Grahame' s writing stems from the tension
between the wanderer and the home-lover: the same might be said
of Milne, but it is equally valid to say that all children relish the thrill
of an adventure into 'the Wild Wood' and even perhaps the 'Wide
World', provided (if) they can find their way home before night.
Grown children, accustomed to the wider world, also seek that
adventure in what seem to them bigger risks, but are in fact
merely fantasies of a different order. The child's excursion into
the wild wood is no less of a psychic adventure than its father's

warfare.
The wanderer-fantasy, however, did exercise the Victorian
imagination and impress subsequent generations, ultimately (as far
as the scope of the present book is concerned) leading to the
journalism of Waugh's Abyssinia, Auden and Isherwood's Iceland
and China, Harold Acton's self-discovery in China, Yeats's
metaphysical voyage firstly through Madame Blavatsky's Golden
Dawn and then returning to Ireland via Byzantium. (The literary
combination of physical and metaphysical travel may have begun in
1880 with Sir Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia.) The tension between
love of far place and love of the horne must be borne in mind here
too, since one must have a horne to regain in order to tell one's story,
or for it to be of any use- Marco Polo or Rasselas or Mervyn Peake's
Titus would have had little purpose without a point of return- to
'know the place for the first time'.
Travel-fantasy may therefore be very firmly related to recollecting
'the enchanted places'. Andrew Sirkin quotes a stunning revelation
on the part of J. M. Barrie, author of the most famous example of the
genre of the boy who wouldn't grow up: that the 'true meaning' of
Peter Pan was 'a desperate attempt to grow up but can't'; 30 while
Humphrey Carpenter suggests that Peter Pan is frightening because
Barrie did not believe in his own creation, and because in the face of
their fates, and the real life rnodel(s) for Peter and his friends, he had
no recourse to a private faith or religion: 'at the heart of the
sentimental dream is a cynical mocking voice'. 31
Travel towards, and flight into, arcadia therefore highlights the
logic and absurdity of child psychology in symbiotic relationship.
Travel, with its analysis of life (but a foreign life), and imagining,
with its escape into life (but an unreal life), are only versions of the
same re-discovery of the ego, as Nin and Durrell respectively
emphasise in their work.
The last, ironic, celebration of the child was A. A. Milne's writing
for his son Christopher, beginning in 1923 with 'Vespers', the
self-parody of which launched the Christopher Robin literature:
Oh! Thank you God for a lovely day

And what was the other I had to say?
I said 'Bless Daddy' so what can it be?
Oh! Now I remember it, God Bless Me. 32
J. B. Morton in parodying this captured the mood of the age:

'Hush, hush, nobody cares
Christopher Robin has fallen downstairs'.
Milne is reworking Dodgson's nonsensical logic, or Carroll's logical

nonsense- 'and the more he looked inside, the more Piglet wasn't
there . . . . And while he waited for Piglet not to answer . . .'. 33 It is
pleasant but superfluous. The critical parodies by (the surely
pseudonymous?) Frederick C. Crews (The Pooh Perplex) expose the
anomalous position of this kind of literature in the modern world. In
a sense Durrell and Nin killed off Christopher Robin when they
assassinated the dandy. The true result of the 'if' process was not
Christopher Robin but the 'analysis of life' which we find almost
contemporaneously in Durrell's examination of arcadian
armageddon and in the fate of Anthony Powell's attempt at 'escape'
in his own self-parody, A Dance to the Music of Time.
But the most disturbing example of the 'can't/won't grow up'

problem of the 1920s, which embodies all the despair, analysis,
escape, travel, introspection and inheritance of modern youth, is of
course in the autobiography of the greatest child of the age, which
reads like a parody of modern literature: Edward the Eighth, known
to his family as David, was the Vorticist King. The abdication from
the greatest throne in the world, from the lonely status of king-
emperor, for a life of private married retreat proved, in his subjective
view, that 'love had triumphed over the exigencies of politics', 34
which had insisted that he could not enjoy both a public and a
private life, or conversely that he could not satisfy both public and
private morality.
But apart from the particular circumstances of private intent
versus constitutional jurisprudence which in 1936-37 precipitated the
abdication crisis itself, the career of David/Edward, the private/
public prince, offers us a pathetic example of the continual tension
between the confines of tradition and the freedom of change. To be a
king-emperor in the age of Ubu meant that tradition and its
momentum had to be weighed against the inevitable social forces
which were removing Britain from the mediaeval into the surreal
world. The living, not the dead, weight of the past continued to
exert an opposite force on the impulse towards reform.
As a child he was introduced to a concept foreign to one

circumscribed by form; freedom, an abstraction which he had to
rationalise and could only understand by visualising it as a view
over the familiar fields near Sandringham. 35 At the height of his
personal crisis he discovered that that freedom existed only in
'Antarctica'; 'a whole continent with no Prime Minister, no
Archbishop, no Chancellor of the Exchequer- not even a King. It
must be paradise'. 36 Alice might have made the same rueful remarks
about the Tarot-pack of Wonderland.
In fact David/Edward typifies the painful role of one man taking
on that side of the Establishment which seemed at best what he,
Alice-like, called 'silly', 37 at worst oppressive. His progress must
have enabled many young men, puzzled by the struggle with their
fathers, to identify with him:
My father and I had many talks about the changes that were
obviously at work within the political and economic structures not
only of Britain but of the whole world; and the more we discussed
them the wider grew the divergence of our viewpoints . . . . I was
... a product of the war, with ideas of my own, a little on the
cynical side maybe, but sure that I knew the answers. My father,
on the other hand, was wholly steeped in the Victorian and
Edwardian traditions that had been the order under which he had
lived the best and most vigorous years of his life . . . . The strange
new concepts that were beginning to permeate our island and the
seemingly reckless desire for change in everything both puzzled
and vexed him, the more so because his eldest son seemed to
share many of these peculiar notions 38 • • • . My father could not
understand why I was not more like him. 39
This perplexity is much more important in the King's Story than his
loneliness, his longing for 'the simple life', 40 rather than 'lonely
drives through tumultuous crowds . . . a man caught in a revolving
door . . . a wayfarer rather than a sojourner'. 41 So too is the naivete
with which the earnest Prince tried to take up a social role:
'But why, Mr Baldwin?' I asked, truly astonished. 'It has never

been my understanding that I am expected to notify the
Government of my movements . . . . I don't understand . . . .
You know that I stand outside politics. My only reason for going is
to see for myself'. 42
That naivete- the question 'Why?'- also forced him into the role of
victim of the intricacies of the abdication crisis, and highlights the
dilemma of the boy who wants to find his paradise and can't, but at
the same time refuses to take the only 'possible' course of action. He
therefore discovers that eventually he is forced to take a road that,
from all points of view, has been inconceivable.
The events of the last days of the abdication crisis present us with
the can't/won't seesaw between the King and the Ministers,
tussling over the fulcrum of a lady and an unwritten (and therefore
invisible) Constitution.
The plea for the King's freedom of conscience turns into a farce.
Edward VIII might have been called the first modern King of
England, had he survived the vortex. But his private story remains
the last song in a troubadour's cycle of romance, of the knight who
sacrificed the chivalric for the erotic- 'wherever you go, I will follow
you'.43
But the ultimate irony is that the king-emperor had, under the
influence of the modern bourgeoisie, become a parody of his ancient
and courtly dignity. While he offended Conservative custom by
preferring golf to the grouse moors, ranching to regattas, gardening
to hunting, night clubs to the salons of the great hostesses, 44 he also
outraged, by his commonsense, the values of those who wanted a
bourgeois monarchy. The humour of the situation in which he tells
of the presentation at Court of six hundred debutantes during a
garden-party is cinematic:
The first big wet drops began to fall. Then came the downpour.
Prudently the other guests who were not being presented
scampered into the protection of the tea tents. But with scarcely a
waver the debutantes came on. Their costly hats and dresses,
which had taken weeks to make, became progressively more
bedraggled, and their expressions increasingly woebegone . . . .
Rising from the gilt chair, I made a bow in the direction of the still
unpresented young ladies, and with a gesture intended to convey
my regret over the inadvertent shower that had necessitated
cutting the garden-party short, I retired into the Palace. There
were some present who felt that without the Sovereign's personal
bow of recognition the presentation was not quite genuine and
that the social position of their daughters was in consequence left
in doubt. Why, I am still at a loss to understand. 45
How anyone would want to be King of such people is no doubt a

mystery. Having disabused them of their system of double-values-
'I have found it impossible ... to discharge my duties as King as I
would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I
love' 46 - he left them 'without even a backward look' .47 But, having
analysed life and then escaped from it, did he find, either way, the
answer to the ambiguous question 'if'?
III BRIEF LIVES
An even greater parody of modern royalty is provided by Czar Boris

of Bulgaria, who might have been fathered by Jarry and stepped into
the pages of Durrell's 'Antrobus' stories. But, as reported by
David/Edward (and other sources) he found himself 'the only
Bulgarian' in a country whose queen was pro-Italian, whose
Ministers were pro-German and whose people were pro-Russian.
His own passion was for driving locomotives and David/Edward
recalls Boris arguing with his brother as to which of them should
drive the royal train. 48
Such ruritanian comic tragedy, so well captured by 'Anthony
Hope' and other romantic novelists, stands half way between 'real'
life and 'fiction'. 'I was obviously in love. They had struck at the very
roots of my pride' 49 was uttered not in Zenda but in Windsor, yet it
typifies the popular fiction not only of the late nineteenth century
but also of the 1920s, because David/Edward was both a chivalrous
exponent of amour courtois and an habitue of the night-dubs so
cleverly described by Michael Arlen. It is almost as if the 'Yankee at
the Court of King Arthur' had been stood on his head.
That the popular fictions of the Victorian and Georgian periods
have so much in common is due to the transitory nature of the
vortex described in Chapter 3. The social change from mediaeval to
modern meant that the reading public was likely to respond less to
romanticised chivalry than to the explicit consequences of the
decadence. There thus arose the need for modern heroism, giving a
new meaning to 'noblesse oblige' in a democratic society. It is
significant that few really popular novels were published in the war
years, whereas the 1920s saw a resurgence of both 'social realism'
and of fantasy in popular fiction.
The dividing line between fact and fantasy remained vague: if the
world was not simply upside down but valueless altogether, it was
quite possible for ruritanian adventures to take place on the real

stage. The decadence which writers as apparently diverse as Corelli,
Benson, Aldington and Arlen discuss in strikingly common terms
stretches from pre-Wilde days to the aftermath of Blast. As C. E. M.
Joad says in his study of decadence:
There is a period of decline, confidence is lost and in the resultant

chaos and confusion man finds himself confronting the non-
human reality which, whatever name he chooses to apply to it,
God, or the devil, or fate, or destiny, or the moral law, or the
rhythm of the universe, now reveals itself as that to which he is
and always has been subject . . . . Decadence, then, is a sign of
man's tendency to misread his position in the universe . . . a
refusal to recognize 'the object'. 50
In addition such non-human realities as time and relativity, and such

human factors as psychology, also contribute to this babel of the
signposts questioning man's role and position in the universe. In
such circumstances it is, I believe, 'natural' that the relationship of
subject to object should become, either accidentally or deliberately,
unclear, and that this lack of clarity is the natural province of the
popular novel.
But, as with other types of genealogy, there is a descent from the
'aristocracy' of heraldic decadence to the' democracy' of the popular
dandy. Thus many of the ideas first expressed in accessible form in
the crystallised fruits of Pater, Wilde and Huysmans became
available to the general public in due course through the pastille
pages of Marie Corelli. In such a process the 'baroque' technique is
much in evidence, even where Corelli herself over-employs it. It in
fact originates in Pater whose prose, as Richmond Crinkley
observes, so often reads like romantic fiction. 51 But 'democratic'
idealism also has a descent through the embourgeoisement of the
chivalric beau: if gentility (being well-born) and dignity (worthiness)
have any meaning in the modern age, then the qualities of being a
gentleman and the possession of dignity must be regarded as
available to all, regardless of birth. 'Noblesse oblige' becomes not so
much the province of a social class as a common humanitarian
privilege reserved to all: the levelling experience of the trenches
brought cockney, farm labourer, bourgeois and public-schoolboy
together in that common heroism.
Rupert Brooke, going up to Cambridge in 1906, consciously takes
on a new persona, translating himself from aesthete to ascetic:

'leaving the people I have hated and loved I shall throw off, too, the
Rupert Brooke I have hated and loved for so long, and go to a new
place and a new individuality'. 52 This split-personality, typical of
the passage from mediaeval to modern, is evident also in Aldous
Huxley, whose decadent Antic Hay (1923) would be simply a
modern pastiche of Huysmans if it were not for the fact that his
bizarrerie is troubled by a puritan conscience.
Some of the energy of this 'neo-decadence' was channelled into a
continuation of the roguery of criminal behaviour or an aesthetic
perversion in drug addiction. But most, it seems to me, followed
and served its age in displaying a naivete which could neither
analyse nor escape this bewildering brief life which seemed so
promising. Lloyd George had promised' A land fit for heroes'- but it
was meaningless when one tried to live it. In the light of two almost
simultaneous books, Dodo and The Sorrows of Satan, which were
revelations at the time of their publication, their successors such as
The Green Hat or Death of a Hero seem flat and stale. Arlen, for
example, pronounces that 'the whole purpose of a "best-seller" is to
justify a reasonable amount of adultery in the eyes of suburban
matrons153 - a statement which was thirty years old at the time he
made it. Aldington also notices the percolation of socialist
principles:
The young War Generation seem to me to have been abnormally

swayed by ideas of grandiose 'social reform'. England swarmed
with Social Reformers. I don't pretend to know why. Perhaps it
was due to the political idealism of Ruskin and Morris, aided by
the infinitely more sensible work of the Fabians. Everbody was
the architect of a New Jerusalem, and a rummy assortment of
plans they provided. This passion has now reached the
disinterested and noble-minded trade unionist and to some
extent even the agricultural labourer. Consequently, you may
now hear, at Hyde Park Corner or in pubs or third class carriages,
beautifully garbled versions of the highbrow talk of about twenty
years ago. 54
(To which Aldington might have added the influence of Wilde's

Ballad.) The essence of the popular fiction of the 1920s, as distinct
from Tarr or even Benson's Mrs Ames, is the marriage of this
democratisation of socialism with the vulgarisation of 'sin'. In a
world in which the incidents of everyday life lose their sense of ritual
the reserved areas of behaviour become equally discredited and
available to all, and myth becomes narrative.
I think this explains why the 'hero' of popular fiction is a grey
insipid figure, only really roused to heroism and greatness by the
example and encouragement of the more racy, exotic and profane
characters. The narrators are self-effacing and in so far as these
novels are autobiographical they are arranged so that the reader
himself can make that transition (or confusion) between subject and
object and step himself into the role of narrator. (In Dornford Yates's
series of 'Berry' books, for example, and in his Vanity Fair where the
eponymous villainess is far more attractive than the 'hero' who
destroys her.)
Scott Fitzgerald says 'Here was a new generation grown up to find
all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken', 55 but the
role of the reader-as-hero had been created thirty years earlier with
Marie Corelli' s The Sorrows of Satan and Benson's Dodo. These works
epitomise an ironic phenomenon in which the ideas of decadence
took popular- one might almost say vulgar- root through a reaction
to the baroque nature of the decadent pose itself. Benson himself
was a protege of Wilde, a member of the 'Establishment' (his father
was the Archbishop of Canterbury); his heroine, Dodo, is the first
female dandy in English prose, pre-dating Lady Bracknell by one
year; furthermore, she is said to have been modelled on Margot
Tennant, a founder of the 'Souls' and later wife of the Prime
Minister, Asquith.
The woman portrayed in Dodo: A Detail of the Day, in 1894 is
accustomed by nature to getting her own way and therefore sets out
to marry into both wealth and position, despite the fact that she is in
love not with her husband but with one of his best friends (who has
position but no wealth). Even her husband is aware of most of this:
He knew that she was, above all things, strongly dramatic, that
she moved with a view to effect, that she was unscrupulous in
what she did, that her behaviour was sometimes in questionable
taste. 56
Dodo however becomes incapable of dealing with the fact that

her husband loves her; she does not understand 'love', an
unknown quantity, and her attempts 'to reduce things to an
equation in which the value of 'x' could be found in terms of those
many symbols which she did know 67 prove unsuccessful, mainly

because in this extraordinary novel Benson has pitted his
unscrupulous heroine against the epitome of England's aristocracy,
a sane and dull version of that Duke of Dorset who had to cope with
Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson, and whose bedside reading was no
doubt Digby's Broad Stone of Honour:
She had got used to not being in love with her husband, and she
accepted as part of this same deficiency the absence of absorbing
pleasure in the body. Not that she considered it a deficiency, it
was merely another type turned out of Nature's workshop. Dodo
laid all the blame on Nature. She shrugged her shoulders and
said: 'You made me so without consulting me. It isn't my fault!' 58
But there is a fault- a contradiction - running through Dodo's

psychology because she attempts, in explaining this to her real-life
lover, to rationalise her behaviour in terms of the prevailing social
code, whereas in her final action of marrying him (after her
husband's death) she underlines the irrationality of either the
original argument or the subsequent action; cause and effect are not
at odds:
you elevate matrimony into a sacrament. Now I don't. It is a

contract for mutual advantage. The husband gives wealth,
position and all that, and the wife gives him a housekeeper, and
heirs to his property ... but of course, there are marriages for
love. I suppose most of the lower middle-class marry for love, at
least they haven't got any position or wealth to marry for. But we,
the disillusioned and unromantic upper classes, see beyond that.
I daresay our great grandfathers married for love, but the fact that
so many of us don't, shows that ours is the more advanced, and
probably correct view. 59
It is unlikely that such a speech could have been made in English

fiction prior to 1893, when not only Wilde's A Woman of No
Importance, but also Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray were
produced (and in which Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession was written,
but not published60 ). There is also considerable humour in Dodo,
no doubt nurtured by the society of Wilde, but also displaying
something of the decadence of Axel (1890); one superfluous
character, Featherstone, announces 'It's an awful bore reading
books, dontcherthink, what? I wish one could get a feller to read

them for one, and then tell one about them .... It's an awful bore
having to learn French, isn't it: couldn't I get a feller to learn it for
me?', after which 'Lady Grantham was seized with a momentary
desire to run her parasol through his body, provided it could be
done languidly and without effort'. 61
Dodo provides the dramatic climax of the novel not with her
relative indifference to the deaths of her child or of her husband but
with the impulse- aut tunc aut nunquam- to elope with the man she
loves:
Like all Dodo's actions it came suddenly. The forces in her which
had been drawing her on to this had gathered strength and
sureness imperceptibly, and this evening they had suddenly
burst through the very flimsy dam which Dodo had erected
between the things she might do, and the things she might not,
and their possession was complete. 62
Dodo is of course an anti-climax. Unlike the heroine of another of

Benson's works, Kit Conybeare in Mammon & Co, in which Benson
portrays marriage as a partnership-in-crime, Dodo does not elope.
We have to wait for her creator to contrive her husband's death
while hunting to provide her with 'the honourable way out'. But
Dodo remains a perfect example of the dandy- as her friend Edith
Staines (modelled on composer Ethel Smyth) observes,
her method is purely to be dramatic, she is almost always

picturesque. To all appearances her only method is to have no
method. She seems to say and do anything that comes into her
head, but all she says and does is rather striking, she can
accommodate herself to nearly any circumstances. She is never
colourless . . . . She is beautiful, unscrupulous, dramatic, warm-
hearted, cold-blooded, and a hundred other things. 63
We could apply to Dodo the comment by William Gerhardie on her

model Margot Tennant: 'In her told story you have the untold story
of British social life; of aspirations which are never mooted; of the
bluntest of social ambitions never acknowledged even to oneself; of
the steady pushfulness of crude fathers .... ' 64
It has been observed that Pater's prose ('the lust of Rome ... the
return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias') 'does smack of
cheap historical novels' 65 - particularly of Marie Corelli, we might

say- but what distinguishes the prose of Benson and Corelli from
that of Pater, Huysmans and Wilde is its simplicity, the feel that this
is built up from sentiment, whereas the baroque literature achieves
its effect by its studied assembly of jewels, a celebration of language
in words, syntax and imagery. It is this approach which Durrell
adopts, especially in The Alexandria Quartet, 66 achieving the same
effect which Leon Blom observed in the work of Huysmans:
'continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or feet down the
worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax'. 67
Corelli certainly paid little attention to literary theory, concerning
herself exclusively with emotions. The hero of The Sorrows of Satan is
Satan himself in the guise of 'Prince Lucio Ramanez' - the prince of
light rather than darkness, a reincarnation of aspects of Lord Henry
Wootton and Dorian Gray. The first theme of the book is disillusion,
the youthful idealism or 'sublime conceit' of the narrator, Geoffrey
Tempest, who 'soon discovered that society was more interested in
the latest unsavoury scandal than in the tragedies of Sophocles or
the wisdom of Plato'. 68 The realisation that one could not
'regenerate a world in which both Plato and Christ appear to have
failed' 69 is accompanied by the explicit entry of the devil incarnate -
in a melodrama we would 'hiss the villain' but as the narrator-
spectator all we can do is read the inevitable up to the point where
Lucio draws us into his own perversion of the other subsidiary
characters. The exposure of the hypocrisy and pretence of London
society provides a backing for the Wildean subversion of the normal
Satanic role; Lucio not only acts as a catalyst on decadence- 'Why do
not the heavens rain fire on this accursed city! It is ripe for
punishment- full of abhorrent creatures not worth the torturing in
hell to which it is said liars and hypocrites are condemned!' 70 - but
gives the narrator-reader a completely new Baudelairean insight on
the nature of 'evil': God tells Lucifer:
'When the world rejects thee, I will pardon and again receive thee'
. . . 'I never heard exactly that version of that legend before' - I
said- 'The idea that Man should redeem the devil is quite new to
me.'
'Is it?' and he looked at me fixedly- 'Well- it is one form of the
story, and by no means the most poetical. Poor Lucifer! ... Man
will reject God fast enough and gladly enough - but never the
devil! 171
The 'sorrows' of Satan are:
the foul and filthy crimes of men, - the base deceits and cruelties
of women- the ruthless, murderous ingratitude of children,- the
scorn of good, the martyrdom of intellect, and selfishness, the
avarice, the sensuality of human life 72
out of which, of course, Satan, as a creature, emerges, condemned to

attempt the utter destruction of Man, his creator:
What a grotesque creation you men have made of Me! As

grotesque as your conception of God! 73
We can re-read the 'Frankenstein' legend in the light of this

pronouncement - especially since to so many readers (and cinema
viewers) the distinction between the names of the creator and of his
creature has become 'blurred'.
We know that Huysmans insisted that much of his 'decadent'
writing was executed 'tongue-in-cheek' and there is evidence that,
despite her moral earnestness and thick-skinned style, Marie Carelli
could see the ridiculous side of her melodramatic tendencies. But it
is also, and more importantly, clear that she was following a path
just as intently and consciously as the 'decadent' writers whom
ostensibly she might appear to criticise; while therefore her anti-
heroine exclaims:
What would you have me be? ... A good woman? I never met
one. Innocent?- ignorant? I told you before we married that I was
neither, 74
Marie Carelli herself is able to accept the symbiotic relationship of

God and Satan. Her book is based on her early poem, the final
stanza of which reads
God said: 'I will ordain

That thou shalt no longer be!'
Satan answered Thou canst not Lord,
For I am part of Thee!' 75
This is extremely important in providing a bridge- at least for the

critic- between Milton's and Baudelaire's Satanic 'evil be thou my
good', and Durrell's outcry, through Pursewarden, about God's

two-facedness. Corelli's anti-heroine continues:
There is nothing left for me to discover as far as the relations

between men and women are concerned - I have taken the
measure of the inherent love of vice in both sexes. There is not a
pin to choose between them . . . . I have discovered everything-
except God! - and I conclude no God could ever have designed
such a crazy and mean business as human life. 76
Lucio and Dodo between them have paved the way for popular
recognition of the 'new woman': thirty years is a huge jump in the
chronology of modern literature to revisit the new woman in the
person of Iris Storm in The Green Hat but it represents the
re-emergence of the woman as decadent hero which the war had
interrupted, by submerging both the homo-erotism of boy-
worship and the emancipation of the woman-as-dandy. Women
between the aesthetic war of the nineties and the military war of
1914-18 became intellectualised in print- Shaw and Wells and even
Eliot took her over and restored her to her niche as the femme fatale
of the mind. In the 1920s Arlen, Fitzgerald and in 'real' life Nancy
Cunard and Diana Cooper restored her to the sensual world.
Arlen's feeling for decadence- especially in the role of outsider-
as-critic for which his Armenian birth, as Dikran Kouyoumdjian,
fitted him- was particularly strong. He had an acute sense, at least
in his early books, before it was blunted by the need to satisfy his
large readership more vulgarly, of the pathetic in degeneration and
decadence. 77 He divined (as also perhaps Eliot and James did) both
the virtues and pitfalls of English society, the dynamics and the
vices of the world in which he himself desired to succeed. (The
night-dub scene in The Green Haf 8 is particularly fine when read in
this cynical satiric light.) Arlen seems to think that the English have
forgotten - or have yet to discover- how to love:
These rather caddish young men who have no vision between a

pimply purity and vice ... these toiling dancers, these elderly
gentlemen with their ungallant vices- are these that we see, all?
Or was there never such an England ?79
The outsider in Arlen creates Iris Storm the exile who declares 'You
talk to me of your England. I despise your England, I despise the us
that is us. We are shams with patrician faces and peasant minds. We
are built of lies' 80 - and she also calls herself 'a pagan body and a
Chislehurst mind'. 81
The exposure of the 'sham' and 'lies' of England is also the
concern of Richard Aldington. It is the bitter and desperate
equivalent of the more volatile intentions of Brooke and Acton to
'wake up England'. This however is the Lewis-Blast cursing and
smashing of the England which has failed to become 'a land fit for
heroes'. In The Green Hat one of the subsidiary characters cannot live
without a hero; 'no hero, no Gerald ... when his hero died, Gerald
died too. . . . Then the war, and that, of course, buried him'. 82 The
destruction of the hero - a form of sparagmos - is therefore a
necessary part of the dismantling of English hypocrisy. Much of
the action - and all the talk - of The Green Hat is motivated by
differing perceptions of the dead hero, 'Boy' Fenwick.
Iris herself acts as the catalyst, the Satane of this exercise in what
the popular press acclaimed as 'sheer delicacy and subtlety', and
'most lovable'- sentiments which somehow do not today match the
blatant heavy-handedness of its confrontations and the crudity with
which emotions are laid bare without ceremony. It is difficult to
regard as 'subtle' for example Iris Storm's statement 'I am a house of
men'; 83 Carelli's sorrowful Lucifer makes a rather obvious re-entry:
'I am not the proud adventuress who touches men for pleasure, the
silly lady who misbehaves for fun. I am the meanest of all, she who
destroys her body because she must, she who hates the thing she
is, she who loathes the thing she does'. 84
Iris Storm nails down the false side of the equation of masks:
'Oh, why do you lie?'

