(Tammy Clewell (Eds.) ) Modernism and Nostalgia Bo

Modernism and Nostalgia
Also by Tammy Clewell

MOURNING, MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM
Modernism and Nostalgia
Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics
Edited by
Tammy Clewell
palgrave
macmillan
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Tammy Clewell 2013.
Remaining chapters © Contributors 2013
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Introduction: Past “Perfect” and Present “Tense”:

The Abuses and Uses of Modernist Nostalgia 1
Tammy Clewell
Part I Bodies
1 Modernism and the Referendum on Nostalgia
in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier 25
Bernard Schweizer
2 Nostalgia, Trauma, and the Aftermath of War:
Siegfried Sassoon and W. H. R. Rivers 36
Robert Hemmings
3 You Can’t Go Home Again: Ambivalent Nostalgia in
T. S. Eliot’s Poetry 54
Gabrielle McIntire
4 Matricide and the End of Nostalgia in
Elizabeth Bowen 71
Maren Linett
Part II Locations
5 “Permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation”:
The Country House, Preservation, and Nostalgia in
Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians and
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando 93
Sarah Edwards
6 Modernist Urban Nostalgia and British Metropolitan
Writing, 1908–1934 111
Barry J. Faulk
7 Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, and
Imperialist Nostalgia 131
Carey Snyder
v
vi Contents
8 “There’ll be no more fishing this side the grave”:

Radical Nostalgia in George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air 149
Patricia Rae
9 Dissolving Landscapes: W. H. Auden’s Protean Nostalgia 166
Eve Sorum
Part III Aesthetics

10 Rupert Brooke’s Ambivalent Mourning, Ezra Pound’s
Anticipatory Nostalgia 183
Meredith Martin
11 The Beloved Republic: Nostalgia and the Political
Aesthetic of E. M. Forster 198
John J. Su
12 Nostalgia, Mourning, and Désistance in James
Joyce’s Ulysses 216
Christy L. Burns
13 Modernist Nostalgia/Nostalgia for Modernism:
Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh 237
Marina MacKay
Afterword: Nostalgia and Modernist Anxiety 252
Elizabeth Outka
Index 262
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank first and foremost the fourteen contributors to this

book. I am grateful for their good humour and patience in seeing this
collection through to print, as well as the intellectual rigor of their
work. An editor could not have hoped to work with a better group of
scholars. Special thanks go to Marina MacKay for her early enthusiasm
for this project, and to Elizabeth Outka for her groundbreaking work on
nostalgia in the modernist period and for a number of inspiring conver-
sations that led to this book.
This anthology was enriched by the insights of participants in a
seminar on modernist nostalgia at the Modernist Studies Association
Conference in Montreal in 2009. The most difficult task I faced as the
editor was limiting the size and scope of the collection in light of many
fine submissions. I can only hope the essays not included here have
appeared in print elsewhere.
I also wish to acknowledge Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan,
and the anonymous readers who provided insightful feedback on each
chapter. Finally, I thank Mark Bracher for his insightful response to
the Introduction and, especially, for helping me put nostalgia into
perspective.
vii
Notes on Contributors
Christy L. Burns is Associate Professor of English at the College of

William & Mary, USA, also serving interdisciplinary studies in Gender,
Sexuality, Women’s Studies and Film Studies. Previous publications
include Gestural Politics: Stereotype and Parody in Joyce (2000), and
numerous articles on modernism, postmodernism, film and media stud-
ies. Her current book project addresses the role of sensate experience in
modern to new millennial fiction.
Tammy Clewell is Associate Professor of English at Kent State University,
USA where she teaches courses in twentieth-century British litera-
ture and contemporary critical theory. She is the author of Mourning,
Modernism, Postmodernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her articles have
appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, Angelaki, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Postmodern Culture.
She is currently at work on a book project, “Virginia Woolf and Literary
Studies in the Age of the Neurosciences.”
Sarah Edwards is Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde,
Glasgow, UK. Her previous publications include articles in Women’s
Writing, Journal of Gender Studies, Life Writing, Journal of Popular Culture,
Review of English Studies as well as Writing the Modern City: Literature,
Architecture, Modernity (2011; co-edited with Jonathan Charley). She was
the leader of an Economic and Social Research Council seminar series,
Nostalgia in the 21st Century (2010–11) and of a special journal issue of
Consumption, Markets and Culture on the series (2013).
Barry J. Faulk is Professor of Victorian Literature and Cultural Studies in
the Department of English at Florida State University, USA. He is the author
of Music Hall and Modernity (2004) and British Rock Modernism (2010).
Robert Hemmings is Assistant Professor in Arts & Culture and English
Studies at Nipissing University’s Muskoka Campus, Canada. Previous
publications include Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and
the Second World War (2008) in addition to essays on Sassoon, Rivers,
Edmund Blunden, war poetry and material culture as well as nostalgia
in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s literature.
Maren Linett is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University,
USA. Previous publications include Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness
viii
Notes on Contributors ix
(2007, 2011), Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader (2009) and The Cambridge
Companion to Modernist Women Writers (2010). She has also published
articles on a variety of modernist writers, focusing on topics such as
Jewishness, trauma, and disability, and is currently at work on her
second book, a disability studies approach to modernist fiction.
Marina MacKay is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English
Studies at the University of Durham, UK. Previous publications include
Modernism and World War II (2007), British Fiction after Modernism (2007;
co-edited with Lyndsey Stonebridge), and The Cambridge Introduction to
the Novel (2011).
Meredith Martin is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University,
USA. Previous publications include The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and
English National Culture (2012) as well as essays published in the edited
collection Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century
(2012). Her articles have appeared in the journals Modernism/Modernity,
Victorian Studies, Victorian Institutes Journal, Literature Compass, and
entries in The Oxford Companion to Victorian Poetry, The Blackwell’s
Companion to Modernist Literature, and the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics.
Gabrielle McIntire is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University,
Canada. Previous publications include Modernism, Memory, and Desire:
T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (2008). Her articles have appeared in jour-
nals including Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Callaloo,
and Narrative, and she has published poetry in journals and collections
such as The Literary Review of Canada, The Cortland Review, Van Gogh’s
Ear, and Kingston Poets’ Gallery. She is currently editing The Cambridge
Companion to The Waste Land and working on a book on modernism
and the sacred.
Elizabeth Outka is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Richmond, UK, where she teaches courses on modernism and the
twentieth-century novel. Previous publications have appeared in journals
such as Modernism/Modernity, NOVEL, and Contemporary Literature. Her
book, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified
Authentic (2009), examines the creation and selling of authentic and nos-
talgic images in turn-of-the-century Britain, when writers, advertisers,
and architects began to evoke an authentic cultural realm paradoxically
considered outside the marketplace. Her current book project, Raising
the Dead: War, Plague, Magic, Modernism, draws on magic shows, séances,
early zombie literature, and modernist novels to explore how the twin
x Notes on Contributors
disasters of WWI and the 1918 influenza pandemic radically shifted

perceptions of the corpse.
Patricia Rae is Professor of English at Queen’s University in Ontario,
Canada. Previous publications include The Practical Muse: Pragmatist
Poetics in Hulme, Pound and Stevens (1997) and Modernism and Mourning
(2007). Her essays have appeared in collections on modernism and war
literature and in journals including Comparative Literature, ELH, ELN,
The Wallace Stevens Journal, Prose Studies, Twentieth Century Literature,
Southern Review, Analecta Husserliana, The Journal of War and Culture
Studies, Queen’s Quarterly, and English Studies in Canada. She is complet-
ing a new monograph, Modernist Orwell, which explores the various
facets of Orwell’s engagement with literary modernism.
Bernard Schweizer, Professor of English at Long Island University,
Brooklyn, USA, specializes in feminist genre studies, ideologies of travel
writing, and the literature of disbelief. Previous publications include
Radicals on the Road: The Politics of Travel Writing in the 1930s (2001),
Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the Female Epic (2002), and Hating
God: the Untold Story of Misotheism (2010). Schweizer has further edited
four collections (on the female epic; on the politics of travel; on quest
narratives; and on Rebecca West). He has edited Rebecca West’s previ-
ously unpublished paper titled Survivors in Mexico (2003) and produced
a critical edition of West’s first novel The Return of the Soldier (2010).
Schweizer founded the International Rebecca West Society in 2003 and
is the Society’s second president. Currently, Schweizer is establishing
a new sub-field of scholarship focusing on literary manifestations of
heresy and blasphemy.
Carey Snyder is Associate Professor of English at Ohio University, USA,
specializing in British Modernism. Previous publications include British
Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Ethnographic Modernism from Wells
to Woolf (2008) as well as published articles in Modern Fiction Studies and
The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. Her current book project exam-
ines the works of colonial women writers Katherine Mansfield, Beatrice
Hastings, and Jean Rhys in relation to metropolitan editors, coteries,
and little magazines.
Eve Sorum is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Massachusetts Boston, USA, where she teaches courses on modern-
ism, modern poetry, and the literature of World War I. Previous pub-
lications include articles on Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf,
Ford Madox Ford, the self-elegy, and World War I poetry in collections
Notes on Contributors xi
including Studies in the Novel, Modernism/Modernity, the Journal of Modern

Literature, and Modernism and Mourning. She is currently working on a
manuscript on modernist empathy and elegy.
John J. Su is Professor of Contemporary Anglophone Literatures at
Marquette University, USA. Previous publications include Imagination
and the Contemporary Novel (2011) and Ethics and Nostalgia in the
Contemporary Novel (2005). His articles have appeared in journals
including American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Modern
Literature, Modern Drama, Modern Fiction Studies and Twentieth-Century
Literature.
Introduction: Past “Perfect” and
Present “Tense”: The Abuses and
Uses of Modernist Nostalgia
Tammy Clewell
Far from being simply an idealized memory of lost homes, lost others,
and lost histories, modernist nostalgia involves a tension between past
and present that structures many of the most well known texts of the
period. In the tension between a backward-looking and forward-looking
impulse, modernist writers have discovered the potential for a produc-
tive dialogue where the past is brought into conversation with the
present. Such a dialogue might nurture regressive fantasies of returning
to the preindustrial or prelapsarian, but it also might lead to creative
visions for self-fashioning, culture, and artistic practice. Modernism
and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics demonstrates that a politics
of nostalgia emerges in the contested struggle between the regressive
abuses and creative uses of nostalgic longing. The thirteen essays and
“Afterword” in this anthology speak directly to this contestation. They
approach nostalgia as an interpretative stance, one that mediates the
interplay between the individual and collective, continuity and rup-
ture, memory and desire, escapist fantasy and social critique. The essays
here show how modernist writers have responded to the upheavals
of the period—war, modernization, and a number of geographic and
social dislocations—from the unique mode of insight made available
by nostalgia. What they assess is whether the modernist longing for the
past fuels a reactionary agenda resistant to social change or promotes a
progressive politics for the future.
Stephen Spender’s account of modernist nostalgia in The Struggle of
the Modern (1963) offers a treatise on just such a politics. Spender begins
by defining modernist nostalgia as a form of memory in which private
and public concerns overlap. Nostalgia entails remembering as well as
forgetting, pleasure as well pain, nuanced types of intellectualism as
well as forms of sentimentality. In contrast to Victorian expressions
1
2 Modernism and Nostalgia
of golden-age yearning, which he claims were always “tempered with

reformist passion” and a commitment to “improvement of the present,”
Spender isolates a distinctly modernist feature of nostalgia. He points to
the way the past is placed in the service of exposing a present cultural
moment rendered wholly contemptible by the wide-ranging effects of
industrialization. Indeed, as he puts it, modernist representations of
nostalgia take the “form of utter hatred for the present, and contempt
for progress” (211). Spender does more than articulate modernist nos-
talgia as an expression of anger over lost cultural meaning; he also
identifies a stylistic feature, what he calls an “elaborate irony,” that
distinguishes modernist nostalgia from earlier manifestations of such
longing. As Spender claims in reference to Pound and Eliot:
What this irony accomplished was more than to put the poet in the
position of one who mocks himself before the reader can laugh at
him. It put nostalgia itself into perspective, by making it appear not
just as hatred of the present and yearning for the past, but as a modern
state of mind, a symptom of the decline that was also modern. (213)
Spender’s account allows us to recognize modernist nostalgia as a ret-

rospective albeit normative form of memory and desire. As he suggests,
nostalgia in the experimental literature of the period is constituted by a
self-conscious literary style and characterized by a meaning that shifts from
its inaugural history as a life-threatening disease to reemerge in the culture
of modernity as a fundamental characteristic of modern subjectivity.
Since the emergence of the New Modernist Studies in the 1990s,
modernism itself has become a term sufficiently capacious to encompass
an array of artistic practices with a range of significations. It should
come as no surprise, then, that the nostalgia structuring so much of
modernist writing assumes similarly divergent meanings. Consequently,
Modernism and Nostalgia offers no uniform interpretation of either the
dynamics or effects of nostalgic longing. The essays that follow define
nostalgia in various ways: as a felt emotion that may be both painful and
pleasurable, as a form of private memory with connections to the social
and collective, as a type of fixation that entails consciousness and the
unconscious. These essays sometimes focus on the subjects of nostalgic
longing—soldiers, mothers, the privileged, middle classes, and dispos-
sessed, colonial subjects, city dwellers, and artists—and other times they
emphasize the objects of such longing: hometowns, loved ones, maternal
comforts, country houses, urban entertainments, primitive cultures, and
artistic practices. The chapters in this anthology draw a multiplicity of
Tammy Clewell 3
conclusions about the modernist expression of nostalgia, demonstrating

how in some instances it fosters a preference for the familiar and acces-
sible and, in others, a taste for the newly imagined and difficult. Taken
together, the essays in Modernism and Nostalgia explore what the people
and places of nostalgic longing manage to reveal about modern culture.
The Struggle of the Modern teaches us, most crucially, that modernist
nostalgia entails an uncertain contestation between a “perfect” past
that is represented as an object of memory or phantasy and a “tense”
present figured in relation to the anxiety-producing developments of
the age. The hatred of the present that Spender isolates as an abiding
feature of modernist nostalgia may lead to regressive aspirations, but it
might also yield much more positive social possibilities. It might lead to
what Svetlana Boym has more recently addressed as a “reflective” rather
than “restorative” form of nostalgia (49). In its most intensely regres-
sive form, as Spender lays out, modernist nostalgia fueled the politics of
fascism; fascist regimes sought “a programme for using entirely modern
techniques to impose upon twentieth century society the patterns of
pre-industrial society” (219). And yet, he also recognizes that nostalgic
longing does not in every instance imply a social vision based on sta-
bility, fixedness, and permanence. In providing us with an alternative
perspective on nostalgia in the modernist period, Spender observes that
while one of nostalgia’s tendencies may be intent on returning to the
imaginative terrain of an idealized past, another tendency, much more
future-oriented in its aims, consists of exploiting the capacity of nos-
talgia to expose the mechanized brutalities, social inequities, dizzying
effects of technological change, the spiritual emptiness of the age. It is
in this vein that Spender ventures the provocative claim that “in some
ways, though not in all, nostalgia has been one of the most productive
and even progressive forces in modern literature” (212). What Spender’s
analysis establishes are the parameters of a precarious struggle between
the blatant abuses and creative uses of modernist nostalgia. Although
always animated by and often fixated on the past, nostalgia need not
succumb to the seductive paralysis of a backward-looking vision. Rather,
as Spender contends, nostalgia may constitute a progressive force by
functioning as a bulwark against any unquestioned acceptance of the
present social order and by giving rise to new directions for change.
The de-literalizing of a word
The inaugural history and subsequently shifting significance of nostal-

gia, one that moves from its designation as a potentially fatal disease
in the seventeenth century to a depathologized phenomenon in the

twentieth, offers an important set of insights for the essays in this col-
lection. As remarked by virtually all contemporary commentators on
nostalgia, including contributors to this collection, Johannes Hofer, a
seventeenth-century Swiss medical student, sought to fill a vacuum in
medical terminology and provide something more precise than what in
German is referred to as “das Heimweh” and French as “la Maladie du
Pays”; he coined the term “nostalgia” in his 1688 dissertation in order
to provide a word for “the sad mood originating from the desire for the
return to one’s native land” (381). Hofer’s nostalgia names a disease of
the body that emanates from an “afflicted imagination” (381). Those
particularly susceptible to this intense form of homesickness included
students studying abroad, hospitalized patients, and, especially, Swiss
soldiers fighting in faraway lands. Sadness, sleeplessness, heart palpita-
tions, nausea, and fever: these Hofer regarded as symptomatic of the dis-
ease. Though he offered remedies for alleviating symptoms, including
stomach purges and bloodletting, he defined one cure and one alone for
the disease: the return home. Hofer insisted on this point, urging that
“the patient should be taken away however weak and feeble, without
delay, whether by a traveling carriage with four wheels, or by sedan
chair, or by any other means” (390). Hofer understood nostalgia as an
emotional disturbance so powerful that it triggered life-threatening
corporeal transformation; the only way to cure the disease, he believed,
was by going home.
Hofer’s diagnosis of nostalgia arose during a period of significant
social change when advances in transportation and increased travel
on the European continent made it newly possible to travel far from
home. This new mobility, as Michael Roth has insightfully addressed,
not only established the conditions for the rise of homesickness; these
same advances were also credited with the eventual eradication of the
disease. As the spread of the postal service, steam train, and telegraph
made it possible to stay in touch and take trips of short duration,
physicians increasingly ceased to regard nostalgia as a serious threat
to health. In Roth’s words, “by the 1870s the medical community had
developed a narrative of progress to show how modernity had provided
a cure for one of the diseases it had provoked” (277–8). Advances in
medicine, however, were ultimately responsible for the elimination
of nostalgia from medical science. Doctors invalidated the assump-
tion that emotional stress could precipitate fatal bodily disease. Many
recognized as well, especially in the wake of the failure of surgical pro-
cedures and autopsies to locate the disease’s biological markers, that
Tammy Clewell 5
a symptomology that included fever, sleeplessness, and appetite loss

might well indicate a variety of other disorders.
By the eighteenth century, when nostalgia ceased to be regarded
in pathological terms, it assumed a temporal form. Nostalgia came to
name not a bodily disease generated by missing a place but rather an
emotional longing for lost time, a phenomenon that Romantic poets
so famously figured as a sense of wonder, of unlimited possibilities,
or even of immortality associated with childhood and youth. As Jean
Starobinski put it in an influential history of the term, nostalgia gave
expression to “the romantic commonplaces with which the alienated
members of the romantic middle-class were preoccupied” and where
“the Platonic themes concerning the celestial home and the terres-
trial exile reappear” (95). More recently, Linda Hutcheon has similarly
emphasized temporal rather than spatial or geographic dimensions,
noting that nostalgia came to “depend precisely on the irrecoverable
nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal” (195). Once nos-
talgia was severed from homesickness, the word became a placeholder
of sorts, no longer necessarily pointing to an exterior object—the home
or homeland—and indicating, with much more frequency, a structure
of internal feeling, typically understood in terms of temporality, mem-
ory, and desire. To invalidate “home” as the referent of such poignant
yearning meant the deliteralization of the word “nostalgia.” This is the
perceptive insight offered by Edward Casey in his excellent philosophi-
cal history of nostalgia:
It is like—indeed in one basic respect it is—omitting site from world.

What then is left? Nothing definite: which is why nostalgia was no
longer of interest to the official psychiatry of the latter part of the
nineteenth century. With the subtraction of homesickness as pathog-
nomic something was also released: nostalgia as a valid state of mind
all by itself, without attachment to the particularity of place and
without specific bodily symptoms. (371)
Modernism and Nostalgia insists on Casey’s deliteralization of the word,

as well as the depathologizing of nostalgic longing. Attending to the
new definitional mobility of nostalgia and the structure of internal feel-
ing it invokes, the essays that follow also reflect a degree of conceptual
overlap between nostalgia on the one hand and mourning and mel-
ancholia on the other. I have addressed elsewhere how mourning and
melancholia, as laid out in Freudian psychoanalysis, involves a process
of internalization, an emotional response to loss that reconfigures the
subject’s personality (“Freud” 61; Mourning 12). Like mourning and mel-
ancholia, nostalgia involves an interiorization of memories and emo-
tional attachments to others, places, ideals, and practices. In contrast,
however, nostalgia may be understood as a substitute for grief work. As
distinct from mourning and melancholia, nostalgia entails an inability
in some cases and a deliberate refusal in others to reconfigure the self in
light of the past. A type of remembrance or fixation on a place, person,
lifestyle, time, or artistic practice: such is the nostalgia of literary mod-
ernism, which invokes the past not to restore it, as much as to measure
and perhaps challenge the present.
Taken as a whole, this anthology demonstrates the absence of any
singular ideological function that would define nostalgia’s effects in
advance. Does modernist nostalgia serve conservative or progressive
ends? Does nostalgia emerge as an object of ridicule or praise, some-
thing to be eradicated or nurtured? Does nostalgia signal a refusal to
adapt to a changing present or a determination to critique its excesses?
To persist in asking these sorts of questions is to risk overlooking a
more fundamental insight that informs the essays in this collection,
namely, that modernist nostalgia is inextricably ideological, even if the
specificity of this ideology cannot be determined in advance of close
attention to its precise figurations. What the essays in this collection
uniformly teach us is this: the nostalgic impulse in modernist literature
reveals how deeply rooted in the damaged, the old, the vanishing, and
the lost were the variety of efforts to imagine and produce the new—the
distinctly modern. In other words, the complex temporality of modern-
ist nostalgia may be understood as a mode through which the culture
of modernity endeavored to “make it new.”
In nostalgic invocations of the past we find, then, a particularity
unique to literary modernism, a particularity that distinguishes the
experimental writing of the period from what immediately preceded it.
In contrast to Nicholas Dame’s excellent account of Victorian nostalgia
as an act, paradoxically, of deliberate forgetting, of what he describes in
the work of canonical nineteenth-century writers as a “remembrance
that leaves the past behind,” “halts its contamination of the present”
(5) and promotes a “life lived as a coherent tale, summarizable, pointed,
and finally moralizable” (7), modernist nostalgia takes a very different
form. In their nostalgic remembrances—of fragmented identities and
damaged bodies; of rural, urban, and colonial locations; and of readerly
communities and aesthetic practices—the modernist writers examined
here seek not to erase the past but rather to locate the sometimes amel-
iorative and other times disruptive effects that it has on the present;
Tammy Clewell 7
they seek not to quarantine but to allow nostalgic memories of both

the exceptional and the ordinary to inform present understanding of
self and culture.
Resignifying nostalgia
In line with a small but growing body of recent critical work on nos-
talgia, Modernism and Nostalgia departs from the tendency to dismiss
nostalgia out of hand, regarding it as either a self-indulgent flight of
fancy at best, or, far worse, an effort to preserve history’s hegemonies.1
Persisting through the early 1990s, negative evaluations of nostalgia
crystallized around two influential developments both in and outside
the academy: the rise of the heritage industry during the Thatcher years,
and the rearticulation of modernism by theorists motivated primarily
by investments in the postmodern. The critical response to heritage
in the 1980s had the effect of rendering nostalgia synonymous with a
Thatcherite political agenda. As Robert Hewison argued in his influen-
tial 1987 book, heritage flourished as a culture industry during the period
and provided a concept of national identity that looked to the past for
a set of values and social stability thought to be lacking in the present.2
Other literary and cultural critics as well produced pejorative critiques of
heritage projects, taking issue with the founding in the late 1980s of the
National Trust, in addition to the expenditure of public monies for the
promotion of country house preservation, Merchant Ivory film produc-
tions, museum projects, and royal family spectacles. Nostalgia fueled
the heritage industry at a time when transnationalism was unmis-
takably on the rise, when immigration patterns in the postcolonial
period put extreme pressure on the persistence of ideas about national
identity that were rooted in outmoded practices and tastes associated
with upper-class, white privilege. Peter Childs, in a censorious account
characteristic of this body of critical work, concluded that the herit-
age industry amounted to “a profound nostalgia for a bygone imperial
England” (212). Nostalgia was thus seen as a dangerously conservative
form of individual and collective memory, a regressive effort to evade
the social exigencies and democratizing tendencies of the present by
restoring what was regarded as the preeminence of the past.
Also influential in rendering nostalgia something of a “dirty word”
for literary critics, especially those working in modernist studies, was
Jean François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, which appeared
in English translation in 1984. When Lyotard turned his attention
to distinguishing modernist and postmodernist aesthetic practices,
nostalgia emerged as the key term of difference. Both modernism and

postmodernism put forward what Lyotard called the unpresentable,
that is, the unpredictable possibilities for thought, personhood, and
society that emerge once the master narratives of the past have been
thoroughly dismantled. Both modernism and postmodernism share
the impulse to dismantle inherited traditions. However, according to
Lyotard, modernist texts may well expose the psychic, linguistic, and
social fragmentation wrought by modernization, but they collude with
the very forces they seek to challenge; literary modernism imposes
significant and pleasing literary forms on the cataclysmic ruptures of
modern life. As Lyotard argued in an often-cited formulation, “mod-
ernist aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one.
It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing con-
tents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues
to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure” (81).
Lyotard’s account was interpreted and widely circulated by such critics
as Ihab Hassan, Andreas Huyssen, and Patricia Waugh, all of whom
rather uniformly argued that postmodernism succeeds where mod-
ernism failed, that is, by abandoning the redemptive properties and
elitist tendencies of modernist form. The postmodern, on this score, is
constituted by a decisive and distinguishing move beyond modernism;
postmodernist textual practices submit their own formal constructs to
the operations of critical scrutiny, self-reflexivity, and indeterminacy.
If postmodernism relinquishes the pretense of providing the answers
to pertinent social questions, modernism was understood as an elitist
form of aestheticism that attempted to fill the space of cultural author-
ity vacated by the end of metanarrative.
The essays that follow counter this monolithic view of nostalgia as
a form of regressive conservatism, as well as the association between
literary modernism and highbrow art; they examine the multiple ways
that modernist writers employ nostalgia to address a host of public
and private ruptures in the opening decades of the century: the vio-
lent traumas of World War I, the decentering of subjectivity, the social
complexities of country house preservation, the disappearance of God
and other transcendent securities, the dislocating effects of moderni-
zation, colonialism, and increasing commercialism, and the shifting
significance about literary value. In an important sense, however,
Modernism and Nostalgia does not quarrel with as much as take its cue
from Lyotard, at least in contrast to Fredric Jameson, for whom nos-
talgia is a not only a periodizing concept but also a characteristic not
of modernism but postmodernism, particularly postmodern nostalgia
Tammy Clewell 9
films.3 Conversely, Lyotard conceives of the postmodern not as the

historical successor to modernism but a rewriting of modernism from
within, a rewriting that submits literary form—that last bastion of
metanarrative authority—to the same critical scrutiny as other inher-
ited ways of living, thinking, and working. Lyotard identifies Joyce,
after all, as the exemplar of postmodern literary practice, describing
Ulysses as a text that seeks “not to supply reality but to invent allusions
to the conceivable which cannot be presented” (81). We might well
credit Lyotard’s work, then, with enabling the kind of keen attention
displayed in the following essays to the paradigmatically difficult liter-
ary forms with which modernist writers represent and assign meaning
to nostalgia.
In taking nostalgia as an object of critical study, a perspective from
which to evaluate modernist representation, the essays in this anthol-
ogy employ the methods of close reading; they pay scrupulous atten-
tion to the linguistic and formal features of individual texts. Whether
this attention to textual and aesthetic detail is informed by history
and the archive, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, biographical criti-
cism, Marxism and cultural materialism, or postcolonial theory, the
essays collected here demonstrate the continued relevance that close
reading has for rewriting modernism—or, more precisely, for rewriting
our understanding of modernism’s engagement with the social world—
from within its aesthetic practices. Rita Felski’s account of “political
formalism,” one of three methodologies employed in modernist studies,
best captures the range of interpretative strategies informing the essays
that follow. In contrast to both “sociological” and “cultural studies”
approaches, political formalism insists on the close reading of aesthetic
form, literary conventions, and figurative language to apprehend the
power dynamics both raised and critically assessed in modernist texts.4
As Felski articulates, political formalism depends on a kind of “textual
hypervigilance”:
Form is not merely a container for content but a vital means of

accessing the invisible intricacies of ideology. Metaphors, binary oppo-
sitions, narrative syntax, and visual schemas all carry patterns of hier-
archy, exclusion, and inequality encoded in their DNA; a close reading
of an innocuous and seemingly inconsequential textual thread can
thus lead deep in the labyrinthian workings of power. (510)
Less a unified methodology than “a loose assemblage of reading tech-

niques” (509), political formalism has not only contributed to the
dismantling of the longstanding view of modernism as a rarified and

apolitical artistic practice; as Felski notes, it also refines our understand-
ing of the relationship between “aesthetic forms and social norms”
(509). In the wake of Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s influential effort
to “‘un-discipline’ modernist studies” by reevaluating modernism as a
global phenomenon, the strict attention in this volume to Anglophone
texts requires explanation (7). As opposed to including popular or emer-
gent forms of cultural production during the period or addressing works
of global modernism that offer important resources for comparative
study, the deliberate focus in Modernism and Nostalgia on the novels,
short fiction, poetry, and essays of seventeen of the most canonical
Anglophone writers of the period speaks directly to the main aim of
this collection: the reassessment of how even the nostalgia of literary
modernism—with all its affective forms of sentimental as well as critical
longing—has the capacity to challenge our understanding of modern-
ism from within its own textual practices. In resisting any lingering
association between modernist aesthetics and elitism, this collection
seeks to demonstrate how deeply interrelated were tradition and inno-
vation, remembrance and aspiration, and the vanishing and the newly
imagined in the literary culture of modernity.
In Consuming Traditions, Elizabeth Outka, who contributes the
“Afterword” to this collection, captures the complexity of modernist
nostalgia in her groundbreaking study of modern literary and commer-
cial culture. The transitional period that encompasses the end of the
Victorian age and the emergence of modernity, a period characterized
by a rapidly expanding marketplace, gave rise to seemingly contradic-
tory desires: one for new possibilities associated with artifice, construc-
tion, and reproducibility; and the other for enduring values aligned
with authenticity, continuity, and permanence. Among the ways com-
mercial culture responded to these contradictory desires was by market-
ing what Outka calls “nostalgic authenticity.” This was a strategy by
which newly manufactured objects and places, as well as literary texts,
were produced, packaged, and bought as hybrids of the new and the
old. By fusing artifice and authenticity, as Outka shows, the marketing
of goods, experiences, and lifestyles, as well as modernist literary depic-
tions of these trends, provided “a critical way to negotiate the difficult
transition into modernity” (6). On the forefront of a paradigm shift
in modernist studies, Outka contends that neither the conception of
the “great divide” (pitting literary modernism against commercial or
popular culture) nor even a dismantling of the high/low opposition
(articulating how modernism exploited the marketplace both in and for
Tammy Clewell 11
its work) offers an interpretative frame flexible enough to capture the

complexities of nostalgia during the period. Outka persuasively argues:
As the twentieth century began, both writers and consumers were not
simply deciding between, on the one hand, ideas of self-fashioning,
of constructed lifestyles and identities, of the urge to make it new
and to discard tradition, and, on the other hand, the longing for
tradition, for permanence, and for aesthetic purity. Instead, writers,
marketers, architects, and consumers were searching for new ways to
sustain these contradictions, to bring different sides together in new
combinations that animated the many forms of the commodified
authentic. (12)
As a whole, Modernism and Nostalgia engages Outka’s understanding of

nostalgia as far more complicated than the impulse to either preserve or
disrupt tradition. What the essays that follow demonstrate—and what
her “Afterword” discusses as well—is how literary modernism brought
past and present together in ways that demanded experimental and
typically difficult literary forms, forms that combine the memory of the
old and desire for the new in the effort to negotiate the present.
Sites of modernist nostalgia
Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, as the subtitle sug-

gests, is comprised of three sections. Although the anthology’s tripartite
organization aims to distinguish various aspects of modernist nostalgia,
the categories that separate “Bodies,” “Locations,” and “Aesthetics”
should be understood as porous and mobile, rather than impermeable
and static. Categorical divisions typically tend to merge, and such merg-
ing is particularly evident in the case of modernist nostalgia, given its
characteristic ability to negotiate the separations between the internal
and external, the personal and social, recollection and longing.
Part I, “Bodies,” presents essays that focus primarily on nostalgia in
its typically twentieth-century form, that is, as a mental activity that
occurs in the hidden recesses and interiority of the human subject. In
light of the etymology of nostalgia, we might say that the essays in
the “Bodies” section place the emphasis on the “algia,” the painful as
well as pleasurable longing for a place or person. In focusing on the
writings of Rebecca West, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot, and Elizabeth
Bowen, the essays address nostalgia as a bodily illness and a symptom
of personal dissatisfaction. They discuss nostalgic memory from various
perspectives: a soldier seeking to escape the bloody fighting of the Great

War, a war veteran grappling with traumatic memories of the trenches,
a poetic speaker confronting spiritual decline in personal and social life,
a child facing individuation and maternal separation. By highlighting
the longing itself, rather than the objects of the longing, the essays in
Part I discuss the subjective dimensions of nostalgia, paying particular
attention to what the bodily injuries, emotional disturbances, personal
complaints, and social grievances of the individual subject reveal to
us about modern culture. In keeping with a fully demedicalized view
of nostalgia, work in this section articulates these afflictions not as
illnesses to be cured as much as critical perspectives on the present,
particularly the mechanized slaughter of modern warfare and the alien-
ating effects of modernization.
The first two essays in “Bodies,” Bernard Schweizer’s “Modernism and
the Referendum on Nostalgia in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier”
and Robert Hemmings’s “Nostalgia, Trauma, and the Aftermath of War:
Siegfried Sassoon and W. H. R. Rivers,” discuss how nostalgia in these
Great War texts indicates the traumatic nature of combatant experience.
Schweizer traces West’s initial pathologizing of nostalgia through to
the story she tells, ultimately modernism’s story, of the demedicaliza-
tion of nostalgia. The novel does not equate the soldier’s return home
with cure but with the threat of the death of the self, the annihilation
of the protagonist’s subjectivity in the present. In responding to what
Schweizer sees as the novel’s referendum on nostalgia, he argues, quite
perceptively, that West’s text culminates in an impasse. Readers under-
stand both the necessity of relinquishing the seeming pastoral perfec-
tion of the past and the dire implications of recommitting to a war-torn
present. This impasse, Schweizer claims, succeeds in deconstructing the
binary between pleasure’s illusions and reality’s threats to reveal the
importance that West places on the notion of “process,” a textual form
of modernist critique.
Hemmings, in an extension of his work in Modern Nostalgia, focuses
on Sassoon’s “A Fragment of Autobiography,” “A Footnote on the War,”
and Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man. These autobiographical writings
engage what Hemmings identifies as “autognosis” and “re-education,”
practices geared toward self-understanding and personal change that
Sassoon learned from Rivers, a neurologist and psychiatrist, whom he
met at Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917. Sassoon uses his writing to
juxtapose a number of different temporal versions of himself: the pre-
war youth living a sporting life in rural England, the traumatized soldier
of the war years, and the cosmopolitan and romantic poet of the 1920s.
Tammy Clewell 13
In a nuanced account of these juxtapositions, Hemmings shows how

nostalgia, which sometimes hinders and other times advances the aims
of autognosis, functions primarily as a kind of vaccine, an inoculation
for Sassoon and his readers against the renewal of traumatic memory in
the years following the Armistice.
Gabrielle McIntire’s analysis of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and other
poems, and Maren Linett’s work on Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction, the con-
cluding two essays in “Bodies,” demonstrate that nostalgic longing dur-
ing the period extended well beyond the geography of actual places to
express a desire for metaphysical comfort and meaning. Indeed, the nos-
talgia that McIntire locates in Eliot’s work names a desire for the sacred;
in Linett’s discussion of Bowen’s novels it reveals a yearning for maternal
wholeness and a pre-linguistic unity with the mother. For both McIntire
and Linett, modernist nostalgia apprehends a wish for transcendence
and plentitude that might provide an experience of permanence, mean-
ing, and stability for otherwise transient subjects. In an implicit chal-
lenge to the tendency to reduce nostalgia to an idealized version of the
past, McIntire, in “You Can’t Go Home Again: Ambivalent Nostalgia in
T. S. Eliot’s Poetry,” argues that Eliot represents the “sacred time of future
remembrance,” a kind of nostalgic longing that cannot be reduced to
the strictures of either exteriority or interiority. Insofar as his nostalgia
simultaneously invokes and resists reduction to actual memory, it com-
plicates our understanding of Eliot’s era-defining notion of modernist
impersonality. In McIntire’s moving account, Eliot’s nostalgia reveals the
deeply personal impulses that inform his poetry, as well as his represen-
tation of a sacred sense of time, one that includes a recognition of both
the pastness of the past and its uncanny presence in the present.
Linett’s “Matricide and the End of Nostalgia in Elizabeth Bowen” dis-
cusses through a number of novels—The House in Paris, The Little Girls,
The Death of the Heart, and Eva Trout—how the peripatetic characters
in Bowen’s fiction embrace the mother–child dyad as a “compensa-
tory fantasy of ideal communion in which some form of non-symbolic
language could unite rather than separate” the two (68). Nostalgia in
Bowen’s fiction seeks a transcendent embrace with the maternal sub-
lime, at least up through Eva Trout, when Bowen tells the story of a deaf
male child who commits a violent act of matricide and moves beyond
the nostalgic wish for unity with the mother. Linett’s account suggests
that Bowen, whose writing was informed by her own relationship to
her mother, thinks through nostalgia in order to dissolve the alluring
attraction of transcendence and affirm a modernist sense of difference
and fragmented subjectivity.
Part II, “Locations,” shifts our attention back to the inaugural history
of nostalgia by highlighting the “nostos,” the particular places that gen-
erate intense types of homesickness and a desire to return. These essays
address the work of Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Symons,
Thomas Burke, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, and W. H. Auden;
they attend to the exterior places that elicit intense forms of yearning:
country houses, urban spaces, colonial settlements, childhood homes,
and geographic landscapes. The essays in this section demonstrate how
particular places of nostalgic longing are partly remembered and partly
imagined; they emerge as locations that demand reflective activity. The
essays in “Locations” teach us that the modernist nostalgia for home
aims not to recover an external place that was possessed and subse-
quently lost, as much as to foster a unique form of memory that relies
on but cannot be reduced to literal recollection. In highlighting the role
of imagination, experience, and reflection in nostalgic remembrance,
the modernist writers discussed here bring the past to bear upon the
present and strive to open up contemporary forms of personal and
social life to different and as yet unimagined possibilities.
Sarah Edwards, in “Permanent preservation for the benefit of the
nation”: The Country House, Preservation, and Nostalgia in Vita
Sackville-West’s The Edwardians and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” speaks
directly to the power that nostalgia has for fostering critical reflection
and promoting social change. Edwards situates her readings of the nov-
els of Sackville-West and Woolf in the historical context of the preserva-
tionist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, discussing how preservation
discourses included trenchant criticisms of the social and economic
inequalities of the country house tradition. In situating their country
house fictions in the transitional Edwardian period, both writers insist
upon the need for gender reform. As Edwards suggests, Sackville-West
and Woolf advocate a model of preservation based on modernizing the
country house, a model that can “not be reduced to a simple nostalgia
where either the past was rendered dead and consigned to the museum
or raised as a bulwark against social progress and change” (93).
Barry J. Faulk’s contribution to this anthology offers a fascinating
addition to our understanding of the locations of modernist nostalgia.
While the discontinuities caused by war and technological progress pro-
duced the well known forms of rural nostalgia that have been variously
addressed in this anthology by Schweizer, Hemmings, and Edwards,
Faulk makes us aware of a much less appreciated form of nostalgia, an
urban nostalgia that appeared in the discourse of the London music
hall, an early type of popular cultural entertainment that disappeared
Tammy Clewell 15
with the rise of modern mass media, including cinema, the gramo-
phone, and recorded music. According to Faulk, in Arthur Symons’s
long essay, London: a Book of Aspects (1908), a kind of travel guide to
the metropolis, Eliot’s “London Letter” of November 1922, which ech-
oes many of Symons’s ideas, and Thomas Burke’s numerous London
travel writings, urban nostalgia for a London associated with music hall
assumes a remarkable similar form: a critique of the emergent age of
mechanical reproduction and a lament for the disappearance of music
hall, which was generally valued for the essential English character of
its performances. However, as Faulk convincingly argues, these writers
did more than critique technology; they also offered “a mode of critical
reflection about the disappearance of a Victorian popular art form and
the rise of modern mass media” (131). The critical reflections that Faulk
discovers in these writings culminate in an affirmation of new art forms
and commercial music. Moreover, these writers instruct by example,
teaching readers then and now that “intelligent people can form mean-
ingful relationships with popular culture” (133).
In “Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, and Imperialist Nostalgia,”
Carey Snyder turns our attention to the way nostalgia functions in
the context of colonialism. Drawing on Renato Resaldo’s account of
“imperialist nostalgia,” Snyder begins by critiquing Lawrence’s effort
to rejuvenate what he regards as the bankruptcy of modern civiliza-
tion by recovering a primal past associated with native peoples. While
Mansfield’s earlier work, including “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped,”
repeats Lawrence’s romanticized view of indigenous populations, she
came to reject both metropolitan primitivism and imperialist nostalgia,
a rejection that Snyder attributes to Mansfield’s own experience as a
New Zealander who had the designation of “exotic colonial” imposed
upon her. In comparing the romanticized view of settler life in “Pearl
Button” to a starkly brutal portrayal in “The Women at the Store,” Snyder
details Mansfield’s refusal to eulogize the passing of primitive culture and
her insistence on depicting the “anti-idyll of colonial life” (153).
The last two essays in “Locations” focus on one of the most com-
monly raised tropes of nostalgia: the journey of the experienced adult
who seeks to return to a simpler and more innocent place: the childhood
hometown. Patricia Rae, in “‘There’ll be no more fishing this side the
grave’: Radical Nostalgia in George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air,” and Eve
Sorum, in “Dissolving Landscapes: W. H. Auden’s Protean Nostalgia,”
proceed from a similar insight, one that Rae puts well when she remarks
that a “fundamental discovery in the modernist discourse on nostalgia”
hinges on an awareness that we “cannot go home again” (172). In
Orwell’s case, as Rae shows, this difficult discovery leads to progressive