'Because one must be reasonable Iris'
'Oh, because this, because that, because of the persecution of
war, the savagery of beasts, the malice of gods! Free me of your
becauses! Lies, all lies! One must be truthful, there is no other law,
all other laws are lies. We are educated by lies, we live with lies,
we worship lies, we fight for lies, we die branded with lies. God
made man out of clay, and countries out of mud, and what can the
son of a marriage between clay and mud be but Master Lie?' 85
The virtue of Iris Storm, from her author's point of view, is that she
is androgynous - that is, because 'Boy' Fenwick has left the stage,
she herself has to fulfil the man's part. She is therefore ideally suited
to celebrate the noble death of others in some chivalric service which

ultimately claims her own in the quixotic gesture of driving her
Hispano-Suiza into a tree called 'Harrods'.
But the ultimate value of this combination of Satan, femme fatale
and heroic youth is her role as the child who sees through the adult
world of pretence. All Iris's appeals are to the world of childhood-
not an arcadian world but one of Victorian psychology which is
summed up in her expression 'there is a dream and there is a
beast'. 86 The dream, one assumes, is the child of light and air
whereas the beast is the father of those lies: 'The dreams walk
fluttering up and down the soiled loneliness of desire, the beasts
prowl about the soiled loneliness of regret'. 87 The lies that are called
god, war, wisdom, are our rational answer to every attempt at
freedom and truth - the beast within us all builds the wall around
our capacity to live.
The narrator's early promise as a counter-balance to Iris
evaporates long before she demolishes his 'because'. Geoffrey
Tempest at the outset is confident that 'I could somehow "cope
with" my time and generation' while Iris and her brother 'were of
the breed destined to failure'. 88 He tells us 'I was of the race that is
surviving the England of Horatio Bottomley, the England of lies,
vulgarity, and unclean savagery; while they of the imperious nerves
had failed, they had died that slow white death which is reserved for
privilege in defeat'. 89 The distinction crumbles however in the face
of the continual questioning of the child - 'Why' - which is never
satisfied with the answers, which is sui generis, which is
'tremendously indifferent' and yet capable of ferocious savagery in
defence of its own 'truth': 'I felt so profoundly incapable with her'. 90
The narrator uses the popular contemporary strategy of the
writer's room as the psychiatric couch:
I was looking not at her but through the half-open door in to my

room. There lay the disorder of my life, the jumble, the lack of
purpose, the silence, and the defeat of my life. 91
At the same time he is trying to 'explain' Iris Storm, as Durrell's

pathetic narrator Darley tries to explain Justine at the beginning of
the Quartet:
I am trying, you can see, to realise her, to add her together, and, of
course, failing. She showed you first one side of her and then
another, and each side seemed to have no relation with any other,
each side might have belonged to a different woman: indeed,
since then I have found that each side did belong to a different
woman. I have met a hundred pieces of Iris, quite vividly met
them, since I last saw her. 92
Although Arlen, or Tempest, fails to show us these many faces it is

enough that he has given us this crude insight into both psychiatry
and relativity - a new way of regarding the femme fatale within the
modern imagination.
Arlen concludes that the difference between his narrator, who
represents the ordinary reader and is bound by his temporal and
spiritual limitation, and Iris Storm, who represents the eternal
innocence of the child, is in fact the difference between the temporal
and the timeless; 'she was of all time'. 93 He thus succeeds in
expressing, however bluntly, the perennial culture and morality
which supersedes the events of time.
If in The Green Hat the hero has died before the action commences,
Death ofa Hero is in fact the life of a hero who dies only in the Prologue
and the final chapter, which I quoted in Chapter 3. Aldington called
his work 'a jazz novel', a 'threnody' 94 begun in 1918 but not finished
until 1929 and published in 1930. Aldington's account of the
landscape of the trenches and the state of mind of their occupants is
drawn from first-hand and accords closely to similar contemporary
documents. A random inspection of one such volume, A Student in
Arms by Donald Hankey (1916 and 1917), a posthumous collection of
articles sent from the front to The Spectator, yields three major
characteristics carried over into Aldington's and similar fiction; the
disinterest of the 'gentleman' who becomes 'a magnificent leader of
men'; 95 the expectation of a better world in employer-union
relations after the war; 96 and 'how adversity made men unselfish,
and pain found them tender, and loyalty made them heroic'. 97
Beneath Hankey's superficial confidence is a nagging doubt
whether man himself will pull through the pathos. Aldington
himself says 'the twentieth century had lost its Spring'- that it cared
little for life or the loss of life. But in Death of a Hero and All Men are
Enemies, Aldington celebrates life, brief though it may be. In a
passage which anticipates Beckett's 'birth astride a grave' he says:
A life may be considered as a point of light which suddenly

appears from nowhere, out of the blue. The point describes a
luminous geometrical figure in space-time; and then just as
suddenly disappears. 98
Such epicureanism as proceeds from this observation is Paterian -

Aldington's agon is with the society which imposes rules and
limitations. Paraphrasing Pound he apostrophises 1890 - 'very
different and yet curiously the same'- 'Rummy old England. Pox on
you, you old bitch, you've made worms' meat of us'. 99
Like Arlen and Wyndham Lewis (and like the future Durrell
on whom his influence was considerable) he attacks and curses 'the
great English middle-class mass'.
That dreadful squat pillar of the nation, [which] will only tolerate
art and literature that are fifty years out of date, eviscerated,
de-testiculated, bowdlerised, humbuggered, slip-slopped,
subjected to their anglicised Jehovah. 100
And like Lewis's Arghol he complains-admits:
Hasten to adopt the slimy mash of British humbug and British fear
of life, or expect to be smashed. You may escape for a time. You
may think you can compromise. You can't. You've either got to
lose your soul to them or have it smashed by them. Or you can
exile yourself. 101
In the unpreparedness for life of his hero, George Winterbourne,

Aldington presents us with the humbug of Victorian psychology;
referring to George's parents he says:
George Augustus did not know how to make a living; he did not
know in the very least how to treat a woman; he did not know
how to live with a woman; he did not know how to make love to a
woman - in fact ... he did not know the anatomy of his own
body, let alone the anatomy of a woman's body . . . . As for Isabel
- what she didn't know includes almost the whole range of
human knowledge. The puzzle is to find out what she did know
. . . . On the other hand, both George Augustus and Isabel knew
how to read and write, pray, eat, drink, wash themselves, and
dress up on Sundays. 102
As a result of 'humbug', 'they had started on the opposite road to

honesty and facing facts'. 103 It is interesting that Aldington
implicitly identifies as their 'knowledge' the same enabling skills
which Iris Storm denounces as lies- worship, literacy and appetite.
Like so many young men of his time - like the Prince of Wales
himself, as we have seen in his own account- George Winterbourne
'was living a double life- one life for school and home, another for
himself. Consummate dissimulation of youth fighting for the inner
vitality and the mystery'. 104 Aldington describes in this 'biography'
George's 'blind instinctive struggle - the fight against the effort to
force him into a mould, the eager searching out for life and more life,
which would respond to the spirit of life within'. 105
The opposite of 'humbug', however, becomes a horrible
realisation of the facts of life and death. As the 'hero' of All Men are
Enemies, Tony Clarendon, discovers from his nurse, the world is a
dangerous place. The episode is reminiscent of Bertrand Russell's
experience:
'Don't you know what death is? That's what comes of not going to
Sunday School. When you're dead, you go all white and still, and
they have to bury you, and there you stay for ever and ever until
the Angel blows his trumpet for the last Judgement, when all the
wicked shall be cast into hell!'
Annie gloated voluptuously over the words 'death' and 'hell'.
Antony turned pale, feeling as if all strength had gushed out of his
hands and knees in a thrill of horror. It was the first time he had
been told about death, the first time he had realised that the lovely
days he took so happily and carelessly would end - 'you go all
white and still, and they have to bury you'. It seemed incredible
and monstrous, but he believed her, because Annie would not tell
him a lie. And he felt no resentment, although she had clumsily
smashed his beautiful child's eternity. 106
There is a pitiful irony in the idea that 'for ever and ever' is only a
temporary spell and that by attending Sunday School children will
learn about death and hell.
One could not therefore realistically expect to regain the paradise
of childhood, which Aldington calls an 'eternity', unless one could
also regain its innocence - the problem is the same for Adam as for
Satan. Pater addressed this problem directly in his story, 'Denys
L' Auxerrois':
Almost every people, as we know, has had its legend of a 'golden

age' and of its return - legends which will hardly be forgotten,
however prosaic the world may become, while man himself
remains the aspiring, never quite contented being he is. And yet
in truth, since we are no longer children, we might well question
the advantage of the return to us of a condition of life in which, by
the nature of the case, the values of things would, so to speak, lie
wholly on their surfaces, unless we could regain also the childish
consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, in ourselves, to take all
that adroitly and with the appropriate lightness of heart. 107
By this Pater is really approximating to, and explaining, Baudelaire's

cryptic statement that 'genius is nothing more nor less than
childhood recovered at will'. 108 This means that will in fact requires
more than a wish to achieve its object, it also involves the sacrifice
implicit in all volition. If one wills to recover something, nothing less
than genius will achieve it.
In Death of A Hero, however, Winterbourne's puzzled relations
with his womenfolk - his mother, wife and mistress - are
predictably narrated. His death, in fact, is inevitable, and therefore
predictably told. The 'biography', or perhaps 'thanatography', is
disappointing in the sense that it sets out to describe the mixed
feelings of those he left behind- mother, wife and mistress- who
frankly were rather bored by George in life and death- but it instead
reverts to describing George's own reactions to warfare of which the
most pathetic is the description of Winterbourne examining the
debris of the battlefield with its uniformed skeletons, fleshless
reminders of a once purposeful existence:
Alone in the white curling mist, drifting slowly past like wraiths of
the slain, with the far-off thunder of drum-fire beating the air,
Winterbourne stood in frozen silence and contemplated the last
achievements of civilised men. 109
Death of a Hero requires to be studied in tandem with All Men are

Enemies (1933) in which Aldington examines the fate of those whom
war has left alive but broken (and also perhaps with his account of
the parallel female psychology, The Colonel's Daughter).
All Men are Enemies is based on Aldington's belief that one must
struggle towards the 'finer, fuller, life':
not only life with the woman he loves [in fact not even life with the
woman] but the energy and beauty of existence . . . . It is the life
of the here and now, the life of the senses, the life of the deep
instinctive forces. If we do not live in these we scarcely live at
all.110
His hero, Antony Clarendon, is simply George Winterbourne

redivivus. Again, the conclusion in which, after a lot of clumsiness
and pain, Antony 'gets the girl', is predictable and uninteresting.
What we need to note is the way in which Aldington rejects in this
book, as in Death of a Hero, and as Lewis did in Blast, the England
which rejects heroes and forces one into a bourgeois frame of
manners, mind and morals. He uses the General Strike of 1926 as the
metaphor and the catalyst of Antony's escape. Aldington himself
was caustic about the new art-form being developed in the cubist
aftermath. Introducing a selection of Pater's writings he refers to a
burlesquing of Pater's ideas 'into a great Aesthetic Fun Fair' -
'Brancusi's sea-shore eggs and Henry Moore's calamitous
excrescences . . . the tortured pigs of Stravinski' s "Sacre" . . . voila
ou m{ment les mauvais chemins' . 111 But he nevertheless is very close
to the core of surrealism which was intended to save what Breton
called '1' amour la poesie' as an inseparable or indivisible concept. 112
Aldington reaffirms everything more strongly here than in Death
of a Hero. 'There are two intermingled lives in each person, one of
the obvious social man, the other of the mysterious unique
personality' 113 and one's own 'real and vital' values 'were by no
means accepted as such by other people'. 114 1t may once again seem
rather unnecessary to point out this somewhat elementary lesson in
growing up but clearly Aldington feels it necessary to chart this
stage in the education of his Emile:
He pondered a great deal over this, and saw in a flash that anyone
who intended to try to live life fully for its own sake, to live 'with
gusto', was bound to be disconcerted in relations with others. 115
England, it need hardly be remarked at this stage, is put to death

once more:
'every single fibre of one is in rebellion and confusion 116 ..

To hell with governments, glories, nations, parliaments,
princes of industry, trade supremacy, red flags and striped flags

and spotted flags - to hell with them! Our national honour is at
stake. Well, let it be- who cares? 117 • • • •
He was not merely Antony Clarendon throwing up a lucrative
job for personal reasons, but the symbol of a generation and a race
passing judgement on the fraudulent values of a debased
civilisation. 118
The solution here is exile from both the inner and the outer worlds:
It seemed to Tony that he had really and truly died, and that a new
life exacted an entire abandonment of his past. 119
But the lesson being painfully learned by the children of the waste
land is that the past cannot be discarded- we carry it within us, like a
germ which can locate the emphasis of our psychic development
either on the individual talent within the stream of tradition or on the
subordination of history to the role of the individual. That
supremacy of time, as an inevitable but indefinable fate, presents the
child and the man with the challenge not only of today, of the
twentieth or nineteenth centuries, but of the time-space continuum:
how to establish continuities and certainties in which one can carry
over sufficient knowledge to maintain sanity and yet retain enough
'space' in which to construct the realities of one's own 'time'. In the
career of Yeats and the early work of Gerhardie (one could hardly
call his work a 'career') we can see this inevitability and its
challenges clearly spelt out.
IV AT THE CAFE BYZANTINE
If Iris Storm is 'a house of men' then Gerhardie's novels are houses
of women, women-in-waiting. Although he was English himself he
displays a Russian mastery of the sense of destiny and his
characters, especially in the first two novels, Futility and The
Polyglots (which are specifically set in Russia), possess a Chekhovian
wishfulness about the future and an equal determination never to
reach it. In the conclusion to this chapter I have decided to combine a
consideration of Gerhardie with a look at Yeats's development from
antinomies to the 'Heraldic Universe' or 'fifth province' mentioned
earlier.
It may seem incongruous to involve Yeats in a discussion mainly

devoted to children: while Gerhardie's characters, whatever their
ages, are all children, Yeats seems to offer the opposite - a
concentration on himself, and, at whatever age, on himself as an old
man. But Yeats's final achievement is the repossession of the
starting-point, innocence and images -I' enfant retrouve son extase.
Moreover the psychic similarities between Russia and Ireland
provide us with examples of the attitude to fate unavailable
elsewhere in Western Europe. 'Tell me you love Russia. Tell me you
love her. We Russians are lazy, drunken, good-for-nothing swine;
but we are good people, aren't we? It's a holy land. It's a holy
people'. 120 Substitute 'Ireland' for 'Russia' and the passage would
not be out of place in modern Irish fiction. Both races are
characterised by depression, due to climate and political subjection,
a fierce religiosity which is largely sui generis, tribalism, faith in an
unobtainable future and a peculiar ability to reason in terms of the
irrational. Gerhardie prefaces the highly autobiographical Futility
with the Rimbaudian words 'The 'I' of this book is not me': not just a
quizzical disclaimer or attempt at objectivity but an indication that in
Russian, as in Irish, there is no present tense of the verb 'to be'; one
cannot say I am. And in order to say 'I have a pen' in either language
the writer must see himself objectively as 'other'; 'there is a pen at
me'. (It is not surprising that Chekhov, in The Seagull for example,
'translates' easily and directly into the Irish context. 121 ) After a
performance of Three Sisters the narrator of Futility asks 'How can
there be such people .... They can't do what they want. They
don't even know what they want. They talk, talk, talk, and then go
off and commit suicide or something. It is a hysterical cry for greater
efforts, for higher aims - which to themselves are vague and
unintelligible- and a perpetual standstill'. 122 This analysis of 'black
melancholy ... incredible inefficiency, ... paralysing inertia'
might be taken from an Irish text on rural sociology.
Gerhardie's Futility and The Polygots use the contemporary
metaphor of the hotel or cafe as a waiting-room for the future. This
was a common technique in the 1920s- Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel
(1927), E. E. Cumming's The Enormous Room (1922) (also Durrell's
'Asylum in the Snow' and the hotels of Pied Piper of Lovers and The
Black Book, Nin's 'house of love' and the labyrinth of the minotaur,
and Miller's succession of hotel-rooms of the Tropics and Black
Spring) all take their place in this junction of art and psychology, for
which Chekhov had supplied the blueprint.
The 'polyglots' inhabiting, or passing through, this junction are

like the pentecostalists in a room filled with a rushing mighty wind
or stream of consciousness - speaking in many tongues, but in
Eliot's expression all they can manage is to
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape. 123
The polyglots, like Chekhov's Three Sisters, step in and out of each
other's minds in search of an 'integrating principle' more concrete
than self-defeating hope. They lack the courage to embrace despair:
'Nikolai Vasilievich believes in the mines. Kniaz helps him to

sustain that belief in return for Nikolai's faith in the shares ... '
'And the "family" ... his wife and her family, his fiancee and her
family, you and your family, his sisters and cousins, Kniaz and
the others and their families- do they believe in the mines?' 'More
firmly than Nikolai . . . . I wish it wasn't real life, my life. Then I
would find it a trifle more amusing'. 124
But such hope is not commanded solely by the future. Fanny

Ivanovna relates a dream of
Nikolai standing high upon a mountain peak, seeking to escape

towards the light and freedom and finding that he could not,
because he was linked to the past. He tried to break the chains, but
the past held him, clung to him, a monster with a thousand arms,
like that picture in Gogol's Terrible Vengeance. He found the past
too strong for him .... Why should the past always hold him?
. . . . He hasn't lived yetY5
Nikolai's answer is a stoical acceptance of fate: 'Life gets you -

sooner or later it gets you all the same'. 126 Nikolai says this despite
the fact that at 53 he has fallen in love with a girl of 17, because he has
found it impossible to escape the 'family' of the past which he carries
on his back. Like Aldington's Antony Clarendon he wants to make
the jump into the future:
this is the love that comes once only, to which you yield
gloriously, magnificently, or you are crushed and broken and
thrust aside. 127
One would imagine, from the account of his infatuation given by

Nikolai's mistress, Fanny Ivanovna, that he had been successful in
seizing the moment, aut tunc aut nunquam, since she sees him in the
role of irresponsible antic, in full knowledge of his own guilt but
resolutely and ruthlessly following his own path:
Nothing could shame him ... he was already ashamed to his full
capacity, conscious of unpardonable sin, conscious of being a bad
man, the very worst man - had admitted it all to himself . . . was
satisfied, as though this confession to himself had cleansed him of
his wickedness and he had come out of it, clean, sanctified. 128
But Nikolai despite his knowledge of his guilt is not liberated by it,
he continues to be imprisoned by the very thing he seeks, life:
'It is all very well,' he said slowly, 'to talk. Life is not so simple.
There are complications, so to speak, entanglements. It cuts all
ways, till - till you don't know where you are. Yes, Andrei
Andreiech . . .' He sighed and paused before he spoke again.
'Chekhov' he said at last, 'is a great artist' .129
As the narrator of Futility eventually realises, the sum total of all this
hope for the future and sense of the past is nothing:
How melancholy, but strangely fascinating, were those evenings:

this gathering of souls dissatisfied with life, yet always waiting
patiently for betterment: enduring this unsatisfactory present
because they believed that this present was not really life at all:
that life was somewhere in the future: that this was but a
temporary and transitory stage to be spent in patiently waiting.
And so they waited, year in, year out, looking out for life: while
life, unnoticed, had noiselessly piled up the years that they had
cast away promiscuously in waiting, and stood behind them -
while they still waited. 130
Joyce, we might recall, achieves a similar effect in the conclusion to

his story 'The Dead' and for similar reasons: the despair of the
narrator at the futility of the talking-shop that is Ireland, the lack of
real purpose or motive, the inert desire to be covered by a numbing
blanket of snow, but also to express the hopelessness which
precedes futility in the mind of the child.
The way in which the narrator Andrei Andreiech tries to solve the
insoluble problems of the huge ramified 'family' of Nikolai which is
a metaphor for the whole world, is Gerhardie's way of saying that
people who consider themselves grown up cannot resist interfering
in the lives of those whom they consider less fortunate in their
struggle towards maturity and worldly wisdom. 'They are
obviously unfit to help themselves': 131
And I proceeded to lay before her the principles on which I said I

was going to re-shape their lives: each one would have to give up
something for the benefit of the whole, and each one would
similarly receive a compensation of some kind in that future life of
theirs . . . . I explained and propounded with something of the
insolence of a creator. 132
By the end of the novel Andrei Andreiech has discovered that that
kind of plan is still future-oriented and -dominated:
When I was very young . . . . I thought that life must have a plot,
like a novel. But life is most unlike a novel. Perhaps it is a good
thing that it is. I don't want to be a novel. I don't want to be a story
or a plot. I want to live my life as a life, not as a story. 133
There remains the question of reason in the public world as related

to subjective 'truth'. Uncle Kostia, the 'thinker' of Futility, says:
Truth is fond of playing practical jokes. . . . My God! how elusive

it is. It is wonderful how beneath our hastily made-up truths, the
truths of usage and convenience, there runs independently, often
contrariwise, a wider, bigger truth. Can't you feel it? The
pseudo-reason of unreason. The lack of reasonable evidence in
reason. Issues, motives being muddled up .... Subtleties of the
mind, if pursued to their logical conclusion, become crudities. 134
Iris Storm clearly reappears here with her distinction between

'becauses' and 'truth'.
Gerhardie gives us a humorous example of the ability of the
Russian mind to identify the 'pseudo-reason of unreason' in the
thought of the English Admiral in the expeditionary force:
It is an intrinsic part of the Russian character that it does not accept

No for No. It is constitutionally incapable of doing so. Its

institutions are all a negation of that principle . . . . The Admiral
meant to show that when an Englishman says No he does mean
No. But none of them would understand the Admiral's
interpretation of No. They had all grown up with the idea that No
meant Yes after an adequate amount of pressure and insistence
. . . . The Admiral replied that when he said a thing he meant it,
this being the sterling value of the British character. But they
persisted all the same, treating him as if he were just human like
the rest of them . . . . Their touching innocence fascinated him so
much that finally he felt he wanted to humour them as one is
inclined to humour quaint, unreasonable children who know no
better. And it was by way of humouring them that the Admiral
gave way. No (for once only) was to mean Yes.U5
In The Polyglots an equally ludicrous episode carries a similar

message - the suicide by hanging of the straight-laced, demure,
Uncle Lucy 'clothed in Aunt Teresa's camisole, knickers, silk
stockings, garters, and a silk boudoir cap'. 136
I am inclined to think that the ordinary normal spectacle of life as it

is lived on our planet had unhinged his mind: had proved too
much for him. I pondered on the logic of the insane: perhaps they
have a logic of their own. Or perhaps madness is the very
antithesis of logic. 137
As another character in The Polyglots, Captain Negodyaev, tells us,

'the logical conclusion of life, of all joy, sorrow, suffering, exaltation,
consciousness; in a word, of being- is not being'. 138
That idea would not have seemed at all incongruous to Yeats, who
spent all his middle years attempting to resolve antinomies between
public and private, between images and ideas, between
romanticism and modernity, in order to realise his inner landscape.
Two statements dominate Yeats's quest: firstly that he obeyed two
impulses, 'love of country and love of the unseen life', and secondly
that 'we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, out of the
quarrel with ourselves, poetry' . 139 Eventually Yeats discovers that
the way home to the poetry of that 'unseen life' is not through
outright rejection of 'country' or 'rhetoric' but through a voyage to
another unknown country, Byzantium, and through a process of

identification in the waiting-room there. (Yeats's hotel of course was
not a room which people and ideas entered and exited, but a tower
enclosing a stairway, which spirits and symbols continually
ascended and descended.)
Yeats begins by rebelling against the 'tyranny of fact', the
if-conditional, in favour of the if-subjunctive. As a child of Pre-
Raphaelitism and the 1890s he adopted mediaevalism as 'the
governing influence of my life'. 140 He espouses images, 'for wisdom
speaks first in images', 141 and as he fills his mind with visible ideas
he writes poetry distinguished by its cinematic or cartoonic quality:
And in a wild and sudden dance

We mocked at Time and Fate and Chance. 142
But he also knows that beauty - the femme fatale of his rapidly
adopted symbolism- carries within it its own, and our, destruction.
He is led to examine, with bitterness, the destruction of the myths of
childhood and, like Mallarme' s child who abdicates from ecstasy, he
'casts his dreams away'. 143
From 1892 Yeats, then attempting to establish in the public
domain a national theatre in Ireland, simultaneously heralds
himself as the voice of 'the revolt of the soul against the intellect'. 144
He sees the symbolist movement as heralding a reversal of human
destiny: 'we are at a crowning crisis of the world, at the moment
when man is about to ascend . . . the stairway he has been
descending from the first days'. 145 He succeeds briefly in achieving
a precarious balance between the order of the private self (the poetic
soul) and the order of the public figure (theatre manager and
statesman) by means of a liminal position as the artist on the
threshold between the private landscape and the public world.
Yeats regards the soul as (in his father's words) 'all that we mean
by senses, passions, appetites, memory of the past, anticipations
joyous or fearful of the future'. 146 During his early manhood he
discovers the ideal metaphor for this 'soul' in the Celtic Twilight,
within which he has a premonition of Jung's 'collective
unconscious'- a mythic community linked to a 'Great Memory', the
modern epiphany of which is the Celtic childhood which is fit to
dream, reliving the 'moral-less tales of a time when nothing had
consequences'. 147
Yeats is therefore able to accommodate the world of becoming
within the world of being. This, as Elizabeth Cullingford has

demonstrated, anticipates Russell's The Problems of Philosophy which
says:
The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the

mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems
and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence
is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear
plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all
the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do
either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the
value of life and the world. 148
The language, we should note, is peculiarly Yeatsian. As Dr

Cullingford observes, this contrast 'suggests the philosophical
framework of both "Sailing to Byzantium" and the later
"Byzantium"'. 149 Yeats not only anticipates Russell's distinction
and pre-dates the Jungian unconscious but he also, as we have
already seen, establishes a 'Heraldic Universe' long before Durrell
coins the term. In 1895 he was examining 'the ritual of the marriage
of heaven and earth', 150 finding the connection between the
essentially private landscape of personal heraldry and the
quintessential role of the poet in the public world- the shamanistic or
divining role of the artist in which he discovers 'new heraldic
images' which are 'true symbols'. Ultimately, as we have seen, Time
and Space become 'unreal'.
The political implications of this are momentous and must be seen
in parallel with the aesthetic condition into which Paterian and
Wildean epicureanism might seduce the artist from his social
obligation. Like Durrell, Yeats recognised this quintessential role as
the culmination of a quincunx, that is, locating the poet, and the
poem, within the centre of four symbols - which he has learned is
the code of the mandala. It is this which he was trying to express in
the cryptic phrase 'Ireland, until the Battle of the Boyne, belonged to
Asia<~ 51 - a dismissal of the entire Renaissance cultural system of
government and perspective which was thereafter imposed on the
Celtic peoples.
Yeats's ultimate symbolic system, bearing a striking resemblance
to the passage just quoted from Russell, and underlining the
construction of The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet, is the
framework of a perennial culture:
(i) that the borders of our mind are ever shifting and that many
minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a
single mind, a single energy.
(ii) that the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our
memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature
herself.
(iii) that this great mind and great memory can be evoked by
symbols. 152
Yeats thus succeeds in making the connection between the 'images

of the affection' with what we could regard as 'images of the
intellect'- eagle, house, stair, sun, moon. In doing so he employs
vagueness in pursuit of a positive statement as conscientiously as
Eliot had used it mischieviously (in the notes to The Waste Land) in
pursuit of a negative frame of mind: 'some will ask if I believe all that
this book contains, and I will not know how to answer. Does the
word beliefbelong to our age? Can I think of the world as there, and I
here, judging it? 1153 [my emphasis].
Yeats's concept of Ireland as a culture is of an ancient passionate
aristocracy (immemorial Titans?) trembling between heaven and
earth: 'In Ireland this world and the other are not widely
sundered'. 154 In this he influenced Symons who wrote of the
symbolists 'to whom the visible world is no longer a reality and the
unseen world no longer a dream'. 155 In saying 'we wish to preserve
an ancient ideal of life', Yeats was pleading for the survival of a
secret garden on the edge of the world where 'a race of gentlemen
keep alive the ideals of a past time when men sang the heroic life
with drawn swords in their hands'. 156 This is the land of youth, Tir
na nOg. But Yeats has to admit that youth perishes, 'it is one of the
great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions.
There is always something in our enemy that we like and something
in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this entanglement of moods
which makes us old'. 157 The worlds of rhetoric and poetry, of
country and the unseen life, keep spilling over into each other, they
are epicene and promiscuous, labile as words themselves, and can
only be joined in the same sort of mystical fire that Eliot conceives in
Four Quartets through the defeat of time.
Yeats himself discovers that Byzantium is Ireland. It was a 'secret
and inviolate' voyage, personal and exclusive. Yeats's only entirely
successful protege was Synge, who found a public way to achieve
this celebration of the Celtic perspective by creating a new language
in which to mediate between the peasant, to whom all images are

symbols, and the new Ireland, to which all allegory was myth.
Nevertheless Yeats, by the example of The Tower, did succeed in
liberating the poets of the thirties from the ice age of The Waste Land
because he showed that a return to childhood is only possible if one
establishes, in Pater's terms, 'the appropriate lightness of heart.'
5
The Winter of Artifice:
1930--40
Only a world gone mad could issue a document like this
Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book1
I THE FROZEN SEA
I earlier emphasised the paradox that surrender to one's age makes

it difficult to express that age in art. One is continually thrown back
on the resources of history to express the present (and, more
agonisingly, the future) through the lessons of the past. The paradox
is that in rejecting the father, his children are forced to confirm their
patrimony in perennial words, images and gestures: one cannot live
in the NOW without being in Time.
We have seen attemps to break this mould- the theatre de la merde,
for example - but predominantly the children of the waste land
found that their despair and consternation is simply due to their
failure to step off the cycle of history. Those whom Samuel Hynes
calls 'the Auden generation'/ who grew up entre deux guerres,
experienced this even more acutely because they had the same
sense of futility as we have discussed in the previous chapter,
heightened by the knowledge that one inconclusive war would be
followed by another, in which they would become the Geoffrey
Winterbournes of their age, living in 'the epoch "preceding the next
Great War"'. 3 The rise of totalitarianism to replace the Kings and
Emperors may not have been so serious a threat to the intellect as
has been supposed - freedom had already, and always, been
constrained by destiny.
In fact the children who struggled through this winter of artifice
are subject to a multiple paradox- they must reconcile themselves to
history but they must also reconcile themselves to themselves, since
psychology tells them that they are divided selves. Within this dual

The Winter of Artifice: 1930--40 167
paradox is another: relativity shows them that the idea of nature as a