politics; in Auden’s writing, Sorum argues, it articulates an ethics for a
secular age. Rae argues that Orwell’s novel takes the form of a “proleptic
elegy,” a mode of writing that expresses sorrow and furnishes consola-
tion in anticipation of future loss. With the looming threat of World
War Two, the protagonist embarks on a fishing trip, only to discover
that industrialization has killed the fish and that an emerging market
economy has transformed his hometown into a picturesque and quaint
tourist attraction. While launching a critique of the journey home,
Orwell’s novel does not completely abandon nostalgia. Rather, as Rae
argues, the text intensifies the nostalgic idea of an authentic self, “a self
that remembers the past” (174), resists interpolation by the industrial
war machine, and commits to a program of social reform at odds with
the forces of modernization and commodification.
While acknowledging that Auden’s early poetry was marked by a
decidedly unnostalgic vision, Sorum argues that he came in later work,
particularly “In Praise of Limestone,” to represent an innovative form
of nostalgic longing, one that manages “to embrace change even while
adhering to a past ideal” (182). Describing his own sense of homesick-
ness for the limestone landscape of his youth while traveling in the late
1940s to a geologically similar place in Italy, Auden renders homesick-
ness as the basis for both an artistic practice that recognizes the impor-
tance of place and for an ethics associated with locality. The aesthetics
and ethics that emerge from Auden’s reassessment of nostalgia, as
Sorum demonstrates, suggest an acceptance of the nontranscendence
and mutability of human experience.
Finally, the essays in Part III, “Aesthetics,” conclude Modernism and
Nostalgia by returning to the vexed connection between nostalgia and
modernist aesthetics, a connection, as we saw, that Lyotard identified
in The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard located modernist nostalgia in
what he called the “recognizable consistency” of its form. The harmo-
nious and often beautiful forms of modernist literature did not simply
mitigate its otherwise harsh and alienating content; the aesthetic was
understood as a recuperation of historical meaning that Lyotard under-
stood as closing off the possibility of radically new beginnings. However,
in keeping with Lyotard’s conceptual reversal of the postmodern disso-
lution of nostalgia—his claim that a text “can become modern only if
it is first postmodern” (79)—the essays in “Aesthetics” discuss forms of
modernist writing that insist on the internal resistances to signification,
including the resistance to the consistency of literary form. In explor-
ing the work of Rupert Brooke, Ezra Pound, E. M. Forster, James Joyce,
Tammy Clewell 17
Anthony Powell, and Evelyn Waugh, these essays demonstrate how

the aesthetic, rather than suggesting a singularly redemptive func-
tion, implies a multiplicity of meanings with which writers during the
period understood and represented it. Indeed, the aesthetic emerges
in these essays as a self-reflexive artistic practice, a sense of a shared
community, a strategy for asserting originality, a literary framework for
expressing irreconcilable differences, and, in the retrospective view of
later writers who admired modernism and worked in the wake of its
heyday, an alternative to what was seen as an emerging didacticism in
the more overtly politicized literature of the mid-twentieth century.
Regardless of these varied meanings, the essays in the concluding sec-
tion argue for a view of modernist aesthetics as thoroughly constituted
by nostalgia, even while they discuss how these investments in the past
cannot be reduced to a stranglehold of history on the contemporary
moment.
The “Aesthetics” section begins with Meredith Martin’s “Rupert
Brooke’s Ambivalent Mourning, Ezra Pound’s Anticipatory Nostalgia,”
an essay that reassesses the relationship between modernist aesthet-
ics and nostalgia and offers an exceptionally insightful account of the
disappearance of the English metrical tradition, which was based on
an education in the classics. Through an examination of two poems,
Brooke’s “Letter to a Live Poet” and Pound’s “Doria,” Martin suggests that
while both poets experiment with English meter in an effort “to make
something new out of something old” (219), the differences between
the two are significant. On the one hand, Brooke observed that the
shift away from training in classical languages foreshadowed the obso-
lescence of metrical poetry, the very type of poetry he wrote as a young
man before his untimely death in 1915. Brooke’s “Letter” responds to
this impending obsolescence with ambivalence, both ridiculing and
expressing nostalgia for all that the English metrical tradition signi-
fied: an awareness of form, regularly alternating lines, a knowledge of
the classics, a sense of a shared national identity, and an experience of
belonging to community of readers, particularly those educated in the
nation’s most prestigious public schools. On the other hand, Martin
argues, Pound reduces the metrical tradition to a singular meaning—the
traditional; the not new—which he then rejects to advocate free verse
and put forward a narrative of modernist rupture with the past. When
Pound does produce a classically-inspired poem, “Doria,” he not only
transforms nostalgia for the loss of classical training into the strictures
of a polyglossial modernism; he also, as Martin suggests, distances his
formulations from a lamentation for the past in order to promote a
new kind of elite readership, a professional class of teachers and schol-

ars who may be able to interpret modernist free verse but who can no
longer read the complex prosody—and all it signifies—in the work of
poets like Brooke.
John J. Su’s “The Beloved Republic: Nostalgia and the Political
Aesthetic of E. M. Forster” takes us to the center of debates about the
meaning of modernist nostalgia by assessing Forster’s notion of the
internal harmony of the work of art. In his timely reevaluation of
Forster’s art, politics, and place within the modernist canon, Su points
out that in contrast to Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, writers praised for the
internal contradictions and collapsing schemas of their texts, Forster
has been widely neglected as a cutting-edge modernist on the basis of
his ideas about both the formal unity and autonomy of the aesthetic. In
forcefully challenging this view, Su revaluates the way Howards End rep-
resents the divisions between the industrial Wilcoxes and the cultured
Schlegels, the country and the city, and the orderliness of art and the
chaos of life. Forster’s novel represents formal unity not as a silencing
of difference but as a framework for expressing conflicting worldviews,
and, by extension, for promoting democratic liberalism and the lib-
eral value of tolerance. At the same time, Su argues, the text presents
“a fantasy of reconciling social and political tensions” (227). This fantasy
might exist in the realm of art but, in Forster’s view, such harmonious
reconciliation could not be replicated in the lived world. Forster under-
stood art as a unique and limited form of knowledge, one especially
well suited to experiential modes of knowing rather than empirical and
evidentiary forms. Nostalgia, according to Su, plays a special role insofar
as it “enables Forster to render closeted desires as legitimate forms of
knowledge” (237). As is particularly clear in the case of Maurice, a novel
of a successful homosexual relationship that Forster withheld from pub-
lication during his lifetime, the text exploits the capacity of nostalgia
“to render a disappointing present in light of an idealized past” as well
as to represent “the nature of present dissatisfaction without presenting
a false consolation in an idealized or utopian future” (241). In giving
shape to Forster’s political aesthetic, nostalgia establishes forms of expe-
riential knowledge that reveal unfulfilled human aspirations, forms of
knowledge absolutely unavailable through empirical ways of knowing.
In “Nostalgia, Mourning, and Désistance in James Joyce’s Ulysses,”
Christy L. Burns demonstrates how the perhaps single most paradigmatic
text in the modernist canon is constituted by a productive engagement
with nostalgic longing. In Burns’s fascinating account, the novel refuses
to resolve the tension created by the two competing narratives upon
Tammy Clewell 19
which it draws: Homer’s The Odyssey which reflects the optimistic

promise, as embodied by Leopold Bloom, of a nostalgic return home,
and Shakespeare’s Hamlet which engages, in the character of Stephen
Dedalus, the personal resentment and social critique of such a journey.
At the center of these competing narrative strands, we find the ques-
tion of mourning. While addressing the grief that Bloom displays for
the loss of his son and father in addition to the threat of losing his wife
to another man, Burns argues that nostalgia enables Joyce’s modern
Odysseus to mourn the past and affirm the future. In making this argu-
ment, Burns’s essay challenges the view of nostalgia as an avoidance of
mourning; she suggests, instead, that when we view Bloom’s mourning
not as a labor of severing attachments but as an ongoing process of
remembering, nostalgia may be understood as a productive dynamic of
grief work. In contrast, Stephen responds to the loss of his mother and
her insistence on religion by a steadfast refusal of nostalgic memory and
by the expression of melancholic rage, both of which place him in the
role of rebellious naysayer. Joyce’s Ulysses assumes artistic form around
the irresolution of its narrative strands. The novel simultaneously
engages both Bloom’s “desire for the more traditional Odyssean end-
ing, of closure that brings a full restoration of home, and perhaps too,
of nation” and Stephen’s desire for resistance, critique, and the “open
word of an uncertain future” (265).
Marina MacKay’s “Modernist Nostalgia/Nostalgia for Modernism:
Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh” brings this anthology to a close
with a remarkably useful analysis of how writers at mid-century con-
strued modernism itself as an object of nostalgia and identified modern-
ist aesthetics as a rarified and apolitical practice, precisely the version
of aestheticism which a generation of critics, including contributors to
Modernism and Nostalgia, have been working to complicate. The novels
of Powell and Waugh repeatedly depict characters reading and discuss-
ing works by Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Lewis, and especially Proust and
Eliot. Their texts also frequently juxtapose characters with modernist
sensibilities to those who appear more politically engaged. This juxta-
position is significant, MacKay argues, for it informs the particular nos-
talgia with which Powell and Waugh represent modernism. In rejecting
the politicization of art in the 1930s, both writers used their work to
critique the reduction of art to didacticism. They believed that what was
lost with the passing of modernism was “a literature answerable only to
the standards of its form” (288). MacKay argues that while mid-century
nostalgia for modernism in the work of Powell and Waugh had the effect
of rendering this version of modernist aestheticism synonymous with
modernism as a whole, it also enabled both writers to produce texts that

are more complex, engaging, and informative than the overtly political
literary documents of the mid-century period.
Taken as a whole, Modernism and Nostalgia argues that nostalgia has
emerged as an important perspective from which to apprehend mod-
ernism’s investment in social and cultural forms of life. Like the focus
on interiority and consciousness that once appeared to bar modernist
literature from real-world concerns, nostalgia, as this collection suggests,
can no longer be simply understood as an escapist fantasy or indulgent
sentiment. Rather, nostalgia offers a crucial vantage point from which
to assess the embeddedness of modernism in myriad political contesta-
tions of the period. The essays that follow do not simply seek to wrest
our understanding of nostalgic longing from a regressive, conservative,
or retrograde effort to restore history’s hegemonic formulations. What
this collection makes a case for is an understanding of nostalgia as con-
stitutive of the aesthetic practices and political aspirations of modernist
literature.
Notes
1. For a negative appraisal of nostalgia, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives
of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, which is arguably the
most widely read negative appraisal of nostalgia. Robert Hemmings, John. J.
Su, and Elizabeth Outka, three contributors to this anthology, have produced
important studies that challenge the view of nostalgia as a social disease.
See Hemmings, Modern Nostalgia; Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary
Novel; and Outka, Consuming Traditions.
2. Robert Hewison, Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline, 181. On
the heritage industry as a nostalgic formation with socially conservative
implications, see also Peter Childs, “The English Heritage Industry,” 212;
Martin J. Weiner, English Culture, 64; and Patrick Wright, On Living in the Old
Country, 87. For challenges to the notion of heritage as “a right-wing project
or strategy,” see Howard L. Malchow, “Nostalgia, ‘Heritage,’ and the London
Antiques Trade,” 198; and Raphael Samuel, Theaters of Memory, 243.
3. Jameson has acknowledged his rather idiosyncratic use of the word
“nostalgia” to designate the representations of history in a number of post-
modern films, commenting that one can no sooner “alter a term like this
retroactively than substitute some altogether different word for postmod-
ernism itself” (xvii). For Jameson, nostalgic displays in postmodern films
“are in no way to be grasped as passionate expressions of that older longing
once called nostalgia but rather quite the opposite; they are a depersonal-
ized visual curiosity and a ‘return of the repressed’ of the twenties and
thirties ‘without affect’ (in another place I try to term it ‘nostalgia-deco’)”
(xvii). See, Postmodernism.
Tammy Clewell 21
4. Among these three methodologies, Felski clarifies that her own intellectual
allegiances reside with a cultural studies approach, an approach grounded
on the view that the “political pulse of a culture is not to be found in the
depths of a single work but rather in a mobile and discontinuous constella-
tion of texts as they play off, influence, and contradict each other” (512).
But Felski also argues that a cultural studies approach to modernism needs
to move beyond its own reductive dismissal of formalist, deconstructive, and
other modes of literary criticism practiced by modernist scholars. To do so,
Felski suggests, cultural studies needs “to apply its own theory of articulation
toward a more sophisticated account of institutional knowledges and the his-
tory of the disciplines” (515).
Works cited
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic: 2001.
Casey, Edward S. “The World of Nostalgia.” Man and World. 20 (1987): 361–84.
Childs, Peter. “The English Heritage Industry and Other Trends in the Novel.”
A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945–2000. Ed. Brian. W. Shaffer.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. 210–24.
Clewell, Tammy. “Mourning and Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss.”
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 52.1 (2004): 43–68.
——. Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009.
Dames, Nicholas. Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction,
1810–1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Doyle, Laura and Laura Winkiel. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
Felski, Rita. “Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies: Reflections on Method.”
Modernism/Modernity. 10.3 (2003): 501–17.
Hemmings, Robert. Modern Nostalgia: Siefried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second
World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Hewison, Robert. Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London:
Methuen, 1987.
Hofer, Johannes. “Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia.” Trans. Carolyn Kiser
Anspach. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2.6 (1934): 376–91.
Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” Methods for the Study
of Literature in Cultural Memory. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. 189–207.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984.
Malchow, Howard L. “Nostalgia, ‘Heritage,’ and the London Antiques Trade,” in
Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture.
Ed. George K. Behlmer and Fred M. Leventhal. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000. 196–216.
Outka, Elizabeth. Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified
Authentic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Roth, Michael S. “The Time of Nostalgia: Medicine, History and Normality in

19th-century France.” Time & Society. 1.2 (1992): 271–86.
Samuel, Raphael. Theaters of Memory, Vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary
Culture. London: Verso, 1994.
Spender, Stephen. The Struggle of the Modern. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1963.
Starobinski, Jean. “The Idea of Nostalgia.” Diogenes. 14.54 (1966): 81–103.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,
the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press. 1993.
Su, John J. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Weiner, Martin J. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Wright, Patrick. On Living in the Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary
Britain. London: Verso, 1985.
Part I
Bodies
1
Modernism and the Referendum
on Nostalgia in Rebecca West’s
The Return of the Soldier
Bernard Schweizer
In her study Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning, Janelle Wilson claims

that “there is no known antonym for nostalgia” (27). This may seem
counter-intuitive at first sight. Indeed, while Alastair Bonnett points out
that “throughout the last century nostalgia was cast as the antithesis of
radicalism” (1), he also reminds us that anarchist thinking—not exactly
a conformist ideology—had been a haven for nostalgia: “anarchism is
the nostalgic counter-culture of orthodox radicalism” (32). Bonnett
complicates the ostensible opposition between nostalgia and radicalism
by demonstrating how the yearnings of nostalgia have paradoxically
lodged themselves within the project of modernity itself: “Nostalgia
has been . . . an integral part of the modern condition, something
that is present whether or not we identify and engage it or repress and
deny it” (169). And what is true of modernity in general is relevant for
artistic modernism more specifically, suggesting the shortcomings of
constructing modernism as an antithesis to nostalgia. As David Brooks
put it, although modernist artists and their work endeavor to leave the
past behind, “the past, and particularly the literary past, has a high and
complex profile within them. Far from ignoring or defying tradition,
they attempt to redefine it. . . . Finding their impulse in a creativity
highly conscious of its own departure, they must also, as a consequence,
constantly remind us of, and so paradoxically sustain, the very things
they seek to jettison or modify” (125). Thus, we should not be surprised
to find elements of nostalgia within literary modernism and to discover
that nostalgia may function not only as a foil to delineate what moder-
nism seeks (but unwittingly fails) to reject but also, more ironically, as a
provocation to forestall any sentimental relationship with the past.
One of modernism’s key texts, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier,
is deeply imbricated in the complexities of nostalgia. In fact, the novel
25
invites and rewards explorations about the nature of nostalgia and its
role in modernist literary discourse. However, before discussing nostal-
gia in this text, it is instructive to clarify the historical vicissitudes of
the term “nostalgia.” Despite its current conceptual multi-valence, the
origins of the term are straightforward enough, as a number of contribu-
tors to this collection also address in varying contexts. Swiss physician
Johannes Hofer, who is credited for coining the term “nostalgia” in
his 1688 dissertation, defined it as a medical condition among Swiss
soldiers who suffered from a painful and debilitating type of longing
for home; however, over time the meaning of nostalgia altered sig-
nificantly, changing from signifying a longing for a place to denoting
a yearning for the past. Roberta Rubenstein clarifies this shift by noting
nostalgia’s separation from its original meaning of homesickness: “while
homesickness refers to a spatial/geographical separation, nostalgia more
accurately refers to a temporal one” (4). Even while the meaning of
nostalgia changed from a spatial to a temporal concept, it also gradually
became de-medicalized, a process that played itself out in the nineteenth
century. As Michael Roth has pointed out, “By the 1850s interest in the
phenomenon as a disease had dropped considerably, and . . . would
never again receive the sustained attention of the medical world. Of
course, the phenomenon of nostalgia did not disappear when the
doctors stopped looking at it” (27). Rather, the concept of nostalgia
entered the cultural vocabulary as the sentimental longing for an ide-
alized past. To return to Rubenstein, this general aspect of nostalgia
appears to be “the existential condition of adulthood” (4). As a structure
of feeling, nostalgia in this sense emerges from a sense of lost childhood
and lost innocence. Nostalgia names an integral and perhaps inescap-
able part of adulthood; in the extreme, it registers a wish to return to
childhood, which may even take on the symbolically virulent form of a
wish to return to the womb.
West’s novel addresses a whole complex of questions related to nos-
talgia: the relationship between nostalgia and modernism, the causes
of nostalgia, and the remedies for it. The novel focuses on Kitty and
Jenny, the inhabitants of an aristocratic country estate in England, who
receive news that Chris Baldry, Kitty’s husband and Jenny’s cousin, has
been injured in Flanders while fighting in the trenches of World War
I. As the details emerge, it is apparent that no wound can be detected,
but that Chris is diagnosed as having “shell shock.” At the time of
West’s writing, this was a relatively new diagnosis, and army doctors
like W. H. R. Rivers and Richard Myers were still working out the exact
aetiology of this condition and designing treatment plans for patients
Bernard Schweizer 27
suffering from it. Chris, however, does not seem to conform to the typi-
cal patient profile of the shell-shocked soldier during the Great War: he
does not have nightmares or hallucinations or suffer from spasms or
speech impediments, the common symptoms of shell shock. Rather,
like the Swiss soldiers observed by Hofer, Chris seems to be predomi-
nantly suffering from nostalgia. Though his most notable symptom is
amnesia, the curious way this manifests itself is that he thinks he is still
in love with his first girlfriend, Margaret, a working-class woman now
in her forties, who has evidently lost the youthful appeal that once
made her precious in the eyes of young Chris. But Chris insists that he
is still in love with her. Because Chris cannot remember the last fifteen
years of his life, he is deemed unfit for further military service and is
discharged, pending further medical evaluation of his case. Instead of
looking forward to being reunited with his upper-class wife, Kitty—and to
Kitty’s considerable annoyance—he only talks about Margaret and declares
he will die unless he can see his outwardly unremarkable and declassée
lover from his past. Clearly, Chris’s mental illness is presented as a bout of
nostalgic delusion.
Thus, bucking the trend of nostalgia’s progressive de-medicaliza-
tion throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, West here
vigorously re-medicalizes it. On some level, The Return of the Soldier
validates the original meaning of nostalgia as homesickness among sol-
diers abroad. Indeed, we don’t know for sure whether Chris has indeed
undergone a physical trauma on the front. All we can verify textually is
that he is in the grips of a nostalgic impulse so powerful as to override
common ties of kinship and undo his faculties of rational decision-
making. Although we don’t learn about the circumstances that triggered
Chris’s flight into the past, we do know that his nostalgic obsession
is so powerful that it operates on several levels simultaneously: he is
drawn to a place (a site of past happiness), to a chronological period
(a time of great contentment before the loss of innocence), and to a
character that unifies the spatial and temporal trajectories of nostalgia.
As both Rubenstein and Roth have shown, the nostalgic impulse can be
associated with an idealized time period and place, as much as with an
idealized person. In Chris’s case, the place is Monkey Island, the time
a magical summer fifteen years earlier, and the person, Margaret. The
nexus among all three objects of nostalgia is love. As Janelle Wilson has
pointed out, love is, of course, a common ingredient and contributor
of nostalgia: “It makes sense that being nostalgic is similar to being in
love; in particular, to the feeling state experienced after a love relation-
ship ends. That which is presently unavailable is not only valuable,
but idealized” (Wilson 24). This is precisely borne out in West’s story.
During Chris’s brief love affair with Margaret, he knew life as a series
of sunny days and experienced love as the pure efflorescence of mutual
affection. Then came the disappointment, an ugly scene when Chris
and Margaret fell out during a class-fuelled bout of jealousy that ended
the relationship between them. In an act of selective repression, Chris’s
amnesia extends to just before that event, excluding everything from
that moment up to his supposed concussion in the war.
The fact that the spatial site of Chris’s nostalgia is a romantic spot
on the Thames is significant within the larger cultural significance of
nostalgia, particularly in the context of the novel’s depiction of the
war-torn present. Monkey Island is clearly marked as an Arcadian idyll:
“In this gentle jungle,” Chris reminisces, “was a rustic seat . . . and on
it they [Chris and Margaret] sat until a pale moon appeared above the
green cornfield on the other side of the river” (40). The portion of the
novel dedicated to re-telling the story of Chris’s brief love affair with
Margaret brims with Georgian motifs of nostalgia, notably the rural
setting, the notion of a past “Golden Age,” and the theme of lost love.
When contrasted with the destructive, heavily mechanized, and bloody
experience of war from which Chris has escaped, the consolatory capac-
ity of this rural locale lures the reader into a sentimentalized version of
the past in a way that cordons off the brutality of the present.
Moreover, The Return of the Soldier not only develops nostalgia themati-
cally but embodies it in its very textuality. In fact, chapter three is itself
an extended exercise in pastoral Georgian literature: we have a simple
country inn, blooming hawthorn bushes, a walnut-tree studded meadow,
a glassy river, and animal husbandry in which rabbits and ducks are
tended to by the rustic owners of the inn. As for the mock-Greek temple
built at the center of Monkey Island, Debra Rae Cohen has argued that
“Chris’s nostalgia is distinctively Georgian as well in the way it folds
classical elements . . . into its version of the pastoral [since] Chris poses
Margaret, in their moment of rapture, in ‘a small Greek temple’” (78).
The novel’s narrator confirms this classicist association by commenting
that this scene “had a grace and silliness that belonged to the eight-
eenth century” (36). During the short time of their courtship, Chris and
Margaret are explicitly shown to be wrapped up in a pre-lapsarian idyll.
In The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell has elabo-
rated on the widespread use of pastoral elements in British World War I
literature. In his well-known argument, Fussell claims that poets from
Owen to Sassoon, from Rosenberg to Blunden had cause to conjure up
scenes of pastoral peacefulness while serving on the front because of the
powerful need to substitute a realm of lovely though wholly fictitious

rural harmony for an unbearable present: “Recourse to the pastoral is
an English mode of both fully gauging the calamities of the Great War
and imaginatively protecting oneself against them. Pastoral reference,
whether to literature or to actual rural localities and objects, is a way of
invoking a code to hint by antithesis at the indescribable; at the same
time, it is a comfort in itself, like rum, a deep dug-out, or a woolly vest”
(Fussell 235). In this sense, the pastoral genre serves as a salvific contrast
and consolatory escape in a time of war.
Chris’s craving for the restorative power of pastoral aesthetics not only
guides his own feelings towards Monkey Island and its inhabitant; it also
affects the discourse of Jenny, the novel’s narrator, who clearly relishes
retelling Chris’s romance on Monkey Island. Since Jenny serves as an
alter ego of the author herself, it follows that West was also invested in
this notion, at least to some degree. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere,1
West was in some ways an incurable nostalgic who abhorred the idea of
exile and even of voluntary expatriation. She considered exile the bane
of authentic selfhood. She is quite literal in her understanding of nostal-
gia as homesickness when she sympathizes with the exile’s plight:
[H]e cannot open the shutters of his bedroom in the morning and
look out on the field where the old white horse used to graze. He per-
haps endures the most frustrating experience of all. As he gets into
his seventies and eighties, he may long to go back to his own coun-
try, on any terms, making any submissions that are demanded, only
that he may die in a particular house, which, however, may now no
longer exist. It has been bombed or burned. (Survivors in Mexico 81)
In addition to expressing the seriousness with which West regarded

exile and homesickness, the passage also gives voice to what she figures
as the quandary of nostalgia. Notably, from the exile’s perspective, to
give in to nostalgia by returning home is equated with physical death.
It is also equated with the loss of principle (“making any submission”)
and with ultimate disappointment, as she clearly represents the object
of nostalgia and nostalgic homesickness as no longer existing. For West,
nostalgia names an existential aspect of the characteristically modern
experience of exile and rootlessness; nostalgic longing cannot be elimi-
nated by returning to a place which has ceased to exist. West’s nostalgia,
then, takes a temporal turn.
West’s nonfictional concerns are relevant to The Return of the Soldier;
indeed, at issue in the novel is not so much the question of overcoming
nostalgia by going “home,” but rather the more difficult proposition

of giving in to nostalgia by attempting to go back in time. This Chris
attempts to do through his amnesia, and West considers his condition
carefully before giving her verdict on the situation. In the final analysis,
the novel is set up as a referendum on the whole idea of nostalgia, both
thematically and structurally. The two women who love and understand
Chris, Jenny and Margaret, must decide what to do about Chris’s nostal-
gic self-delusion. They face a stark existential decision: whether to allow
Chris to persist in his nostalgic delusion, which is presented as equiva-
lent to puerile stagnation, or to shock him out of his pleasantly escapist
fantasy and compel him to face the world as an adult, which is presented
as his returning to the front and fighting a war he may not survive.
Characteristically, the referendum on nostalgia ends with an impasse.
We soon realize that Chris’s problem is not just one of obsessive fixa-
tion on the past; it is one of a highly selective fixation on the past as a
site of desire rather than the site of a loss that needs to be confronted.
After all, Chris’s son, Oliver, who died mysteriously at age two, is just as
much part of his past as is Margaret. But this loss Chris excludes from
his memory as strenuously as he clings to the remembrances of his
happy days with Margaret. To West, Chris engages in an understandable
but wholly misguided handling of the relationship between past and
present. The Return of the Soldier, in fact, may be read as an object les-
son in the effects of any selective fixation on the past, which is shown
to be pathological insofar as it robs its practitioner of what West called
“process.” Indeed, life’s most sacred and elemental principle to her was
process, be it temporal, historical, stylistic, or epistemological. For West,
what is static is dead and what is processual breathes life.2 This empha-
sis on temporal unfolding speaks, of course, to nostalgia insofar as the
nostalgic subject refuses to subscribe to process and, instead, seeks to fix
the object either temporally or spatially. To West, this tendency towards
fixation and stasis represents a personal pathology, and it would not be
far-fetched to say that, collectively, the desire to seal the past off from
informing and shaping the present represents a type of social pathology,
hence her re-medicalization of nostalgia.
The novel’s medicalizing of nostalgia carries over from the level of
thematic treatment, where Chris’s nostalgic longing is presented as
a debilitating condition, into other spheres of narrative and textual
presentation. In fact, one can argue that West implemented process
equally on the level of literary form, notably in the novel’s conspicuous
move toward and then away from literary nostalgia. It is as if the novel
started out as an Edwardian “problem novel,” replete with social class
conflict and feminist stirrings. Indeed, there are intimations of social

class tension in the manner of E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, as well as
an awareness of patriarchal gender structures like that of H. G. Wells’s
Ann Veronica, and even a few Conradian stabs at imperialism’s vaunted
“civilizing mission.” This Edwardian element has not escaped the atten-
tion of previous critics, including, most notably, Samuel Hynes, who
has argued that the year when Chris’s memory stops, 1901, has been
deliberately selected. As Hynes puts it:
It is the year when Queen Victoria died and her son Edward succeeded
to the throne, and gave his name to the decade that followed. Part of
the novel is Edwardian. The Edwardian years were a turbulent time
in English history, a narrow channel where the tides of Victorianism
and Modernism met. English wealth was never more ostentatious
than at that time, nor English poverty deeper. There were troubles
with workers, women, and the Irish; political and social powers
shifted. And then there was the great trouble of the War. Those trou-
bles, endured together, made England seem a different place, cut off
from its own past as by a breach of time. Chris Baldry’s shell-shocked
amnesia has erased those troubled years. (ix)
This clever reading helps to clarify my own argument. Indeed, it is in

keeping with the novel’s Edwardian opening chapters that the orderly,
aristocratic, and pastoral setting of Baldry Court comes under stress,
first by the intrusion of the working-class woman, Margaret, and then,
by the return of the soldier who brings with him the taint of the chaos,
madness, and death from the war. The first line of defense put up
against the “Edwardian agenda for change” (83), as Robert Caserio has
claimed, is the resurgence of pastoral reflexes, a transition that is textu-
ally embodied in The Return of the Soldier by the Georgian interlude of
the nostalgic episode on Monkey Island.
But there comes a point when the strain of contemporary events
becomes unmanageable and the novel departs both from the Edwardian
sense of an embattled but still largely intact British order (chapters 1–2)
and from the Georgian pastoral escapism of Monkey Island (chapters
3–4). In the last third of the novel (chapters 5–6), the text begins to
assume a more explicitly modernist outlook.3 Jenny’s visions and
her spiritual disillusionment, in addition to Dr. Anderson’s Freudian
discourse, should convince most readers that the narrative has sur-
mounted both its Edwardian and Georgian phases and is now headed
into modernist territory. This aesthetic process, the changing of the
narrative logic, is compounded by the palpably deconstructive (or shall

I say “proto-deconstructive”) ending of the story. As I have shown in
another context, West was one of the twentieth-century’s philosopher-
novelists whose reasoning anticipated in some ways the postmodern
turn in the humanities.4 In The Return of the Soldier we can see this at
work in the novel’s final homage to the centrality of process—a process
of epistemological dimension.
As the story nears its end, it focuses increasingly on what can
be described as the master-binary of the tale: an opposition of two
impulses—one towards reality and pragmatics, and the other towards
unintellectual happiness and pleasure. This dualism is made explicit
late in the novel when Jenny and Margaret discuss whether or not they
should humor Chris by letting him continue in his happy, infantile,
deluded state of mind. Margaret presents the pleasure/reality binary:
“I know nothing in the world matters so much as happiness. If any-
body’s happy you ought to let them be. . . . Let him be. If you knew how
happy he was just pottering round the garden. . . . Oh, do just let him
be” (86). Here, happiness and its corollary, pleasure, is the dominant
term of the binary: pleasure/reality. But, as it the case with any binary,
the dominant term is kept in place by its polar opposite, in this case
reality. Eventually, the possibility of maintaining pleasure’s dominance
without letting it be tempered by the claims of reality is cast into doubt:
“There was to be a finality about his happiness which usually belongs
only to loss and calamity” thinks Jenny, and she continues: “He was
to be as happy as a ring cast into the sea is lost, as a man whose coffin
has lain for centuries beneath the sod is dead” (87). At this point, the
understanding gradually dawns on the women that the binary pleasure/
reality must, in fact, be inverted:
I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when
one is adult one must raise to one’s lips the wine of the truth, heedless
that it is not sweet like milk but draws the mouth with its strength,
and celebrate communion with reality, or else walk forever queer and
small like a dwarf. Thirst for this sacrament had made Chris strike
away the cup of lies about life that Kitty’s white hands held to him,
and turn to Margaret with this vast trustful gesture of his loss of
memory. And helped by me to safeguard the dignity of the beloved,
so that neither God in his skies nor the boy peering through the
hedge should find in all time one possibility for contempt, and had
handed to him the trivial toy of happiness. We had been utterly neg-
ligent of his future, blasphemously careless of the divine essentials
of his soul. For if we left him in his magic circle there would come a
time when his delusion turned into senile idiocy. (88)
This long passage tracks the development of Chris’s quest for authentic
happiness. It becomes clear that by rejecting one type of falsehood (his
marriage with Kitty) and pursuing another (his infatuation for Margaret)
Chris is locked into a kind of death-in-life. Both relationships are equally
premised on dissimulation, make-believe, and inauthenticity. Therefore,
Jenny and Margaret take it upon themselves to reverse the binary once
and for all. This inversion (reality/pleasure) is the “sacrament” to human
dignity and sanity invoked in the passage above; it is the “wine of the
truth” that draws the mouth, all the while revealing its full-bodied and
complex flavors. By comparison, one can speculate, the pleasure/reality
binary would be something like soft-drink—sweet, cloying, and inher-
ently unhealthy. Once Chris is jolted back to reality when Margaret
shows him toys belonging to his dead son, Oliver, Chris is immediately
described as turning his back “on this fading happiness” (90).
But here is the rub. The inversion of the binary still does not hold a
genuine resolution to the larger problem at stake here. Hynes, for his part,
takes this reversal, this prioritizing of complex and difficult reality over
flat, mindless pleasure to be the ultimate message of the book: “It is a harsh
moral lesson that this novel teaches. It says that Reality is the highest
human value—higher than love, higher than happiness, and that not to
accept and honor that high value is to be less than human” (xvi). Although
this seems a plausible interpretation, the text actually does more than
simply reverse the binary pleasure/reality. It ultimately deconstructs the
binary itself. Indeed, the reality to which Chris returns after being shocked
out of his amnesia is really the falseness of his marriage and the quagmire
of the war. He is passed from the fire of delusion into the frying pan of
disillusion. The reversal of the binary accomplishes only one thing: by sav-
ing Chris from lasting senility, it delivers him into the Dantean inferno of
trench warfare, another form of madness. Rather than giving us a simple
solution by inverting the binary of the pleasure and the reality principles,
West undercuts the entire binary itself. By doing so she dissolves it into
dialectic and therefore delivers it to the authority of process. She suggests
thereby that dualisms are ultimately life-denying if indulged to the point
where we perceive of them as static and, literally, entrenched.
This message is equally applicable if we substitute nostalgia or
pastoralism for the catch-all term “happiness.” Both nostalgia and
pastoralism stand in a similar binary relationship to reality and real-
ism. Thus, what West does is not as simple as refuting nostalgia per se.
Rather, she demonstrates that the dualistic, binary logic that upholds
nostalgia (the prioritizing of pleasure over reality, the preference of the
past over the present, the longing for rural spaces over developed areas)
is in itself problematic and needs to resolve itself into the dialectical
process of mutual engagement and higher order synthesis. It is not that
modern life necessitates an escape into nostalgia or that nostalgia is the
solution to the current problems that beset either the characters in the
novel or those who lived during this critical juncture in human history.
It is rather that conventional nostalgia, one predicated upon denying
the complexities of the present while indulging in selective fixation on
a desirable past, is prelude to an ossification as deadly as the prioritiza-
tion of the present over the legitimate claims of the past.
Thus, West exposes modernism’s true conundrum: on the one hand,
she has no use for nostalgia, because nostalgia is revealed as an ulti-
mately debilitating state of mind and a useless means of escape from
the strictures of the present. On the other hand, there is a real hatred
for the present, a present poisoned by the unspeakable horrors of the
Great War and threatened by the denaturalization of the environment
through urban sprawl and industrial pollution. The novel does not end
by suggesting that people are now caught in a true double-bind because
that would bespeak stasis and ossification. And West loathed nothing
more than that. Rather, she formulated a genuine alternative to the
binary stasis implied in nostalgia. Process is at work in The Return of the
Soldier, both formally, as the novel progresses through an Edwardian,
a Georgian, and a Modernist phase; and again, it is evidenced in the
epistemological unraveling of the pleasure/reality binary, which is pro-
gressively undermined, reversed, and, ultimately, dissolved. Within this
development, nostalgia has had its day in the sun and its chance to
state its case. But ultimately, nostalgia had to make room for other pre-
occupations—an analysis of the human psyche, spiritual questioning
and reorientation, and female ascendancy—preoccupations that are all,
in West’s and many other artistic works produced during the interwar
period, more central to the modernist project.
Notes
1. See Bernard Schweizer, “Rebecca West and the Meaning of Exile.” Partial
Answers, (2010).
2. Peter Wolfe called process “her most encompassing doctrine” (12).
3. A similarly tripartite division seems to be operating in West’s next novel The
Judge. This narrative also starts out on an Edwardian footing, with a strong
suffragist and “New Woman” orientation; then during yet another pastoral
digression, it shifts emphasis and location to a rural location on the coast of
Essex. But the protagonist’s expedition to the countryside is not conducive to
the reassurance of rural revival—on the contrary, death and destruction ensue
in a dramatic climax that is, once again, fuelled by the Freudian dynamics of
an Oedipal complex and mother fixation.
4. See Bernard Schweizer, “Rebecca West’s Philosophy of History and the
Critique of Postmodernism.” Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Critical
Approaches (2006).
Works cited
Bonnett, Alastair. Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia.
New York: Continuum, 2010.
Brooks, David. “Modernism.” Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism. Eds. Martin
Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall, and John Peck. London: Routledge,
1990. 119–30.
Caserio, Robert L. “Edwardians to Georgians.” In The Cambridge History of
Twentieth-Century English Literature. Eds. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1975.
Hemmings, Robert. Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma, and World War II.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Hynes, Samuel. “Introduction.” The Return of the Soldier. New York: Penguin, 1998.
Kavka, Misha. “Men in (Shell-) Shock: Masculinity, Trauma, and Psychoanalysis
in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier.” Studies in Twentieth Century
Literature. 22:1 (winter 1998): 151–71.
Roth, Michael. “Returning to Nostalgia.” In Suzanne Nash, ed., Home and Its
Dislocation in Nineteenth-Century France. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993.
Rubenstein, Roberta. Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia, and Mourning
in Women’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave—now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Schweizer, Bernard. “Rebecca West’s Philosophy of History and the Critique
of Postmodernism.” Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Critical Approaches.
Newark: Delaware University Press, 2006.
——. “Rebecca West and the Meaning of Exile.” Partial Answers. 8:2 ( June 2010):
389–407.
——. Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010.
West, Rebecca. The Return of the Soldier. New York: Penguin, 1998.
——. Survivors in Mexico. Ed. Bernard Schweizer. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2003.
——. “The New God.” Unpublished typescript. McFarlin Special Collections,
University of Tulsa.
Wolfe, Peter. Rebecca West: Artist and Thinker. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
Wilson, Janelle L. Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning. Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont
Publishing, 2005.
2
Nostalgia, Trauma, and the
Aftermath of War: Siegfried
Sassoon and W. H. R. Rivers
Robert Hemmings
Towards the end of 1944, Siegfried Sassoon reluctantly agreed to edit

a collection of poems by soldiers serving in the Eighth Army during
the fiercely fought invasion of Italy. Of the seventy-two entries in the
collection, he specifically names only a single poem in his introduc-
tion, one which “particularly charmed” him (Introduction 11). This
poem is called “Nostalgia.” Technically unremarkable, “Nostalgia”
celebrates fondly recalled and comforting details of the poet’s distant
home, eschewing entirely direct mention of the war and its traumatic
“after-effects” (11). Sassoon’s remarks about this quiet, ordinary poem
by an unheralded soldier-poet reflect an essential tension in his own
autobiographical writing after the First World War, a tension between
nostalgia and trauma.
Sassoon’s attempts to make sense of his postwar present inevitably
involve returning through his writing to the past, the idyllic and ideal-
ized past of pre-war peace, but this distant past is persistently obtruded
by the more immediate and inescapable past of his traumatic experi-
ences in the First World War. At all autobiographical turns, the figure of
W. H. R. Rivers, whom he met in 1917 at Craiglockhart War Hospital,
acts as a “guiding spirit” (Sherston’s Progress 149). Rivers’ therapeutic
practice of “autognosis” is a key to giving provisional shape and pur-
pose to Sassoon’s increasingly nostalgic inclinations. Focusing in par-
ticular on “A Fragment of Autobiography,” “A Footnote on the War,”
and Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man in this essay, I read Sassoon’s writing
of the 1920s as an uncanny collision between prior selves that is repre-
sentative of modern (and modernist) anxieties about trauma, nostalgia,
and subjectivity.
36
Robert Hemmings 37
Nostalgia and trauma
Nostalgia is rooted in pathology and the experience of war. The young