'temple' of interrelated factors is wrong; a more appropriate image
would be a hall of mirrors in which everything, real and unreal, is
distorted. Still life begins to move, portraits talk back, fictional
characters take over the writing of their own novels.
In 1936 Durrell writes from Corfu, where he has begun his exile
from England: 'The Victorians tried to destroy our psyche by their
cheap watch-chain certainty, their half-hunter universe. Thank God
someone had the sense to break it wide open and uncage the real
mysteries for us to feed on'. 4 As we shall see, patricide was the
simultaneous gesture and method of three writers from widely
different backgrounds, but it did not succeed in destroying the
Victorians themselves: the long arm of Pater's aesthetics stretches
confidently into our own age, his standard carried by Durrell and
Beckett among others. Instead they begin to find a way out of the
labyrinth, a way of confronting 'the real mysteries' in a head-on
psychic encounter.
The predominant characteristic of the age has been identified as
bewilderment and despair - but this seems to me misleading
because it gives insufficient account of the way in which some
writers overcame that despair in their autism. For example
Aldington' s Antony Clarendon 'thought with some bitterness that if
ever he were silly enough to adopt a coat-of-arms, he would take
'Lost' as his motto. It seemed to sum up his life admirably'. 5 They
know they are lost, because they are about to become orphans by
their own hand: in an early poem Durrell writes 'The father is now in
death'. 6 Even the poets of 'the Au den generation' who took up
political writing and became, however briefly, communists, seem to
have done so out of need for a strategy rather than from a conviction
that their chosen stance was inherently right. When Spender, for
example, tells us that 'to be modem meant in the thirties to interpret
the poet's individual experience of lived history in the light of some
kind of Marxist analysis' 7 he does not convince. He says that 'we
were putting the subject back into poetry', 8 but it was not the
subject, simply a subject. In a world where subject and object had
become interchangeable the claim does not amount to much,
particularly when Spender goes on to say that 'the appearance of a
common direction amid so much diversity is perhaps due to the fact
that fascism itself gave anti-fascism a semblance of unity'. 9
Furthermore Spender makes an ironic comparison with 'the
modem movement' of Yeats and Eliot which, by contrast, 'created
art which was centred on itself and not on anything outside it'. 10
Ironic, because while the general trend in the 1930s was towards the
outer world, towards involvement in political gestures such as the
Spanish civil war, there was also a distinct and contrary movement
towards the inner landscape, confirming the direction taken by
Yeats and Eliot. The public life of the thirties was in any case not
original: Lewis and Aldington, for example, had, as we have seen,
tried that route and, in their different ways, so had Waugh and
Fitzgerald. The introspective writers of the thirties were prepared to
excavate the' dry brain' and its 'real mysteries' not in order to restore
the subject but to confirm the absence of object. This psychological,
subjective imperative meant that one made a virtue of being lost
because it showed that what had been lost was not the outer
direction but the relationship of the self to the other person
wandering around within the dry brain- Gerontion's audience is
not a public but a private set of demons.
As Kafka says, a book should be an axe for the frozen sea within
us. It is not surprising that his novels should have begun to find
their vogue in the 1930s since they are hallmarked by compassion for
this other self but not by self-pity. Today this may also be difficult to
understand since the popular concept of the 'Kafkaesque situation'
is of the small, innocent man beset by incomprehensible, and
inevitable, fate. But it is an essential ingredient in this prozess that the
victim should acquiesce in, and contribute to, that fate.
Compassion for the 'tiny centres' is therefore a song for innocence
never known, a celebration of complicity. When Anals Nin axes the
father figure she simultaneously smashes a frozen centre within her
because, as her diary shows us, she and her father have become one:
her cubism simply mirrors the truth of the psychological world. It is
entirely understandable that her work should have been greeted as
the first modern exploration of the female psyche, since both her
novels and her diary perform the same function for her readers as
Picasso, or Magritte' s pictures for the spectator seeking a map to the
relationship of the world within his own mind.
Violence itself therefore diminishes in importance compared with
the liberation of the psyche it is intended to achieve. Patricide,
deicide and regicide, in other words, are designed to remove the
intolerable burden of oppression but the assassin will inevitably
proceed to proclaim himself king, to beget children or to bow down
before other kings and patriarchs. Beyond the killing is a recognition
of the King within us, which opens the door to a new form of
knowledge, the relation of fact to fiction, of real to unreal, which had

previously been incomprehensible.
In this way Miller can announce (in Tropic of Cancer):
I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can

retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is
something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God,
but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am
alive. Morally I am free. 11
Moral freedom is clearly a greater property than spiritual death

because it allows him to overcome history, not by denying it or
attempting to destroy it, but by making no claim on it: 'As far as
history goes, I am dead'. Miller, as we shall see, celebrates this death
by an emphatic re-birth of the flesh.
We have therefore seen so far in this book the course of dandyism
from attitude to posture, the gradual reduction of heraldry under
the weight of history, a devaluation of original and creative acts as
the rise of ennui, despair and cynicism make such gestures
anachronistic and absurd. In this cyclic process there are of course
many examples of autism, of the child in the man becoming
dangerously savage and behaving brutally, heraldically perhaps, in
defence of his secret gardens: Baudelaire, Wilde, Jarry and
Wyndham Lewis are prime cases. But the writers whose work
prompted the writing of this book belong to the first generation who
had available to them the means of changing the course of the modern
novel because they could consciously employ the devices of
Freudian psychology and Einsteinian relativity which are implicit,
but unexplored, in James or Proust. In this respect Nin, Miller and
Durrell are more important in the history of European literature
than Woolf or Joyce because they (Durrell in particular) manipulate
the facility for monologue so that it is pressed into service in split-
ting up the worlds of space, time and consciousness and in
reconstructing society and its history. It is not merely therefore a
question of exploring the relationship of time to the ego, but of all
time with all egos: myth is therefore regained, but then re-
established as narrative so that the novel is purified of its bourgeois
appurtenances and becomes both 'mantic and semantic'.
II THE AXE
The book becomes the means of freeing the child-artist from the
intolerable posturing into which his dandy-father is pushing him.
Although violence is the means rather than the purpose, the book
remains an axe and, as with the earlier 'blasting' by Wyndham
Lewis, the dominant imagery of rejection is abrasive, iconoclastic,
blasphemous. As Durrell says,
Miller toiled away like a monk, cleaning the keys and cogs of his
typewriter every morning before sitting down to work: like a paid
assassin checking and oiling his gun. 12
For Miller the enemy, the father, was the American way of life, and
its polite literature. For the Surrealist - or 'Durrealist' as Durrell
called himself13 - it was the whole of Western civilisation: surrealism
was 'the desperate act of men too profoundly concerned for the
rottenness of our civilisation to want to save a shred of its
respectability' .14
In 1933 Miller writes to Anai:s Nin:
There is no solution. This is how the world is today. Millions must

go to the wall. Millions must suffer, and die. No man can do
anything. These are the lean catastrophic years ... These are
such bad, such evil times now and then that not even God
Almighty can raise a finger to help men. So it is. Men must not
only suffer for their own sins and omissions, but for the sins of
others, for the sins of the past, for the mistakes of history. 15
But books about the sickness, the end, the destruction, of society
were both public and private. It was not only the public world which
had been undermined by history but the private integrity. It was
merely an act of history which provided the young men of the
thirties - 'the Auden generation' - with the prospect of
totalitarianism; as Isherwood said 'Youth always demands its
nightmares ... Germany supplied them'. 16 But Miller and Durrell,
despite the backgrounds against which they were rebelling, were
not particularly concerned with public or social events, not even
with what Edmund Wilson was calling 'a crisis of human culture' . 17
The 'England' or 'America' which excited their fury was, like the
'Ireland' of Joyce's 'The Dead', not so much a polity as a state of
The Winter of Artifice: 1930-40 171
mind. In this sense their early work, unlike Goodbye to Berlin, was
predominantly personal, and only marginally concerned with the
world. Durrell's 'English Death' and the 'universe' he constructs to
conquer it are within him. Similarly when Miller describes Tropic of
Cancer's concern with 'the disease of civilization-Is he sees it not as
something to be discussed in social terms, but in terms of the only
entity he knows, Henry Miller the struggling writer - 'hence the
necessity to change one's course and begin all over again' 19 (my
emphasis]. Anticipating Camus by fifteen years, Miller says 'to
dispossess God and become a god oneself- this is the Promethean
drama'. 20
In this insistence on self as the only knowable entity, and the
elucidation of worlds in which the self is at once king and the only
inhabitant, we see a quite different approach to the novel than that
of Proust or Joyce whose concern is with the outer world and with
history. In the novels of Nin, Miller and Durrell (as with Beckett and
Nabokov) the elements of time and place, whatever form they take,
have no meaning unless they can first be measured against the
yardstick of pure self.
In their books they are thus hacking down the bourgeois,
male-dominated novel of the Renaissance and uniting the subject-
matter of the modern novel with the form of pre-Renaissance
story-telling, the courtly poem and the mystical dream.
Through brutality Miller hopes to achieve a new age of
tenderness. As we shall see, he intends principally not to destroy
but to create, to build worlds ('China') in which the self can know
its elements with a mediaeval clarity, a heraldry in which he is
pancreator and autogeneous. Unlike the other 'fanatic idealists'
(such as Lenin, Hitler, Roosevelt and H. G. Wells whom he
discusses with Michael Fraenkel in the 'Hamlet' correspondence),
Miller's purpose in wielding the axe is to restore the heart:
They are all addressing themselves to the intellect, or the

passions, or to the instincts - never to the heart. The seat of
intelligence is in the heart. The man who does not see and
understand with his heart gets swept away by the tides. At
present the heart is dying of white heart rot, as the arboriculturists
term it. The rotten cavities are being plugged up with cement
and gold. 21
The axe will therefore inevitably strike at the core of modern

civilisation because, as Miller's analysis tells us, it is not the way we

think, or the effect of our thoughts, which has to be dammed or
diverted but the organ and mode of thought itself, not the intellect
but the intelligence. Freud had formulated this difficulty
simultaneously in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), in which he
identified the struggle between ego and id with that between the
reality-principle and the pleasure-principle. If we extend this, in
Miller's terms, to the tension, and qualitative difference, between
heart and head we can see that to re-establish the primacy of heart,
'the undifferentiated, amoral realm of primitive yearning' 22 is to
dis-establish western civilisation and to reject not only the
patrimony but the father himself.
For Freud, of course, the son's relationship with the father was
the key to individual and collective guilt. The axe-men demanded
that sons and daughters should be regarded as people, as 'tiny
centres' in their own right, rather than as child-shaped adults.
Durrell and Miller became the new Baudelaires. Whereas Proust
and Joyce had altered the course of the modern novel, these
gladiators effected a heraldry which we can already detect in Henry
James's ratiocination, a movement inward to the exclusion of the
world, all its intellect, instincts, manners, mind and morals, in order
to become sui generis- 'the individual ... who, at the extreme
point, moves not with the times, to affect a change in the times, but
with himself, to effect a change within himself. To come alive to
himself'. 23
Durrell, like Miller, struggled towards himself in his first books,
deconstructing and disestablishing accepted codes of writing as of
belief: 'God I'm so despondent to write a BOOK' he tells Alan
Thomas. 'Something with contours and blood and stuff in it: not just
romantic viscera that quiver at the sight of any rainbow, and a
precious turdous STYLE a la Strachey'. 24 And very soon after he tells
Thomas: 'What I am after is the real feeling for things uncomplicated
any more by our pal J. C. or ethic or code or what not .... I see now
what Lawrence means, what Miller is at, and I corroborate it, not
just intellectually, but with my own feeling and experience and
bowels'. 25
To demolish literature ... and write a book. Durrell and Miller
both discover that while they may be able to alter the course of
literature they are also bound to use its methods and processes, and
that they cannot write in an entirely unknown or original language.
However esoteric or cabalistic the expression of their thoughts and
experiences may be, the reader will eventually find the key. 26
Durrell's particular achievement is to forge a brand of literature
which unites the commonplaces of the modern novel with the
scientific developments dominating the world-view of modern
society. His novels are psychological and relative in a way that most
of the other major novels are not. Of older writers Djuna Barnes,
among contemporaries Nabokov, and among younger writers John
Fowles, are the only prominent fellow-travellers on this path. (It
may seem strange that I discount Proust, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett
in this connection; this is because in the case of the first three the
method of 'stream-of-consciousness' predominates in the books-
one is conscious of consciousness itself rather than the object of
consciousness- while in the case of Beckett the private conversation
is unashamedly ratiocinative, an attempt to dispense with
consciousness itself in order to return 'from silence to silence'.)
It is in this sense of uniting- or re-uniting- the people of an age
with the spirit of their age that Durrell and Nin especially succeed in
turning the waste land inside out. The autobiography of the modern
hero which, as we have seen, Aldington and Wyndham Lewis failed
to write, is his odyssey through the waste land and the winter of
artifice, through the explicit use of the tools of psychology, towards
the self. In each case this consists of establishing an imaginary zone
and placing in it all one's knowledge and id-entity. For Miller this is
'China', for Durrell 'the Heraldic Universe', while for Nin it is more
firmly located from the beginning in the chambers and houses of her
own mind. In each case also, it is the BOOK which is used as a
double-edged weapon- to smash the icon of father, king and god
and to smash the frozen sea within us.
III CHINA
It is possible that contemporary literature looked at through the

wrong end of the telescope - from 1995 say - will yield strange
configurations. Miller will then have taken his true place beside
Freud as the greatest liberator from guilt through the analytic
method . . . . By elucidating the Oedipus Complex Freud
destroyed at one blow the whole subject matter of European art
from Doctor Faustus onwards. Miller has fulfilled the cycle. We
can now proceed. 27
When Durrell wrote this in 1946/47 Miller was still unknown.

Although like Durrell he had been published in Paris in the 1930s,
his books (Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring and Tropic of Capricorn) had
very little circulation and the obscenity and violence of his language
had gained him a reputation which obscured both his intentions and
his achievements.
Miller regarded his life in America, which he left in his late
thirties, as 'an unacknowledged struggle to adapt myself to the
world', whereas 'I should have been adapting myself to myself'. 28 In
his first three books Miller was attempting not so much artistic
expression as self-expression, forming a personality through the
vivid statement of thoughts and experience. In this he was greatly
assisted by the sympathetic sup.r,ort of Anals Nin and her analyst,
Otto Rank, whose Art and Artist 2 had a widespread influence at that
time. The greatest single influence for Miller, and for Nin, was D. H.
Lawrence (on whom they both wrote at this stage as acts of
homage 30). Rank had written that the modern artist 'will re-mould
the self-creative type and be able to put his creative impulse directly
in the service of his own personality'. 31 Miller rejected America
precisely because it seemed to him that that service was impossible-
in Nin's words 'the human being who thought this was to be his
world is . . . being sacrificed'. 32
In Paris Miller began a long correspondence with Michael
Fraenkel which was published in 1939 as Hamlet, an exploration of
the psychosis of the modern individual (implicitly male) in his
relationship to his father and his own creativity. Behind the
correspondence was the problem of how this private psychosis
related to, or was affected by, the public death of civilisation.
Fraenkel explains:
We simply had to face and accept the death, squarely and

resolutely, take it inside, as it were, into our blood stream,
consciously, deliberately, face and accept it in the inmost depths
of our being, and - live it out. 33
In the 'Hamlet' correspondence - in which Miller succeeds in

resolutely avoiding any explicit discussion of Shakespeare's play,
which he jocularly suggests he has not read 34 - we find the most
useful clues to Miller's intentions in his Tropics.
Firstly, we understand his need to destroy people, places,
emotions, language itself. In 'The Genesis of The Tropic of Cancer'
Fraenkel described the private and public malaise which Miller set
out to cure:
'a rust of the soul, a blight of the spirit, a death, a spiritual

devastation within, of the mind and heart and soul, which no
blood of the living dead could wash away, so long as the death
underneath remained. 35
This realisation gives 'Hamlet' its particular tone of contempt and

despair at the prospect of modern man trying to set right the
disjointed times. Miller despised modern writers - Huxley for
example36 - who brought intellectual power to bear on a world
which requires action. 'Hamlet is a disease- a disease of the mind' 37
he declares. 'I've always regarded him as the very symbol of
cowardice. Perhaps cowardice is too strong a word. Frustration, to
use the modern parlance, would be better'. 38 Miller, determined not
to be frustrated, untroubled by doubts, rushes into emphatic
assertive prose, an unequivocal embrace of experience, which is
action in itself, a romping, racing assault on a language which
betrays poverty of description because the author is not creating
descriptions in words but making direct statements about
experience and personality.
Whereas the ineradicable sense of fear had previously been
expressed as 'a tangible, talkable fear of death', the 'modern neurosis
. . . expresses itself through fear of life'. 39 For Miller this was
intolerable. He was determined to swallow death and life, rejecting
the modern watch-word, 'immune ... a static, sanitary eternity of
the present ... a sanitary republic of ineffective bacteria' 40 in order
to live 'the vivid dream', the 'very plasma of life'.
Secondly therefore he must discover what the present actually
means - is it a sanitised halting-point between past and future, a
hostage to indecision, or a place where things actually happen?
Miller is concerned that if the morbid neurosis of civilisation can be
overcome or rejected then the present moment can be made to live.
Fraenkel argues that
Hamlet is the bridge between past and present ... [the] logical
end in despair and disillusionment ... the last outpost of modern
knowledge where the net result of all our exploration into the
unknown is to overwhelm the mind with a sense of frustration
before the ultimate problems of life and destiny ... the dead end
beyond which there is nothing ... with him the modern spirit
finally spends itself and disappearsY
Miller sees Hamlet not as the victim of these 'ultimate problems of

life and destiny' but as a perpetrator of an aesthetic and social crime
-'the supreme coward who walks out on LIFE. Nothing is solved by
his action: the results [sic] is murder and suicide' _42 The modern
spirit clearly has no right to surrender to paralysis.
We talk about the past and future like stageshifters talk about the
scenes that are being shifted back and forth. History is a
meaningless decor for the show we never put on. Nothing lives in
us, neither in retrospect nor in anticipation. The present is a
vacuum, a painfully frozen state, a sort of gloomy vestibule in
which we lie suspended. 43 • • • At such moments, those who have
lived by illusions find themselves high and dry, thrown up on the
shore like the wreck of the sea, there to disintegrate and be
swallowed up by the elemental forces. Whole worlds can go to
bits like that, living out what you would call a 'biological death'
. . . Here the unreal world of ideas, dogmas, superstitions,
hopes, illusions, flounders in one continuous nightmare - a
reality more vivid than anything known in life because life had
been nothing but a long evasion, a sleep. Hamlet's fear of the
other world is the most vital thing about his philosophizing. For
him nothing could be more certain than that he would toss fitfully
about in hell. He represents a lost soul, in that he could never
decide to go to the right or to the left .... He is doomed to live
among the ghosts of his own creation. 44
Thirdly, Miller's discovery that the rest of the world sees the central
moment as a dead centre sparks off the process which Durrell calls
'artist to autist' 45 - a transition in which the writer, by stamping on
the universe, identifies himself as the sole survivor of the human
race, the single guarantor of language, ideas and reality in a world
where language fails, ideas are destroyed and reality is illusion. The
failure of heroism turns all quixotic behaviour from public to private.
As Samuel Hynes observes 'it is no longer possible, in a time of
crisis, to make the writer himself heroic; his gift becomes a wound
which disqualifies him from entering the world of action'. 46 Miller
typifies the autistic child stamping with demonic fury on the past
The Winter of Artifice: 193~0 177
and the future, declaring a private republic of self, which he will call
'China'.
Miller tells us that Tropic of Cancer was activated by 'hatred and
vengeance . . . . But beyond that . . . there was the idea of
separation. I had to break with the past, my own past particularly'. 47
It is not only a question of getting beyond the waste land but of
creating a new world out of 'the horror of the present' which is
'screaming in pain and madness'. 48
Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could
have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am
proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and
governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and
principles .... And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness,
my ecstacy to the great circuit which flows through the
subterranean vaults of the flesh .... Side by side with the human
race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race
of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless
mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they
imbue it turn the soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine
and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert
slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of
individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside
down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands
always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for
the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to
quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals .... And anything
that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less
shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less
contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is
human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness. 49
It is the spectacle of a world in which man is ridiculous because he is

both sublime and absurd 50 which gives energy to Miller's despair.
This brings him perilously near to insanity because, in 'adapting
himself to himself' he almost cuts out the heart. 'I cannot express
tenderness' he tells Anai:s Nin, 'only extravagance. Only passion
and energy'. 51 And Nin records in 1932 that 'to sneer, to rebel, to
revolt, that has been his only work so far. And not to care. To
destroy is easy'. 52 He tells her 'I am a monster. ... A necessary
monster. A divine monster. A hero. A conqueror. A holy destroyer.

A destroyer of dying rhythms. A maker of living rhythms. The
important thing is to set the passions free. The drama is everything,
the cause of the drama nothing'. 53 On which Nin reflects 'Henry is a
sensualist, an anarchist, an adventurer, a pimp, a crazy genius'. 54
If Miller is a child-in-the-house, it is the 'whorehouse of life' 55
which fascinates him, he wants to celebrate it as surely as Baudelaire
and Rimbaud but first he must protect it, sing a threnody which will
put it beyond the reach of 'the men of science' 56 by dynamiting it
and then, of course, re-creating it:
To fathom the new reality it is first necessary to dismantle the

drains, to lay open the gangrened ducts which compose the
genito-urinary system that supplies the excreta of art. The odor of
the day is permanganate and formaldehyde. The drains are
clogged with strangled embryos. 57
Therefore the book must evolve as the 'vehicle' for our ideas of
amelioration, 58 'a new cosmogony ... a new Bible- The Last Book
. . . . We will exhaust the age'. 59
Miller could not achieve this if he did not give an unconditional 'Yes'
to the whole of life. There are no 'ifs' either for or against him. He
must devour the universe sexually, sensually, aesthetically,
intellectually, in order to set both him and it free. He has discovered,
as Alban Berg put it, that 'sensuality is not a weakness, does not
mean a surrender to one's own will. Rather it is an immense
strength that lies within us- the pivot of all being and thinking. (Yes
all thinking!). In this I am declaring firmly and certainly the great
importance of sensuality for everything spiritual'. 60 Miller, like
Berg, becomes a mixture of Nietzsche and Rasputin, an anarchist
struggling to restore order.
Within the whole-of-life he rediscovers the . capacity for
tenderness, and the expression of tenderness, which he had denied
in 1932. By the time he comes to write 'everything which the fathers
and mothers created I disown', 61 he has passed beyond autism in a
return to art, secure now in the knowledge of self:
The wonder and the mystery of life- which is throttled in us as we

become responsible members of society! . . . I have gained

nothing by the enlargement of my world: on the contrary, I have
lost. I want to become more and more childish and to pass beyond
childhood in the opposite direction. I want to go exactly contrary
to the normal line of development, pass into a superinfantile
realm of being which will be absolutely crazy and chaotic but not
crazy and chaotic as the world about me .... I want to break
through this enlarged world and stand again on the frontier of an
unknown world which will throw this pale, unilateral world into
shadow. I want to pass beyond the responsibility of fatherhood to
the irresponsibility of the anarchic man who cannot be coerced
nor wheedled nor cajoled nor bribed nor traduced .... I want to
flee towards a perpetual dawn with a swiftness and relentlessness
that leaves no room for remorse, regret, or repentance .... Even
if I must become a wild and natural park inhabited only by idle
dreamers, I must not stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity of
responsible, adult life. I must do this in remembrance of a life
beyond all comparison with the life which was promised me, in
remembrance of the life of a child who was strangled and stifled
by the mutual consent of those who had surrendered. Everything
which the fathers and the mothers created I disown. I am going
back to a world even smaller than the old Hellenic world, going
back to a world which I can always touch with outstretched arms,
the world of what I know and see and recognize from moment to
moment. 62
Miller is now able to achieve that Hellenic position of being able to

reach out and touch the walls of his universe; he has grown from a
tiny centre into a universal man, controlling his environment and at
peace with it.
The prejudice against Miller, which culminated in the final
attempts to ban his work in America in the 1960s, 63 is largely due to
his orgasmic style. Anai:s Nin recalls that young writers in the 1930s
in Paris 'when they had cadged a meal ... rush to their room and
write twenty pages in exultation' 64 - clearly she had Henry Miller in
mind. As she said much later (in The Novel ofThe Future) 'some of our
writers favour lavatory writing, graffiti, gutter language . . . . To
write aesthetically or emotionally about sensuality was not real. To
be real, language must be violent, vulgar, and crude'. 65 Again she
does not name Miller specifically, but the inference is obvious.
Miller's appetite for women, food, dance, every department and

facet of life, was expressed as an orgasm, a riotous celebration of the
now:
If any man dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down
what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think that
the world would go smash, that it would be blown to smithereens
and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the
pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to
make up the world. 66
Later in Tropic of Cancer he declares:
Let us have a world of men and women with dynamos between

their legs, a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama,
dreams, madness, a world that produces ecstasy and not dry
farts. 67
It is a life of utter action- in Tropic of Cancer Miller explodes to meet

and sublimate the atomic universe; it is not so much that he cannot
find tenderness or compassion as that he is too impatient to fuck
everything that moves, to find time to care: 'Forward without pity,
without compassion, without love, without forgiveness . . . . More
and more of it - until the whole fucking works is blown to
smithereens, and the earth with it!' 68 At this stage it is impossible for
him to be 'reasonable'. 'I don't want to be reasonable and logical. I
hate it! I want to bust loose, I want to enjoy myself. I want to do
something'. 69
This indulgence is like Wilde's- the child playing with the world
rather than serving it. Shaw's verdict on Wilde is apposite: 'he plays
with everything, with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with
actors and audience, with the whole theatre' / 0 in the same way of
course as Jarry played with everything while subverting the world.
And his obscenity merited the same verdict as that accorded to
Wilde- 'the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction'. 71
Miller is in fact constructing an elaborate provocation with which to
confront a paralysed world. Nin says 'Henry, with his clowning,
whips the world into a carnival' 72 • • • • 'The key to Henry's work is
contained in the word burlesque. What he writes is a burlesque of
sex, a burlesque of ideas, a burlesque of Hamlet, or Bergson, or
Minkowski. A burlesque of life'. 73 Nin eventually fails to see what
this is all about because she is essentially too serious a person, or too
serious a mind, always (and especially in contrast and reaction to
Miller) 'turning inward' to novel and diary?4
But this obscures the fact that the reason for this burlesque, for
Miller's copious activity, is his self-sacrifice:
Somebody has to put his hand in to the machine and let it be

wrenched off if the cogs are to mesh again. Somebody has to do
this without hope of reward . . . . Otherwise this show'll go on
forever. There's no way out of the mess . . . .75
The vehicle, and the cause, of this sacrifice is, for Miller as for
Baudelaire, the city.
No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is

cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances,
like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing
but a dead thing like the moon. 76
We are reminded of Baudelaire's apostrophe to revolution: 'Every

one of us has the spirit of republicanism in his veins, like the pox in
our bones; we are all democratized and syphilitic'. 77 Probably Paris
is no different from New York, but Miller has made a necessary
odyssey in order to recognise himself: 'it is a Paris that has to be
lived, that has to be experienced each day in a thousand different
forms of torture, a Paris that grows inside you like a cancer, and
grows and grows until you are eaten away by it.' 78 One makes of
Paris one's own hell- 'there are no ready-made infernos for the
tormented' 79 and one makes of it an Heraldic Universe:
I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the

hallucinated, the great maniacs of love, I understood why it is that
here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most
fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in
the least strange. 80
That crucible, in which seemingly contradictory or impossible ideas

can be held together in harmony, is Miller's 'China', an artificial,
imaginative realm in which nothing is eternal or absolute: time and
space are defeated, expelled in order to embrace both good and evil
simultaneously in creative confluence.
I use the symbol China because actually, realistically it is the
furthest opposite to everything we do, think, feel, believe, etc. It
is, in a sense, very similar to that real China which is so
incomprehensible to us - China the stronghold of democratic
individuality, China the world of anarchy! ... A realm where the
language is built up out of ideographs, not letters of the alphabet.
Instead of a dictionary of words, a dictionary of ideas, of
poetic graphs or glyphs. A process, by the way, which tends to
prevent or resist the natural separation between word and
thought so noticeable in us. A tendency also which preserves the
concrete image-symbol quality of thinking, that prevents the decay
of thought thereby, that insists per se on a continual return to prime
sources, that gives a consistent and infinitely varied fluidity to
thought, so that men can Jive in thought, whereas we die in
thought. A realm, I might also add, in which the music is
preponterantly tympanic. A realm wherein the theatre is
dominant because life is completely extraverted; everything
reduced to drama and incident. . . . This philosophic attitude, so
ubiquitously expressed in the stone images of man and beast,
bearing a corresponding concrete passivity to that of the
ideograph. A mere glance suffices to reveal the fact that our
changeable alphabet arrangement which on the surface seems so
flexible is really a stranglehold on our thought processes. The
stone passivity of the Buddhas a poetic testimony to the at-
homeness of thought, the enjoyment of thought, the life of
thought. 81
Miller uses 'China' because it reverses the Graeco-Roman tradition
on which the European and American fear of death is based, and it
offers a new way of looking at the world, from within rather than
without. In Wilde's terms (adopted by Yeats) 'all art is at once
surface and symbol' expressed by the ideograph. What appeals to
Miller is the fact that nothing stands between the 'idea', or
experience, and its expression where idea is in fact experience.
I am here in the midst of a great change. I have forgotten my own
language and yet I do not speak the new language. I am in China
and I am talking Chinese. I am in the dead centre of a changing
reality for which no language has been invented. 82
It might be 'reasonable' to regard China as an escape-valve, a literary

and spiritual bolt-hole amid an incomprehensible, impenetrable
world into which there is no need to pursue Miller, if it were not for
his serious purpose in proclaiming this 'new language':
In talking of China, then, I am regarding man as a species of final

divinity. The aim is to kill the 'skull psychology', the striving, the
will to this and that, the idealism, the evolution, hocus-pocus, etc.
To stop history, in short.
History is the record of countless experiments and failures, a
continuous cycle of births and deaths, spiritual births and deaths.
China is a stage of biologic eternity which recognizes only being,
that is, the momentary, the instantaneous, the all-expanding
moment. Not a living out of separate parts or cells, as in the life of
the cadaver, but a full consciousness, a flame, a song, which
comes from illumination, from a vision of the world as is, the
world-as-is being the all, the all-sufficient.
... An artist like myself, consequently, a late-city product, so to
speak, twin brother to Crosz, Whitman, Van Gogh, Strindberg,
the brothers Bosch, all the demonologists, finds himself under a
supreme obligation, entrusted with a sacred mission. He must
escape this death which is engulfing the world in order to protect
and preserve his magic role. He flees to an imaginary China
(hasn't the artist always done this?) where the changeless man
(changeless only for the last 20,000 years: Homo Sapiens) resides.
The fundamental changeless, rock-bottom man, immortal,
unscathed by catastrophes. With kaleidoscopic changes of mask
he hypnotizes his audience into a superstitious state of mind
whence they may proceed from doom to magic once again.
Guided on the one side by his brother the criminal, and on the
other side by the lunatic whose obsession is to fly away from the
earth. The tension between the two poles of destruction preserves
in him a peculiar dream equilibrium. 83
It becomes clear that, just as emphatically as 'the Auden

generation', Miller and by extension Durrell are pursuing a political
role: to subvert by aesthetic means the state of western polity, to see
(and therefore to organise) the world through orientation of thought
rather than occidentation. Ultimately Miller attacks America in The
Air-Conditioned Nightmare and The Rosy Crucifixion, while Durrell
writes a 'Tibetan novel' in 'The Avignon Quintet'. This is the
conclusion - although one cannot call it 'logical' - to Miller's

self-sacrifice. 'The artist's dream of the impossible, the miraculous'
leads him to construct 'the legend wherein he buries himself ... his
tomb of poem, in order to achieve that immortality which is denied
him as a physical being'. 84 This is the same social and political crime
as Wyndham Lewis's Arghol commits in the crime of being, of
selfism, 'the expression of his wish to triumph over reality, over
becoming'. 85
'When he becomes fully conscious of his powers, his role, his
destiny, he is an artist and he ceases his struggle with "reality". He
becomes a traitor to the human race'. 86 This treachery consists in killing
the known world in order to bring the unknown into existence. As
Anai:s Nin said in her preface to Tropic of Cancer:
in a world grown paralysed with introspection and constipated by

delicate moral meals, this brutal exposure of the substantial body
comes as a vitalizing current of blood . . . . It is beyond optimism
or pessimism. The adventure which has brought the author to the
spiritual ends of the earth is the history of every artist who, in
order to express himself, must traverse the intangible gridirons
of his imaginary world. . . . The crumbling monuments, the
putrescent cadavers, the crazy jig and maggot dance, all this
forms a grand fresco of our epoch, done with shattering phrases
and loud strident hammer strokes. 87
Or, as Miller himself put it:
This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a
prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants
to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . . For a hundred
years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one
man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to
put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. 88
Eventually, however, the artist rediscovers, or re-invents, the heart,

tenderness and compassion:
By an unflinching regard for one's self one gradually becomes so

in harmony with the world that he no longer has to think about his
duty toward others. One ceases to think about causing the other
pain or sorrow or disillusionment because one's act and speech
become so transparent that the heart's intention always

registers. 89
One receives the impression that by creating oneself one creates

others. The concluding passage of Black Spring, giving the lie to the
idea that all Miller is blasting obscenity, is a love poem to the self and
to the world:
Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world.

Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of
your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a
lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I
respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with you-
MYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am. 90
Miller adopts the Einsteinian view of time, that all time is contained
in each moment of time, 91 but he extends it into personality- that
he is all time. This means the absorption not only of the universe
at the present, but the eternal universe. n This is the defeat of
history.
It becomes clear that Miller, despite his dismissive gestures
towards the past, and because of his omnivorous reading,
understands perfectly well the genealogy of aesthetics which makes
him such a bastard. This he betrays in his book on Rimbaud, The Time
of Assassins, written in 1946:
The whole nineteenth century was tormented with the question

of God. Outwardly it seems like a century given up to material
progress, a century of discoveries and inventions, all pertaining to
the physical world. At the core, however, where the artists and
thinkers are always anchored, we observe a profound
disturbance. Rimbaud epitomizes the conflict ... he impresses
on his whole life the enigmatic cast which characterizes the epoch
. . . . He is split from top to toe in every realm of his being. He
faces two ways always. He is torn apart, racked by the wheel of
time. He is the victim and the executioner: when you speak his
name you have the time, the place and the event. Now that we
have succeeded in breaking down the atom the cosmos is split
wide open. Now we face in every direction at once. We have
arrived, possessed of a power which even the gods of old could

not wield. We are there, before the gates of hell. Will we storm the
gates, burst hell itself wide open? I believe we will. I think that the
test of the future is to explore the domain of evil until not a shred
of mystery is left. We shall discover the bitter roots of beauty,
accept root and flower, leaf and land. We can no longer resist evil:
we must accept. 93
It takes little critical acumen to realise that Miller's book on Rimbaud

is in fact a book on Miller, the reincarnation of Rimbaud and
Baudelaire still, in the middle of the twentieth century, discussing
the long death of the modern world.
'Like Rimbaud' he says 'I too began at an early age to cry 'Death to
God!'. 94 But he now accepts the cyclic process of history, the
generation which comes from the flowers of evil: 'it was death to
everything the parents endorsed or approved of . . . . The
antagonism never ceased until my father was virtually at the point of
death, when at last I began to see how much I resembled him'. 95 To
kill one's father and beget a son . . . .
'Have we touched bottom' Miller asks. 'Not yet. The moral crisis
of the nineteenth century has merely given way to the spiritual
bankruptcy of the twentieth. It is "the time of the assassins" and no
mistaking it'. 96 Thus Miller was not in this sense, as Orwell called
him, 'the starting point of a new school'/7 but he was the herald
of death and life who catapulted the European and American
literatures into a fresh awareness of the artist and his role.
IV HOTEL CHAOTICA
Where Miller goes out to meet the world, Nin finds it within her.
Her 'culte de la moi' as we might call it is primarily for herself but
then, most immediately, for the reader. She has been hailed as the
first woman writer because she writes unequivocally as a woman, as
distinct from for example Elizabeth Bowen or Virginia Woolf who
write simply from a woman's point of view. Everything in her work
is a self-examination based initially on intuition and later, after
her first association with Otto Rank, on the principles of
psychoanalysis.
As in Miller's case, the reader is encouraged to take part in the
novels, but here one is left more to one's own devices. Nin creates
the environment within which we can establish a relationship with
the basic Tarot-pack of characters she also provides. The
environment is the psychiatric room we have become to expect.
'House of Incest', for example, suggests an intense self-exploration
while later titles such as her quintet Cities of the Interior which
includes The Four-Ciulmbered Heart and A Spy in the House of Love; and
'Under a Glass Bell'; continue this idea of confined examination.
Even the idea of a monster prowling within her books is made
explicit in the title of the final volume of Cities of the Interior, Seduction
of the Minotaur.
Only in her relationship with her father which, with the major
exception of the story 'Winter of Artifice', is confined to her diary,
does Nin present us with a specific, personal wound. Elsewhere she
writes about the wound of womanhood itself: men have greeted her
work with startled acclaim because she was the first to do so.
But Nin herself discriminates between her novels (and stories)
and her diaries, which she began to make public in 1966 but which
had already achieved a legendary status because they had been
widely discussed by those who had privately read the typescripts.
The principal reason for keeping a diary was 'the desire to keep a
channel of relationship with a lost father'; 98 the diary was a letter to
him, a record of her existence, an attempt to justify herself to him. It
became a record of everything which touched her and ironically the
diary is the more public document while the novels constitute a
fantasia of the unconscious.
Nin calls her approach to analysis 'archaeology of the soul', 99 the
purpose of which is to reveal 'how little objectivity there is in man's
thinking'. 100 Man is simultaneously rational and irrational; in 1935
we find Nin recording, after her return from Otto Rank in New
York, that impression which will be familiar to us by now, that we
are constantly seeking rational reasons for believing in the
absurd, 101 as Durrell's Balthazar would later express it. 102 This
causes the difficulty which most readers find in her novels but
which is absent from her diary: that dream and reality, absurd and
logical, are intertwined and confused. In 1933 she had recorded that
she tried to segregate them: 'the dream on one side, the human
reality on the other. I took passages out of House of Incest which
belong in Winter of Artifice'. 103
The confusion is compounded however because Nin makes
explicit statements about the nature of analysis while conducting
analysis itself. Consider this passage frum 'Stella', the first novelette
of Winter of Artifice:
This hotel room was for him the symbol of the freedom of their
love, the voyage, the exploration, the unknown, the restlessness
that could be shared together, the surprises, the marvellously
formless and bodiless and houseless freedom of this world
created by two people in a hotel room. It was outside of the
known, the familiar, and built only out of intensity, the present,
with the great exalted beauty of the changing, the fluctuating, the
dangerous and unmoored . . . . 104
We can understand why Miller got to the heart of Nin's dilemma

when he wrote to her (in 1939) 'To me the Diary is like the moving
needle of the compass .... You are recording the constancy of
change, the eternity of metamorphoses. You have chosen not to
create but to record creation'. 105 And we can understand how Nin
herself could say (in 'The Voice', the third novelette of Winter of
Artifice) 'She was drifting, drifting. Drunkenness. It was not the
Hotel Chaotica which had many rooms, but she Djuna, when she
lay on her bed, folding them all together, the layers and all the
things that she was not yet'. 106 Archaeology of the future also then;
the present moment simply a couch between knowledge and
imagination. In Miller's sense then Nin is not creating but recording:
in her own title, 'a spy in the house of love'.
Nin justifies this approach to writing in The Novel of the Future:
An immediate, emotional reaction to experience reveals that the

power to re-create lies in the sensibilities rather than intellectual
memory or observation. This personal reaction I found to be the core
of individuality, or originality and personality. A deep personal
relation to all things reaches far beyond the personal into the
general. 107
It might at first seem on this basis that Nin is an anti-Epicurean,

rejecting experience itself in favour of the recollection or re-creation
of experience, that her forensic interest in what lies at the heart of
things stands in the way of her intuitive grasp of the' general'. But in
her diary for 1932 we read:
I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of

selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a
disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept
about people around me was that all of them were coordinated
into a WHOLE, whereas I was made up of a multitude of selves, of
fragments. I know that I was upset as a child to discover that we
had only one life. It seems to me that I wanted to compensate for
this by multiplying experience. Or perhaps it always seems like
this when you follow all your impulses and they take you in
different directions. In any case, when I was happy, always at the
beginning of a love, euphoric, I felt I was gifted for living many
lives fully. Oune?). It was only when I was in trouble, lost in a
maze, stifled by complications and paradoxes that I was haunted
or that I spoke of my 'madness', but I meant the madness of the
poets. 108
I think Nin here reveals her attempt to compensate for the broken
integrity of her family life after the separation of her parents.
Perhaps she realised that her attempt to correspond with her father
through the diary had in fact led her into 'a house of many
mansions' and that the multiplication of personality was simply a
method of comparing the many fragments of one personality.
Certainly the aesthetic principle as expounded by Wilde and Yeats,
that we need many masks, is here turned inside out. Nin is clearer
than most modern writers in finding the reason for this inversion. In
'Stella', for example, she places 'her screen self' in a 'Movie Star bed
of white satin' in a room of mirrors, but
not until she found a way of slipping her small body away from
the splendour, satin, space, did she sleep well: by covering her
head. And when she covered her head she was back in the small
bed of her childhood, back in the small space of the little girl who
was afraid. 109 . . . Through layers and layers of time she gazed at
an image made small by the distance: a small figure. It is her
childhood, with its small scenery, small climate, small
atmosphere, Stella was born during the war. But for the
diminutive figure of the child the war between parents - all
division and separation - was as great as the world war. The
being, small and helpless, was torn asunder by the giant figures
of mythical parents striving and dividing. The sorrow was
transferred, enlarged. But it was the same sorrow; it was the
discovery of hatred, violence, hostility. It was the dirt face of the

world, which no childhood was ever prepared to receive. In the
diminutive and fragile vessel of childhood lies the paradise that
must be destroyed by explosions, so that the world may be
created anew. 110
In Nin' s case the catalyst which enabled her to create a new world, to
free her from the bondage of the diary, was in fact Henry Miller's
own appetite for gratification, aided by the midwife of psychiatry.
Dr. Allendy began to probe a painful contrast between Henry's life

and my father's life, the life I was brought up in. We only saw
talented people, people of quality, musicians, writers, professors.
But I like these lower depths of Henry's life. It seems real to me,
What is Dr. Allendy hinting at? That I had to go to the other end of
the world, to opposite poles, to forget my father, to escape from
his image, his values? I am denying all the values he emphasized:
will, control, manners, achievement, aesthetics, elegance, social
or aristocratic values, bourgeois values. 111
('Everything', said Miller, 'which the fathers and mothers created, I

disown'.) She goes on later in the diary to add to this catalogue of the
father's faults:
My father organizes life, interprets it, controls it, His passion for
criticism and perfection paralyzed me. Henry's absence of
criticalness liberated meY 2
Her visit to America to see Otto Rank liberated her in the same way
that Miller's odyssey to Paris and Ana1s Nin had liberated him. In
each case it was freedom from the constraints of a parent. Nin reacts
to New York's chaos:
Paris, New York, the two magnetic poles of the world. Paris a
sensual city which seduced the body, enlivened the senses, New
York unnatural, synthetic; Paris- New York, the two high tension
magnetic poles between life, life of the senses of the spirit in Paris,
and life in action in New YorkY 3
It was life in New York which emphasised to her the static, frozen
condition of her father's mind and manners.
I never buy for duration, only for effect, as if I recognized the

ephemeralness of my settings. I know they are soon to be changed
to match the inner changes. Life should be fluid. My father, on the
contrary, builds for eternity. He has such a fear of life that he
struggles for permanency, to defeat change .... I am motivated
by such a passion for life that the idea of not moving is for me a
death concept . . . . The quest for fixed values seems to me a
quest for immobility and stagnation . . . . Whatever is not alive I
want to cast away 114 [my emphasis].
The diary becomes 'a monologue, a dialogue, dedicated to him,

inspired by the superabundance of thoughts and feelings caused by
the pain of leaving him' _ns Pain causes the retreat into the diary,
provides the reason for creating the new, inner, secret world, but a
world that takes on its own existence and begins to act out its own
fantasies:
She held long conversations with herself, through the diary. She
talked to her diary, addressed it by name, as if it were a living
person, her other self perhaps . . . . Within the covers of the diary
she created another world wherein she told the truth, in contrast
to the multiEle lies which she spun when she was conversing
with others. 16
In 'Winter of Artifice' Nin re-enacts the loss of her father, the

childhood imaginings and the attempt to reconcile herself to her
father in the reintegration of diary and dedicatee - 'the circle of
empty waiting will close'. 117 'After twenty years she is still obsessed
by the fear of him. But now she felt that it was in his power to
absolve her of all fear ... she does not want to write another line in
her diary. She wants him to smash this monument which she
erected to him and accept her in her own right' _11 8
The meeting failed, predictably, to provide the desired
integration. 'They were not talking. They were merely
corroborating each other's theories'. 119 Each remains locked into the
role created to protect the ego from the fear of pain. He discovers in
her diary how she had sought his memory in others, she begins to
serve his fear and confirms her own role-playing. This is a complex
relationship because while in serving her father's 'myopia of the
soul' 120 she diminishes her true self, denies herself her own actions
and lives a secondary, unreal role, she is still fulfilling a basic need
which has recurred every day since childhood: 'she was so happy to
have found a father, a father with a strong will, a wisdom, an
infallible judgement. . . . To have a father, the seer, the god' .121 He
conversely resents the fact that in her diary and in her life she has
been re-creating him, re-casting the absentee in a series of
immediate roles.
Ironically it is in this restoration to each of the living fear that the
dead roles come to life: in meeting, like 'two magnetic poles of life',
they instantaneously force themselves apart and begin again the
process of rejection, abandonment and fantasy-substitution:
She thought again of his remark 'You are an Amazon. You are a
force' ... What was it her father saw? ... Strength in creation, in
life, ideas. She had proved capable of building a world for herself.
Amazon! Capable of every audacity in life, but vulnerable in
love . . . . Why? Because an Amazon did not need a father. Nor a
love, nor a husband. An Amazon was a law and a world all to
herself. He was abdicating his father role. . . . He, the writer, the
musician, the sculptor, the painter, he could lie down and dream
by the side of the Amazon who could give him nourishment and
fight the world for him as well. 122
Each becomes confined in the prison of pretence which each has

created in order to overcome fear and maintain the image of the
other: the prison contains the self and the other. Within Anai:s'
psyche lurks the frightened child, her father, controlling her lust
and fear, so that discovering herself she also discovers, or invents,
him: 'all through the world seeking a father, loving the father,
awaiting the father, and finding the child' .123 'When a pattern and a
goal, when an aesthetic order penetrates so deeply into the motions
of life, it eats into its spontaneity like rust . . . . She wondered how
far back she would have to trace the currents of his life to find the
moment at which he had thus become congealed into an attitude' .124
The contrast is finally defined, as we have had it in the diary: 'He
had chosen to live on the surface, and she to descend deeper and
deeper. His fundamental desire was to escape pain, hers to face all
life'. 125 Within that nalf statement repose the icebergs and the
ice-breakers of modern literature.
In 'Stella' the father becomes an actor moving in and out of his
own, and her, realities as a role-player. It does not matter whether
he dies on the public stage or in the private auditorium. He dies, as

he has lived, 'congealed into an attitude'.
He barred the way with his self-love. His self-love isolated him.
Self-love the watchman, barring all entrance, all communication.
One could not console him. He was dying because with the end of
luxury, protection, of his role, his life ends. He took all his
sustenance from woman, but he never knew it . . . . He was
fulfilling his destiny. He had sought only his pleasure. He was
dying alone on the stage of self-pity. 126
But for Nin herself the ultimate irony is that she has to remain on
that stage, she is her father's daughter whatever device she adopts
to re-state that relationship. 'Does the love of the father never die,
even when it is buried a million times under stronger loves, even
when she had looked at him without illusion?'. 127
In fact the symbiosis of the Anai:s of the diary and the 'Stella' or
'Djuna' or 'Lillian' of the novels condemns her to a perpetual motion
between the dead father of Winter of Artifice and the continuing
affect of the father in the diary.
As we have already noticed the diary and the novels are interactive;
within the novels themselves characters and author become more
real or less fictional as moods and scenes are shifted:
The limitation of the novel sent me back to the diary. For example,
when I finished the novel Winter of Artifice I did not feel that I had
finished with the relationship of father and daughter, because in
the diary I had an example of a continuum which did not come to
an end but which changed . . . . The continuity of relationship
and its alterations ... made me feel that there was always another
truth around the corner, there would always be another
revelation, another discovery about my father. 128
But does either her diary or her father place her in the public domain
as a writer who has anything to contribute to the development of
modern literature? While her work gives us a unique insight into the
psychology of female creativity, has it any relationship to the 'grand
lines' of the theme under discussion here?
We can answer that partly by looking at the way Nin herself looks
at the outer skin of her writing. Like Miller she imagines an 'other'
world which is distinguished simply by its otherness. She does not
name it but she places the emphasis on novelty:
It is the sameness of everything which makes me feel I have not

moved at all. That is why adventurers take a ship and go to Africa,
walk through Tibet, climb the Himalayas, ride on camels through
Arabian deserts. To see something new. Face to face with a gentle,
diminutive Paris, all charm, all intelligence, the new Anals feels:
But I know it already. It is familiar. I am in love with a new, as yet
uncreated world, vivid colours and large scales, vastness and
abundance, a synthetic vast city of the future. 129 [my emphasis]
She approximates this to Miller's 'China' 130 but unlike his, or

Durrell's, Heraldic Universe, hers is populated solely by her self, a
capsule in which she encounters her otherness. Of the three writers
under scrutiny here she is the most concentrated on the self to the
exclusion of all other factors, while Miller is the most easily, and
necessarily, distracted by extraneous matter. One has the
impression with Nin that nothing else matters, that there is no
world beyond the self. But the conquest, or at least the recognition,
of self does lead to conquest or recognition of the rest of the world,
provided we accept that that world is entirely dependent on self for
its existence. Nin in fact uses this world, which is essentially an
invention of her selfish, fictive autogony:
I am living out through others what I cannot live out myself

directly: chaos, disorder, tumult, obscure instincts, caprices,
fears, fevers, violence. They live it outfor me. They destroy what I
create. They blunder, they get lost, they fall, they shock me, they
hurt themselves, and some part of me is dragged into their
destructiveness, and another part of me fights their
destructiveness, and another part of me, which is wise, which has
passed beyond this, suffers deeply with them, for them, through
them. It is my Karma, to pass through darkness, confusion,
violence and destruction not of my own making, which I have
controlled, transmuted, tamed in myself. 131
Nevertheless Nin is not acting entirely selfishly or blindly in living

through others, whether real or fictional: she is also attempting to
join herself to the rest of the world. 'I have made myself personally
responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my
way'. 132 She rejects the idea that there is a universal unity or truth, a
correspondance such as Durrell envisages.
In her 'archaeology of the soul' or 'detective story of the
emotions' 133 she fails to achieve what she sees as the principal role of
the psychological novelist, to 'probe deep enough until he finds
where the chain broke'. 134 Employing Jung's method ('proceed
from the dream outward' 135) she regards the dream as the key in
order to make psychological reality equivalent to surface reality. 136
She uses the visual imagery of the mirrored room and the
consequent multiplication of personae as the symbol of multiple
personalities, 137 since 'we are obliged to reinstate [symbolism] as the
most important form ofexpression of the unconscious'. 138 In The Novel of
the Future she notes that 'when Proust says "I" it is far more than the
"I" of Proust. It is an "I" which contains many men, and far beyond
that, it is a symbol of men'; 139 in 'House of Incest' she uses the
decomposition and recomposition of these multiple images 140 to
establish a symbol of her recomposed self. To the question 'DoEs
ANYONE KNOW WHO I AM?' she answers 'I AM THE OTHER FACE OF YOU
... THIS IS THE BOOK YOU WROTE AND YOU ARE THE WOMAN I AM'. 141
Her ultimate consolation is that she can walk into her own book
'seeking peace'. 142 But it is only a partial consolation because in
replicating the way her father controlled her destiny by living
through her, she is in effect creating the children of artifice.
Elsewhere she notes: 'Part of our reality is that we invest others with
mythical qualities, and we force them to play the roles we need. If
we do not take into account the force of these myths, we overlook
one of the most powerful motivations in human nature. Many
people invent situations, invent each other, to satisfy some
obscure psychological need'. 143 She quotes Rank telling her 'The
new hero, still unknown, is the one who can live and love in spite of
our mal du siecle' 144 but she fails to create such a hero because her
books fail to smash the frozen sea which her relationship with her
father has created. As a female Hamlet she remains trapped in the
cycle of indecision and cowardice. In her case, therefore, the
assassination of the dandy is an unsuccessful attempt to free the
modern spirit- or is it a proof that all such attempts are futile?
V THE HERALDIC UNIVERSE
'And then it struck me that the only thing to do was to fit all this into
a book. It is the classic way of treating life'. 145 With this assertion
Gerhardie opened Futility, his reworking of Three Sisters, a 'classic
way' of representing myth as narrative. Durrell, almost twenty
years later, determines to squeeze not life but death and history into
a book which will subvert the traditional process by returning
narrative to myth.
In order to do so, Durrell must assassinate those who have not
already succumbed to 'the English death'; he must murder language
and syntax; he must establish a world in which he is the only
inhabitant, in which time and ultimately space do not exist, which
he calls 'the Heraldic Universe'.
A colonial by birth and an expatriate by choice, Durrell has an
acute perception of England and Englishness and a strong sense of
tradition. This enabled him to know with great clarity what he was
demolishing, in contrast for example with Aldington whose All Men
Are Enemies demonstrates how difficult it was to get clear of the
oppressive hegemony of Father, King and God when you were
under their dead weight. By neatly sidestepping his 'heritage'
Durrell was able to utilise his mother's Irishness as a way of
explaining his difference from other Englishmen, while his first
exile, in the Ionian, gave him a different perspective from both the
north of India with its proximity to Tibet, where he had grown up,
and England, where he had been sent to school. When he began to
write, he was thus located in an artificial zone between that which
he knew he had to destroy, and that vision of childhood which
continues to furnish his imaginative realm.
In addition he had the intellectual and animal stimulus of Tropic of
Cancer which appeared in 1934, and which led him into an intense
correspondence and friendship with Miller; through Miller he
established contact with Anai"s Nin. The massive influence of Tropic
of Cancer and the lesser influence of Winter of Artifice are obvious in
his prose-poems 'Zero' and 'Asylum in the Snow' and his third
novel (the first which he regards as truly worthwhile) The Black Book.
Just as all his subsequent work is encapsulated in 'Asylum in the
Snow', so all Durrell's method- but not of course his inspiration- is
to be found in the first page of Tropic of Cancer:
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt

anywhere, not a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are
dead . . . . Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a
weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There
will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the
slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is
eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing
themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We
must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is
no escape. The weather will not change. 146
When they first meet in Paris, Nin remarks of Durrell in her diary 'at
times I feel he could have been, symbolically speaking, the child of
Henry and mysel£' 147 but she also remarks 'I think he does not know
yet where he stands'. In fact the uncertainty was Nin's rather than
Durrell's; it exhibits itself in her constant questioning of the
differences between herself, Miller and Durrell, particularly in her
vacillation on the question of the 'Heraldic Universe'. 148
Durrell accepts Miller unequivocally because, as he was
struggling to express the particular death which offended and
oppressed him, Miller comes out with a book which is an axe for the
frozen mind and gestures of the universal death. 'This is the book for
our generation' he tells Alan Thomas, 149 'the greatest thing written
in our lifetimes . . . . Where all the other people like Joyce and
Lewis got stuck in the morass and dirt of modern life, Miller comes
out on the other side with a grin, whole, hard and undamaged'. He
wants to embrace Miller's world, 'in which there must be no hope,
but no despair' . 150 He tells Miller, 'God give us young men the guts
to plant the daisies on top and finish the job . . . . It finds the way
out of the latrines at last. 1151 And many years later he remarks that
Tropic of Cancer 'puts the case for the difficulty of self-liberation. The
problem was to make of oneself an open wound so as to 'reach a
point from which to overcome the twisted aspect of one's
personality ... a certain contempt for literature which ends by
turning it into a therapy'. 152 I emphasise this point because the vital
aspect, as far as my present thesis is concerned, is the conquest by
Miller and Durrell (and by Nin in her own distinct way) of the mind,
manners and morals of their time, a conquest of environment and of
history which succeeded, by means of an asylum which each
established according to particular need, in putting the author
beyond the clutches of the destructive atavism which reaches down

the centuries to colonise their minds with thoughts of death. That
the asylum necessarily involves a death of its own, a destruction of
some area of the personality, is inescapable. When Durrell writes in
'Asylum in the Snow' 'I am sitting here with my coat on murdering
everything as fast as I can write it down' 153 he is quite obviously
killing self every time he writes the word 'I'. But the keynote which
earlier writers sought unsuccessfully is tenderness and, in finding
his own new voice, a delicious uncertainty. The influence of Miller
here is massive: 'When I speak the words torment the doctors,
because there is as yet no vocabulary, no glossary in the tongue. It is
a magnificent experiment, but I am lonely'. 154
From Miller he learns how to destroy the outer world; from Nin,
the art of progression into the interior, 'where the big intuitions lie
waiting to be verified'. 155 It is in fact Durrell's significant
achievement that he is able to create epicene characters who can
explore both sides of their psychic sexuality and in this sense he is
truly the symbolic child of Nin and Miller. In The Black Book Death
Gregory writes:
The presence of oneself! . . . The eternal consciousness of oneself

in substance and psyche. The eternal consciousness of that
shadow which hangs behind my shoulder, watching me flourish
my ink on this rude paper. What a recipe for immortality! The one
self and the other, like twin generals divided in policy, bungling a
war. The eternal, abhorrent presence of oneself. 156
The discovery of self, whether in the mirror or in the pages of one's

own diary which the alter ego has written in one's absence, is ringed
with fear. Whatever else we become (another echo of Miller) 'the
treasonable self remains' 157 and survival depends on coming to
terms with one's treason, one's capacity for destruction, requires
one to find an autism which is at once electric in its discharge of
energy and therapeutic in the effect of that discharge.
There are of course many echoes and entrances of other influences

in The Black Book particularly: Eliot for example provides many
images, from stony ground and eyeless, sunken fishermen, to the
voices of lost, mocking seers, 158 but the chief value in The Black Book,
as far as Durrell's later development is concerned, is not that he
celebrates these influences but that he overcomes them. The child
kills his parents in order to beget his own orphans, in the ritual cycle
which confirms fear and lust.
The predominant image - or symbol - in The Black Book and
'Asylum in the Snow' is the child:
The barriers of the explored world, the divisions, the corridors,

the memories- they sweep down on us in a catharsis of misery,
riving us. I am like a child left alone in these corridors, those
avenues of sleeping doors among the statuary, 159
he writes in The Black Book, asking us to focus on this 'tiny centre' as

the sole autistic inhabitant of a world where every other murderous
or hopeless creature has been cut down or has extinguished itself.
The child's anxiety is created by the father's anxiety, by his sense
of his own inadequacy and failure at communication. In his first
novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, Durrell describes moving with his father
into an old house at Kurseong - where 'the man' attempts to
reassure 'the boy'-' "it'll be all right" repeated the man pressing the
small hand of his son, "what do you say?". The boy offered no
comment . . . . "It'll be fine" persisted the man, but he did not
believe in his own assertions'. 160 In 'Zero' Durrell establishes the
keynote of his own method of killing the father, one of tenderness
and understanding:
It is a sort of gathering up of threads, a finale, a vale- before the

adventure begins. It is necessary to put my affairs in order before I
go to meet my father. It is necessary to empty the old wine in
meditation and reverence before stiffening the skins with new. 161
In a sense Durrell grew up in Corfu, threw off his precociousness

there and took on an Ionian syntax - he continues to see the world
with Ionian eyes, familiar with details of everyday existence of a life
otherwise known only superficially to tourists. No ordinary
Englishman would have written 'stiffening the skins' in place of
'filling the barrels'; no Englishman has this sensibility to light or the
ability to dictate time at his own speed; no Englishman could realise
so acutely that he did not 'fit' in England - ''There!" she said,
"they're real English shoes" ... it was a great pity they did not fit
him' 162 - and at the same time be able to paint the same glorious
tempting picture of England that he creates - in meditation and
reverence - in The Black Book:
I was thinking tonight of those summer days in the shadow of the

priory. They seem to belong to another world- a world of shapes
which included such colours, as warmth, charity, love, etc. A
whole dormant Platonic principle which, in its essence, is
England - the marrow and bone of England. This is a very
necessary valediction, not only to England, but, if you like, to the
world. It will hurt you, but it is the truth .... Southward, like a
green beating heart, the flats stretched away into the mist. The
myths weathering softly on the corbels, the fragile spines of the
windows with their armorial bearings, the buttresses flying into
an eternity of childish history .... You were offering me, in your
oblique way, the whole of England- the masques, the viols, the
swans, the mists, the doom, the fogs: you were offering me the
medieval death in which I could live for ever, stifled in the pollen
of breviaries, noctuaries, bestiaries: split silk and tumbrils,
aesthetic horses and ruined Abbeys. 163
But to what purpose? Durrell retreats to the Ionian to see this and to
know that he will destroy England in order to rebuild it:
That is an England I am going to kill, because by giving it a quietus

once and for all, I can revive it! ... What it cost me to maintain this
equilibrium, to become responsible only to myself for what I am-
that is not the important thing. The important thing is this: if I
succeed, and I will succeed, then I shall become, in a sense, the
first Englishman. 164
'Asylum in the Snow' is Durrell's answer to the problem of not

growing up. He allows himself the freedom which neither Barrie nor
Milne can give to their 'child', the ability to strike out, to name the
guilty father, to write their own bedtime stories, to take part in the
adult world without being adult- and he convinces us that he can do
so because we now know much more about child psychology. David
Mountolive, a central character in The Alexandria Quartet, can never
grow up because, like Durrell himself, there is an affective father left
behind in India, still commanding the emotions and the curiosity of

'the boy' and still creating a sense of anxiety.
To be born again he creates and enters an asylum like 'the roof of
the world', that imaginative realm which gives to the English death,
to the European death with its sense of time, a Tibetan perspective
based on snow. Snow is both an anaesthetic, isolating medium in
which the animus can be reconstructed and nursed towards
meaning, and a plane on which the elements of the psyche can be
thrown into high relief- 'the statues on the snow whose personality
I can feel even in my dreams 1165 - and he constantly returns to this
keynote to 'find a new meaning in the snow each time'. 166 As Nin
recorded, 'he is a boy of ten playing in the Himalayas with the snow
disease on him (the English disease of impersonality)'. 167
Let us look more closely at the problem of the English death- which
is clearly more to Durrell than simply a local symptom of a more
universal malaise. It is something which he feels within, as well as
without, himself- the hero of The Black Book not only celebrates 'the
English death' but is himself called 'Death Gregory' - 'I was born
dead'. 168 Like Rimbaud, who initially called his 'Saison en Enfer' the
Livre negre, Durrell sets out to write a book both for himself and his
reader. (Miller recognises this when he writes to Durrell 'it is a
modern poem of the first dimension, something that not only frees
you from the Ego and the Id but the reader also'. 169) He is writing for
'the seventy million I's whose focus embraces these phenomena and
records them on the plate of the mind'. 170 He is not only recording
'the proverbs, practices and precepts of a dead life in a dead land' 171
but the effect of that death: 'Inside I am weeping for my generation. I
am devising in my mind a legend to convey the madness which
created us in crookedness, in dislocation, in tort'. 172 Like Nin and
Miller he has decided to play a Christ-role- as Miller writes to him
'to be absolutely responsible myself for everything'. 173
Where Nin begins with the dream and moves outward, where
Miller begins with the nearest meal or the nearest fuck, Durrell takes
the lowest denominator, the grumus merdae, 174 examines it,
recognises its properties, decorates it, builds on it. In the handful of
dust, the souvenir of the waste land, he reconnects something with
everything. Because Durrell is incapable of such savagery as Miller,
because his immense innate tenderness and compassion never fails
to express itself more consistently and obviously than Miller can, he

mediates more effectively between the past, with its accumulation
of inadequacy, incomprehension and silence, the 'crookedness ...
dislocation ... tort', and the future he envisages for himself and his
readers. It is a painful, sacrificial transition, to make oneself the
tympanum through which the dead generations pass into a new life.
That does not mean that Durrell, in writing 'Zero', 'Asylum in the
Snow' and The Black Book was not also possessed by bitterness
towards the father's England- 'that mean, shabby little island up
there wrung my guts out of me and tried to destroy anything
singular and unique in me', he tells Miller. 175 And he says, looking
back from the early 1970s, 'I attack England because I identify it with
my father' . 176 But Durrell is concerned to be re-created, rather than
consumed, by his passions - 'I am the owner of the million words,
the ciphers, the dead vocabularies. In this immense ceiling of
swan' s-down there is nothing left but a laughter that opens
heaven'. 177 Three years before Eliot published (in 'East Coker') the
line 'The wounded surgeon plies the steel', Durrell has found the
same image of self-repair: 'the masked face of myself leans down
over my body, selects an instrument, and begins' . 178 Death
unequivocally leads to life:
An agon for the dead, a chronicle for the living 179 • . . • In this
dead night under a dead Greek myth I tell you finally that it is not
death. It is life in her wholeness from which one draws this
terrible system of love, of creation, of loss. 180
The rest of Durrell's work is directed towards exammmg this

'terrible system', the way life, rather than death, treats the
frightened children of time, the way we make languages, the way
we build pictures of the world, the way we multiply personalities,
confuse the real with the imagined, the rational with the absurd.
The Black Book has been Durrell's agon, 181 the means of working out
the first principles of this exploration, 'the enormous Now' . 182 It is
the axe with which he cuts down his enemies within and without-
his own pretensions as well as the dandy's:
Sometimes I feel so damn stale inside. Full of stale air and

microbes. I dream I am suffocating. I go into a room with an axe
and there I am lying on the bed like a plaster cast, full of dust.
Honestly. I lift the axe, one, two, three . . . . My head cracks
open, and rolls to the floor, I break in half; and the room is full of
dust, the hotel, the street, everything thick with dust. Then I look
at the plaster, and there is nothing inside! 183
The twin aims of The Black Book are 'to find myself - and find
language-1 84 - to re-establish a mythology, and then to find a way of
expressing it as narrative which begins, as he says in 'Zero', as 'the
intangible glyphs from the new book of the dead'. 185 Repeating
Miller (and Nin) he says 'nothing remains for me but the deaf-mute
syllables of a tongue I have yet to learn 186 • . • • It is a language
totally unfamiliar, which runs along a dimension of sensibility I
have not hitherto cultivated .... There is no language, not even
the new spatial language, which can do justice to loneliness'. 187
At the close of The Black Book there is still the detritus of chaos, of
psychic demolition, to be re-ordered as the various diaries of his
divided personalities are read simultaneously to the one part of
himself which is now capable of listening and recording their
messages, whether comprehensible or not:
I am beginning my agony in the garden and there are too many

words, and too many things to put into words. In the fantastic
proscenium of the ego, when I begin my soliloquy, I shall not
choose as Gregory chose. To be or not to be. It is in your capacity
as Judas that you have chosen for me. The question has been
decided. Art must no longer exist to depict man, but to involve
God. It is on the face of this chaos that I brood. And on the same
chaos printed across the faces of these hideous mimes of mine,
your pale glyph. 188
Durrell is, as always, writing a circular book- one that ends with the
words 'once upon a time'. 189 Gregory calls it 'a profound synthesis
of life- ... an epitaph to the age' 190 while Lucifer says 'I tell myself
continually that this must be something without beginning,
something which will never end, but conclude only when it has
reached its own genesis again: very well, a piece of literary perpetual
motion, balanced on a hair, maintaining its precarious equilibrium
between life and heraldry'. 191
All this is a preparation for something which is around the comer in

Durrell's life, the possession of the 'Heraldic Universe'. He
proclaims it in his correspondence with Miller but it does not come

to pass in The Black Book. He passes into it through the private
'Asylum in the Snow' and the public Black Book.
The Heraldic Universe is the furthest point to which I feel this
chronicle, this genealogy of modern aesthetics, can go. It places us
on the borders of literature and science, the point at which what we
call'life' and Durrell calls 'heraldry' meet. It is something which he
himself does not fully embrace until the Quintet, his fully 'Tibetan'
novel, is written between 1972 and 1984. The western tradition of
literature, as affected by the successive traumas of nineteenth-
century scepticism and the scientific theories and discoveries of the
twentieth, is dedicated to the care of eastern ways of seeing time,
space and the ego.
'What I propose to do with all solemnity, is to create my
HERALDIC UNIVERSE quite alone' Durrell tells Miller:
The foundation is being quietly laid. I AM SLOWLY BUT VERY

CAREFULLY AND WITHOUT CONSCIOUS THOUGHT DESTROYING TIME. I
have discovered that the idea of direction is false. We have
invented it as a philosophic jack up to the idea of physical
disintegration. THERE IS ONLY SPACE. A solid object has only three
dimensions. Time, that old appendix, I've lopped off. So it needs
a new attitude. An attitude without memory. A spatial existence
in terms of the paper I'm writing on now at this momene 92 . . • .
What I am trying to isolate is the exact moment of creation, in
which the maker seems to exist heraldically. That is to say, time as
a concept does not exist, but only as an attribute of matter- decay,
growth, etc. In that sense it must be memory-less. 193
He also tells Miller 'I think Tibet is for me what China is for yout1 94
and Miller responds 'There's a new dimension in your book which
could only have come from such a place'. 195
This is a realm in which the child is King, a selfist who can
organise the world on his own terms as a child rather than a small
adult. 'I believe in Man-King-of-the-Universe' Durrell says over
thirty years later. 'Otherwise all is lost - culture, pleasure,
poetry' . 196 Man, as we have already seen, becomes God by
deposing God. In declaring the Heraldic Universe Durrell writes to
Miller:
You say in big strident tones I AM A MAN. THAT IS ENOUGH.

Because you know that an artist can hardly taste his food he is so
weak with virtue. If it were possible you would like to go on
saying 1 AM A MAN ad lib in order to hide the more terrible stage
whisper 1 AM AN ARTIST and from there to the ultimate blinding
conclusion 1 AM Goo!!! 197
It is therefore apposite that he should have prefaced 'Zero' with a

quotation from Nietzsche: 'fundamentally every name in history is
myself'. 198 It expresses the correspondance which Durrell pursues
throughout his work, the idea that we are all corresponding
elements and factors in the 'temple of nature', a view which creates a
congruence between Buddhism and gnosticism, the twin pillars of
his developing philosophy. It thus enables him, in terms of his own
personal circumstances, to understand that he carries his own
universe within him, that as an expatriate he needs subjective rather
than objective correlatives, carrying all possible worlds within
him 199 - 'EVERYTHING ILLOGICAL IS GOD: AND I AM GOD!' 200
All this is possible because, as the leitmotif of The Black Book
explains, 'everything is plausible here, because nothing is real'. 201
The heraldic conquest of time presents us 'in the snow' with 'a
chronology which has nothing to do with time - or it has forfeited
time for the living limbo' - this is 'the chart' which makes its
appearance in 'The Avignon Quintet' as the map of death: 'it
contains every principle, every motive, every boundary to which
our deaths are subject, in which they are consummated' 202 and,
because they are consummated, it also contains (in the sense of
overcoming and sublimating) time itself. 'I live only in my
imagination which is timeless' says Lucifer. 'Therefore the location
of this world, which I am trying to hammer out for you on a blunt
typewriter, over the Ionian, is the location of space merely. I can
only fix it with certainty on the map'. 203
Within this Heraldic Universe it will at least be possible 'to find
myself -that is, to re-establish myth; or 'it is not only a question of
going back to a myth. The myth will come back to us' 204 ' . . . The
circuit is complete. We have put our myths in the cellar and must
start building again with new implements, a new tongue' 205 ' . . . I
know that the myth which hangs so heavily on us is not dead. It is
coming back slowly into focus, its power is being restored'. 206 He
calls identity 'that myth which is supposed to exist behind the
scuffle of words in my brain'/07 and it is identity, or the id-entity
which we constantly oppose to ego-entity, that convinces us that
memory is ineradicable. The affect of the past is ourselves, whereas the

affect of history is others.
In Durrell's Heraldic Universe the aesthetic belief that only the
ideal is real has thus become subverted and we see a reversal of the
relationship of the symbol to world, of object to word. This is the
result of allowing the psychoanalysts to open up the cubic
possibilities of the mind in place of 'our effete aesthetic', 208 and to
defeat, and re-establish, idealism through unreality: 'there is no
reality. Only phenomena'. 209 Ultimately, as we have seen with
Nin's 'House of Incest', one comes face to face with the 'other', the
lover whom one has loved; as Durrell calls it 'the heraldic Narcissus
in your face' 210 - 'rib to rib, face to face with the absolute heraldic
personality which wakes in each other's eyes, even the lovers
tremble'. 211
But this goes much further than Nin's auto-analysis which is
limited in trying to find ways of responding to myth and which is a
form of becoming. Durrell, on the other hand, concentrates on the
core of being, on inventing himself and creating myth:
If I were to try and translate this existence into terms more easily
understood, I might say that this happiness, in which I am
nothing, is simply the turning-off of being: the entering into of
1se12
By 1945 Durrell judged that he had not yet passed from the 'minus
side' to the 'plus side' in which 'pure forms' emerge - levels of
buddhist consciousness which were only possible through (an echo
of Eliot here) 'raids on the inarticulate across the border from minus
to plus'. 213
Anals Nin indeed distrusted the Heraldic Universe: 'a poetic island?
a place of nobility, a wholeness, a sign, a fraternity?' 214 From this it
is clear to me that she confused symbol with world. She believed
that it was erroneous to 'get back into the womb' if it meant 'making
a womb out of the whole world, including everything in the womb
(the city, the enlarged universe of Black Spring, of The Black Book) 'the
all-englobing, all-encompassing womb, holding everything'. 215 But
Durrell's answer would be that
the whole question, in essence is acceptance, the de-

personalization of self, of the society which one has absorbed.

It is not only a question of art, but a question of life. You are
altered, affected, transmuted by this orientation. Whatever was
your antecedent, your history, that no longer matters to me. 216
It is not a question then of making a recovery from understanding

one's own unconscious symbolism, one's racial or genealogical
history, but of accepting oneself as the world, of re-creating the
world in one's own image while reconstituting oneself in the image
of the world- 'this act of tuism' :217
In this theatre it is all or nothing, Oneself is the hero, the clown,

the chorus; there are no extras, and no doubles to accept the
dangers. But more terrible still, is the incessant whine of the
chorale, the words, words, words spraying from the stiff mouth
of the masks, one becomes at last aware of the identity of the
audience. It is my own face in its incessant reduplications which
blazes back at me from the stone amphitheatre. 218
There is only oneself, therefore there is no point questing for

meaning- 'do not inquire of the ingenuous mask, I say, it can tell
you nothing'. 219 Nothing, that is, which you/1 did not already
know. We are fictions (plausible) or we are realities (implausible), it
does not matter. We flow in and out of one another (ourselves):
Durrell's statement 'There is you' 220 sums up and confirms
Rimbaud; Miller has invented a character called 'van Norden' and
'Norden' writes Durrell's second novel, Panic Spring; the process of
authors, characters and readers appearing in, and writing, each
others' books has begun.
Borges asks 'why are we uneasy ... if Don Quixote reads Don
Quixote or Hamlet is a spectator at Hamlet? I believe I have found the
reason: such inversions suggest that if the characters in a fiction can
be readers or spectators, then we, their readers and spectators, can
be fictional characters too'. 221 In the age of totalitarianism, we have
found the answer to the problem of 'facing up' to the political, public
issues of one's own time. Cyril Connolly, for example, argued in
Enemies of Promise that 'one who is not political neglects the vital
intellectual issues of his time, and disdains his material'. 222 How then
was it possible to exclude it, to become an aesthetic version of the
conscientious objector? Orwell, in the essay which first put Miller on
the literary map ('Inside the Whale'), urges that 'Miller's work is
symptomatically important . . . in its avoidance' of the public

issues, 'an unexpected swing of the pendulum' 223 in which Miller
tells Orwell that a sense of obligation to the Spanish Civil War is 'the
act of an idiot'.
Thus by recognising oneself in these public actions and by
refusing to ask oneself for the meaning, one is reconciling oneself
with 'mon semblable, mon frere', restoring faith in the 'hypocrite
lecteur' while at the same time reaffirming one's diversity. This is to
replace in autism the despair and death of art: Durrell succeeds in
achieving what Rimbaud had initiated, 'to break down logical
structure' 224 which was, in effect, what the politicians were doing all
around him. He is simply standing Connolly's demand on its head-
'it is not the first time in history that the gulf has opened up between
the people and their makers- the artists'. 225 Orwell has emphasised
that one can accept one's position within the 'whale' of
contemporary events- or history- and Durrell also, coincidentally,
climbs inside the same whale, even though to him it has become the
universal vagina, 'the endless tributary of sex': 226
Jonah, I say to myself, quietly, persistently. It is the only word left

over from the dead vocabularies. The only sound which I dare use
in this red balloon, where I am inhabited by space. It has become
my JAH. On the strange numen of this sound, left over from
drowned languages, I shall shape the contemplative myth. The
nucleus, myself. 227
6
Into the Inner Landscape
We all knew we were parting from a pattern of life we would
never see again, from friends we might never see again. I knew it
was the end of our romantic life.- Anais Nin 1
The war divided the group of writers at the Villa Seurat of whom
Miller, Nin and Durrell were part. They never again met with the
same frequency or intensity. But 'the end of our romantic life' was
not only that kind of parting, but a farewell to 'heroism and passion'
which, Nin had recorded two years earlier, 'are vanishing from the
world'. 2
Would a continued and prolonged association between them
have enriched their individual lives? Or was the imprint of the 'Villa
Seurat Library' 3 as short-lived as the 'Celtic School' which Wilde
playfully shared with Shaw?4 (One thinks of the empathy between
Kandinsky and Schoenberg which might have flowered into a new
art movement at the Bauhaus. 5 )
In fact the war was quite unlike that of 1914-18, which had freed
the artist to examine a waste land of civilisation; now the artist
would be driven beyond the waste land into his own corpse -
looking back in 1953 Eliot said 'the conditions of one's life changed
and one was thrown in on oneself'. 6 But the three writers discussed
here had already recognised the 'end of romantic life' and had taken
steps to find their inner landscape. They had recognised in
themselves the same defects which Cyril Connolly bewailed in
'England Not My England' (1929) and Enemies of Promise (1936)-
'there is no place in England for a serious rebel; if you hate both
diehards and bright young people you must, like Lawrence, Joyce or
Aldous Huxley, go and live abroad. It is better to be depayse in
someone else's country than in one's own'. 7 Anticipating Miller
(and providing the raison d'etre for The Black Book) Connolly also
said 'The English mandarin simply can't get at pugilists, gangsters,
speakeasies, negroes, and even if he should he would find them
absolutely without the force and colour of the American
equivalent'. 8

It would thus be necessary for the writers to be forced apart, Nin

to America and the 'Cities of the Interior', Miller to the new
America, the 'air-conditioned nightmare' and the 'Rosy Crucifixion'
and Durrell to Alexandria and the 'Tibetan' novels of the Quartet
and Quintet. With such a seemingly endless, or cyclical, process of
novels- one hesitates to say 'fiction' when the result will be entirely
new ways of considering reality from the perspective of invented
characters in whom we recognise ourselves - this is clearly not a
story which can be drawn to a close, except with the words 'once
upon a time'. This chronicle, which began with the year of
Brummell's death, has seen another age of assassination for the
dandy congealed into an attitude. On the verge of self-immolation
Durrell recognises just in time the need to explore the inner
landscape rather than destroy it, thus commencing a new cycle of
expression:
if there is any passion in this writing, anywhere, it is because I am

creating a death I almost shared. I mistook it for my own property.
I know now, for the first time, where I stand. We are nothing if we
cannot convert the dross of temporal death . . . . Day by day
now, increasingly day by day, I can feel the continents running in
my veins, the rivers, the oceans balanced in a cone on my navel. I
am no longer afraid of this heraldry. I have given myself to it
utterly . . . . Above all there is the journey . . . . There is only
trial and error on a journey like this, and no signposts. 9
Or, as Maurice Valency puts it, 'Nature, as a subject, was

relinquished to the scientists, and as the outerworld ceased to sit for
its portrait, the speculum of art increasingly became a portrait of the
artist, his moods, his dreams, and even his convictions. The mirror
was wide. It accommodated everything from "Guemica" to Krapp's
Last Tape'. 10
Valency is of course describing in general the artistic retreat which

we have noted in the course of this book. It is significant that he
mentions a work by Picasso dating from 1937 and a play by Beckett
of 1958 (and in the context of a chapter entitled 'Mallarme'). The
reader will quickly have noticed the almost total exclusion in this
study of a gamut of artists from Joyce to Proust, Lawrence to Woolf,
Into the Inner Landscape 211
of Huxley and Isherwood, in order to concentrate on a man who

writes:
Inside I am weeping for my generation. I am devising in my mind

a legend to convey the madness which created us in crookedness,
in dislocation, in tort. 11
Durrell is responding to that retreat of nature into science; he is

recording the result of one hundred years of social fission, of
homeless particles. Miller, blowing the world to smithereens, is not
so much destroying this as confirming history:
There will be oceans of space in which to move about, to

perambulate, to sing, to dance, to climb, to bathe, to leap
somersaults, to whine, to rape, to murder. A cathedral, a veritable
cathedral, in the building of which everybody will assist who has
lost his identity. 12
Miller, Nin and Durrell go much further than the other major writers
of the entre deux guerres because they recognise, even more acutely
than Eliot, that the controlling myth has somehow disappeared -
consumed by those it was intended to control. The central myth has
in fact become the lack of a myth, of an enabling fiction by which to
live life. Not only has Einstein shown us that 'all time is contained in
each moment of time' but also all space is contained in each
dimension of space. Science has of course taken over - cubism
becomes the artist's way of following Einstein, surrealism his
strategy of walking away from what he finds there.
But it has taken forty years to discover this; since Wilde began to
stand logic- at least aesthetic logic- on its head, and Jarry to expose
himself (and ourselves) to the distorting mirror of social manners,
the artist has tried to reconcile himself to a process by which the
world seems to be turning itself inside out. Everything which was
marginal now becomes central, while the social cores crumble under
inspection; men begin to invent their own gods, even to proclaim
themselves as gods because it is their only way of trying to hold the
world together- as Miller says (in the 'Hamlet' correspondence) 'the
collapse of the world is the collapse of the myth'. 13
Why did these three find an answer which has been so influential
in the development of contemporary literature? Miller writes 'The
myth will come true ... a link will be found between the unknown
men we were and the unknown men we are . . . . It is only the
tumult and confusion which is of importance ... we must get down
and worship it'. 14 The answer therefore lies in taking the flight into
social and moral breakdown, into schizophrenia, and admitting not
only a 'tragic sense of life' but the fact that life is itself a tragedy. In
this way perhaps Yeats was the greatest of the moderns. Lawrence
by contrast does not achieve this. In Psychoanalysis and the
Unconscious (1921) he says 'the whole of life is one long, blind effort
at an established polarity with the outer universe, human and
non-human; and the whole of modern life is a shrieking failure. It is
our own fault'. 15 Yes, says Miller, but if we are to suffer for it let us
ensure that it does not happen again, not by trying to deny the
inevitably cyclic nature of history but by changing the rules.
Durrell believes that in his Heraldic Universe he can dispense
with occidental Time but in his later work he will adopt a different
tactic in order to achieve this oriental state: as Balthazar says in The
Alexandria Quartet, 'to intercalate realities is the only way to be
faithful to time'. 16 Durrell's attitude to language and time had a
subliminal influence on Steiner's approach to translation, especially
where he says 'language ... alters at every moment in perceived
time . . . changes as rapidly and in as many ways as human
experience itself' 17 and that 'a civilization is imprisoned in a
linguistic contour which no longer matches the changing landscape
of fact' . 18 Steiner, whose review of the Quartet in 1960 was seminal
in emphasising the importance of the baroque element in Durrell's
art, seems to be echoing Durrell's statement in the Key that 'time and
the ego are two determinants of style for the twentieth century'. 19
To throw reason overboard, to reject and deconstruct the western
logocentric tradition in order to surrender to sensation, dandyism,
the vortex, is to affirm the reversal of modern aesthetics and political
life instituted in France by Baudelaire and in England by Wilde.
Probably Durrell's particular contribution to that reversal is to have
seized on the possibilities offered by the principle of relativity in
order to interpret the idea of social and moral fission with which his
predecessors - his patrimonials - had been fumbling. Miller's
linguistic destructiveness and his emphasis on the immediate
experience, Nin's essays into psychology, were powerful influences
on this contribution.
We have seen that Durrell needed the distance of an Ionian exile in

order to describe the English death. Later he would write what
subsequent generations have made a commonplace- 'Greece offers
you the discovery of yourself'. And in Cefalu (later re-titled The Dark
Labyrinth, 1947) and in his poetry from the same period he provides a
paraphrase for Herbert Read's later remark that 'surrealisme, a form
of art that denies "art" ... seeks only the naked heart, the
unknown, the uncreated, the dreaded Minotaur in the dark
labyrinth of the unconscious mind'. 20 This process completes the
transition from artist to autist, from dandy to herald, because it
discovers the inner strength to stamp on words, icons and ideas. To
conquer time is to surrender to time because, in Durrell's terms,
only thus can one embrace space and 'put an end to loneliness', as a
Surrealist Bulletin put it. 21
Durrell achieves this particular transition in The Alexandria
Quartet:
at each stage of development each man resumes the whole

universe and makes it suitable to his own inner nature; while each
thinker, each thought fecundates the whole universe anew22
One reads the interlinear, the intercalation of realities, one's

own history of birth, copulation and death, but in a way, by means
of a strategy, which convinces one not only that 'I have been here
before' but also that 'I am living through a different dimension'. The
self-abuse in which Pursewarden engages before the bathroom
mirror has surely been learned from Anai:s Nin. In the interlinear of
the Quartet he learns to say not only 'I am not what I am' but also
'you are not what you seem'. It is a very much greater step again into
the 'Irish' or 'Tibetan' state of mind of 'The Avignon Quintet' in
which he can re-integrate himself into time and announce the
equivalent of 'I am what I was'. Then (for example in Sebastian) he
has the strength to revert to 1930s-style psychology - 'Then
gradually the voices came, I developed a whole repertoire, it was
like becoming a hotel with someone different in each room' 23 - and
to admit the existence of history; "'of course," she said "by all
means let us have the truth, since we have all suffered so much from
it'". 24
But in his diary for December 1946 Durrell noted: 'Underneath the
whole question of poetry an unstateable proposition like the
shadowed side of the moon'. 25 He is still worrying at the problem of
realising what that shadowed side might actually be. 'It seems', he
says, 'that if poetry is not exactly lying about the world it is talking
about the things of the substance in a very special relation to time'. 26
The significant factor, for Durrell as for Miller, is that the world has
lost its heraldic metaphors, the signposts by means of which it
navigates between its literal sense of 'history' and its emotional
sense of 'the past'. Durrell however is determined to re-establish
these metaphors in an entirely personal way, answering Miller's
critical observation that 'the fear of life ... is but the admission of
the breakdown of cultural form'. 27 If we consider that the quest
for the inner landscape, for one's own voice, threw many
contemporary writers back onto the device of the fable, the allegory,
the perennial method of finding a cultural form in an age of political
and cultural crisis, we will more easily see how Durrell comes in the
Quartet to write allegories of the human condition within the
framework of 'once upon a time'. In this he is re-stating the themes,
but redeeming the craftsmanship, of his own childhood reading
matter, Kipling, Scott, Ruskin.
Much later (in 1970) he is to say that he sees contemporary,
fragmented, individuated creativity once more shaping into a
collective culture. 28 But he himself has been a leader in a new
'baroque' school in which the fragmentation, the confirmation of
social as of scientific fission, has been studiously pursued for its own
sake. To make images of an inexplicable world 29 is the only fiction
still available to us, filling space with images which no longer bear
any relationship to time. Thus Durrell moves from the surrealism of
The Black Book to the baroque of the Quartet in a combination of
structuralism and existentialism in order to make sense of meaning
in a world without meaning. Yet this is more than a threnody for
'our romantic life', it represents a desperate need to say 'Yes!' to life,
an affirmative which Purse warden will call' an act of tenderness'. 30
But Durrell cannot solve the problem alone, and the recognition of
that fact sets him aside from most of the authors of his generation
and puts him in the company of those like Nabokov who realise the
need to extend the world of the novel into that of the reader- 'can
the artist offer no clue to living? Alas, no, his public does that for
him'. 31
Let us look once again at the cyclic nature of literary tradition and
aesthetic protest. Perennial images such as 'the secret garden' or the
allegory of monster-fighting recur from pre-mediaeval times to the

mid-twentieth century, from the Roman de laRose to Four Quartets,
from Beowulf to Tolkien, above all those works which provide the
transition from discrete to public worlds and from one culture
to another, such as Chaucer's tales or Nin's psychological
explorations. Are we therefore controlled, lived, are our books
written, by history itself, or by the recurrence of man and
environment in unchanging symbiotic captivity?
All our investigation has seen the repetition of the war between
generations, and the slow action of history, in which the transition
effected by any parricide is almost less significant than the way in
which the sons then confirm the living weight of their patrimony.
Baudelaire says 'every revolution has for its corollary the massacre
of the innocents' 32 and, like Durrell a century later, he embraces
Sade- 'one must go back constantly to Sade, that is to say to Natural
Man, in order to explain evil'. 33 In the age of Baudelaire and the
liberal revolutions, Marx and Engels announce that 'man will cease
to be the object of history ... and will become the master of himself,
society and nature'; 34 this is simply a socio-economic paraphrase of
the aesthetic doctrine which the French writers developed in order
to explain, and come to terms with, the quality which Brummell had
popularised in France - ennui. Laforgue writes 'Marche funebre
pour Ia mort de Ia Terre', Peladan, in Le Vice Supreme (1884), speaks
of 'a spiritual nausea' as the central fact of civilisation; d' Aurevilly
greets the appearance of Huysmans' des Esseintes as a confirmation
that the world is 'at its last gasp', 'the nosography of a society
destroyed by the rot of materialism'. 35 The English establishment
attributed Wilde's peculiar smell to the influence of the French novel
but it was quick to recognise how deeply Brummell's insidious
influence had been re-imported into England and how pervasive it
had become. One of Wilde's detractors writes 'English society is
equally to blame' 36 because it had pedestalled Wilde and appointed
him court-jester. As an institution he had transgressed by showing
society 'the rot of materialism' in its own mirrors. It thus becomes
not only a question of cutting down the dandy but of deconstructing
society itself. It is this task, replete with both psychic and aesthetic
obstacles, which faced Durrell in the 1930s. It is that much more
acute because he is conscious of his deep-rootedness in much of
what he knows he has to destroy.
In 1914 Pound writes:
We are all futurists to the extent of believing with Guillaume