Swiss physician Johannes Hofer’s coining of the term “nostalgia” in
the seventeenth century was based on his observation of symptoms in,
among others, Swiss soldiers fighting on foreign soil. As later commen-
tators like Jean Starobinski and George Rosen have pointed out, Hofer’s
disease has striking affinities with afflictions common to those in the
early twentieth century suffering from a range of neuroses, including
the traumatic neuroses of war. Hofer likened the all-consuming long-
ing for home to “things that impress us deeply and reappear in our
dreams,” and ascribed its cause “to a disordered imagination” (qtd. in
Rosen 342). According to Rosen, Hofer had noted:
The actual occurrence of nostalgia is revealed by a continuing mel-

ancholy, incessant thinking of home, disturbed sleep or insomnia,
weakness, loss of appetite, anxiety, cardiac palpitation, stupor, and
fever. (342)
Hofer’s symptomatology bears an uncanny resemblance to those

symptoms found at Craiglockhart and other war hospitals through-
out Europe during the First World War; they certainly characterize
some of the complaints Sassoon described in his postwar diaries and
letters.
Early conceptions of traumatic neurosis have a great deal in com-
mon with the aetiology of nostalgia. In the late seventeenth century,
Hofer speculated that a physiological alteration of channels transferring
“spirits” between brain and body underlie the symptoms he observed
in nostalgics. In nineteenth-century Europe, similarly strange symp-
toms, partial paralyses, and other bodily malfunctions arose in those
who experienced industrial or railway accidents. In Britain, this was
called “railway spine.” In America, during the Civil War, a soldier’s
nervous exhaustion on the battlefield was attributed to “windage,”
the incalculable result of exposure to the shock waves of cannon fire.
The transforming power of these shocking interactions between the
human subject and the machinery of modernity compelled early phy-
sicians of the modern industrial age to assume that the trauma of the
accident must have produced some underlying organic change. This
assumption was slow to leave medical epistemology. In the last decades
of the nineteenth century, physicians began to explore more closely

the connection between the memory of the shocking experience and
the ensuing alterations of the self. Hofer’s idea that the impressions
which lead to nostalgia can reappear in our dreams is an almost exact
prefiguring of the relation between traumatic experience and dream in
psychoanalytic terms.
During the First World War, English military physician Charles Myers
transformed the diagnosis of windage into “shell shock,” attributing
the severe somatic impairments of combat veterans to an impercepti-
ble alteration to the nervous system caused by the concussive force of
high explosive shellfire. But given the difficulties of finding somatic
causes, many physicians abandoned an organic approach to aetiology
in favour of exploring the effects of traumatic experience upon memory
and its legacy upon self-understanding. This psychological or psycho-
analytic turn in understanding the impact of war experience upon the
human subject retained influence until well after the Second World
War. Physicians in the service of the British military, like Myers and his
colleague Rivers, gave shape to these psychological models in Britain,
building on and adapting controversial psychoanalytic ideas from the
continent.
From traumatic neuroses, to shell shock, war neuroses, war stress,
battle fatigue, and posttraumatic stress disorder, notions of trauma have
dominated the twentieth century and contemporary understanding of
the psychological impact of war. Of course, trauma transcends mili-
tary experience; it informs discourses of family violence, child abuse,
slavery, and AIDS, to name but a few, and in recent years has become
a privileged psychic phenomenon and mode of inquiry in the humani-
ties and social sciences. In these terms, trauma refers, as Cathy Caruth
has addressed, to an overwhelming experience of catastrophe to which
the response occurs not immediately, but in a series of delayed and
repetitive after-effects (Caruth 11). Andreas Huyssen considers trauma,
along with the abject and the uncanny, the “master-signifiers” of the
1990s, “all of which have to do with repression, specters, and a present
repetitively haunted by the past” (8). Like nostalgia, but in a different
register, trauma is “located on the threshold between remembering
and forgetting, seeing and not seeing, transparency and occlusion” (8).
This liminality, together with the prominence of repression, specters,
and a present haunted by the past, is very much a feature of Siegfried
Sassoon’s post-First World War writing and aligns his work more closely
with the dominant concerns of modernism than either he or his critics
would concede.
Robert Hemmings 39
In the 1930s, Sassoon describes the understanding of wartime trauma

he gleaned from Rivers and Craiglockhart:
Shell shock. How many a brief bombardment had its long-delayed

after-effect in the minds of these survivors, many of whom had
looked at their companions and laughed while inferno did its best
to destroy them. Not then was their evil hour, but now; now, in the
sweating suffocation of nightmare, in paralysis, in the stammering of
dislocated speech. (Sherston’s Progress 51)
He had himself experienced the “sweating suffocation of nightmare,”

and well understood the persistence of the “evil hour” of “now”: that
is, of a present haunted by the past. For Sassoon and other veterans,
the war did not end with their withdrawal from the front-line or with
the Armistice. Six years later, in 1924 T. E. Lawrence wrote to Robert
Graves:
What’s the cause that you, and Sassoon . . . and I can’t get away from
the War? Here you are riddled with thought like an old table-leg with
worms: [Sassoon] yawing about like a ship aback: me in the ranks,
finding squalor and mistreatment the only permitted existence; what’s
the matter with us all? It’s like the malarial bugs in the blood, coming
out months and years after in recurrent attacks. (Lawrence 463)
What was the matter with them all? Lawrence’s pathological metaphor
of “recurrent attacks” contains the answer. In a word, trauma.
Sassoon’s Rivers
Sassoon met Rivers when he was officially, if controversially, diagnosed

a victim of trauma. In July 1917, already decorated with the Military
Cross (MC), he was sent by the military authorities to Craiglockhart
War Hospital. Their motives were political. Eventually published in
twelve newspapers, including The Times, and read out in the House
of Commons, Sassoon’s statement against the war was a potentially
damaging document. The War Office sought to limit the damage by
declaring that the author of “A Soldier’s Declaration” was suffering
from shell shock and therefore not of sound mind (Wilson 1 384). He
was entrusted to the care of Rivers, who had returned to England in
the spring of 1915 from ethnographic field work in the South Pacific,
assigned to psychological work in military hospitals (Slobodin 53).
Since his neurological training in Germany in the early 1890s, Rivers

had been interested in Continental approaches to neuroses and from
that point forward became an early advocate of Freudian ideas in
Britain. He gave a paper before the Edinburgh Pathological Club, six
months after he moved to Craiglockhart (Slobodin 59), on the contro-
versial subject of Freudian ideas and their potential utility (Instinct 159).
He demonstrated how Freud’s ideas could be validated by general obser-
vations of human behaviour as exemplified by himself or his friends,
and he downplayed the contentious issue of sexuality, insisting that it
was not as central to Freudian thought as either his avid supporters or
vehement detractors made out.1 Rivers emphasized the “naturalness” of
unconscious experience in human existence and the role of instinctual
impulses in the unconscious, foregrounding what he found to be the
most striking aspect of Freudian thought: the active nature of forget-
ting, especially forgetting unpleasant experience and suppressing it in
the unconscious. But unlike the typical case studies of Freud, who traced
his patient’s illness back to childhood traumas or sexual development,
Rivers focussed on the emotional conflicts of front-line experience that
produced the “flight to illness.”
Rivers held that, like the neuroses of peace time, war neuroses were
the result of not fully successful “attempts to solve the conflict between
[the] warring elements” of instincts and their controlling forces (Instinct
119). Accordingly, he saw war neuroses as a product of the conflict
between the soldier’s instinct of self-preservation and the sense of duty
that endangered his survival: the instinct to avoid danger in active
service produces fear, which is held by “the ordinary standard of our
social life” to be unmanly, “disgraceful” (Instinct 121). The “healthy”
solution to this conflict, Rivers thought, involved the suppression of
instinctive fear and its absorption into the unconscious mind, leaving
the soldier able to perform his dangerous duty. When the “unwitting”
or unconscious act of suppression was initiated by physical or mental
shock, neuroses typically resulted. That Sassoon understood repression
is evident in his poem, “Repression of War Experience,” which is named
after a 1917 Rivers essay.
Nevertheless, Sassoon dismissively referred to Craiglockhart as
“Dottyville” and insisted that there was no psychological basis for his
confinement in “the truly awful atmosphere of this place of washouts
and shattered heroes” (Diaries 1 189). Sassoon would recall in the mid-
1930s how both of them had joked about the “anti-war complex” from
which he was reputedly suffering (Sherston’s Progress 12). He asked Rivers
outright if he was a shell shock case and reports that Rivers replied,
Robert Hemmings 41
“Certainly not” (12). Compared to some of his dramatically incapaci-

tated fellow “inmates” in that “live museum of war neuroses” (12), he
was perhaps relatively more affectively stable. However, Sassoon himself
was very anxious about the state of his nerves, as shown by his wartime
diaries and the later memoirs as well as his continuing reliance after
Craiglockhart on Rivers as his spiritual guide.
Rivers provided Sassoon with a strategy to keep his anxieties at bay.
Rivers approached the treatment of neuroses, including war neuroses,
through what he called autognosis and re-education. By autognosis he
meant “the process by which the patient learns to understand the real
state of his mind and the conditions by which this state has been pro-
duced” (“Psycho-therapeutics” 437). This search for self-understanding
had to be combined with re-education, “a process in which the patient
is led to understand how his newly acquired knowledge of himself can
be utilized” (440). Sassoon’s indebtedness to Rivers is clear in the way
he adopts the concepts of autognosis and re-education, adapting them
to suit his impressionistic, poetic, and nostalgic temperament. His
autognosis, authenticated by Rivers’s authority both in person and in
memory, facilitates Sassoon’s exploration of his past, but his nostalgia,
as I will address, hinders its thoroughness.
“Autognosis” in the interwar years
In a 1921 diary entry Sassoon described the difficulty of knowing

himself and asserted the importance of being “a watchful critic” of his
own behaviour: “I must be both action and the audience; ‘produced’
by environment” (Diaries 2 47). His words echo Rivers’ sense of the
combined influence of internal and external forces that shape self-
understanding, but Sassoon comes to adopt a version of autognosis
that incorporates his increasingly nostalgic inclinations. Although his
published poetry of the early twenties was predominantly satirical, cul-
minating in his 1926 collection Satirical Poems, his diaries during these
years make it clear that he was intrigued by the potential of autognosis
to enrich his poetry, but was at the same time wary of uncovering and
writing about “the unconscious causes of unrest.”
Under Rivers’ influence he strove in his own circumscribed way
“to pluck unconscious causes of unrest from self-deceiving nature”
through the act of poetic self-reflection, as seen in The Heart’s Journey
(1927) and nearly all subsequent collections of poetry, and later, in the
semi-fictionalized Sherston memoirs (Diaries 2 47). Sassoon’s growing
autobiographical project really began with his encounter with Rivers
and autognosis. His diaries record his perception that his “real state
of mind” was a site contested by various aspects of self, the present
recollecting self, and the selves of his pre-war past and, more problem-
atically, the selves of his wartime past. Not until he engaged in poetic
form with his repressed “Fusiliering self” and his traumatic memories
was he able to pursue autognosis in his writing, inflecting it with his
own nostalgic impulses.
In a diary entry from February 1922, he stated his autognostic goal
explicitly:
I have formed an inflexible resolve to reveal my real self; my inner

self; my secret self; the self that never sees the light of day. . . . The
question now arises—which of my selves is the more worthy of
survival? Which of my selves is writing this exordium? And, hav-
ing written it, how can it be responsible for what future selves may
reveal? (Diaries 2 104)
This resolve and understanding of identity based on distinct, multi-

ple and compartmentalized selves found expression in much of his
post-war poetry. “A Fragment of Autobiography,” a poem published
only privately in 1923, attempts to trace the relationship of three ver-
sions of self—past, present, and future—as they are affected by present
experience and by memories and spectres of the past. The poem opens
in a moment of leisured rumination; during the present day in 1920
Sassoon reads Hardy by firelight. He recalls a time when he did not like
Hardy, and is suddenly confronted by his unsophisticated 1910 self, a
sportsman in cricket gear standing before him. The 1920 self tries to
engage the 1910 self in conversation, but the latter shows no signs of
recognition or interest in anything beyond his cricket bat, the weather,
and scoring runs. “WAR! . . . Can’t I sting you into life with that? . . . ”
(Diaries 2 22); not even the exclamatory explosion of capitalized letters,
or the gaps of ellipses can shock the 1910 self into imagining an exist-
ence beyond the sporting life. The present self continues:
Good-bye; I won’t detain you now; I know

You want to read The Sportsman on the lawn.
Go out and gobble strawberries. I’m a ghost;
A face that yawns in fireless wintry dawn. (22)
The 1920 self dismisses his “visitor” to leisured, epicurean satiety and
acknowledges that “I’m a ghost.” But just who is “a ghost”? Where is
Robert Hemmings 43
the “I” to be situated? The “I” has all along been the present 1920 self,
the present narrative persona of the poem; the 1910 self is the ghost that
appears before him. With the dismissal, the two selves collapse into the
weary countenance that faces the bleak onset of day. The present self
apprehends the constitutive legacy of 1910 and sees the inevitability of its
own participation in a repetitive pattern of non-recognition. The poem
concludes as the 1920 self imagines a time ten years hence when he will
haunt the memory of a 1930 self, as much a “stranger” then as his earlier
self is to him now (22). “A Fragment of Autobiography” provides an early
example of Sassoon’s technique of juxtaposing different temporal versions
of self, the effect of which reveals the interconnectedness of past and
present, the intrusion of war into the peaceful sporting life of youth.
Nevertheless, his determination to apply autognostic principles to his
writing had obvious limitations. While autognosis stimulated an explo-
ration of the past, Sassoon’s nostalgic inclinations tempered gestures
of open or full disclosure. As he would later write, “All human beings
desire to be glad. I prefer to remember my own gladness and good luck”
(Old Century 233). Autognostic tendencies towards remembering and
transparency run up against Sassoon’s more persistent “preference” not
exactly for forgetting, but for selective memories and occlusion. One
such striking site of occlusion is sexuality. When he first contemplated
prose autobiography, he seriously considered articulating an inner,
“secret self”—his homosexuality—which part of him longed to express
with candor and even pride. In the early twenties, E. M. Forster lent him
a copy of the unpublished novel Maurice, which he found both moving
and inspiring. In his diary he contemplated again writing a Proustian
novel of memories which would reveal his true feelings unmasked and
unburdened. He imagined this work as a “Madame Bovary of sexual inver-
sion . . . a Tess created from my own experience!” (Diaries 2 53). Several
years later, after reading J. R. Ackerley’s Prisoner of War (1925), a play
about a tormented homosexual officer, he told a friend at the Reform
Club that he would write an unabashed autobiography on the same
theme (Diaries 3 234). The desire to express his homosexuality haunted
him for years, but was never realized. In his diary in 1939 he noted that
“Homosexuality has become a bore; the intelligentsia have captured it”
(Diaries 2 53n). Homosexuality, indeed sexuality of any kind, does not
feature explicitly in any of his writing published during his lifetime, its
absence an indication of the extent of his withdrawal and reclusion.
In spite of his resolve to express the complexity of his “real self,” he
also typically resisted explicitly incorporating the wartime soldier aspect
of self into his poetic representations of subjectivity. This resistance is
in keeping with Sassoon’s purposeful nostalgia, directed to what he

called “gladness,” but it also accords with another precept gleaned from
Rivers. In “Repression of War Experience,” an essay Rivers wrote in 1917
(the title of which Sassoon adopted for a poem in the same year), Rivers
cautioned against the damaging consequences of a “wartime culture
of forgetting” tacitly encouraged by non-combatants (Instinct 187). At
the same time, Rivers maintained that for soldiers traumatized by their
war experience “it is just as harmful to dwell persistently upon pain-
ful memories or anticipations, and brood upon feelings of regret and
shame, as to attempt to banish them wholly from the mind” (203). For
the most part, Sassoon embraced this caveat in Rivers’ approach to the
past in his adaptation of autognosis, favoring a resistance to dwelling
persistently on dark and painful memories of soldiering. Like the ghost
of 1910 from “A Fragment of Autobiography,” he had to be stung into
the darkness. Such a sting came in a letter he received in late February
1926 asking him to contribute to a regimental history. Wary of getting
caught up in war memories, he initially refused, but the request stimu-
lated his poetic energies in unexpected ways: he wrote “A Footnote on
the War: On Being Asked to Contribute to a Regimental History,” unpub-
lished during his lifetime. The poem enacts the disruptive disinterment
of repressed memories of war. Its key trope is exhumation, uncovering
spatial and temporal layers buried in the sediment of time. The poem
is a “footnote,” that is, something which appears below the main body
of text, but since there is no Regimental History to appear beneath, the
“footnote” becomes the text and the first act of exhumation, uncover-
ing what is buried, or more precisely what should be buried.
“A Footnote on the War” operates in a series of contrasts between
peace and war, proceeding deeper into the buried past till it reaches a
point beyond articulation. It opens with a contrast between the Sunday
morning in London of the present, with Sassoon inside and protected,
and the “gory” French Front of “nine years ago,” when he was outside
and exposed (War Poems 147). He then notices on his desk the letter
requesting his contribution to the regimental history. Sassoon wonders
with trepidation, “What can I unbury? . . . / Seven years have crowded
past me since I wrote a / Word on [the] war” (148). He is reluctant to
exhume his own “wounding memories of the dead” because
. . . in those seven odd years I have erected

A barrier, that my soul might be protected
Against the invading ghosts of what I saw
In years when Murder wore the mask of Law. (148)
Robert Hemmings 45
Returning nonetheless to his wartime diary, he tells himself that “My

Fusiliering self has died away,” and the “scribbled entries” of the diary
are “moribund—remote / From the once-living context of his mind”
(148–9). Again compartmentalizing aspects of himself, he sees the
“Fusiliering self” as dead and buried beneath the protective “barrier”
he has “erected.” Even as he seeks to ward off the “invading ghosts,” he
finds himself conjuring them up: “a fair-haired Cameronian / Propped
in his pool of blood while we were throwing / Bombs at invisible
Saxons” (149–50). This “plutonian / Cartoon” has a haunting intensity
that he cannot “join up” with the present comforts of his music room
(149). At the end he wills himself to turn away from the horrors of this
past:
. . . War’s a mystery
Beyond my retrospection. And I’m going
Onward, away from that Battalion history
With all its expurgated dumps of dead:
And what remains to say I leave unsaid. (150)
And yet, even as he resolves to move “Onward, away from that Battalion
history” he cannot help articulating at least some of the things that he
determines to “leave unsaid.”
As he wrote in 1937 of frontline experience: it is “hateful and repel-
lent, unforgettable and inescapable” (Introduction ix). The experience
remains, to recall Huyssen, in the “repression, specters, and a present
repetitively haunted by the past.” But onwards Sassoon resolved to
move away from mourning the losses of dead, away from the trauma
of war, a movement into the liminal space “between remembering and
forgetting, seeing and not seeing, transparency and occlusion,” that is,
into the space of modern nostalgia.
Prose autognosis
Through much of the 1920s Sassoon had in his desultory way developed
his skills as a prose writer, largely through the diary he started during the
First World War, receiving encouragement from literary friends as diverse
as Edmund Gosse, Osbert Sitwell, T. E. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster. His
plans for a “Madame Bovary of sexual inversion” evolved into hopes to
write “a powerful, realistic modern novel full of gloom and grandeur
and tragic truthfulness” with a cosmopolitan, non-sporting poet as the
central character.2 Though his prose books developed differently, it is
significant that both of these unrealized plans are autobiographical

in nature. In the 1920s Sassoon was very much the cosmopolitan and
romantic poet (who had largely given up the sporting life), and whose
emotional and sexual adventures had led him through the fashionable
destinations of Europe. His diaries record these interactions. But when
it came to writing his “novel,” these aspirations collapsed under the
weight of Sassoon’s nostalgic vision. The autobiographical impulse,
fused with nostalgia, drove his self-reflexive and autognostic inclina-
tions back deeper into his past, beyond the too-near twenties, ripe with
emotional and sexual confusions and tensions, past the war years and
their traumatic turmoil, back to the safety of a reconstructed childhood
assembled from selected memories.
In the autumn of 1926 Sassoon returned to his childhood home in
Kent to visit his mother and during this visit he felt himself “invaded
by all the strangeness of the past” (qtd. in Wilson 2 176). As meetings
earlier in the year with his former comrades had disturbed lurking
memories of his war experience, encounters with his mother and his
former neighbors led to vivid recollections of the calmer, earlier past
of peace and childhood. Sassoon harnessed the power of this “strange
invasion” for Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Early in the writing process
he realized that these childhood recollections must be shown to lead up
to his war experience (Wilson 2 178). That is, the project of autognosis
both vitalized his nostalgic inclinations and revealed their abutment
to trauma. The second Sherston volume, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
(1930), explores the heart of Sassoon’s traumatic war experience, but it
is significant that the war is figured as an encroachment into the sport-
ing and leisured rural world of his childhood and youth.
Sassoon created his autobiographical persona—roughly one fifth
of himself, as he suggested to Graves—in sharp contrast to his initial
novelistic aspirations of sexual candor. While George Sherston is an
enthusiastic (indeed obsessed) sportsman, he is without sexual appetite
or inclination, without interest in the art of poetry: the recollecting
Sassoon focuses his attention on reconstructing his idyllic past. The epi-
graph from Shakespeare’s Richard II is aptly chosen: “This happy breed
of men, this little world.” John of Gaunt’s idealizing vision of England,
with its emphasis on happiness, masculinity, and the autonomy of the
English world, exactly suits the setting Sassoon creates. In contrast to
the postwar 1920s, replete with unemployment, ripplings of unrest in
the Empire, and divisive labor disputes, Sassoon’s 1890s were a golden
time for a particular English social geography of rural leisure featuring
the acquisition of the right horses, the thrill of point-to-point races,
Robert Hemmings 47
and long, hotly (but decently) contested cricket matches. Sassoon’s