Apollinaire that 'on ne peut pas porter partout avec soi le cadavre
de son pere'. But 'futurism', when it gets into art, is, for the most
part, a descendant of impressionism. It is a sort of accelerated
impressionism. 37
As we have noted, Aldington remarked with distaste on the descent

of aesthetics from Pater to Moore - 'voila ou menent les mauvais
chemins'. And it is because he sees himself on the same inevitable
path that he characterises with such dismay the death-in-life of his
emasculated 'hero', the wimp of history. In 1922 Kandinsky writes to
Schoenberg 'much that was a daring dream at that time [1912-14]
has now become the past. We have experienced centuries'; 38 but
where Pound reminds us that the future is in effect the past, we have
to remind Kandinsky that the past is the future; that by one heraldic
act the course of a civilisation can be changed and that change affects
not only the future but also the way we remember the past- a myth
is killed and a narrative is born.
Always the enemy is the past, and 'continuity of life survives, but
at the cost of individual life'. 39 Samuel Hynes draws attention to
Coward's Twentieth Century Blues' in Cavalcade (1931) - people
who have lost their way, 'nothing to win or to lose'- juxtaposed
with 'God Save the King'; is this ironic, satirical, or just another
version of ennui? Hynes significantly calls it 'this odd combination
of despair and tradition'. 40 The following year, 1932, an anonymous
writer in Twentieth Century declares 'Lock up the Old Men! Youth
prepares for a coup d'etat ... a state of crisis is perfectly natural. We
have never known any other state'. 41 Hynes believes that the central
difficulty of artists in the 1930s is that of action, and that the Spanish
Civil War crystallised that difficulty by creating all the conditions,
opportunities and difficulties required for a dress rehearsal for the
second world war. As Hynes puts it, 'in the present in which men
live they must choose and act: the present is the point of intersection
in time where freedom becomes Necessity and Choice becomes
History'. 42
And this is the dilemma which we recognise most acutely in the
Jew, the Irishman and the Russian, all those in love with the concept
of time and yet affected, imprisoned or oppressed by the facts of
history. Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and much of Durrell's later work,
addresses these themes directly. But when Durrell writes 'Zero' and
'Asylum in the Snow' the identity of the refugee is not yet clear: we
know simply that he is trying to stake out a clean white space, to set
a distance between himself and the rest of the world in order to abort
the lessons of history, to deliver himself of the apocalyptic message
from the top of the tower of babel, to stop being Hamlet.
In this sense the writers who survived the 1930s- and this is again
what distinguishes those under examination here from some of the
much 'greater' names, like Auden, Spender or Isherwood - are
'parting from a pattern of life' as Nin puts it. Unable to liberate
themselves from the past except by repeating its atrocities, they
translate themselves into another sphere, an imaginative realm,
the 'Heraldic Universe', 'China', 'Hotel Chaotica'. Nin's voyage to
New York in 1939 was the necessary transition into the inner land-
scape, to catch up with the dream so that she could (again)
proceed outwards; expatriate Durrell'finds' himself in the Ionian;
Miller, child of Brooklyn, relocates himself in California, Dubliner
Beckett in Paris, Russian Nabokov in America. For all of them this
action, a declaration of 'non-serviam' towards some god, was a
supreme example of the 'retour secret sur moi-meme', 43 a strategy
to escape the enemy, time, and this gesture marks them out as
'heraldic'.
I have not used the concept of the herald in this book as an idle
rhetorical flourish but as a real metaphor to image the inventive and
the gestive, to provide an expression of the process from myth into
narrative. Of course the heraldic is really too important to be
entrusted to the herald, because the herald is already a secondary,
ancillary, derivative character: once we express the heraldic in any
narrative form its essence is dissipated and it becomes open to
misconception, to science, to the inventions of history. Heraldry
derives from the herald as chivalry derives from the chevalier, but in
turn the herald derives from the heraldic, as the chevalier does not
come from the chivalric but invents it as a social form. The
complication of the two, of courtly manners and forms with private
gestures and motives, bedevils the pursuit of the primitive heraldic
force and makes the idea of gentility, or of nobility, a fragile rather
than a brutal social reality.
Durrell's 'Heraldic Universe' is 'detached from the temporal
continuum of association ... a separate existence in a sort of stasis'.
He says:
I use the word 'Heraldic' for this life because the same sort of
symbolic substitution is indulged in by the herald. A symbol of
quality becomes a private symbol of a man or a family and lives on
in this particular quality for ever; and the personal myth of the
artist is an extension of his created myth in books or paintings. 44
Heraldry may be the 'shorthand of history' 45 but it is also the

shorthand of the moment which Durrell, as we have seen, is 'trying
to isolate . . . the exact moment of creation, in which the maker
seems to exist heraldically'. The mythic quality of the invention of
the symbol becomes obscured by the narrative fashion in which that
symbol is borne, the method of display in which the dandy becomes
congealed. The causal somehow becomes enmeshed in identity and
this presents an obstacle in our pathway into the inner landscape.
We need to answer the question 'Who?' before we answer the
fundamental question 'Why?' but the descriptive and analytic
way we do this seems to be reversing the direction of our
discovery, always interposing the attention to form rather than
initiative.
We are thus imprisoned in the role of Hamlet when we want to be
Faust. The demand that someone explain the universe to us -
Maeterlink's Les Aveugles (1890), Synge's The Well of the Saints (1905),
Evreinov's Theatre of the Soul (1912) and Beckett's Play (1963) are all
powerful allegories paraphrasing the scientific enquiry of our age -
is ultimately a desire to look upon the face of the Savage God. Rilke' s
quest for a terrible destiny, greater even than the extinction of the
self, establishing a correspondence in which each individual
communicates in the destruction of humanity, is only symptomatic
of a world in which the human essence so fervently worshipped by
Mahler or Rouault or Whitman is being thrown away. The instances
of the retreat from this precipice are few: Rimbaud finds a way of
identifying himself with God, but self-discovery of this kind is so
dangerous that we prefer to invent an enabling fiction, we paint a
raven or a cross upon our shield and our sleeve, thus proclaiming an
identity towards the outer world. Or we seek anonymity (the White
Knight) such as we find in the retreat of the imagists like Klee or
Rothko into the absence of image, of wordmongers like Pirandello
and Beckett into a state of wordlessness. Beckett himself sees man as
a tragic figure expiating 'the original and eternal sin ... of having
been born'. 46 In entering the labyrinth in search of his own identity-
the question 'Who?' - he encounters and recognises himself
as the termite mining his own dung - the process and question
'Why?'
We are not therefore concerned with any of these writers as heralds

in the sense established by heraldry, as 'technical experts ... a
priesthood' or with heraldry itself as 'a literary [and] a learned
culture', 47 any more than we are concerned with the tournaments of
the thirteenth or of the twentieth centuries. To continue that figure
of speech, we are concerned with the Don Quixote on the lone
battlefield, the self-descriptive rather than the narrative, the auto-
erotic, autographic mind which suffers from this compulsion to
explain. As Beckett says, 'silence once broken will never again be
whole'. 48 The continual problem of description is how to maintain
language as anthropocentric, celebrating the deeds of heroes rather
than submitting to the diktats of stronger languages and
environments. Virgil sings 'arma virumque', of arms and the man,
the two essential elements of heroic poetry but, just as importantly,
that man is 'prim us' and his story is aboriginal- his struggle against
Juno's memorial anger. Is it despite the revelations of Freud, of
Einstein, of Schliemann or because of them, that we are always
vexed by the need to go back, in illo tempore, to find the day before
memory, to reaffirm truths immemorially posited? We want to be
there on the very first day on which someone noticed that the sea
was 'wine-dark'. Steiner asks 'How are we to make intelligible the
fact that our psychological and cultured condition is, at signal
points, one of uninterrupted reference to a handful of antique
stories?' 49 We want to answer that question by being there when
those stories are first told because we want to discover the origin of
myth itself. To do this is to translate ourselves through time, but the
startlingly original discovery is that it does not matter which
direction we take, through which dimension of time, so to speak, we
undertake the transitus.
In 'Zero' Durrell therefore writes with Sophoclean clarity:
I have decided to speak, not for those who in their fervour are
aimless and lunatique, those who run magically, whose ankle-
bones are chaotic with reality; nor for those who paddle in their
own urine, or knead their dung into delicate torsos. I will tell you
who I am and what I am doing here. I will speak with a nicety of
language that would give ears to the blind and eyes to the deaf
who hear me, but do not understand what my glossary is50 . . • I

am teaching everyone how to experience phenomena. In this
sector of experience there is only the creative activity. We are
nothing ourselves: we do not let our imaginations even imagine
that we have a part in the cosmic dance 51 . . • Hamlet is dead . . . .
He had died in the future - how far ahead of us all we could not
tell. Even the physicist could not tell. It was a moment of great
nicety- because we could not bury him until he had joined us in
the present52 . . . The last service of the body, I suppose, is in the
Death: the music-room where is the absolute counterpoint of
God, unrolling its empty dialogues of silence into time. Death is
that white status which it is no longer necessary to contemplate.
For me, there remains only the journey, the outbound express
into the wilderness of lightwaves, clocked by no milestones,
fooled by no flags, the red and the green, stopped by no signal.
Arctic Ultimate. You see? At last I have learned the bitter lesson-
to speak for myself. 5 3
'Fooled by no flags' - the testament of a man who has yet to live life
but who is familiar with its syntax, its scientific heraldry- 'amusia,
aphasia, aboulia, alexia, agraphia, and anoia' 54 against which he
posits 'the intangible glyphs from the new book of the dead'. 55 If
Freud could write of 'civilisation and its discontents' Durrell and
Miller, in revolt, could describe 'civilisation and its barbarians'.
'Asylum in the Snow', even more than The Black Book, established
Durrell's relationship with the world, not just England but
everywhere, recognising himself as an expatriate, seeking
homecomings. Where civilisation needs to codify its passions in
order to safeguard life, Durrell and Miller use them to make havoc of
life, to maraud, to be antinomian, and thus, perhaps unconsciously,
to provide civilisation with its own black book, its anti-bible. As the
diaspora spreads, translating symbol into word, possession and
manners, the barbarian undercurrent is also being formulated into
its own poetry. Eventually this too becomes over-stylised, the
knight-errant, once a threat to civilisation, becomes 'fantastic and
useless'. 56
Barbarians, dandies and even heralds start to fall apart at the same
pace (but at a different phase) as society itself because they live
within a symbiotic captivity. Thus Huizinga tells us 'the whole
chivalrous culture of the last centuries of the Middle Ages is marked
by an unstable equilibrium between sentimentality and mockery'. 57
In the same way, as we have noted in passing, the social comedies of

Corelli and Benson (and of course Ouida and Baroness Orczy)
satirised, and implicitly condemned, the apotheosis of Victorian
materialism. In a sense politeness had been civilised out of
existence: 'after us the Savage God'. In another sense that politeness
represented the reductio ad absurdum of the chivalric culture of the
middle ages as re-invented in the eighteenth century. The Broad
Stone of Honour and the popular romances of Henty and Kipling,
which meant so much to youngsters like Durrell, were the 'last gasp'
of nobility and gentility in a vulgar, egalitarian, anomie world, poor
echoes of a historical mythology.
By contrast Pater's re-invention of the Renaissance provides
Aldington, Durrell, perhaps even Joyce, 58 with an alternative
strategy, another genealogy of aesthetics characterised by its
interior monologue, a self-communing with the sense of the past
rather than the facts of history. Ultimately then the retreat into
autism is a way of replacing history, or time, within oneself. Instead
of 'the past' as 'the enemy', the artist becomes 'the Enemy', more so
than ever before, because he is also autist, a new phenomenon bred
by science out of ennui, the fleur du mal of modern civilisation.
Wyndham Lewis, the Enemy, becomes a model for Durrell's
Pursewarden. In Tarr Lewis writes 'his contempt for everybody else
in the end must degrade him: for if nothing in other men was worth
honouring finally his own self-neglect must result' ;59 and in Blast 1:
For the suicide with the pistol in his mouth, 'Life is there', as well,
with it's [sic] variety and possibilities. But a dissertation to that
effect would not influence Him; on the contrary. For those men
who look to Nature for support, she does not care. 'Life' is a
hospital for the weak and incompetent. 'Life' is a retreat of the
defeated. It is salubrious - The Cooking is good - Amusements
are provided. 60
This 'uncle' of Pursewarden, as potent as Miller's Norden, or Djuna

Barnes' Dr O'Connor, has discovered the lack of tenderness in the
world; and that God not only does not care, he does not care one
way or the other. Lack of tenderness is in itself a kind of passion, a
brutal, fatal passion. In order to pursue this ineluctable, antigonal
reality it is necessary not to be destroyed by world wars but to live
through them. 'The Greeks', says Maurice Bowra, 'have shown a
tendency to be truthful and accurate in their heroic poems about
contemporary events, no doubt because their reayovOta are often

sung in camps by men who have themselves taken part in the events
of which they sing'. 61 Durrell likewise reduces the heroic conflict to
a personal agon; the poetry of action thus becomes the poetry of my
action, the song of Lawrence, so that in Durrell's words (about
Rimbaud's otherness) the description is 'both mantic and semantic'.
The hero is both superman and everyman.
Is it therefore surprising that we find Durrell today echoing the
warlords of his father's generation - 'the young are far more
idealistic than we were. But, poor things, they need a war; what
they want, if only they realized it, is for the older generation to
provide them with a war'? 62 I think not. The recurrence of
paternalism is inevitable even in one so conscious of having
provided the modern novel with its exit from occidental thought. It
is inevitable because despite Durrell's and Nin' s achievement in
using the inner landscape to re-enter the public world from a new
dimension, there still remains the problem of language. They must
relate the world of fiction and fantasy to the world in which their
words create resonance and echo. The celebration in heroic poetry
of the themes of love and death, of fear and lust, and of man's and
woman's triumph or defeat within those themes, is part of the
otherness, the seeing oneself in a different realm of being, the roman
du moi which ultimately, in order to be received, must be returned to
the reader as a roman appareil.
All the modern literature surveyed in this book has been such a
roman appareil, an attempt to engage the spectator as participant, a
cultural democracy in which we make ourselves into gods in order
to fill a lacuna in the world, in ourselves. But it relates nonetheless to
the matrix of mythology, it affirms the incestuous relationship of
history to time, of which truth is the bastard child. Our guttural
consonants, our resounding vowels, our visual and linguistic
concern with genealogy, land-holding, possession of time itself, are
all inadequate expressions of our psychic need to say 'yes' to life.
As Durrell recorded in his diary in 1946:
I do not think we should ever forget the fact that writers are really
in charge of history; and that their writings are of no importance to
them. They are looking for something else, frantically searching
in the old leather trunk in the attic for something they lost in their
childhood; fretfully they toss out all they find, clothes, books,
broken toys. These are what we call works of art, and sit up all
night to discuss. But meanwhile the search goes on. 63
Clothes, books, broken toys, the detritus of a civilisation, its

manners, its mind, its morals. What was lost in childhood? Durrell
thinks he has the answer: it belongs not to the logocentric,
Graeco-Roman world, but to the east, the roof of the world which he
remembers from his own boyhood. 'Zero' begins with the words
'EVERYTHING ILLOGICAL IS GOD: AND I AM GOD! The night opens with a
Tibetan delicacy' . . . . Not the Homeric rosy-fingered dawn, but an
orientation towards the sublime, at last able to embrace the absurd.
Notes and References
Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.
ABBREVIATIONS
In the case of texts which have been quoted frequently here, the following
abbreviations have been adopted for convenience:
For books by Lawrence Durrell
Black Book: The Black Book, an Agon (first published Paris, 1938; edition used:
Faber & Faber, 1973).
Place: Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel, edited by Alan G. Thomas
(Faber & Faber, 1969).
Quartet: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea (first
published in one volume, Faber & Faber, 1968).
Key: The Key to Modern Poetry (Peter Nevill, 1952; also published as A Key to
Modern British Poetry, University of Oklahoma Press, 1952).
For books by Anai's Nin
Diaries 1: The Journals of Anai"s Nin 1931-1934, edited by G. Stuhlmann

(Quartet Books, 1973).
Diaries 2: The Journals of Anais Nin 1935-1939, edited by G. Stuhlmann
(Quartet Books, 1974).
Artifice: 'Winter of Artifice' and 'House of Incest', published as Winter of
Artifice (Quartet Books, 1979).
Novel: The Novel of the Future (Peter Owens, 1953).
For books by Henry Miller
Cancer: Tropic of Cancer (originally published Paris, 1934; London: Calder,

1963; edition used: Granada Books, 1965).
Black Spring: Black Spring (originally published Paris, 1936; London: Calder,
1965; edition used: Granada Books, 1974).
Letters: Letters to Anais Nin, Part One (Peter Owens, 1965).
Other texts
Hamlet: 'Hamlet, A Philosophic Correspondence', Henry Miller and
224
Michael Fraenkel (London: 1939-1941; later reprinted in one volume,

Paris: Carrefour, 1962).
Correspondence: Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: A private Correspondence,
edited by G. Wickes (Faber & Faber, 1963).
Alyn: Lawrence Durrell, The Big Supposer: A Dialogue with Marc Alyn
(Abelard-Schumann, 1973).
INTRODUCTION: PARIS 1937-1938
1. Black Book, p. 10.

2. Ibid., p. 41.
3. Artifice, p. 82.
4. Quartet, p. 194.
5. Correspondence, p. 23.
6. Ibid., p. 19.
7. Ibid., p. 72.
8. Ibid., p. 4.
9. Diaries 1, p. 71.
10. Ibid., p. 80.
11. Ibid., p. 149.
12. Ibid., p. 147.
13. Cancer, p. 256.
14. Cf. V. Nabokov, in F. Bowers (ed.), Lectures on Don Quixote (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) p. xiii.
15. The Time of Assassins: a study of Rimbaud (New York: New Directions,
1946) see Chapter 5, note 94.
16. E. J. Hinz and J. J. Teunissen (eds), The World of Lawrence: a passionate
appreciation (Calder, 1985).
17. See Abbreviations, p. 224.
18. S. Spender, The Thirties and After (Fontana, 1978) p. 14.
19. Ibid., p. 244.
20. Eliot, 'Ash-Wednesday', Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 1963) p. 95.
21. Cf. my 'Ireland as a State of Mind in the Work of Lawrence Durrell',
Proceedings of the Fourth Lawrence Durrell Conference (1986)
forthcoming.
22. 0. Wilde, entry in commonplace book, quoted in R. Shewan, Oscar
Wilde: Art and Egotism (Macmillan, 1977) p. 108.
23. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 1913 (Brighton: Harvester,
1976) p. 57.
24. Miller: Sexus, written 1946, published 1962; Plexus, written 1953,
published 1962; Nexus, written 1960-62, published 1964.
25. Nin: Ladders to Fire, 1946; Children of the Albatross, 1947; The Four-
Chambered Heart, 1950; A Spy in the House of Love, 1954; Seduction of the
Minotaur, 1958; published as Cities of the Interior (Peter Owen, 1978).
26. Justine, 1957; Balthazar, 1958; Mountolive, 1958; Clea, 1960, all published
by Faber and Faber.
226 Notes and References
27. Tunc, 1968; Nunquam, 1970; published as The Revolt of Aphrodite 1974,
both published by Faber & Faber.
28. Monsieur, or the Prince of Darkness, 1974; Livia, or Buried Alive, 1978;
Constance, or Solitary Practices, 1982; Sebastian, or Ruling Passions, 1983;
Quinx, or the Ripper's Tale, 1985, all published by Faber & Faber.
29. In a letter to the author, 30 October 1984.
30. Magazine Litteraire, 210, September 1984.
31. 'Zero' originally published in Seven, 3, Winter 1938, repr. in Place,
pp. 245--58.
32. 'Asylum in the Snow' originally published in Seven, 6, Fall1939, repr. in
Place, pp. 258-72.
33. See Abbreviations, p. 224.
35. Black Spring, p. 164.
36. Hamlet, p. 36; cf. Cancer, p. 288.
37. R. Pine, Oscar Wilde (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1983).
38. Cf. Chamberlin, Ripe Was The Drowsy Hour: The Age of Oscar Wilde (New
York, 1977) pp. 20, 40, 191, and Pine, Oscar Wilde, pp. 137-41.
39. Quartet, p. 99.
1. THE DANDY AND THE HERALD
1. W. H. Pritchard, Seeing Through Everything, English Writers 1918-1940

(Oxford University Press, 1977).
2. Miller, introduction to Selected Prose (McGibbon & Kee, 1965) vol. 1.
3. In M. Horder (ed.), Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques (Duckworth,
1977) p. 23.
4. M. mac Liamm6ir, The Importance of Being Oscar (Dublin: Dolmen
Press, 1963) 1978 reprint, p. 22.
5. Lionel Johnson in The Hobby Horse, 1891.
6. Baudelaire, in Art in Paris 1845-1862, trans. J. Mayne (Phaidon, 1965)
p. 28.
7. A. Camus, The Rebel, trans. A. Bower (Penguin, 1962) p. 74.
8. Baudelaire, in the preface to Les Fleurs du Mal.
9. Quoted in E. Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (Seeker &
Warburg, 1960) p. 31.
10. Ibid., p. 21.
11. Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, 1840, p. 106.
12. J. A. Barbey d' Aurevilly, Of Dandyism and of George Brummell, trans.
D. Ainslie (Dent, 1897) p. 20.
13. Ibid., p. 18.
14. Ibid., p. X.
15. Ibid., p. xi.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 2.
18. Ibid., pp. xx-xxi.
19. Ibid., p. xxii.
20. Ibid., p. xxiii.

21. Ibid., p. XV.
22. Ibid., p. 15.
23. Ibid., p. 19.
24. Ibid., p. 63.
25. Ibid., p. 8.
26. Ibid., p. 9.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., p. 22.
29. Moers, The Dandy, p. 13.
30. The Painter of Modem Life, in Art in Paris.
31. Ibid., p. 27.
32. Ibid., pp. 27-8.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 31.
38. Ibid., p. 32.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., p. 34.
45. Ibid., p. 33.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., p. 9.
50. Ibid.
51. See Pine, Oscar Wilde, pp. 31, 68, 103, 110.
52. d' Aurevilly, Of Dandyism, p. 135.
53. Ibid., p. 121.
54. Ibid., p. 22.
55. Ibid., p. 23.
56. Ibid., p. 44.
57. Baudelaire, Art in Paris, p. 27.
59. Ibid., p. 136.
60. Baudelaire, Art in Paris, p. 13.
61. Ibid., p. 14.
63. In 1859: cited in Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 6 ['Macaronyish'].
64. S. Sontag, 'Notes on "Camp'", in Susan Sontag Reader (New York:
Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1982) pp. 105-19.
65. Ibid., Note 11.
66. Ibid., Note 2.
67. Ibid., Note 49.
68. Ibid., Note 2.

69. M. Booth, Camp (Quartet Books, 1983) pp. 30--4.
70. Sontag, 'Notes on "Camp'", Note 17.
71. Ibid., Note 21.
72. Ibid., Note 41.
73. Ibid., Note 52.
74. Ibid., Note 36.
75. Ibid., Note 48.
77. M. Green, Children of the Sun (Constable, 1977).
78. Ibid., p. 27.
79. Ibid., p. 28.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid., pp. 28--9.
83. Ibid., p. 29.
84. Ibid., p. 30.
85. Ibid., p. 32.
86. H. Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (Methuen, 1948, repr. 1970) p. 1.
87. Ibid., p. 2.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., p. 118.
90. Ibid., p. 81.
92. E. H. Erikson, Young Man Luther, (Faber & Faber, 1972) p. 79.
94. Ibid., p. 12.
95. Ibid., p. 13.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid., p. 17.
98. Ibid.
99. In Camus, The Rebel, p. 7.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., p. 27.
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid., p. 50.
104. Ibid., p. 29.
105. Ibid., p. 31.
106. Ibid., p. 270.
107. Ibid., p. 16.
108. Ibid., p. 44.
109. Ibid., p. 28.
llO. Cf. B. Friel, Translations (Faber & Faber, 1981) quotes Ovid: 'I am a
barbarian who am unknown in this place'.
111. Camus, The Rebel, p. 46.
ll2. Ibid., p. 17.
113. Ibid., p. 16.
2. THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE: ART AND POLITICS

1840--95
1. Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, p. 3.

2. R. Blake, Disraeli (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966) p. 77, quoting J. Pope-
Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: The Years of Promise (1949) p. 88.
3. Key, p. X.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. xi.
6. Ibid., pp. 8-14.
7. Ibid., pp. 15-16.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 17.
10. D. H. Lawrence, Psychology and the Unconscious (Seeker, 1923) p. 12.
11. J. Dixon Hunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination 1818-1900 (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1968) pp. 203--9.
12. Quoted in W. Gaunt, The Restless Century: Painting in Britain 1800-1900
(Phaidon, 1972) p. 27.
13. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924) trans. F. Hopman
(Penguin, 1965) p. 13.
14. Ibid., p. 22.
15. Ibid., p. 147.
16. Ibid., p. 193.
17. Ibid., p. 194.
18. Ibid., p. 37.
19. Ibid., p. 197.
20. S. Heaney, 'Feeling into Words', in Preoccupations: Selected Prose
1968-1978 (Faber & Faber, 1980) p. 56.
21. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, pp. 222-3.
22. Key, p. 87.
23. Ibid., p. 7.
24. Ibid., p. 87.
25. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, p. 39.
26. Ibid., p. 65.
27. Cf. ibid., p. 67.
28. Cf. J. Wilson, I Was an English Poet, a biography of Sir William Watson
(Cecil Woolf, 1982).
29. D. Thomas, Swinburne: the poet in his world (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1979) pp. 206-10.
30. Quoted inS. Weintraub, Beardsley (W. H. Allen, 1967) p. 243.
31. Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution (1912 edn) p. 73.
32. K. Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour, vol. 1 (1844 edn) pp. 86-7, quoted
in M. Girouard, The Return to Camelot (Yale University Press, 1981).
33. Quoted ibid, p. 164.
34. Ibid.
35. G. C. Coulton, Mediaeval Panorama (Cambridge University Press,
1938) p. 235.
36. Cf. Girouard, The Return to Camelot, p. 180.
37. Cf. ibid., p. 271.