gentried class was secure within the pinnacle of British imperial domi-
nance, and this security underwrites Sherston’s pursuit of leisure in an
isolated world of boys and men. Female characters do exist, but they are
functional and peripheral to the male-dominated world of fox-hunting
and cricket, which are both in turn preparations for Sherston’s, and
Sassoon’s, ultimate masculine realm, the army. The most significant
female character, especially early in the narrative, is Sherston’s aunt.
While she may hold the purse strings, the groom-gardener Dixon holds
the reins that both guide young Sherston in his horsemanship and
deftly manipulate his aunt into supporting his masculine pursuits. Aunt
Evelyn is a hapless female bystander and unwitting enabler of sporting
hobbies Dixon so skillfully instills in her nephew. As such Dixon serves
as a father-figure, foreshadowing Rivers’ role in Sherston’s Progress, the
third volume of memoirs, and a mentor who pursues through sport the
harmony the natural world affords to the privileged social classes.
The Sherston volumes provide a vision of Englishness consistent with
the Englishness Blunden sought to preserve in his essays and poetry, in
which he posits a nation balanced and at home in the natural world,
away from the broil of modern urban industrialization (Blunden 353–8).
Through the woods on horseback, or between the wickets on the village
green, young Sherston learns the same joys of being English. Distinctly
absent from Sassoon’s vision are references to the social conditions that
might cloud the golden age he reconstructs. The darker realities of the
organic community of rural England, the majority of whom contributed
to the brute work of the farming economy that sustained rural English
life, and lived in conditions far from idyllic, have no place in Sassoon’s
nostalgic recreations. If it is ever mentioned, social hardship is con-
nected to the industrialized metropolis. On changing trains in Waterloo
station, Sherston notices the sprawling and “dilapidated tenements and
warehouse” with a certain air of disgust: “Poverty was a thing I hated to
look in the face; it was like the thought of illness and bad smells, and
I resented the notion of all those squalid slums spreading out into the
uninfected green country” (Fox-hunting Man 81). Poverty is not so much
a social ill, or condemnation of societal values, but a vague, distasteful
and inconvenient contagion that threatens Sassoon’s treasured recrea-
tion of a particular social geography of England.
In the nostalgic confines of Sassoon’s first autognostic journey in
prose, home and its sensual particulars are the shimmery high points.
Sassoon’s portrayal of the resplendent pastoral comforts of his childhood
home, refracted through the semi-fictional lens of Sherston, is an implicit
response to what historian Svetlana Boym identifies as modern nostal-

gia’s object of mourning: the absence of a physically and spiritually real-
ized sense of home, “an enchanted world with clear borders and values”
(Boym 8).3 The key moments where the recollecting subject attains a
sense of quasi-spiritual interfusion with the natural world occur always
at home. Sherston’s exploits at public school, based upon Sassoon’s alma
mater Marlborough, and his undistinguished career at Cambridge play no
role in the narrative. What is more important is the renewed appreciation
of home he gains upon returning there from periods away at school.
Back for the summer holidays, Sherston is attuned to the relative
comforts of home and its harmonic integration into the natural world:
My window was wide open when I went to bed, and I had left the
curtains half-drawn. I woke out of my deep and dreamless sleep to
a gradual recognition that I was at home and not in the cubicled
dormitory at Ballboro’ . . . .
I loved the early morning; it was luxurious to lie there, half-awake,
and half-aware that there was a pleasantly eventful day in front of
me. . . . Presently I would get up and lean on the window ledge to see
what was happening in the world outside. (Fox-hunting Man 52)
What he sees are starlings nestled in the jasmine, and the distant tree-
tops reaching toward the brightening morning sky. The eventful day
that awaits him involves a purloined slice of cake from the pantry and
a dramatic village cricket match. There is in this passage a Proustian
sensitivity to the luxuriousness of embracing the quiet pleasures of a
privileged life in the country.
Having decided to leave Cambridge without a degree, and secured
his aunt’s support of his decision not to pursue legal studies in London,
Sherston finds himself back in his home county, en route to a cricket
match:
The air was Elysian with early summer and the shadows of steep white
clouds were chasing over the orchards and meadows; sunlight sparkled
on green hedgerows that had been drenched by early morning show-
ers. As I was carried past it all I was lazily aware through my dreaming
and unobservant eyes that this was the sort of world I wanted. For
it was my own countryside, and I loved it with an intimate feeling,
though all its associations were crude and incoherent. I cannot think
of it now without a sense of heartache, as if it contained something
which I have never quite been able to discover. (76)
Robert Hemmings 49
Again the landscape of rural England is the object of his dreaming,

intimate love. “Now,” now that the recollecting Sherston is separated
from this beloved countryside, he can think of it only with pangs of
heartache. This is what Boym calls “reflective nostalgia,” in which the
algos, the pain of separation from the home, animates the nostalgic who
dwells in “the imperfect process of remembrance” (41). This passage
is also noteworthy for its explicit literary reference. While figuratively
“elysian” refers to a place of perfect happiness, which is the primary
meaning in this passage, it also invokes death, as “elysium” is liter-
ally the resting place of the blessed dead in Greek mythology. Like the
reproduction of George Frederic Watts’s painting “Love and Death,”
which hangs in Aunt Evelyn’s drawing room and repeatedly captures
Sherston’s attention, the elysian air of this richly nostalgic passage
draws together perfection and death, reifying the painful longing for a
home, a time and a place that has irrevocably passed, to which one can
never properly return.
Watts’s painting depicts the figure of a cherubic boy, “Love,” who
cannot bar a shrouded figure, “Death,” from entering the house; Watts
depicts them in stasis upon the threshold. All has yet to be lost. In simi-
lar fashion, Sassoon constructs the nostalgia of the pre-war past to hold
off his shrouded memories of traumatic war experience, serving as a
protective mechanism against what Rivers described in his “Repression
of War Experience” essay as the “harmful” consequences of brooding
“upon painful memories” and “feelings of regret and shame.” As well,
Sassoon’s version of modern nostalgia in part expresses pangs for an
absent absolute, for “a home that is both physical and spiritual, the
edenic unity of time and space before entry into history” (Boym 8).
Through much of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man Sherston dwells, like
the boy, Love, in a pre-lapsarian Edenic time and space, but with the
declaration of war and Sherston’s ready enlistment in the army, death
looms inevitably marking an entry into traumatic history.
The concluding image of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man features
Sherston in a trench, immersed in a life without comfort, thinking of his
last visit with Aunt Evelyn. Her comforting home, and the community
of supporting country characters, represent a rural England whose values
exist in sharp contrast to his growing disillusionment with the role of
the English church in the war, and the future prominence of death in
Sherston’s military exploits as they unfold. In the final two volumes
of the trilogy, the chronology of the narrative is immersed in wartime;
there is no pre-war period to provide a nostalgic counter to the chaotic
disruption and trauma of war. Instead, the nostalgic locus shifts from the
temporal to the spatial register. In the second Sherston volume, Memoirs

of an Infantry Officer, Sassoon juxtaposes nostalgically rendered French
landscapes relatively untouched by war and imbued with the verdure of
pastoral England with the traumatized landscapes of battle-torn France
and Flanders, until the disillusionment erupts into Sherston’s “Soldier’s
Declaration” against the conduct of the war. Sherston’s incarceration
into Slateford War Hospital (Craiglockhart) at the outset of the final
Sherston volume facilitates the appearance of Rivers into his life, a new
father-figure to replace Dixon and help Sherston to negotiate the after-
effects of his war experience. Fittingly, Sherston’s very last words of the
trilogy summarize the lessons of Rivers in a homily: “it is only from the
inmost silences of the heart that we know the world for what it is, and
ourselves for what the world has made us” (Sherston’s Progress 150). It
is a succinct reiteration of autognosis, if a rather wishful assessment of
Sassoon’s own autobiographical enterprise.
Nostalgia: pathos and pathology
Like any nostalgic, Sassoon looked to the past to make sense of the
present. Sassoon’s nostalgia reflects the Victorianist aesthetic values he
championed, the Georgian embrace of a distant English rural way of
life, and the modernist tradition he hated but could not escape. On the
one hand, he dismissed what he saw as the arid intellectualism of mod-
ernists like Eliot, Pound, and Wyndham Lewis, and others who ignored
or criticized his poetry and prose of the interwar period as backward
looking. On the other hand, he sought their approbation and remained
chagrined when he was thought of as yesterday’s man. And yet he did
look backwards; he was in a way yesterday’s man. But in some ways,
so too were Eliot and Pound and Lewis, who looked to the past, albeit
beyond the nineteenth century, for order to counter the chaos of con-
temporaneous history, which troubled each in a different manner. As
Stephen Spender has it in The Struggle of the Modern, modernists sought
to combine an understanding of the virtues of classical order with the as
yet untapped potential of modern technology to transform the modern
world through art (207). And yet, this tacit acceptance of technology
is combined paradoxically with “an intense hatred and contempt for
modern life” (208). While one of the preconditions for nostalgia is a dis-
satisfaction with the present, for Spender it is this degree of utter hatred
for the present that distinguishes modernist nostalgics from any of their
predecessors. While previous nostalgics looked to the past for models
to inspire their rejuvenated artistic actions in the present, modernist
Robert Hemmings 51
nostalgics like Pound and Wyndham Lewis felt that their geniuses, so
entrenched in the values of a past period, received no sustenance in
the abhorred climate of the present (214). The subjects of modernist
poetry are accordingly rootless, alienated, ironically detached in the
decay of the industrializing present. Characterising his aesthetics as
happily, indeed confrontationally Victorian, Sassoon took a kind of per-
verse pride in distinguishing himself from the high modernists, but he
shared with them a powerful nostalgic impulse. Spender once referred
to nostalgia as “the peculiar modern disease” (247), and disease, both
figuratively and literally, turns out to be a fruitful way to investigate this
prominent modern phenomenon.
A range of scholars in the humanities have come to read nostal-
gia more complexly as a filter through which memories of the past
are ordered and shaped by forces of the present. According to Linda
Hutcheon, nostalgia “is the past as imagined, as idealized through
memory and desire . . . but also [through] forgetting” (195). This con-
stitutive dialectic between memory and forgetting likens nostalgia to
the underlying tension of trauma, which Andreas Huyssen locates
“on the threshold between remembering and forgetting, seeing and
not seeing, transparency and occlusion.” For Svetlana Boym nostalgia
functions as “not merely an artistic device but a strategy of survival, a
way of making sense of the impossibility of homecoming” in a time of
crumbling empire (Boym xvii). The erosion of the British empire after
the First World War underscores the importance of nostalgia as a strat-
egy of survival for writers like Sassoon invested in a social geography of
Englishness to which homecoming was no longer possible. In this inter-
war period nostalgia had already acquired its pejorative sense, indicat-
ing a futile yearning for a past way of life from which one has been
permanently cut off (Starobinski 101). The sense of emotion, passion,
and suffering in the Greek root of pathos is present in diluted form in
the pejorative connotations of nostalgia. The OED cites David Garnett’s
description from 1933 of “that violent sentimental nostalgia . . .
felt by the very young [girls] about the very recent past” as evidence of
“sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past.”
Nostalgia in Garnett’s usage is a useless, childish longing, more particu-
larly, the longing of a girl, a concept steeped in pathos, but its pathos is
undermined by the implied immaturity of the speaker and uselessness
of the period for which the speaker pines. In this depreciatory sense,
nostalgia is a feeling certainly far from the notion of masculine heroism
associated with the daring exploits of an empire builder or a soldier-
poet. But this limiting conception of nostalgia fails to acknowledge
how Sassoon deliberately uses it as a kind of vaccine, a consciously

held means of inoculating himself and his readers against the renewal
of trauma. In this respect Sassoon’s use of nostalgia, with its capacity to
selectively remember, and to forget, as a private “strategy of survival”
adumbrates modernism’s public use of nostalgia, its determination to
shore up fragments against the culture’s ruin. As Sassoon’s case attests,
nostalgia in the period between the wars becomes sufficiently malle-
able to accommodate English nationalist, conservative, and masculine
aspirational subjectivity in search of an elusive, illusive, and allusive
sense of home.
Notes
This essay is adapted from material in Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon,
Trauma and the Second World War. Edinburgh UP, 2008. Please see http://www.
euppublishing.com/book/9780748633067.
1. Like Freud, Rivers began his medical training in neurology, and this field
offered both men an important mutual influence: the British neurologist,
John Hughlings Jackson. Rivers revered Hughlings Jackson as a “father-
figure” (as Rivers himself was to be revered as a “father-figure” by Sassoon),
and was deeply affected by his death in 1911 (Slobodin 45). Freud’s early
work on aphasia is particularly indebted to the ideas of Hughlings Jackson,
whom Freud “regarded as his mentor in this sphere” (Dewhurst 107). Indeed,
Hughlings Jackson’s conceptual understanding of brain functions, which
Freud praised in his neurological writings, helped Freud give shape to his
theories (Wallesch 22). For instance, Freud’s first reference to “regression” can
be traced to the Jacksonian idea of “reduction” (Dewhurst 108), as can Rivers’s
use of the term (Instinct 148, 251).
2. These are Sassoon’s words from his notes towards an incomplete fourth
volume of autobiography (qtd. in Wilson 2 175).
3. Boym’s “modern nostalgic” evolves from the nostalgic sufferer first identified
by Johannes Hofer in 1688, one beset by a “disease of an afflicted imagina-
tion [which] incapacitated the body” (4). Often those afflicted were soldiers
serving on foreign soil, always they were removed by circumstance from
home. While nostalgia shared some important symptoms with melancholia,
Hofer’s disease became for Boym “not merely an individual anxiety but a
public threat” with political and nationalist implications (5). The shift from
the individual to the national accounts for the importance of empire, and a
glorified imperial past, replete with clearly delineated social values and state
boundaries, which represents for the modern nostalgic a longed for but ever
elusive sense of order in contrast to the relative chaos of the present. While
Boym’s primary focus in her book is on the nostalgia arising from the col-
lapse of the Soviet empire, I maintain that the dynamics of this nostalgia are
relevant too to Sassoon’s interwar England, which is increasingly confronted
with the consequences of the collapse of the British Empire. Sassoon’s
Robert Hemmings 53
modern nostalgia is inflected by individual trauma (mediated by Rivers’

contributions) and a kind of national, imperial longing, both of which were
profoundly affected by the First World War.
Works cited
Blunden, Edmund. “The Preservation of England.” Votive Tablets: Studies Chiefly
Appreciative of English Authors and Books. London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1931.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Dewhurst, Kenneth. Hughlings Jackson on Psychiatry. Oxford: Sandford, 1982.
Hofer, Johannes. Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia. Trans. Carolyn Kiser Anspach.
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2 (1934): 376–91.
Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, nostalgia, and the postmodern.” Methods for the Study
of Literature as Cultural Memory. Ed. Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 189–207.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003.
Lawrence, T. E. The Letters of T. E. Lawrence. Ed. David Garnett. London: Cape,
1938. “nostalgia.” Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 1944.
Rivers, W. H. R. Instinct and the Unconscious. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1924.
——. “Psycho-Therapeutics.” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. Ed. James
Hastings. Vol. 10. New York: Scribner’s, n.d.
Rosen, George. “Nostalgia: a ‘Forgotten’ Psychological Disorder.” Psychological
Medicine 5 (1975): 340–54.
Sassoon, Siegfried. Diaries [1] 1915–1918. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber,
1983.
——. Diaries [2] 1920–1922. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1981.
——. Diaries [3] 1923–1925. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1985.
——. Foreword. The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg. Ed. Gordon Bottomley and
Denys Harding. London: Chatto and Windus, 1937.
——. Introduction. Poems from Italy: Verses Written by Members of the Eighth Army
in Sicily and Italy July 1943–March 1944. London: Harrap, 1945.
——. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Illustr. edn. London: Faber, 1929.
——. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. 1930. London: Faber, 1965.
——. Sherston’s Progress. 1936. London: Faber, 1983.
——. The War Poems. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1983.
Slobodin, Richard. W. H. R. Rivers. New York: Columbia UP, 1978.
Spender, Stephen. The Struggle of the Modern. Berkeley: U of California P, 1963.
Starobinski, Jean. “The Idea of Nostalgia.” Diogenes 54 (1966): 81–103.
Wallesch, C. W. “Hughlings Jackson and European Neurology.” Hierarchies in
Neurology: A Reappraisal. Ed. Christopher Kennard and Michael Swash. London:
Springer-Verlag, 1989. 17–23.
Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon [1]: The Making of a War Poet: A Biography
(1886–1918). London: Duckworth, 1998.
——. Siegfried Sassoon [2]: The Journey from the Trenches, 1918–1967. New York:
Routledge, 2003.
3
You Can’t Go Home Again:
Ambivalent Nostalgia in
T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
Gabrielle McIntire
T. S. Eliot writes everywhere of memory. From his earliest work through

and beyond the zeugmatic phrase “mixing/memory and desire” that
appears in the opening lines of The Waste Land, where seemingly incom-
mensurate pulls of the past are in an agonizing contest with the present-
ness of longing, Eliot persistently renders the labor of what it means to
write the vitality, vicissitudes, founderings, and compulsions of recollec-
tion. Quite surprisingly, though, we rarely find evidence in Eliot’s work
of the kind of sentimental, nostalgic longing for past time that so many
other memory-driven modernists passionately describe, from Marcel
Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, to W. B. Yeats’s nostalgias for a fad-
ing Celtic inheritance, to Virginia Woolf’s elegiac laments for her mother
in To the Lighthouse, and her lost brother, Thoby, in The Waves, to Vera
Brittain’s contemplations of a pre-World-War-One England as “The
lovely legacy of a vanished world” (Testament of Youth 73). That is, even
though the modernist avant-garde was compelled to write the new and
forge ahead into futures of form and content ostensibly unencumbered
with the past, the nostalgic mode was not entirely shut down. T. S. Eliot,
though, rarely participated in such backward glances, repressing or sub-
limating nostalgic impulses rather than indulging them.
Indeed, much of the dramatic tension of Eliot’s verse occurs because
his speakers repeatedly strive to convince themselves that there is no
surplus benefit to maintaining an emotional cathection to the intensest
desires of the past. In his relatively early poem, “Gerontion” (1920), for
example, we find a confessional defense that directly repudiates pas-
sions of the past: “I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep
it/Since what is kept must be adulterated?” (58). This statement—which
amounts to nothing less than an equation for dispensing with one’s
profoundest feelings—both confirms and contradicts Eliot’s famous
54
Gabrielle McIntire 55
critical doctrine of “impersonality” that he expresses in “Tradition and

the Individual Talent” (1919). In “Gerontion” the speaker attests, in a
rather personal voice, that he has known passion, even if the present-
tense voice seeks to dispense with these feelings through a logic that
maps its deterioration and debasement. “To adulterate,” the OED tells
us, was originally linked with adultery; over time, though, it has come
to mean “To render spurious or counterfeit; to falsify, corrupt, debase,
esp. by the admixture of baser ingredients.” Eliot’s utilitarian logic
affirms the uselessness of passion as he simultaneously justifies the loss
of emotional intensity with a Freudian-sounding reality-principle: it is
better to sever ourselves from past desires, since whatever we preserve
from prior cathections must inevitably suffer the negative corruption
of time. In other words, since nothing of the past’s passions can be
preserved purely, as they were, we may as well not labor to guard against
their loss. To lose them as they were is unavoidable.
Ten years later, in “Ash Wednesday” (1930), Eliot again advises
against keeping passions of the past, insisting on the austere value of
present time:
Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounced the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again (16–23)
Eliot composed this poem—dedicated in its earliest versions to “my

wife” (Vivienne, from whom he was already estranged)—just three years
after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, enfolding now the language
of the religious ascetic into his resistance to nostalgic remembrance.
Again, Eliot emphasizes the purity of a specific past time and event,
suggesting not only that longings for such a past ought to be controlled
and repudiated, but that the present moment will offer adequate com-
pensations: “I rejoice that things are as they are.” In this gesture Eliot
bolsters his ongoing efforts to be the impersonal poet par excellence,
while now adding a theological critique to his long-time secular cri-
tiques of sentimentality, renouncing desires that might make us want
to “turn again”—perhaps to the past’s seeming plenitudes and its still-
vibrant remains—seeking instead to accept the simple grace of what is.
Defining nostalgia
Where, though—if anywhere—do we find an emotive engagement

with the private longings of and for a lost past that Eliot’s verse seems
so often to arouse only to repudiate? I want to propose that an unre-
solved nostalgia does erupt at various points in Eliot’s verse, and I want
to emphasize two instances of this: first, the epigraph that shadows his
first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, dedicated to his
friend “Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915/mort aux Dardanelles,” and second,
much later, in the opening passages of “Burnt Norton” (1935), the first
of the Four Quartets, when he writes,
Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. (11–14)
Both instances take us into the veiled terrain of the highly personal,
with Eliot writing out passionate attachments to very real people in a
coded script that concedes and confesses while it hides and displaces.
Looking again to the Oxford English Dictionary, we are reminded that
nostalgia’s etymology takes us to the ancient Greek, where the noun
nostos designates a “return home”—specifically the mythical “return
home” of Odysseus and his men after the Trojan War. In roughly 1756
nostos was combined with the Greek, algos, meaning “pain” (compare
with fibromalgia, neuralgia, athralgia, etc) to join the English lexicon.
In its late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century meanings nostalgia came
especially to describe a homesickness, or home-pain, where one achingly
yearns for that place—both homely and home-like—where one might
find respite from the ongoing burdens of a temporal and geographic
dislocation that increasingly characterized modern human subjectivity.1
The term signified a condition of being in pain for want of one’s heim or
nostos, where desires to return to the perceived pleasure of that former
“home” could engender severe psychic and even physical pain. What
we encounter in early uses of the word, then, is a noun that designates
a voyage, a movement, and a cycling back toward the heimlich-like
(both canny and home-like, as Freud describes it) haven of a familiar
locus that one always hopes to re-encounter, and perhaps to re-possess.
The nominalization at play in such a psychically active type of memory
also suggests that our concepts of a return home contain an illusion of
that place’s staticity. Even in our postmodern currencies, we fantasize
that nostos—that return to a safe, habitable, and perhaps almost sacred

space—is an achievable project that one might finally attain (or re-attain).
Perhaps in the re-turn one would conquer home-sickness to achieve the
home-healthiness of our own individuation.2
The figures who populate Eliot’s poems seem to be suffering perpetu-
ally from the unbelonging, un-ease, and un-homeliness of the modern
condition. Indeed, we can say that the experience of the world for most
of Eliot’s speakers from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to The
Waste Land and Four Quartets is one of a deeply rooted unheimlichkeit
(unhomeliness/uncannyness) where any safe haven of home is repeat-
edly and painfully deferred and elusive. We might think of the perma-
nent state of anxious unrest in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
where repetitive questions such as “‘Do I dare?’” and ‘Do I dare?’” . . .
“Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” (45–6) help to propel the poem’s
tense and alienated unease, rendering a subjectivity discomfited by
the twentieth-century landscape of both the human and the inhu-
man. One speaker laments, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (73–4). In The Waste Land,
several of Eliot’s speakers are at a loss about how to inhabit what Rainer
Maria Rilke has called “our interpreted world,” where we “don’t feel
very securely at home” (“The First Elegy,” 13 and 12). As if extending
Prufrock’s dramatic question, “how should I begin?” (59 and 69) with
another set of queries that also meet a cognitive impasse, one of Eliot’s
speakers in “A Game of Chess” asks:
‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?

I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
What shall we ever do?’ (131–4)
This is the unheimlichkeit of a figure who is neither at home within the

home—needing to “rush out . . . and walk the street” (131)—nor in the
public sphere of the cityscape that promises little more than humilia-
tion from such an impulse. The wasted land of the poem also, of course,
signifies the ruined potential and lost fecundity of a place, a geography,
a locus, and a culture where one would not be condemned to wander
between consciousnesses, among Inferno-like “crowds of people, walk-
ing round in a ring” (56), or amidst “the agony in stony places” (324).
The places of home that Eliot seeks in his poetry are also usually
mythical, ancestral, or associated with his childhood. He writes with
some pathos about the “Dry Salvages” of the Massachusetts coast of his
boyhood, the Anglican chapel of “Little Gidding,” and the “East Coker”
of his seventeenth-century ancestors. Each place functions as a mythic
displacement of longings for the past by a poet who became a transat-
lantic emigré after already having abandoned his earliest home in the
mid-west of St. Louis for the high-brow culture of Boston and Harvard,
and whose unplaceable accent always gave away his uprootedness. Even
the chapel in The Waste Land exemplifies yet another failure of a return
to homeliness, being ultimately not a place for worship, but “only the
wind’s home./ It has no windows, and the door swings” (389–90).
Fundamentally a kinetic mnemonic, nostalgia pulls us, as if toward
a magnet, to a past we fetishize, taking us back to anteriorities whose
unconscious unrest still resides even if we think we have mastered it.
The supposed surplus of meaning of our phantastical nostalgias inti-
mates that a plenitude of being and experience were once achievable
and would be achievable again if only we could manage to return to
that home. As such, nostalgic thinking brings us face-to-face with the
intimacy of time’s collapsibility. Fredric Jameson argues in “Walter
Benjamin, or Nostalgia” that for Charles Baudelaire, “Commemoration
[Andenken] is the secularized version of the adoration of holy relics” (62).
We can say, too, that nostalgia, commemorates a vanished and almost
sacred time when, as Roderick Peters proposes, “the core of one’s being
[was] touched” (136). As Peters suggests, nostalgia seeks to re-approach
a “lost state of being” that has “to do with not feeling in conflict, not
having constantly to struggle; it is almost like the longing of organic life
to return to the inorganic state of being” (136). Perhaps not far from
the Freudian death instinct, as Berthold-Bond argues, which perpetually
“calls the self to a path of regression to a state of rest” (366), the nostal-
gic impulse not only draws us toward an ineffable past, but also “call[s]
spirit away from the strife of [a Hegelian model of] evolution back to a
past which it yearns for as a scene of peace and repose” (366).
Nostalgia’s pull has many faces of desire, all calling us away from
the “groaning and travail” of ongoing becoming (to borrow from the
words of St. Paul) to the homelike restitution of a past where we might
find something like the “peace [that] passeth all understanding” of the
“shantih shantih shantih” that closes The Waste Land. As a personalized
form of commemoration in which we are brought again into proxim-
ity with a past where uncertainties about the future have been allayed
because we have already faced that future’s ambiguous dream and con-
sequences, nostalgia re-enacts a cathection to the (perceived) superiority
of prior experience, and in that re-cathection such “lost” time becomes
almost holy to us. Emily Dickinson writes in 1851, “Home is a holy
thing—nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals” (47).

The “turning again” of nostalgia, then, insists on collapsing the dis-
tance between our presents and these familiar—perhaps even family-
like—pasts, to momentarily take us to a place of rest that is, nevertheless,
all too tenuous.
Part of nostalgia’s wager is that it is possible to become present again
to our favorite periods, places, or episodes of the past by achieving a
kind of ideal, mnemonically infused temporality where such experi-
ences would be infinitely retrievable. Nostalgia tells us that we can
be—with all our being—there, in the past, again. Furthermore, nos-
talgia may even allow us to appreciate aspects of the past psychically
for the very first time, since from the vantage point of the present one
can relativize “good” and “bad” memories in hierarchy: both the best
and the most traumatic stand out amidst the forgotten or the merely
unexceptional. As Eliot writes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
“the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious
present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the
past’s awareness of itself cannot show” (39). Eliot is writing here with
an eye toward “the historical sense” of literary and cultural traditions
(38), but his words could also apply to the temporal paradoxes at the
heart of nostalgic remembrance. In nostalgic recollection we might say
that the remembering subject blends present and past to forge a kind of
ideal memory that seeks not only to restitute lost time, but to achieve
a kind of super-time where hindsight and a retrospective awareness of
past agons work together superimposed, thus offering the pleasures of
future-anterior vision.
We might also say that nostalgia involves an awareness of a loss of
a time of being that one has particularly come to love; in nostalgic
remembrance we long to revisit a fragment of past time that might syn-
ecdochically represent aspects of our best Self and our best experiences
of being-in-the-world. We might, then, even think of nostalgia as a form
of mnemonic photography: it represents one of the most compelling
means we have for fixing past time, for making it available to later rei-
fications. John Berger insists that “Images were first made to conjure up
the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evi-
dent that an image could outlast what it represented” (10). Nostalgia also
preserves an image that we have of the past that has ended up outlasting
what it originally signified, absorbing subsequent unanticipated mean-
ings and values. As we will see, in Eliot’s “rose-garden” memory from
“Burnt Norton,” what is more tragic than the mournful yearning for lost
time that the speaker expresses is that this yearning is for a potentiality
and an experience that were never actually achieved. Part of nostalgia’s

seductive allure, then, is that it momentarily seems to refute the con-
tinuum of time by allowing one to re-commune, passionately, with what
would otherwise be a lost or unachieved temporality. By striving to con-
found chronology, nostalgia thus attempts to bring what is lost into the
purview of our desires for the future: what we had then we want again,
both now, and later. As such, nostalgia exerts a powerful mnemonic mus-
cle by working to recuperate the past, hoping blithely to bend the rules
of being-in-time to achieve a modicum of control over temporality’s
inexorable march. Indeed, to turn to Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth for
another brief moment, we might remember that by way of consolation
for her ongoing war-time separation from her beloved Roland, she cites
one of her “favourite fragments from W. E. Henley’s Bric-à-Brac” (151),
which includes the line, “We are the masters of the days that were” (152).
Certainly, nostalgia gives us a sense of power over what was, that at least
momentarily combats the powerlessness we may otherwise feel in the
face of our own evanescence.
Often considered less authentic than either history or other types of
memory, though, nostalgia is a highly subjective and emotive kind of
remembrance that blends the present’s awareness of the meaning of the
past with that anteriority as if that past had somehow been preserved—
unchanged save for the accretion of positive mnemonic affect. Indeed,
within literary studies, nostalgia has suffered from a bit of a “bad name”
for decades, having by the 1930s and 1940s, as Robert Hemmings notes,
“already acquired its pejorative sense, indicating a futile yearning for a
past way of life from which one has been permanently cut off” (6). In
2009, Susannah Radstone finds “a continued and rather relentless nega-
tivity” about “nostalgia criticism” (116), and we might observe that in
literary and cultural studies very little at all was attempted on the topic
of nostalgia before 1990. Over the past twenty or so years, even with the
proliferation of trauma, psychoanalytic, and memory studies, “nostalgia”
has still retained a certain stigma—as if it represents a mode of merely
unselfconscious sentimentality that gives a “‘false’ representation of the
past” (Radstone 114). Radstone, though, importantly reminds us that
so-called “realist” aims to represent the “truth” about either history or
memory are also themselves limited and subject to their own biases and
predispositions. Here, though, I want to propose that nostalgia may in fact
be the type of memory that most obviously reveals the scaffolding behind
subjectivity’s changing relations to its own mnemonic scripts, and, as
such, is eminently worthy of reconsideration. Matthew Arnold suggested
in the latter half of the nineteenth century that the “main effort” of
“all branches of knowledge” was “to see the object as in itself it really is”
(1), and even though from our postmodern perspective we often tend
to prefer Oscar Wilde’s inversion of Arnold’s proposal, when Wilde sug-
gests that “the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself
it really is not” (144), we might begin to consider that nostalgia exerts
deeply insightful misreadings and misprisions that productively see the
object of the past both ways.
Turning backward: The Waste Land and the Prufrock

volume
In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot renders the past as both continuous and
contiguous with the present, insisting in both the poem’s form and con-
tent that the past is vital to the becoming of the present. Indeed, a gap
of centuries is frequently traversible with the turn of a single line. After
Eliot describes a present-day visit to “Margate Sands,” for instance—the
seaside town in the south of England where he convalesced during his
1921 breakdown—the speaker adds,
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest (307–10)
We are asked here to see the present crisis involved in the speaker’s
breakdown as commensurate with the spiritual and emotional trials
of St. Augustine’s late-fourth-century visit to Carthage—a place which
Augustine famously describes as “cauldron of illicit loves,” and where
he had a child out of wedlock. For a moment “burning” Carthage even
sounds like an after-effect of Margate Sands, with the temporalities and
subjectivities of both places and figures intimately blended. And even
though Eliot dispenses with the quotation marks that have framed the
first-person speech for the previous fourteen lines, the “I” of Carthage
still reads as the “I” of Margate Sands” who “can connect/ Nothing
with nothing./ The broken fingernails of dirty hands” (300–2). In
this pre-conversion moment, Eliot thus challenges his reader to build
bridges between Eliot’s present life and the torment and temptations
experienced by one of the most important early Christian theologians
and philosophers. Or, if we want to read him entirely “impersonally,”
then Eliot challenges us to connect Margate with Carthage, even while
the speaker himself (or herself) “can connect/Nothing with nothing.”

Again, a few lines later, at the beginning of “Death by Water,” Eliot
traverses another seven hundred or so years to describe the (recent)
death of “Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead” (312), as if ancient
history is as present to the poem’s ethos and consciousness as present
time; as if the logic of chronos can be overturned through the poetic
space.
Still, despite all the revisitations of past time in The Waste Land, where
previous cultural moments and eras, legends and languages, personal
experiences and crises are evoked, the poem’s voices remain funda-
mentally bereft of nostalgia in the sense of longing for the phantasy of
a prior “home.” Even in the palpable yearning of the “hyacinth girl”
passage, the tone is of abstracted reportage rather than of nostalgic
longing:
‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer. (35–42)
In these lines we find no longing to be back in the place of agonized arrest

of “a year ago”; we find no explicit pain for want of the homeliness of
that past.
Interestingly, though, critics have made the argument that The Waste
Land as a whole should be read as a nostalgic project. Eluned Summers-
Bremner, among others, notes that the poem has “come to represent the
losses and longings of an entire post-World War One generation,” and
sees it as a “post-traumatic poem memorializing the losses entailed in
modernity” (263). This is certainly an accurate reading of its reception,
but I would argue that part of why the poem came to stand for such losses
is because it encapsulated the utter failure of its speakers—condemned
to a Dantean hellscape—to evince even a nostalgia for nostalgia. The
poem is decidedly not filled with longings for a pre-war period, even
if it describes the traumatic affect and effects of a post-war culture. Its
scenes with the most sentimental potential are rendered either with a
detached, almost existential pathos at the reality of loss (“Oed’ und leer
das Meer,” 42), or with an almost chilly, matter-of-fact distance from the
“home” of prior time—“at my back in a cold blast I hear/The rattle of

the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear” (185–6).
If we turn to the Prufrock volume, we find that Eliot’s 1915 epigraph
and dedication of the book, “For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915/mort aux
Dardanelles,” is followed immediately by an excerpt in Italian from
Dante’s Purgatorio:
Or puoi la quantitate
comprender dell’amor ch’a te mi scalda,
quando dismento nostra vanitate,
trattando l’ombre come cosa salda
In Eliot’s essay on “Dante” he translates this, in prose, as “Now can you

understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that
I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing” (219).
Juxtaposed with the naming of Verdenal, the marking of the brief span
of Verdenal’s life, and the emphasis on the mythically loaded location
of the Dardanelles (associated with the great romances of both Hero
and Leander and of the Trojan War), Eliot all but confesses to a passion-
ate longing for his dead friend: “Now”—after death—“can you under-
stand the quantity of love that warms me towards you.” By dedicating
this otherwise rather un-nostalgic book in such passionate terms to a
figure of love and loss from a past he sometimes longed to revisit,3 Eliot
casts a shadow of nostalgia over the whole volume, indicating that
even within the context of his “impersonal” verse the remembrance
of feelings of the past are una cosa salda: something solid that marks
the psyche.
Through the Prufrock volume, though, Eliot’s speakers are almost
pathologically detached from the personal and cultural memories and
histories that haunt them. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
we find mainly temperate and jaded glances to memory, including the
famous refrain, “I have known them all already, known them all—/
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,/ I have measured
out my life with coffee spoons” (49–51). In “Portrait of a Lady,” Eliot’s
speaker advises only a casual half-attentiveness to the relics of the
past:
—Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,

Admire the monuments,
Discuss the late events,
Correct our watches by the public clocks. (36–8)
Then, later in the same poem, music of the past is dismissed as a

“worn-out” citation played on a mechanized machine without an aura:
I keep my countenance,
I remain self-possessed
Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired
Reiterates some worn-out common song
With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
Recalling things that other people have desired.
Are these ideas right or wrong? (77–83)
The uncertain slippage to “Recalling things that other people have

desired” (82) from the seemingly stern self-control of “I keep my coun-
tenance,/ I remain self-possessed” (77–8) is prompted by the discomfit-
ing “smell of hyacinths” from a distance. But the moment is hardly
nostalgic. The speaker recalls not his own desires but the abstracted
longings of others, as if he is experiencing, in this case, a nostalgia
for nostalgia, and a simultaneous longing to be freed from the strict
policing of impersonality. Such a freedom would mean being able to
experience the immediacy of desire without always enacting displace-
ments and ethical hesitations around sites of intimacy. Even Eliot’s
seemingly nostalgic turn in “La Figlia Che Piange”—“She turned away,
but with the autumn weather/Compelled my imagination many days”
(17–18)—is transferred almost immediately into the language of reason
and distancing: “Sometimes these cogitations still amaze/The troubled
midnight and the noon’s repose” (23–4). The shadow of Eliot’s dedica-
tion to Verdenal should make us read these poems harder, though, as
signifying perhaps less-than successful resistances to the nostalgia they
seem to try to avoid so assiduously.
Impersonality and approach
If Eliot steers his speakers away from nostalgia for the past, this
reluctance to engage with this all-too “personal” emotion again concurs
with Eliot’s era-defining call for the “impersonality” of the poet: “Poetry
is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not
the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (“Tradition
and the Individual Talent” 43). Here, though, Eliot adds a qualifying sen-
tence that is less frequently cited: “But, of course, only those who have
personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from
these things” (43). Amazingly, what has now become the catch-word
for the entire essay—“impersonality”—only appears once, and not until

the final paragraph, when Eliot introduces both the term “impersonal”
and “impersonality”: “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet
cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to
the work to be done” (44). Eliot’s phrasing is enigmatic, to say the least,
which means that his ponderous probing of the relations between art,
emotions, and the self just here will necessarily remain unresolved—
agitated with the enduring curiosity they provoke. But we can say that,
as in his verse, Eliot repudiates “emotion” only to back off and let it loose
again, ambivalently hedging his bets, not wanting to disavow emotion’s
potent imprint altogether: “only those who have personality and emo-
tions knew what it means to want to escape from these things.” He also
demands, in fact, that the poet do no less than “surrender” “to the work
to be done”—that is, to become completely vulnerable and subject to to
the labor of his craft.
Eliot’s appeal to “impersonality” has of course generally been inter-
preted (and criticized) as being abstracted from feeling, removed from
the body, and dodging the responsibility of emotion. But we might also
say that Eliot’s appeal to “impersonality” grants him a way to explain
how the poet is able to “give us a new art emotion” by using “ordinary”
emotions and “working them up into poetry, to express feelings which
are not in actual emotions at all” (43). Impersonality allows a distanc-
ing from the “personal” charge of emotions, but this displacement also
confirms that an intense anxiety exists about any strictly “personal”
revelations. Indeed, at the end of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
Eliot’s remarks actually relate quite directly to the question of nostal-
gia: “he [the poet] is not likely to know what is to be done unless he
lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the
past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already
living” (43). The “already living” body of the longed-for past appears
everywhere in Eliot’s present poetics even when we discern a palpable
fear of this potential embrace. If Eliot’s verse is impersonal, it is only so
with the insistent press of emotion close at its back.
We have to wait about twenty more years beyond Eliot’s dedication
to Jean Verdenal and the momentary lapse in “La Figlia Che Piange” to
find another significant glimmer of nostalgia, but in the opening verse
paragraph of “Burnt Norton” we very suddenly—yet briefly—find some-
thing that sounds like nostalgic recollection:
Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. (11–14)
Setting up this reminiscence as a present-tense subjunctive revisitation