38. Ibid., pp. 228, 229, 271.
39. 'In Vinculis', 1889, sonnet XIV, quoted in Girouard, The Return to
Camelot, p. 228.
40. Cf. Pine, Oscar Wilde, pp. 107-13.
41. Quoted in J. Dixon Hunt, The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin (New
York: Viking, 1982) p. 370.
43. Ibid., p. 13.
44. Ibid.
45. Pelham, published in 3 volumes in 1828.
46. In Revue des DeuxMondes, quoted in Moers, The Dandy, pp. 68and 123.
47. Ibid., pp. 94--5.
48. Ibid., p. 95.
49. Blake, Disraeli, p. 38.
50. Wilde, Letters, (ed.), R. Hart-Davis (Hart-Davis, 1962) pp. 352-3.
52. Cf. Times Literary Supplement, 1969, pp. 909, 931, 954, 1003 and 1159.
54. Ibid., p. 52.
55. Ibid., p. 50.
56. Ibid., p. 87.
57. Vivian Grey (Ward Lock, 1888) from the revised 1853 edition.
58. Pelham: The Works of Lord Lytton, Knebworth Edn in 37 vols
(Routledge, 1873--1877) p. 180.
59. Ibid., p. 181.
60. Ibid., pp. 181-3.
61. Ibid., p. 351.
62. Ibid., p. 352.
63. Ibid., p. 8.
64. Vivian Grey, p. 369.
65. Quoted in C. E. M. Joad, Decadence, A Philosophical Enquiry (Faber,
1948) p. 12.
66. M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge University Press, 1960)
p. 221.
67. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (Penguin, 1983) p. 385.
68. Ibid., p. 387.
69. Ibid., p. 407.
70. Ibid., p. 413.
71. A. de Jonge, Baudelaire, Prince of Clouds (Paddington Press, 1976)
p. 89.
72. Quoted in R. Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant Garde, trans.
G. Fitzgerald (Belknap Press, 1981) p. 9.
73. Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes (Paris, 1961) p. 952.
74. Ibid.
75. 'Mon Coeur Mis A Nu', in Intimate Journals, trans. C. Isherwood
(Panther Books, 1969) p. 52.
76. Yeats, Synge and the Ireland of His Time (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1911) p. 3.
77. Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, p. 54.
78. Ibid., p. 56.

79. Ibid., p. 73.
80. Key, p. 87.
81. Baudelaire, Painter, Art in Paris, p. 28.
82. Ibid.
83. Swinburne, Complete Works, E. Gosse and T. ]. Wise (eds)
(Heinemann, 1925--27) vol. xm, pp. 420-1.
84. Ibid., p. 423.
85. Ibid., p. 426.
86. The Athenaeum, no. 2023, 4 August 1866.
87. R. Buchanan, Fleshly School of Poetry (Edinburgh: Strahan, 1872).
88. Ibid.
89. P. Appleman, 'Darwin, Pater and a Crisis in Criticism', in
P. Appleman (ed.), 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis (Bloomington,
Indiana: 1959) pp. 81-95.
90. Pater, Plato and Platonism (Macmillan, 1893) p. 9.
91. Appleman, 'Darwin, Pater and a Crisis in Criticism', p. 86.
92. M. Levey, The Case of Walter Pater (Thames & Hudson, 1978) p. 95.
93. Ibid., p. 83.
94. Pater, Appreciations (Macmillan, 1889) pp. 9-10.
95. Ibid., p. 34.
96. Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) p. xxx.
97. Appreciations, p. 66.
98. Ibid., p. 67.
99. Ibid., pp. 65--6.
100. More Letters of Oscar Wilde, R. Hart-Davis (ed.) Oohn Murray, 1985)
p. 48.
101. Ibid., p. 84.
102. Wilde, Works, p. 1091.
103. P. Ackroyd, Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (Abacus, 1984) p. 143.
104. See especially Pelham, pp. 133-7.
105. Wilde, More Letters, p. 171.
106. The Woman's World, March 1889 (a review of Lady Munster's Dorinda).
107. Cf. Wilde, More Letters, pp. 61-2.
108. Pelham, p. 182.
109. Ibid., p. 181.
110. Ibid., p. 94.
111. Ibid., p. 132.
113. Wilde, Lectures, pp. 111-12.
114. Ibid., p. 113.
115. Ibid., p. 119.
116. Ibid., p. 121.
117. Ibid., pp. 131-2.
118. E. Bendz, Oscar Wilde, A Retrospect (Penn.: Folcroft, 1969) p. 6.
119. Ibid.
120. Key, p. 7.
121. mac Liamm6ir, The Importance of Being Oscar, p. 25.
123. Beerbohm, in K. Beckson (ed.), Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage

(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).
124. Cf. M. Miyoshi, The Divided Self a perspective on the literature of the
Victorians (New York University Press, 1969) pp. 294, 301, 355.
125. Wilde, 'The Truth of Masks', Works, p. 1078.
126. E. Carpenter, Towards Democracy, 1883 (Unwin, 1892, 3rd edn).
127. Cf. Pine, Oscar Wilde, pp. 31-4, and 'Step-Children of Nature' in
Identity, Dublin, Autumn 1983.
128. Wilde, Letters, p. 685.
131. In an unpublished draft of Autobiographies, quoted in R. EHmann,
Eminent Domain (Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. 12-13.
132. L. MacNeice, The Poetry ofW. B. Yeats (Faber & Faber, 1967) p. 51.
133. 'Anima Hominis' in W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (Macmillan, 1959) p. 331.
134. Essays and Introductions (Macmillan, 1961) p. 163.
135. In J. Ronsley (ed.), Myth and Reality in Irish Literature (Waterloo,
Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1977) p. 102.
136. Quoted by Donoghue, ibid, p. 108.
137. Ibid.
138. Pine, 'Ireland as a State of Mind in the work of Lawrence Durrell'.
139. Cf. EHmann, Eminent Domain.
140. Published in Harper's Magazine, November 1893, vol. LXXXVII,
no. oxxn, pp. 858-67.
141. S. Nalbantian, Seeds of Decadence in the late Nineteenth Century Novel
(Macmillan, 1983) p. 116.
142. Cf. EHmann, Eminent Domain, pp. 17, 26.
143. A. Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) p. 191.
144. Harper's, November 1893.
145. Ibid.
146. Ibid.
147. Ibid.
148. Ibid.
149. Fortnightly Review, March 1892, vol. uno. cccm, pp. 402-12.
150. Ibid.
151. Ibid.
152. Ibid.
153. Symons, The Symbolist Movement, p. 9.
154. Cf. J. Hone, W. B. Yeats (Macmillan, 1943) p. 181.
155. Cf. Yeats, A Vision (Macmillan, 1938) 'Phase Nineteen', pp. 147-51.
156. Symons, Symbolist Movement, p. 9.
157. Ibid.
158. Ibid., pp. 13 and 19.
159. V. Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote, p. 111.
160. Symons, The Symbolist Movement, p. 9.
161. Magazine Litteraire, no. 210, September 1984.
162. Ibid.
163. Key, p. 91.
164. Ibid., p. 92.
165. Ibid., p. 101.

166. Ibid., p. 109.
3. VORTEX, 1895--1920
1. W. Gerhardie, Futility (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971) p. 43.

2. Chapter 3 of Clea, Quartet, pp. 749-73.
3. Simon Watson Taylor, introduction to Alfred Jarry: The Ubu Plays,
trans. Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor (Methuen, 1968)
p. 16.
4. R. Shattuck and S. Watson Taylor (eds), Selected Works of Alfred Jarry
(Methuen, 1965) p. 192.
5. Ibid., p. 193.
6. Ibid., pp. 252-3.
7. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (Macmillan, 1955) pp. 348-9.
8. P. Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (Hamish Hamilton, 1984) pp. 52 and 165.
9. Ibid., p. 52.
10. Ibid., p. 29.
11. Cf. Pine, Oscar Wilde, p. 61.
12. Wilde, Letters, p. 265.
13. Connolly & Taylor, Alfred Jarry: The Ubu Plays, p. 39 (the French text is
quoted from Maurice Saillet (ed.), Tout Ubu (Paris: Livre de Poche,
1962) p. 68).
14. Ibid., p. 41 (Tout Ubu, p. 75).
15. Ibid., p. 101 (Tout Ubu, p. 243).
16. Ibid., p. 111 (Tout Ubu, p. 274).
17. Ibid., p. 134 (Tout Ubu, p. 313).
18. Introduction to The Supermale, trans. Ralph Gladstone and Barbara
Wright (New York: New Directions, 1977) p. iv.
19. Ibid., p. vi.
20. Ibid., p. 3.
21. Ibid., p. 30.
22. Ibid., p. 35.
23. Ibid., p. 79.
24. Ibid., p. 80.
25. R. Aldington, Death of a Hero (Chatto & Windus, 1929/1930) p. 436.
26. Cf. Supermale, p. 54.
27. Ibid., p. 15.
28. A. Symons, Collected Works (Seeker, 1924) vol. 9 (Studies in Seven Arts)
pp. 236--40.
29. Quartet, p. 362.
31. T. Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, trans. B. Wright
(Calder, 1977) p. 1.
32. Ibid., p. 7.
33. Quoted in Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant Garde, p. 62.
34. Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos, pp. 8-12.
35. T. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: reflections on the technocratic

society and its youthful opposition (Faber & Faber, 1970).
36. C. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (Abacus, 1980).
38. Ibid., p. 665.
39. M. de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. E. S. Crawford Flitch
40. Ibid., p. 322.
41. Ibid., p. 323.
42. Ibid., p. 325.
43. See M. H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: a study of English
literary doctrine 1908-1922 (Cambridge University Press, 1984) pp. 63--8.
44. Ibid., p. 23.
45. V. Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, 1954 (Penguin, 1957) p. 122.
46. A. J. Balfour, Decadence, Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture
(Cambridge University Press, 1908) p. 50.
47. Ibid., p. 58.
49. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes, Essays on Style and Order (Faber & Faber,
1928, 1970) p. 68.
50. Ibid., pp. 77-8.
51. Yeats, Poems, edited by R. J. Finneran (Macmillan, 1985) p. 79.
52. In addition to the Lawrence title cited in Chapter 2, note 10, see also
The Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922, repr. Seeker, 1923).
53. Quoted in B. Tuchmann, The Proud Tower (Macmillan, 1966) p. 76.
54. Cf. Steiner, After Babel (Oxford University Press, 1975) chapter 1,
'Understanding as Translation'.
55. H. S. Hughes, Consciousness and Society (Brighton: Harvester, 1979)
P· 344.
56. Ibid.
57. Quoted in C. Hassall, Rupert Brooke (Faber & Faber, 1964, 1972)
p. 293.
58. Blast 1, 'Review of the Great English Vortex', edited by Wyndham
Lewis, 1914.
59. Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant Garde, pp. 65-6.
60. Barn~s: Le Culte du Moi trilogy, Sous l'Oeil des Barbares; Un Homme Libre;
Le Jardin de Berenice (Paris: 1892).
61. A. Guerard, Five Masters of French Romance (Fisher Unwin, 1916)
p. 226.
62. Quoted in J. Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras, Europe in 1900, trans.
A. Pomerans (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978)
p. 528.
64. K. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the
Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Pantheon Books, 1981)
pp. 168--9.
65. Cf. N. Stone, Europe Transformed 1878-1919 (Fontana, 1983) p. 179.
66. Cf. Tuchmann, The Proud Tower, p. 358.
67. Quoted in Hughes, Consciousness and Society, p. 384.
68. Quoted in J. Meyers, The Enemy (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980)
p. 134.
69. Ibid., p. 104.
70. A. Breton, What is Surrealism: Selected Writings, edited by F. Rosemont
(New York: 1978) p. 115.
71. Blast 1, pp. 11-18.
72. Ibid., p. 32.
73. Ibid., p. 33.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., p. 37.
76. Quoted in W. Michel and C. J. Fox (eds), Wyndham Lewis on Art
(Thames & Hudson, 1969) p. 335.
77. Blasting and Bombardiering (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937) p. 32.
78. Tarr, 1918, (Penguin, 1982) p. 35.
79. G. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell, A Study (Faber & Faber, 1968) p. 9.
80. Blast 1, p. 7.
81. Ibid., p. 148.
82. Ibid., p. 147.
83. Ibid., p. 7.
84. Ibid., p. 135.
85. Ibid.
87. Wyndham Lewis on Art, p. 81.
88. Ibid., p. 341.
89. Ibid., p. 351.
90. Quoted inN. Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (Penguin, 1974) p. 349.
91. Hassall, Rupert Brooke, p. 263.
92. Ibid., p. 396.
93. Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, p. 118.
94. Meyers, The Enemy, p. 68.
95. W. Gerhardie, God's Fifth Column (Hodder & Stoughton, 1981) p. 11.
96. Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 250.
97. Ibid.
98. Cf. Stock, Life of Ezra Pound, p. 69.
99. Blast 1, p. 153 (reprinted in Fortnightly Magazine, 1 September 1914).
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid.
102. Ibid., p. 154.
103. S. Giedion, 'The New Space Conception: Space-Time' in C. Patrides
(ed.), Aspects of Time (Manchester University Press, 1976) p. 82.
104. J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (BBC/Penguin, 1972) pp. 16-17.
105. Giedion, 'The New Space Conception'.
106. Ibid.
107. Quoted in Berger, Ways of Seeing.
108. Giedion, 'The New Space Conception'.
109. Ibid.
110. Outlook, vol. 33, 5 September 1914.
111. Key, p. 29.
112. Ibid.
113. Ibid.
114. Ibid., p. 31.
115. Quoted in Time and Western Man (Chatto & Windus, 1927) p. 24.
116. Ibid., p. 29.
117. Ibid., p. 52.
118. Ibid., p. 51.
119. After Babel, p. 218.
120. Cf. P. Ricoeur, quoted in R. Kearney (ed.), The Irish Mind (Dublin:
Wolfhound, 1985) p. 316.
121. Time and Western Man, p. 149.
122. Ibid., p. 316.
123. Ibid., p. 319.
124. Ibid., pp. 396-7.
125. Quoted in Hughes, Consciousness and Society, p. 117.
126. Quoted in Meyers, The Enemy, p. 64.
127. Steiner, 'Lawrence Durrell and the Baroque Novel' (originally
published in The Yale Review 1962), Language and Silence (Faber &
Faber, 1967) p. 309.
128. Enemy of the Stars in Blast 1, p. 59.
129. Ibid.
130. L. 0. Forkey, 'A Baroque "Movement" in the French Contemporary
Theater', Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 18, September 1959,
pp. 80-9.
131. Enemy of the Stars, p. 66.
132. Ibid., p. 70.
133. Ibid., pp. 71-3.
134. Ibid., p. 77.
135. Ibid., p. 78.
136. Ibid., p. 85.
137. 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', section ii, in Pound, Selected Poems (Faber
& Faber, 1948) p. 173.
138. 'Burnt Norton', 11, Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 192.
139. E. Sitwell, Aspects of Modern Poetry (Duckworth, 1934) p. 108.
140. Introduction to Pound, Selected Poems.
141. In Kangaroo (1923) quoted in Meyers, The Enemy, p. 77.
142. Wyndham Lewis on Art, p. 284.
143. Cf. C. D. Heymann, Ezra Pound, The Last Rower (New York: Seaver
Books, 1976) p. 64.
144. 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' section v, p. 176.
145. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (Penguin, 1963) p. 118.
146. F. O'Connor, The Backward Look (Macmillan, 1967).
147. Baudelaire, as quoted by Eliot in The Waste Land, Collected Poems
(Faber & Faber) p. 81.
148. 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 14.
149. 'Portrait of a Lady', ibid., p. 21.
150. Quoted in J. Smith, The Arts Betrayed (New York: Universe Books,
1978) p. 110.
151. Ibid., p. 109.
152. 'The Hollow Men', 1, Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 89.
153. 'The Hollow Men', 2, ibid.

154. Ibid.
155. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 1893 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968)
p. 306.
156. Quoted in Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 310.
157. Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 39.
158. Eliot, The Waste Land: A facsimile and transcript . .. edited by V. Eliot
(Faber & Faber, 1971) pp. 4ff.
159. Ibid., pp. 13, 19, 21.
160. 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 16.
161. 'Preludes', ibid., p. 24.
162. Ibid., pp. 24--5.
163. Pound, Selected Poems, p. 89.
164. Ibid., p. 82.
165. Ibid., p. 33.
166. Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 26.
167. Ibid., p. 40.
168. The Waste Land, line 430, Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 79.
169. Key, p. 146.
170. Pound, Selected Poems, pp. 173--4.
171. Ibid., pp. 184--6.
172. 'Ash-Wednesday', Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 95.
173. Ibid., p. 100.
174. Ibid., p. 104.
175. Ibid.
176. Key, p. 74.
177. Ibid.
178. 'The Hollow Men', III, Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 90.
179. Key, p. 143.
180. Ibid., p. 144.
181. Ibid., p. 151.
182. Ibid., p. 136.
4. THE CHILDREN OF THE WASTE LAND: 1920--30
1. Edmund Wilson, The Twenties (Macmillan, 1975) p. 92.

2. Key, p. 63.
3. Levey, The Case of Walter Pater, p. 22.
4. Cf. Pied Piper of Lovers in Place, pp. 181-4.
5. Key, p. 22.
6. Ibid., p. 23.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 72.
9. Cf. Correspondence, p. 19.
10. Sontag, 'Notes on "Camp'", Note 23.
11. Wilson, The Twenties, p. 110.
12. Ibid.
13. H. Carpenter, Secret Gardens (Allen & Unwin, 1985) p. 58.

14. L. Carroll (C. L. Dodgson], Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
15. Quartet, p. 17.
16. Ibid., p. 245.
17. Magazine Litteraire, no. 210, September 1984.
18. Key, pp. 95--6.
19. Quartet, pp. 83-4.
20. Ibid., p. 79.
21. Ibid., p. 86.
22. Ibid., p. 21.
23. Ibid., pp. 660--1.
24. Ibid., p. 672.
25. B. Russell, Autobiography (Allen & Unwin, 1967) vol. 1, p. 23.
26. Carpenter, Secret Gardens, p. 59.
27. Ibid., p. 62.
28. Ibid., p. 66.
29. Quoted in Carpenter, Secret Gardens, p. 117.
30. A. Birkin, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (Constable, 1979) p. 297.
31. Carpenter, Secret Gardens, p. 186.
32. When We Were Very Young (Methuen, 1924) 'Vespers', pp. 99-100.
33. The House at Pooh Corner, (Methuen, 1928) p. 1.
34. A King's Story, the memoirs of H.R.H. the Duke of Windsor (London:
1951) p. 415.
35. Ibid., pp. 57-8.
36. Ibid., p. 352.
37. Ibid., p. 79.
38. Ibid., p. 130.
39. Ibid., p. 192.
40. Ibid., p. 150.
41. Ibid., p. 160.
42. Ibid., p. 228.
43. Ibid., p. 405.
44. Cf. ibid., pp. 283-4.
45. Ibid., p. 301.
46. Ibid., p. 413.
47. Ibid., p. 364.
48. Cf. ibid., p. 309.
49. Ibid., p. 327.
50. Joad, Decadence, pp. 14--15.
51. R. Crinkley, Walter Pater, Humanist (Kentucky University Press, 1970)
pp. 4--5.
52. Hassan, Rupert Brooke, p. 98.
53. M. Arlen, The Green Hat (Collins, 1924) p. 112.
54. R. Aldington, Death of a Hero, p. 180.
55. In This Side ofParadise, quoted in A. Jenkins, The Twenties (Heinemann,
1974) p. 15.
56. E. F. Benson, Dodo: A Detail of the Day (Methuen, 1894) p. 25.
57. Ibid., p. 32.
58. Ibid., p. 143.

59. Ibid., p. 175.
60. Cf. Pine, Oscar Wilde, p. 93, where I inadvertently stated that all three
plays had also been produced in that year.
61. Dodo, p. 309.
62. Ibid., p. 267.
63. Ibid., pp. 366-7.
64. Gerhardie, God's Fifth Column, p. 28.
65. Crinkley, Walter Pater, Humanist.
66. Cf. Steiner, Language and Silence.
67. Quoted in the introduction to Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours),
trans. R. Baldick (Penguin, 1959).
68. M. Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan (Methuen, 1895) p. 8.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., p. 61.
71. Ibid., p. 65.
72. Ibid., p. 350.
73. Ibid., p. 466.
74. Ibid., p. 308.
75. Cf. B. Masters, Now Barabbas Was A Rotter: the extraordinary life of Marie
Carelli (Hamish Hamilton, 1978) pp. 144-5.
76. Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan, p. 308.
77. Cf. The Green Hat, p. 65.
78. Ibid., pp. 106-20.
79. Ibid., p. 82.
80. Ibid., p. 310.
81. Ibid., p. 47.
82. Ibid., p. 14.
83. Ibid., p. 33.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid., p. 285.
86. Ibid., p. 46.
87. Ibid., p. 47.
88. Ibid., p. 15.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid., p. 20.
91. Ibid., p. 19.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., p. 21.
94. Death of a Hero, p. x.
95. D. Hankey, A Student in Arms (Melrose, 1916) p. 49.
96. Ibid., p. 86.
97. Ibid., p. 228.
98. Death of a Hero, p. 3.
99. Ibid., pp. 35-6.
100. Ibid., p. 60.
101. Ibid.
102. Ibid., pp. 46-7.
103. Ibid., p. 50.
104. Ibid., p. 77.

105. Ibid., p. 91.
106. Aldington, AllMenAre Enemies (Heinemann, 1933, 1948 reprint) p. 11.
107. Quoted in Crinkley, Walter Pater, Humanist, p. 108.
108. Cf. Baudelaire, Painter, Art in Paris, p. 8.
109. Death of a Hero, p. 430.
110. All Men Are Enemies, pp. ix-x.
111. R. Aldington, introduction to Selected Works of Walter Pater
(Heinemann, 1948).
112. Breton, What is Surrealism, p. 113.
113. All Men Are Enemies, p. 6.
114. Ibid., p. 61.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid., p. 144.
117. Ibid., p. 205.
118. Ibid., p. 270.
119. Ibid., p. 155.
120. Gerhardie, Futility, p. 124.
121. Cf. T. Kilroy, The Seagull (Eyre Methuen, 1981), and B. Friel, Three
Sisters (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1981).
123. 'Portrait of a Lady', Ill, Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 22.
124. Gerhardie, Futility, pp. 39-40.
125. Ibid., p. 52.
126. Ibid., p. 87.
127. Ibid., p. 33.
128. Ibid., p. 34.
129. Ibid., p. 19.
130. Ibid., p. 161.
131. Ibid., p. 59.
132. Ibid.
133. Ibid., p. 177.
134. Ibid., pp. 83--4.
135. Ibid., pp. 12~1.
136. Gerhardie, The Polyglots (Macdonald, 1970) p. 183.
137. Ibid., p. 184.
138. Ibid., p. 251.
139. 'Anima Hominis' in Mythologies, p. 331.
140. The Table of the Law', ibid., p. 295.
141. 'The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry', in Selected Criticism (Pan) p. 79.
142. The Wanderings of Oisin', line 290, Poems, p. 363.
143. Cf. Aibhric in 'The Shadowy Waters', line 366, ibid., p. 422.
144. Yeats, Letters.
145. Essays and Introductions (Macmillan, 1961) pp. 192-3.
146. L. Robinson (ed.), Further Letters of f. B. Yeats (Dublin: Cuala Press,
1920) p. 22.
147. Mythologies, p. 125.
148. Quoted in Kearney (ed.), The Irish Mind, p. 238: Elizabeth
Cullingford, 'The Unknown Thought of W. B. Yeats'.
149. Ibid.
150. The Secret Rose (1897) pp. 142-3.
151. Quoted in S. Deane, 'Remembering the Irish Future', Crane Bag,
Dublin, vol. 8, no. 1, 1984.
152. Quoted by Cullingford, 'The Unknown Thought of W. B. Yeats',
p. 232, and originally quoted by R. Ellman in The Identity of Yeats
153. A Packet for Ezra Pound (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1929) p. 32.
154. 'The Celtic Twilight', Mythologies, p. 98. ·
155. A. Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (Heinemann, 1899)
p. 6.
156. Mythologies, p. 44.
157. Ibid., p. 77.
5. THE WINTER OF ARTIFICE: 1930-40
1. Black Book p. 242.

2. Cf. Hynes, The Auden Generation (Faber & Faber, 1979).
3. Ibid., p. 40.
4. Place, p. 47.
5. Aldington, All Men Are Enemies, p. 195.
6. Durrell, Collected Poems (1986) p. 64.
7. Spender, The Thirties and After, p. 22.
8. Ibid., p. 26.
9. Ibid., p. 27.
10. Ibid., p. 25.
11. Cancer, p. 104.
12. Alyn, pp. 49-50.
13. Ibid., p. 50 and see also Correspondence, p. 24.
14. H. Read, quoted in Symons, The Thirties (Faber & Faber, 1975) p. 85.
15. Miller, Letters, p. 181.
16. Quoted in Hynes, The Auden Generation, p. 359.
17. E. Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics 1912-1972 (New York: Farrar
Strauss Giroux, 1977) p. 222.
19. Ibid.
20. Hamlet, p. 111.
21. Ibid., p. 394.
22. Hughes, Consciousness and Society, p. 148.
23. M. Fraenkel, The Genesis of The Tropic of Cancer (Village Press, 1973).
24. Place, p. 40.
25. Ibid., p. 43.
26. Durrell deliberately creates a 'difficult' opening (for the reader) to both
Tunc and Nunquam.
27. Windmill, vol. 2, no. 6 (1947) 'From a Writer's Journal'.
29. 0. Rank, Art and Artist, trans. C. F. Atkinson (New York: Knopf,
1932).
30. Nin, D. H. Lawrence, an Unprofessional Study (Paris, 1932: Black Spring
Books, 1985).
31. Quoted in Key, p. 89.
32. Diaries 2, p. 9.
33. Fraenkel, The Genesis of the Tropic of Cancer.
35. Ibid.
36. Hamlet, p. 51.
37. Ibid., p. 49.
38. Ibid., p. 48.
39. Ibid., p. 29.
40. Ibid., p. 52.
41. Ibid., pp. 25-6.
42. Ibid., p. 385.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., p. 389.
45. Windmill.
46. Hynes, The Auden Generation, p. 92.
47. Hamlet, p. 170.
49. Ibid., pp. 255---6.
50. Cf. Cancer, p. 255.
51. Diaries 1, p. 71.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., p. 147.
54. Ibid., p. 149.
55. Cancer, p. 170.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Cf. ibid., p. 156.
59. Ibid., p. 33.
60. Quoted in Smith, The Arts Betrayed, p. 98.
61. Tropic of Capricorn (Granada, 1966) p. 132.
62. Ibid., pp. 131-2.
63. Cf. E. Gertz and F. L. Lewis (eds), Henry Miller, Years of Trial and
Triumph (Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).
64. Nin, Diaries, vol. 5 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974) pp. 199-207.
65. Novel, p. 100.
66. Cancer, p. 250.
67. Ibid., p. 258.
68. Ibid., p. 268.
69. Ibid., p. 306.
70. K. Beckson (ed.), Oscar Wilde, The Critical Heritage (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1970) pp. 176-8.
71. The Daily Telegraph quoted in Pine, Oscar Wilde, p. 67.
72. Diaries 1, p. 80.
73. Diaries 2, p. 68.
74. Ibid., p. 70.

75. Cancer, p. 150.
76. Ibid., p. 189.
77. Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes, p. 1456.
78. Cancer, p. 184.
79. Ibid., p. 185.
80. Ibid., p. 186.
81. Hamlet, p. 88.
83. Hamlet, pp. 89-90.
84. Ibid., p. 82.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., cf. Black Spring, p. 133.
87. Quoted in Miller, Letters, p. 18.
88. Cancer, p. 10.
89. Letters, p. 184.
90. Black Spring, pp. 205--6.
91. Cf. Key, p. 29.
92. Cf. Black Spring, p. 25.
93. In H. Miller, Selected Prose, vol. 1, p. 87.
94. Ibid., p. 77.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid., p. 157.
97. Orwell, 'Inside the Whale' (1940, repr. Penguin Books, 1962).
98. Novel, p. 142.
99. Diaries 2, p. 10.
100. Ibid., p. 23.
101. Ibid., p. 50.
102. In Justine, Quartet, p. 79.
103. Diaries 1, p. 275.
104. Artifice, p. 20.
105. Letters, pp. 180--1.
107. Novel, p. 159.
108. Diaries 1, p. 54.
109. Artifice, pp. 12-13.
110. Ibid., pp. 30--1.
111. Diaries 1, p. 109.
112. Ibid., p. 262.
113. Diaries 2, p. 11.
114. Ibid., p. 65.
116. Ibid., p. 61.
117. Ibid., p. 55.
118. Ibid., p. 66.
119. Ibid., p. 71.
120. Ibid., p. 76.
121. Ibid., p. 79.
122. Ibid., pp. 79-80.
123. Ibid., p. 81.

124. Ibid., p. 82.
125. Ibid., p. 105.
126. Ibid., p. 44.
127. Ibid.
128. Novel, p. 161.
129. Diaries 2, p. 48.
130. Cf. Diaries 2, p. 49.
131. Ibid., p. 316.
132. Ibid., p. 51.
133. Novel, p. 7.
134. Ibid.
135. Cf. ibid., pp. 118-19.
136. Ibid.
137. 'Stella' in Artifice, pp. 32-3.
138. Novel, p. 9.
139. Ibid., p. 37.
140. Cf. Artifice, p. 33.
141. Ibid., pp. 184-6.
142. Ibid., p. 204.
143. Novel, p. 77.
144. Diaries 1, p. 294.
146. Cancer, p. 9.
147. Diaries 2, p. 240.
148. Ibid., p. 238.
149. Place, p. 26.
150. Ibid., p. 37, quoting from Cancer, p. 3.
152. Alyn, pp. 4~6.
153. Place, p. 271.
154. Ibid.
155. Alyn, p. 145.
157. Ibid., p. 41.
158. Ibid., pp. 143-5.
159. Ibid., p. 41.
160. Place, pp. 171-2.
161. Ibid., p. 247.
162. Ibid., p. 180.
163. Black Book, pp. 13~.
164. Ibid., p. 136.
165. Ibid., p. 59.
166. Ibid., p. 66.
167. Diaries 2, p. 235.
171. Ibid.
172. Ibid., p. 138.

174. Cf. Quartet, p. 115.
176. Alyn, p. 26.
178. Ibid., pp. 186-7.
179. Ibid., p. 20.
180. Ibid., p. 234.
181. Ibid., p. 19.
182. Ibid., p. 244.
183. Ibid., pp. 119-20.
185. Place, p. 253.
187. Ibid., p. 175.
188. Ibid., p. 243.
189. Quartet, p. 877; see also Mary Byrne, 'Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria
Quartet- A Work in the Baroque Style', M.Phil thesis (University
College Dublin, 1985).
191. Ibid., p. 66.
193. Ibid., p. 23.
194. Ibid., p. 61.
195. Ibid., p. 73.
196. Alyn, p. 41.
198. Place, p. 245.
199. Cf. Alyn, p. 25.
200. Place, p. 245.
201. Black Book, pp. 40, 59, 70.
202. Ibid., p. 55.
203. Ibid., p. 56.
204. Ibid., p. 151.
205. Ibid., p. 157.
206. Ibid., p. 158.
207. Ibid., p. 181.
208. Ibid., p. 58.
209. Ibid., p. 176.
210. Ibid., p. 163.
211. Ibid., p. 171.
212. Ibid., p. 176.
213. Correspondence, p. 203; cf. Eliot's 'East Coker'.
214. Diaries 2, p. 238.
215. Ibid., p. 181.
217. Ibid., p. 218.
218. Ibid.
219. Ibid.
220. Ibid., p. 243.
221. Quoted by G. Genette in Figures, 1, 1966, and by Mary Byrne,
'Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet'.
222. C. Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 1938 (Penguin Books, 1962) p. 129.
223. Orwell, 'Inside the Whale', pp. 40-1.
224. Alyn, p. 118.
226. Ibid., p. 124.
227. Ibid., p. 175.
6. INTO THE INNER LANDSCAPE
1. Diaries 2, p. 364.
2. Ibid., p. 219.
3. Villa Seurat Library: i. Durrell's Black Book; ii. Miller's Max and the White
Phagocytes; iii. Nin's Winter of Artifice. Cf. Correspondence, p. 114.
4. Cf. Pine, Oscar Wilde, pp. 145---6.
5. See J. Hahl-Koch (ed.), Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky: Letters,
Pictures and Documents (Faber & Faber, 1984).
6. Interview with John Lehmann, New York Times, 29 November 1953,
quoted in Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, p. 253.
7. C. Connolly, 'England Not my England', July 1929, repr. in The
Condemned Playground (Hogarth Press, 1985).
8. Ibid., p. 101.
10. M. Valency, The End of the World (Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 58.
12. Cancer, p. 34.
13. Hamlet, p. 79.
14. Black Spring, pp. 163-4.
15. Lawrence, Psychology, p. 111.
17. Steiner, After Babel, pp. 1~19.
18. Ibid., p. 21.
19. Key, p. 117.
20. H. Read, 'The Triumph of Picasso' in A Coat of Many Colours (1956)
quoted by Smith, The Arts Betrayed, pp. 150-1.
21. Quoted by Hynes, The Auden Generation, pp. 224-5.
23. Sebastian (Faber & Faber, 1983) p. 14.
24. Quinx (Faber & Faber, 1985) p. 120.
25. Windmill.
26. Ibid.
27. Hamlet, p. 29.
28. Alyn, p. 32.
29. Cf. Mary Byrne, 'Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet', p. 153.

31. L. Durrell, Times Literary Supplement, 27 May 1960, 'No Clue to Living'.
32. Oeuvres Completes, p. 521.
33. Ibid.
34. E. Kamenka and F. B. Smith (eds), Intellectuals and Revolution: Socialism
and the Experience of1848 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979) p. 78.
35. Cf. J. Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination 1880-1900 (University of Chicago
Press, 1981) p. 36.
36. Andre Raffalovitch, quoted in Pine, Oscar Wilde, p. 108.
37. Fortnightly Review, 1 September 1914.
38. Schoenberg-Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents.
39. Hynes, The Auden Generation, p. 54.
40. Ibid., p. 66.
41. Ibid., p. 84.
42. Ibid., p. 252.
43. Montesquieu, quoted by H. Arendt, The Life ofthe Mind, vol. 1, Thinking
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) p. 75.
44. Windmill.
45. L. G. Pine, Heraldry and Genealogy (English University Press, 4th edn,
1974) p. 12.
46. S. Beckett, Proust (Chatto & Windus, 1932) p. 26.
47. M. Keen, Chivalry (Yale University Press, 1984) p. 124.
48. S. Beckett, The Unnamable (Trilogy Picador, 1979) p. 336.
49. Steiner, Antigones (Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 110.
50. Place, p. 246.
51. Ibid., p. 248.
52. Ibid., p. 249.
53. Ibid., pp. 253-4.
54. Ibid., p. 251.
55. Ibid., p. 253.
56. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, p. 75.
57. Ibid., p. 78.
58. Cf. Crinkley, Walter Pater, Humanist, pp. 71-2.
59. Tarr, p. 246.
60. Blast 1, p. 130.
61. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (Macmillan, 1952) p. 531.
62. Alyn, pp. 33-4.
63. Windmill.
Index
Ackroyd, Peter, 69, 85 Balfour, Arthur, 18, 92-3

Acton, Sir Harold, 5, 11, 29-31, Balla, Giacomo, 106
103, 127, 136 Barbey d' Aurevilly, J. A., 12, 14,
aesthete, 29-31, 91-2 27, 215
aesthetic (adjective), 26 Of Dandyism, 17-24, 28--30, 37
aesthetic rebellion, 42-3 Barnes, Djuna, 6, 173, 216, 221
Ainslie, Douglas, 18--19 baroque, 126, 214
Ainsworth, W. H., 40 Barres, Maurice, 96
Aldington, Richard, 6, 99, 126--8, Barrie, J. M., 129, 136, 200
141, 149, 168, 173, 216, 221 Peter Pan, 125, 136
influence on Durrell, 152 Barthes, Roland, 9-10
All Men Are Enemies, 151-6, 158, Baudelaire, Charles, 8--9, 12, 13,
167, 196 14, 1:>--18, 27-8, 32, 34, 48, 70,
Death of A Hero, 87-8, 126, 142, 83, 89, 110, 11:>--16, 12:>--6, 154,
151-6 169, 172, 178, 181, 186, 212, 215
Alice in Wonderland, see Dodgson, Les Fleurs du Mal, 59-60
c. Journal Intimes, 61-3
Allendy, Dr Rene (Nin's Le Peintre de Ia vie moderne, 20-4
psychiatrist), 190 Durrell on, 82
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 97, 216 Eliot on, 93
Aragon, Louis, 96 Beardsley, Aubrey, 8, 9, 10, 41-2,
Aristotle, 110 47-8, 50, 73, 120, 125
Arlen, Michael (Dikran Beaton, Cecil, 30
Kouyoumdjian), 126, 128, 140-- Beckett, Samuel, 6, 78, 125, 151-2,
1, 152 167, 171, 173, 217-9
The Green Hat, 126, 142, 148--51 Krapp's Last Tape, 210
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 136 Not I, 22
Arnold, Matthew, 39, 49, 69, 91 Play, 218
Culture and Anarchy, 59 Waiting for Godot, 111, 112
Arnold, Thomas, 49-50 Beerbohm, Sir Max,
Artaud, Antonin, 28 as a dandy, 32
Arthurian legend, 49-50 on the dandy, 17, 21
Asquith, H. H., 18, 143 his caricatures, 14
Auden, W. H., 5, 136, 217 on Wilde, 73
'the Auden Generation', 166--8 Zuleika Dobson, 144
183 Benson, E. F., 141
autism, 62, 169, 176, 198, 208, 221; Dodo, 126, 142-6, 221
see also Heraldic Universe and Mammon and Co., 5:>--6, 145
Selfism Mrs Ames, 142
avant garde, 9:>--6 Beowulf, 215
Axel (Villiers de l'Isle Adam), 83, Berg, Alban, 178
144 Berger, John, 105
248
Index 249
Bergson, Henri, 109-10, 180 Citizen Kane (Welles), 122-3

Birkin, Andrew, 136 Cleveland Street scandal, 50
Blake, Robert (Lord), 54--5 Cocteau, Jean, 103
Blast, see Lewis, P. W. Connolly, Cyril, 11, 84, 207-8, 209
Blavatsky, Madame Helena, 136 Cooper, Lady Diana, 148
Blunt, W. S., 50--1 Corelli, Marie, 40, 141, 146, 221
Boccioni, Umberto, 106 Sorrows of Satan, 126, 142-3,
Booth, Mark, 27-8 146-8
Borges, J. L., 207 Coward, Noel, 216
Bosch brothers, 183 Crane, Walter, 50
Bowen, Elizabeth, 157, 186 Crinkley, Richmond, 141
Bowra, Sir Maurice, 221-2 cubism, 97, 105--6, 123, 211
Bradley, F. H., 117 Cullingford, Elizabeth, 163
Brancusi, Constantin, 155 Cummings, E. E., 157
Breton, Andre, 240 n.112 Cunard, Nancy, 148
Broad Stone of Honour, 48--9, 144, Curzon, George (Lord), 18
221
Brooke, Rupert, 95, 97, 103, 141-2 dadaism see Tzara, T.
Brummell, George, 14, 17-19, 31, dandy, as a type, 11-38, 51
34--5, 39, 51, 56, 69, 210, 215 Darwinism, 40--1, 65, 67, 108
Buchan, John, 97 Das Kapital (Marx), 41
Buchanan, Robert, 64 'Death Gregory' (Black Book), 52,
Bulwer Lytton, Edward, 39, 70 100, 198; see also Durrell (Black
Pelham, 52--4, 56-8, 69-71, 73 Book)
Burke, Edmund, 48 decadence,40, 76-80,92,127,141
Burne-Jones, Edward, 125 'decadent', 26, 61
Byrne, Mary, 245 n.189 'Des Esseintes' (A. Rebours), 20, 78--
Byron, George (Lord), 19; Wilde 80, 88, 215
on, 71 Diaghilev, Sergei, 14
Disraeli, Benjamin,
Caine, T. H. Hall, 40 as dandy, 13, 32
'camp' (adjective), 25--9 as novelist, 39
Camus, Albert, 12, 16, 76, 83, 103 Contarini Fleming, 54--5
L'Homme Revolte, 25, 35--8 Vivian Grey, 52-8, 69-70
Carlyle, Thomas, 14, 16, 56, 61 Dodgson, Charles, 125, 130--1,
Heroes and Hero-Worship, 16, 39 134--5
Sartor Resartus, 16-17 Dodo, see Benson, E. F.
Carpenter, Edward, 75 Donoghue, Denis, 77
Carpenter, Humphrey, 130--1, Don Quixote, 4, 6, 55, 91-2, 124,
134--6 207, 219, 225 n.14
Carra, Carlo, 106 'Dorian Gray' (Wilde), 52; see also
Carroll, L., see Dodgson, C. Wilde, (Picture of Dorian Gray)
Chateaubriand, Vicomte de, 13 Doyle, Sir A. Conan, 97
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 215 Dreyfus, Alfred, 83
Chekhov, Anton, 126, 157 Duchamp, Marcel, 42, 105, 106
'China' (Miller's), 171, 173-86, 194, Durrell, Lawrence, throughout,
204, 217 but especially:
chivalry, 30, 40, 43-51, 129, 217 in Paris with Miller and Nin, 1,
Clarke, Harry, 42 7-8, 9, 196-7, 209;
250 Index
Durrell, Lawrence - continued 113-23,135, 164;influence

correspondence with Miller, on Durrell's Key, 122
1, 2-3, 201, 204; relations Ellis, Havelock, 75
with father and England, 1, enfant terrible, 26
2, 16, 49, 167, 199, 201-2, Erikson, Erik, 32-3
222; Ireland as a state of Evreinov, Nikolai, 218
mind, 5; on decadence, 82;
on Miller, 170; on the Fenn, G. Manville, 40
second world war, 120, 122 Firbank, Ronald, 14
Alexandria Quartet, 7, 52, 91, 99, Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 126, 128, 143,
106, 126-7, 131-4, 146, 150- 148, 168
1, 163, 187, 200, 210, 212-3 Fletcher, I. K., 14
'Antrobus' stories, 140 Forkey, L. A., 111
'Asylum in the Snow', 8, 157, Forster, E. M., 88
196-8, 200, 202, 204, 216-7 Fraenkel, Michael, 171, 174-6
Avignon Quintet, 5, 7, 77-8, 91, Fraser, G. S., 101
106, 126-7, 163, 183, 204-5, Frazer, Sir James, 16
210 Freud, Sigmund, 41, 67, 108, 127,
Black Book, 2, 8, 11, 49, 83, 89, 169, 219
131, 157, 166, 196-208, 209, Civilisation and its Discontents, 98,
220 172, 220
Key to Modern Poetry, 8, 40-1, 46, Durrell on, 173
106, 126-7, 131-2, 212 Friel, Brian, 228 n.110, 240 n.121
Panic Spring, 2, 207 futurism,90, 96-7,102,106
Pied Piper of Lovers, 91, 125, 157,
199 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 95, 99
Tunc/Nunquam, 5, 7 Gautier, Theophile, 61
'Zero', 8, 196-7, 199, 202-3, 205, Gerhardie, William, 128, 145, 156
216-7,219-20,223 Futility, 83, 126, 156-61, 196
see also Heraldic Universe The Polyglots, 126, 156-61
on Proust, 103
Giedion, Siegfried, 105
'egoist', 26 Girouard, Mark, 49-51
Edward the Eighth, King, 137-40 Gladstone, W. E., 46
Einstein, Albert, 41, 67, 107-8, 122, Grahame, Kenneth, 130
127, 169, 185, 211, 219 Green, Martin, 25, 29-30
Eliot, T. S., ~, 8, 22, 59, 61, 93, Groddeck, G. W., 122
103, 125-6, 148, 167-8, 199, Grosz, George, 183
211 Guys, Constantin, 20
'Ash Wednesday', 93, 113, 121
Four Quartets, 4-5, 93, 110, 113, Haggard, Sir H. Rider, 97
123, 164, 202, 215 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 4, 174, 207;
'Gerontion', 40-1, 113, 117-19, subject for discussion by
128, 168 Miller, 9, 171, 173-86, 211,
'The Hollow Men', 113, 121 217-8; Anai:s Nina female
Prufrock, 93, 113, 118; influence Hamlet, 195
on Durrell, 98 Hankey, Donald, 151-2
The Sacred Wood, 93 Hardy, Thomas, Durrell on, 82
The Waste Land, 4, 83, 93, 104, Heaney, Seamus, 229 n.20
Index 251
Henley, W. E., 47, 81 Kafka, Franz, 13-14, 112, 168

Henty, G. A., 40, 97, 124, 135, 221 Kandinsky, Wassily, 9-10, 105,
'Heraldic Universe', 2-3, 9, 11-12, 209, 216
24,33,38,86-7, 109,156,173- Kaunitz, Prince de, 19
86, 194, 196-208, 212, 217-8 Keats, John, Wilde on, 71-2
heraldry, 11-14, 169, 214, 217-20 Khnopff, Fernand, 42
as a characteristic, 11-38, 204, Kilroy, Thomas, 240 n.121
206, 210, 217 Kipling, Rudyard, 129, 131
see also chivalry influence on Durrell, 82, 131-2,
Herbert, G. A., 50 214, 221
Hesse, Hermann, 98 Klee, Paul, 9-10, 218
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 96
Hope, Anthony (A. Hope Laforgue, Jules, 215
Hawkins), 140 Landseer, Sir Edwin, 46-7
Hopkins, G. M., 8 Lane, John, 47
Housman, A. E., Durrell on, 82 Lasch, Christopher, 91
Howard, Brian, 29, 31, 103 Laverdant, M., 60-1
Hughes, Thomas, 135 Lawrence, D. H., 4, 174, 209-10
Huizinga, J. H., 43-5, 220 on Freud, 41
Hunt, John Dixon, 41 Lady Chatterley's Lover, 3
Hunt, W. Holman, 50 Psychoanalysis and the
Huxley, Aldous, 142, 175, 209-11 Unconscious, 212
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 78-9, 141, Women in Love, 115
146 Lawrence, G. A., 50
Hynes, Samuel, 166, 176, 216 Lears, K. Jackson, 97
Leavis, F. R., 115
Lefebvre, Camille, 97
imagism, 90, 102, 104 Levenson, M. H., 92
'Iris Storm' (Green Hat), 52, 126, Lewis, C. S., 130-1
128, 148-51, 156, 160 Lewis, P. Wyndham, 79, 86, 90,
see also Arlen, M. 98-105, 113, 126, 149, 152, 155,
Isherwood, Christopher, 5, 30, 168-70, 173, 221
136, 211, 217 Blast 1, 98-100, 105, 221
Goodbye to Berlin, 171 Blast 2, 95
Blasting and Bombardiering, 100
Enemy of the Stars, 98, 110-13,
James, Henry, 169, 172 184
Jarry, Alfred, 10, 14, 28, 32, 34, 58, Tarr, 3, 100-1, 115, 126, 142, 221
62, 89-90, 92-4, 97-8, 102, 107, Time and Western Man, 101, 107-
126, 169, 180, 211 8
Docteur Faustroll, 86-7 influence on Durrell, 221
Le Surmiile, 87-8 Lloyd George, David, 142
Ubu Roi, 83, 89, 111 Luther, Martin, 32-3
Jeffries, Richard, 125, 135
Joad, C. E. M., 127, 141 macaronic, 25-6
Joyce, James, 3, 93-4, 103, 159, mac Liamm6ir, Micheal, 15, 72
169, 172-3, 209-10, 221 Maclise, Daniel, 50
Ulysses, 115, 118, 128 MacNeice, Louis, 76
Jung, Carl, 98, 162, 195 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 218
252 Index
Magritte, Rene, 168 Diaries, 84, 181, 188-9, 192-3, 209

Mahler, Gustaf, 218 House of Incest, 2, 186-95, 206
Mallarme, Stephane, 77, 162, 210 Novel of the Future, 179, 188, 195
Malory, Sir Thomas, 50, 97 'Under a Glass Bell', 187
Mann, Thomas, 116 Winter of Artifice, 2, 11, 55, 186-
Marryat, Frederick, 97 95, 196
Marx, Karl, 93, 100, 167, 215 Nin, Joaquin, 1, 14, 55
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 89, 121 Nobel, Alfred, 2
Meredith, George, 18 Nordau, Max, 64
Millais, J. E., 41-2
Miller, Henry, 1, 3---4, 7-8, 9, 13, O'Connor, Frank, 115
16, 34, 61, 78-9, 91, 113--14, Orczy, Baroness E., 40, 221
125,157,169-70,173--86,207- Orwell, George, 186, 207-8
8, 217 'Ouida', 40, 221
Air Conditioned Nightmare, 183 outsider, 26, 113--23
and Anai:s Nin, 188, 190, 194
Black Spring, 1, 4, 11, 36, 174, 185 pataphysics, see Jarry, Alfred
Rosy Crucifixion, 7, 183, 210 Pater, Walter, 6-8, 18, 39, 46, 63,
Time of the Assassins, 185-6 65-7, 73, 91, 104-5, 110, 124-5,
TropicofCancer, 1, 169, 171, 174, 135, 141, 145-6, 153--5, 165,
177,180,184,196-7 167, 216, 221
Tropic of Capricorn, 2, 174 influence on Wilde, 69
Milne, A. A., 125, 129, 136-7, 200 'Aesthetic Poetry', 58
Minkowski, Hermann, 106, 180 'Coleridge', 66-7
Moers, Ellen, 20, 25, 31, 33--6, 52-4 'The House and the Child', 124-
Monckton Milnes, Richard, 39 5
Moore, Henry, 155, 216 'On Style', 66
Morris, William, 18, 42, 50, 58 Renaissance, 59, 66
Morton, J. B., 137 Peguy, Charles, 94
Mosley, Sir Oswald, 30 Peladan, Josephin, 215
Munch, Edvard, 42 Peter Pan, see Barrie, J. M.
Picabia, Francis, 14
Nabokov, Vladimir, 4, 9-10, 125, Picasso, Pablo, 9-10, 102, 104-5,
171, 214, 217 168
naif, 29-30, 138-9 'Guernica', 210
narcissist, 26, 29 Pine, L. G., 247 n.45
Nerval, Gerard de, 20, 81 Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing, 144
Newbolt, Sir Henry, 49, 135 Pirandello, Luigi, 218
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 97, 178, Poggioli, Rennato, 95
205 Pound, Ezra, 44, 59, 78, 93---4, 99,
Nin, Anai:s, 1, 7-8, 9, 34, 78, 122, 102, 104-5, 107, 113--15, 215-16
125, 130, 169, 173---4, 177-8, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 115, 119-
179-81,184,186-95,198,212- 20
3, 217 Lustra, 118
relations with father, 2, 16, 168, Ripostes, 119
187, 190--3, 195; see also, Nin, Powell, Anthony, 137
Joaquin Pre-Raphaelitism, 41-2, 45-6, 50--2,
on Durrell, 201, 206-7 58-60, 64, 71-2, 105, 124-5,
Cities of the Interior, 7, 187, 210 162
Index 253
Pritchard, William, 11 Sorrows of Satan, see Corelli, M.

Proust, Marcel, 93--4, 103, 169, 'Souls', 18, 26
172-3, 195, 210 Spender, Sir Stephen, 4, 11, 167-8,
217
Quennell, Peter, 103 Steiner, George, 108, 212, 219
quincunx, 163 Stirner, Max, 92, 112
Stravinsky, Igor, 97, 155
Rank, Otto, 122, 127, 174, 186--7, Strindberg, August, 183
190, 195 Stubbs, Bishop William, 49-50
Rasputin, Gregor, 178 surrealism, 90, 97, 170, 211, 213
Read, Sir Herbert, 35, 213 Swinburne, Algernon, 4~, 63--4
rebel, 25, 3~ symbolism, 44--5, 77-80
Redon, Odilon, 73, 80 symbolist, 26
Rhymers Club, 78 Symonds, J. A., 59
Ricoeur, Paul, 236 n.120 Symons, Arthur, 45, 78--81, 88--9,
Rilke, R. M., 218 94, 164
Rimbaud, Arthur, 4, 22, 28, 84, 95, Synge, J. M., 78, 116, 164--5, 218
157, 178, 185--6, 201, 207, 218,
222 Tarr, see Lewis, P. W.
rogue, 29-30, 83-123 passim Taylor, Simon Watson, 233 n.3
Roman de Ia rose, 215 Tennant, Margot, 18, 143, 145; see
Rossetti, D. G., 41-2, 45, 50, 125 also Benson, E. F.
Roszak, Theodore, 91 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 'Idylls of
Rothko, Mark, 218 the King', 49-50, 122
Rouault, Georges, 218 'Ulysses', 40-1
Ruskin, John, 18, 39, 52, 59, 91, Thomas, Alan, 172, 197
214 Thoreau, Henry, 59-60
Russell, Bertrand, 96, 134--5, 163 Tolkien, J. R. R., 130, 215
Toorop, Jan, 42
Sade, D. A. F., marquis de, 28, 215 Turner, W. M., 52
Sala, G. A., 25 Tylor, Sir Edward, 59
Sartre, J. P., 83 Tzara, Tristan, 89-90
Satie, Erik, 97
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 96 Ubu Roi, see Jarry, A.
Savoy, The, 6 Unamuno, Miguel de, 91-2, 117
Schliemann, Heinrich, 219
Schoenberg, Arnold von, 209, 216 Valency, Maurice, 210
Scott, Sir Walter, 59, 214 Van Gogh, Vincent, 183
selfism, 66--7, 98--9, 111-12, 184; see Vertov, Dziga, 105
also autism vorticism, 90, 97-105, 137
Severini, Gino, 106
Shaw, G. B., 144, 148, 180, 209 Waste Land, The, see Eliot, T.S.
Shelley, P. B., 71 Water Babies, The, (Kingsley}, 125
Sheridan, R. B., 19 Watson, Sir William, 47
Sitwell, Edith, 114: family, 30 Watts, G. F., 50
Smiles, Samuel, 66 Waugh, Evelyn, 52, 126--8, 136, 168
Smyth, Dame Ethel, 145 Webb, Beatrice, 98
sonnenkinder, 26, 29 Wellington, Arthur, Duke of, 13
Sontag, Susan, 25--9, 128 Wells, H. G., 148
254 Index
Weston, Jessie, 114 Soul of Man Under Socialism, 68-

Whistler, J. MeN, 71, 105 9, 96
Whitman, Walt, 60, 183, 218 A Woman of No Importance, 144
Wilde, Cyril, 92 Wilson, Edmund, 124, 128, 129,
Wilde, Oscar, fr-.10, 13--15, 18, 21, 170
22, 32, 34, 41, 4fr-.7, 50-1, 59, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 96
68-75,83,89,90,94,97-8,102, Woolf, Virginia, 128, 169, 173, 186,
126,141-3,169,180,182,209, 210
211-12,215 Wright, Barbara, 86
influence on Durrell, 72
Ballad of Reading Gaol, 69-71 Yates, Dornford, 143
An Ideal Husband, 75 Yeats, W. B., 5, 45, 61, 66, 75-8,
The Importance of Being Earnest, 84--5, 87, 91, 93, 109, 110, 128,
42, 69, 75, 83 136, 156, 161-5, 167-8, 182,
Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 42, 189, 212
54-5, 69, 70, 73, 146 Yellow Book, The, fr-7, 47
Salome, 42, 69, 73, 84 Yonge, Charlotte, 49-50

Richard Pine (Auth.) - The Dandy and The Herald - Manners, Mind and Morals From Brummell To Durrell-Palgrave Macmillan UK (1988)

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THE DANDY AND THE HERALD

By the same author

First published 1988

Typeset by Wessex Typesetters

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Introduction: Paris 1937-38 1

1 The Dandy and the Herald 11

2 The English Renaissance: Art and Politics 1840--95 39

4 The Children of the Waste Land: 1920--30 124

5 The Winter of Artifice: 1930--40 166

6 Into the Inner Landscape 209

Notes and References 224

Extracts from The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell are reprinted by

Extracts from Lawrence Durrell's letter(s) to the author are reprinted

R. Pine, The Dandy and the Herald 1

Tropic of Capricorn which appeared in 1938. Nin had published House

What were these writers trying to achieve in their assassination of

that quality of magic and spatial existence which I want to tack on

At the same time he explains:

To have art you've first got to have a big personality, pass it

This imaginative realm therefore simply refuses to deal with the

Durrell's reference to a backward look is very significant, not only

For Durrell, however, as for Nin and Miller, this reconstruction

Because I cannot hope to turn again

The 'asylum in the snow' is an imaginative realm in which the

exert a proprietorial and affective control on their emotions,

the vortex of futurism, expressionism and modernism. And it is

We are all such different writers. How to explain our sound

OTHER! It is most curious. We disagreed violently on details but on

In a sense they were on a war-footing: as Durrell has recently said

The map of Europe is changing before our eyes, nobody knows

This is clearly both a political and an aesthetic quest. It is little

The Heraldic Universe is proclaimed because the world of the dandy

R. Pine, The Dandy and the Herald 11

outrage, a child often savage in defence of the identity it has just

Kafka determined to demonstrate that the essence of rebellion is the

The search for definitions of the dandy is unsatisfactory: those we

intelligence, bravado, defiance and, ultimately, abandon and

the modern world has been principally political - attempting to

III THE CLASSIC LITERATURE OF DANDYISM

Carlyle, whose Heroes and Hero-Worship appeared in 1840, the year of

a dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and

Dandyism is social, human and intellectual. It is not a suit of

Those 'clothes', we might add, can be social, human, or intellectual

such as Sheridan or Byron he was content to be a dandy, not finding

And therein lies the difficulty of identifying what exactly 'Dandyism

'French disease' and ennui prevailed in the society of Baudelaire. An

The word 'dandy' implies a quintessence of character and a subtle

Having established that toiletry and material elegance 'are no more

introduced into England through the skilful medium of Wilde and

Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when

Baudelaire continues to express a kind of eternal truth on which his

-a brilliant extrapolation of the outward adornment of the dandy as

the inevitable tendency in ourselves to despise nature- 'in their naif

Vanity seeks the approbation of others, an amiable impulse of the

D' Aurevilly seems to think this behavioural trait in the dandy is

accordingly one of the consequences and principal characteristics

Dandies, of their own authority, make rules that shall dominate

Dandyism, an institution beyond the laws, itself has rigorous

then is this passion, which, becoming doctrine, has produced

Moreover d' Aurevilly warns against the dangers of excessive

the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent ... this transitory,

adding, somewhat cryptically, 'almost all our originality comes from