of a missed chance, and by articulating the movement of what might have
been as a downward approach followed by a penetration—“Down . . .
Towards . . . Into,”—Eliot’s speaker experiences a spatialized echo of
“Footfalls” down a “passage” that he and an Other (or Others) never
actually took, an imagined would-have-been of a possible past that never
materialized, but whose residue of regret remains. As such, Eliot blends
what feels like a still-active cathection to that past with the reality of
its long-accomplished repudiation. The psychological charge of the
reverberating sound effect of these “Footfalls” (whose “echo” will not
cease its haunting) also discloses a passionate grammar of desire to
belong to a past that never was, and proposes that the passageways
of memory retain a spatial reality whose architectural remains—like
a ruin—demand both revisitation and a certain degree of wonderment.
In these opening lines of Four Quartets, Eliot relies on traditional,
almost clichéd, symbolic figures of speech to perform the shorthand
of longing—“the passage which we did not take,” “the door we never
opened,” and “the rose-garden”—designating each with a definite arti-
cle, as if the speaker has rather specific events and locations in mind.4
Yet, instead of hindering our access to emotive intensity, these most
traditional symbols still seem to offer the ideal trope for memories of
unfulfilled possibility. Fredric Jameson suggests that “the symbol is the
instantaneous, the lyrical, the single moment in time; and this tem-
poral limitation expresses perhaps the historical impossibility in the
modern world for genuine reconciliation to last in time, to be anything
more than a lyrical, accidental present” (“Postmodernism” 61). Then,
Roderick Peters makes a direct link between symbolic thinking and nos-
talgia: “the experience of nostalgia has to do with a state of being for
which any specific contents stand as representatives, or perhaps more
accurately as symbols” (136). Eliot’s rendering of the moment of inac-
tion at Burnt Norton—when the “door” was not “opened”—condenses
time, desire, and loss into the simplicity of symbol loaded with the
accrued semiotics of centuries of literary symbol to generate a potent
condensation of memory mixed with desire, suggesting that there may
have been a better future-in-the-past if he and his companion had cho-
sen to open the door to the rose-garden.
Two lines further on, this brief break into nostalgic reverie is curtailed,
though, as the speaker already begins to dismantle the impulse to revisit
past time (and place) under such romanticized auspices. Instead, the
speaker almost instantly adopts a rationalist, philosophic, “impersonal”
distancing: “But to what purpose/ Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-
leaves/ I do not know” (16–18). These three lines of query also stand,
quite strikingly, alone on the page, as a miniature verse paragraph of
their own, replacing the long verse paragraph of the lush and blossom-
ing “rose-garden” with the strict realism of dust-covered, dried rose-
leaves preserved within an ornamental vessel, with their promise of a
faint—and manageable—fragrance. Hesitation and refusal thus replace
passionate longing for the plenitude of an unachieved past, as Eliot sets
up a dialectical counterpoint of engagement followed by recoil. As such,
this rare nostalgic display is immediately temporally bounded as an
inaccessible domain of mnemonic longing, cordoned off from present
consciousness for all but the briefest of moments.
Still, the speaker’s second-thoughts about nostalgia’s ineffectual
“purpose” turn out to be insufficient to stop the nostalgic impulse just
yet, and for the next several lines we witness impulsive and even playful
returns to the continued vitality of this inheritance:
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. (19–24)
The imperative—“Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,/ Round
the corner” (21–2)—offers an irresistible patter of monosyllables with
scarcely a break, breath, or pause. A compulsion to know and experience
the past again in order to uncover what we may not have adequately
experienced in the first place draws the speaker closer to the past’s
reveries, while this compulsion also invites the reader to witness and
engage in the encounter. The speaker again, though, retreats into doubt
with a second recoil, interrupting the cascading pleasure of spontane-
ity with mistrust and misgiving: “shall we follow/ The deception of the
thrush?” (23–4). This time the answer is an ambivalent yes, but not as
one might think: instead of outright nostalgia we find through the rest
of “Burnt Norton” ruminations on nostalgia, with desires to belong to
the home of the past moderated by ascetic retreats into less passionate
and more passive meditations on the holy relics of past desire; we find
Eliot’s speaker troping away from the play of romantic sensibilities and
longings to the calmer march of almost mathematical and impersonal

reflections. Indeed, I am tempted to call what happens through the
poem a mathematics of nostalgia, where instead of reveling in nostalgia,
Eliot builds up a series of equations that reflect rationally rather than
passionately about what it means to be caught within the dance of
time and desire. Still, at the close of “Burnt Norton” it is almost as if
the speaker cannot quite rein in his passions, and we return again to an
aching lament for the fecundity of that past, along with an insistence
that such a past, together with its nostalgias, will always remain:
There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after. (174–8)
Coda: nostalgia for the future
One last place in which Eliot allows himself a remarkably nostalgic

identification with another time happens not so much vis-à-vis the
past, but with a view to the unrealized and unimaginable future. In
“The Dry Salvages,” the third of the Four Quartets, Eliot writes:
I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant—

Among other things—or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been
opened. (126–30)
Writing into nostalgia via prolepsis here, Eliot borrows from the ancient
sacred wisdom of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita to remind us of the minuscu-
lism of our life span, where even our unimaginable future descendants
will one day glance back at their ancestral past—which is our unknown
future—with “wistful regret.” Another way to say this is to dare to turn
to Eliot’s first lines from the Four Quartets that work as a key to his
developing perspectives on temporality: “Time present and time past/
Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in
time past” (1–3). The “faded song” of the future anterior is more pas-
sionately mourned than the “worn-out common song” (80) of the past
that Eliot descries in “Portrait of a Lady” perhaps because, just as the
“rose-garden” moment from “Burnt Norton,” such future time exists

purely and thus very beautifully solely in the potency of its potential.
What Eliot’s verse is most nostalgic for, then, are times and experiences
that have not yet been—for the not-quite realized love-relations with
Jean Verdenal and Emily Hale, for example; for the music of the future’s
“faded song.” In “The Dry Salvages” we do not find the pure nostalgia
of wanting to return to that time, that place, that home (nostos) of the
fantastically (re)envisioned past, but we discover instead a forward-
looking witnessing to what we might call a sacred time of future remem-
brance. While most of Eliot’s verse enforces an emotional distance from
nostalgia’s “regret” by insisting that although the past manifests its
symptoms in the present tense we can never go home again, even in
this distancing from the object of memory we are uncannily invited to
a new proximity with feeling, past time, and longing. His distancing in
fact brings close.
Notes
1. For an illuminating discussion of the “Pathos and Pathology” of nostal-
gia from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century, see
Hemmings 6–8.
2. Roderick Peters provocatively argues that “Nostalgia aims toward individu-
ation inasmuch as its pain provides an impulsion to do something, and in
some people that something is the gruelling work of individuation” (145).
3. In a letter of January 1921 to his mother about a recent visit to Paris, Eliot
records, “If I had not met such a number of new people there Paris would be
desolate for me with pre-war memories of Jean Verdenal and the others” (433).
4. As it happens, there may be a very distinct “personal” and biographical
explanation for such specificity. Lyndall Gordon points out that Eliot began
composing “Burnt Norton” in 1934, shortly after visiting the Gloucestershire
manor and garden of Burnt Norton with his long-lost would-be love, Emily
Hale (265–9). Twenty years earlier, before Eliot left Boston for England, there
was a serious chance that Hale was to be his future wife. Although Hale was
devastated when Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, the two main-
tained a strong personal connection for decades, and the possibility that they
would marry remained until T. S. Eliot instead married Valerie Fletcher in
1957. With such highly personal details in mind, one can hardly help read-
ing “Burnt Norton”—and perhaps the entire impetus for the Four Quartets—as
hinging on a nostalgic regret for a love that was never allowed to blossom
despite its ironically fecund locus of remembrance. Indeed, Gordon argues
that Emily Hale manifested a powerful presence in Eliot’s work through the
late 1920s through the mid-1930s: “Like Beatrice, Emily alone could stir the
higher dream through her shared memory of unsullied love. Between 1930
and 1934 they developed some sort of understanding. First, through memory,
then through meeting, Eliot hoped for a renewal of feeling that would help
him recover a visionary gift” (241–2). Their romantic reunion was not to be
fully achieved, but Gordon believes that the struggle between “on the one
hand, the higher dream associated with Emily Hale; on the other, the sense
of sin associated with Vivienne” brought forth “the great poems and plays of
Eliot’s maturity: Ash-Wednesday, Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion,
and Four Quartets” (242).
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Berthold-Bond, Daniel. “Evolution and Nostalgia in Hegel’s Theory of Desire.”
CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 19.4 (1990):
367–88.
Dickinson, Emily. Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986.
Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed.
Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975. 37–44.
——. “Dante.” 1929. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York:
Harcourt, 1975.
——. The Complete Poems and Plays. 1969. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.
Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. London: Norton, 1998.
Hemmings, Robert. Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second
World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Jameson, Fredric. “Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia.” Salmagundi. 10–11 (1969–70):
52–68. The Oxford English Dictionary. Online.
——. “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review
146.1 (1984): 53–92.
Peters, Roderick. “Reflections on the origin and aim of nostalgia.” Journal of
Analytical Psychology. 30 (1985): 135–48.
Radstone, Susannah. The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory.
New York: Routledge, 2009.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Duino Elegies. Trans. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1939.
Eluned Summers-Bremner. “Unreal City and Dream Deferred: Psychogeographies
of Modernism in T. S. Eliot and Langston Hughes.” Geomodernisms: Race,
Modernism, Modernity. Eds. Laura, Doyle, and Laura Winkiel. Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005.
Wilde, Oscar. The Critic as Artist. 1891. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1999.
4
Matricide and the End of Nostalgia
in Elizabeth Bowen
Maren Linett
In an article published in The Listener in 1951, the Anglo-Irish writer

Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) criticizes the nostalgic bent of contempo-
rary literature. She understands nostalgia’s draw:
The unfamiliar: really, it may be argued, these days we are having

enough of that. . . . Our emotions, even our senses, seek something
stable to cling to. How can we not seek, in some form, an abiding
city? We continue to cry out for the well known, the comfortable, the
dear, for protecting walls round the soul. The resource, we begin to
feel, the solution, is to turn back—turn back into the past. The past,
now, seems to be the repository of all treasures. . . . Then, we may
come to believe, the sun always shone. There was happiness. (“Cult
of Nostalgia” 225)
But great art, she insists, should do more than evoke the past; it should
attend to the present, adding something new to the world. “What of
the present, the ‘now,’ the moment—so disconcerting, so fleeting, so
fascinating in its quivering inability to be pinned down? What has
great art done but enclose that eternal ‘now’?” (“Cult of Nostalgia”
226). For Bowen, art must not succumb to the understandable search
for “protecting walls round the soul.” It must seek instead to “enclose”
the reality of the present moment. Bowen’s modernist theory of art’s
relationship to time, to the “quivering” present, accords with Virginia
Woolf’s admonition that artists “convey this varying, this unknown and
circumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display”
(“Modern Fiction” 288). In her efforts to focus on the present, Bowen
consciously works against nostalgia in her fiction, making clear that the
past is not the “repository of all treasures.” Her novels for the most part
71
bear out the line that, just after the passage quoted above, refutes the
sentiment that the “sun always shone” in the past: “Nonsense—as we
all well know” (“Cult of Nostalgia” 225).
But at the same time, Bowen is susceptible to the need for “some form
[of] an abiding city.” Nostalgia does suffuse descriptions in her novels
and memoirs of one particular relationship: the mother–child dyad,
portrayed as offering fleeting, ineffable warmth and safety. Hers is not
the nineteenth-century nostalgia for the innocence of childhood, how-
ever, but what we might view as a distinctly modernist nostalgia for a
pre-symbolic maternal connection, for a bond that precedes—and can
continue to transcend—linguistic interaction.1 Although the maternal
bonds Bowen depicts do not actually exclude language, they do rely on a
flow of immanent meaning that suggests a Kristevan semiotic. As Lynne
Huffer explains, although the semiotic is “associated with the pre-
Oedipal phase prior to the formation of the subject through an entry
into language” it nevertheless “exists both as a locus prior to the sym-
bolic (as that which precedes language), and as a concept that can only
define itself in opposition to the symbolic, as that which, understood
synchronically, emerges and breaks open an already established linguis-
tic system” (77). That is, the semiotic is never completely supplanted by
but erupts within the symbolic, as it does in Bowen’s linguistic descrip-
tions of pre-linguistic maternal bonds.
Bowen’s nostalgia is structured around a return to a transcendent bond
with the mother, a psychological nostos. But what this nostalgia serves to
suppress, as I will show, is a rage at maternal betrayal and abandonment.
Bowen’s own mother was often vague to the point of inaccessibility,
and she died when Bowen was thirteen years old, leaving her daughter
“disfigured” with grief. In Black Sun Kristeva describes the aggression
layered within mourning: “The disappearance of that essential being
continues to deprive me of what is most worthwhile in me; I live it as
a wound or deprivation, discovering just the same that my grief is but
the deferment of the hatred or desire for ascendency that I nurture with
respect to the one who betrayed or abandoned me” (5). This aggres-
sive rage is repressed and displaced, in ways I will describe, throughout
Bowen’s fictional work. But in her final novel, Eva Trout (1968), rage
erupts and the child, “pirouetting” down a train station platform, shoots
and kills his mother. This abrupt ending to the portrayals of mother–
child communion reflects Bowen’s critique of her own earlier nostalgic
formulations. The fictional representation of matricide evinces Bowen’s
capacity, apparently acquired late in her life, to surrender those last “pro-
tecting walls.” Bowen ends, then, by dismantling the structuring fantasy
Maren Linett 73
of unmediated wholeness. Indeed, as I explain below, Bowen’s defenses

of the fictional and autobiographical mother’s inaccessibility acknowl-
edge that the mother not only has the right to her otherness, but that
otherness is built into the mother–child relationship from the start.
Anti-nostalgic Bowen
The knowledge that happiness does not reside in the past is a major
theme of Bowen’s 1935 novel, The House in Paris. In this novel, a Jewish
character named Max Ebhart comes to represent an unstable and destruc-
tive modernity. His instability is contrasted throughout the novel with
the sturdy and constant world of the Michaelis family. When he becomes
romantically involved with the daughter of this family, Karen Michaelis
(who is engaged to a more socially appropriate man), his parvenu status
keeps him off balance, worrying whether his attraction is influenced by
Karen’s “background.” Finally forced to accept that his love for Karen is
inseparable from his anxiety about his social status, Max kills himself.2
It is tempting to assume that such a novel celebrates the reassur-
ing stability of the Michaelis family. The family, after all, is initially
described in positive terms:
Karen Michaelis had been born and was making her marriage inside
the class that in England changes least of all. . . . Their relatives and
old friends, as nice as they were themselves, were rooted in the same
soil. Her parents saw little reason to renew their ideas, which had
lately been ahead of their time and were still not out of date. Karen
had grown up in a world of grace and intelligence. . . . The Michaelis’
goodness of heart had a wide field; they were not only good to the
poor but kind to the common, tolerant of the intolerant. (HP 68–9)
This passage, particularly in the phrase “rooted in the same soil,” figures
class as part of the natural order. It seems to evince Bowen’s nostalgia
for a state of stable English culture before modern hybridity began to
destroy the “grace and intelligence” of the “class that changes least of
all.” But as the novel proceeds, it begins to unravel the purported toler-
ance and goodness of the Michaelis family.
Karen’s engagement to Ray Forrestier, a cousin of a cousin, provides
“firm ground under her feet, but the world shrank; perhaps she was miss-
ing the margin of uncertainty” (HP 68). When she meets an Irishwoman,
the text hints at a claustrophobia that circumscribes Karen’s class. “Karen
saw she must look to [the Irishwoman] like something on a Zoo terrace,
cantering round its run not knowing it is not free, and spotted not in a
way you would care to be yourself” (HP 97). When she is annoyed with
her friend Naomi, she can “feel her mouth setting in a smile like her
mother’s—a too kind, controlled smile” (HP 104). The groundedness of
the family, then, comes to be aligned with control.
The sense of a controlling claustrophobia is compounded by the
sense that nothing out of the ordinary is allowed to disturb the calm
of Chester Terrace. When Mrs. Michaelis realizes that Karen has been
lying about her whereabouts when she has gone to meet Max, she has
a “deadly intention not to know” (HP 191). Karen realizes that “when
mother does not speak it is not pity or kindness; it is worldliness begin-
ning so deep down that it seems to be the heart. Max said: ‘Why are
you running away from home?’ Now I know. She has made me lie for a
week. She will hold me inside the lie till she makes me lose the power
I felt I had” (HP 192). By portraying Mrs. Michaelis as the epitome of
rooted, upper-middle-class English society, Bowen suggests that falsity,
worldliness, and a fierce insularity are at the “heart” of the most stable,
continuous English class.
Bowen treats the theme of nostalgia more directly in The Little Girls
(1963), where she focuses not on a particular class but on a woman’s
relationship to her individual past. The protagonist, Dinah Delacroix,
becomes obsessed by the idea that she must reconnect with two child-
hood friends. When she finds them, she convinces them to dig up a
coffer they had buried as 11-year old girls. Dinah attempts to live com-
pletely in the past. One indication of this is that she continues to call
herself and her friends by their childhood nicknames, Dicey, Sheikie
and Mumbo. Another is the importance she ascribes to recovering the
contents of the coffer. When the three women, after elaborate planning,
meet after dark and finally dig up the coffer, it is empty.
The empty coffer seems to indicate that it is impossible to “recon-
struct the past as it once was” (Wyatt-Brown 175). Indeed, it seems
that the past, in which Dinah has invested so much, is itself empty.
The shock of this realization prompts Dinah’s mental breakdown; she
takes to her bed and loses touch more completely with the present.
Her children and grandchildren are summoned; her friends attend her.
Eventually, Dinah seems to recover, accepting that the past is gone. Her
return to the present is illustrated at the end of the novel, when she asks
who is at her bedside.
“Mumbo.”
“Not Mumbo. Clare. Clare, where have you been?” (LG 237)
Maren Linett 75
By rejecting the childish nickname, Dinah shows her belated accept-

ance of the present. The novel’s exploration and ultimate rejection of
nostalgia is analyzed by Marian Kelly. Pointing out the charm of the sec-
tions of the novel set in the past, Kelly explains that “[i]n order to make
us see the perils of nostalgia, Bowen must first make us understand its
pleasures, so she uses her past sections to show us first-hand the attrac-
tion that nostalgia holds for her protagonists” (12). Just as she does in
“The Cult of Nostalgia,” Bowen spends a good deal of time acknowledg-
ing the seductiveness of nostalgia before wrenching her characters and
readers back to reality. The last lines of The Little Girls create an effect
similar to the line—“Nonsense, as we all well know”—with which her
article rejects the possibility that “there was happiness” in the past.
Nostalgic Bowen
But Bowen’s critique of nostalgia does not extend, until Eva Trout, to
mother–child pairs. Most of her mothers and children are peripatetic,
but they create loving homes wherever they go, their love for each
other serving as their shelters. The most abstract of these relationships—
because the parties have been separated since the child’s birth—is the
one between Karen Michaelis and the son, Leopold, whom she bears to
Max Ebhart after Max has died. In The House in Paris Bowen portrays an
imagined perfect communion, a realm apart from ordinary life where
Karen and Leopold could speak to each other in “the true terms.”
Karen and Leopold never meet in the space of the novel. But the
whole middle section of the novel, “The Past,” is a conceit structured
around what Karen would explain to Leopold about his origins if she
could speak to him on another, purer plane. This imagined plane is
an instance of the modernist yearning for a time before the symbolic
order intervenes in the semiotic communion with the mother. It takes
place through language, but language transformed and made magical.
The section opens with Leopold’s reaction to the news that his mother
cannot come to meet him that day in Paris as she had planned. He is
devastated, but at the same time, his mother’s absence means that the
possibilities of which he dreamed cannot be proven false.
But by her not coming, the slate was wiped clear of every impossibil-
ity; he was not (at least that day) to have to find her unable to speak
in his own, which were the true, terms. . . . Actually, the meeting he
had projected could take place only in heaven—call it heaven; on the
plane of potential, not merely likely behaviour. Or call it art, with
truth and imagination informing every word. Only there—in heaven

or art, in that nowhere, on that plane—could Karen have told Leopold
what had really been. . . . So everything remained possible. . . . This is,
in effect, what she would have had to say. (HP 65–7)
Here Leopold denies his loss, compensating for it with an imagined

communion that could never have happened if his mother had come.
Kristeva describes this kind of response to loss as a “denying or manic
position”: “no, I haven’t lost; I evoke, I signify through the artifice of
signs and for myself what has been parted from me” (23). The text
acknowledges that such a realm is otherworldly: “heaven,” “art,”
“nowhere,” another “plane.” But by presenting for the bulk of the novel
Karen’s imagined, “true” explanation to Leopold of “what made [him]
be,” Bowen joins Leopold in an extended compensatory fantasy of ideal
communion in which some form of non-symbolic language could unite
rather than separate.
This communion reaches its apotheosis when the narrator describes
the night of Leopold’s conception. Here the narration suddenly
addresses Leopold. “Having done as she knew she must she did not
think there would be a child: all the same, the idea of you, Leopold,
began to be present with her” (HP 165). Maria DiBattista describes this
address as an instance of the “maternal sublime” erupting into the text.
This eruption, she says,
should startle us into picturing the heaven, or call it art, prom-

ised earlier and now finally glimpsed in its full sublimity. Bowen’s
maternal language of sublimity . . . dissolves identity into an irre-
sistible moment of identification and direct address. In this sublime
moment . . . Leopold becomes both a character in the novel and the
reader for whom it is written. (229)
The fantasy of ideal communication between a parent and child, then,

is no mere gesture in this novel; instead it provides the novel its struc-
ture and much of its power. By suggesting that the account of “The
Past” we are reading is really written for (as well as about) Leopold, so
that he may know the truth of “what made [him] be,” the novel makes
good on the promise that within art, the full communication Leopold
imagines is indeed possible. It demonstrates Bowen’s full-fledged par-
ticipation in the fantasy she has created.
In Bowen’s next novel, The Death of the Heart (1938), the communion
of the mother–child pair is moved from the realm of fantasy to the
Maren Linett 77
past: Portia’s mother Irene has died in Switzerland, where the two lived
in various pensions after Portia’s father died. Portia’s descriptions of her
life with her mother are full of charm. Watching other inhabitants of the
hotels, they would make up stories about their lives. They would spend
rainy afternoons lying down, covered with coats, “smelling the wet wood-
work” and reading aloud to each other (DH 39). At nights they “pulled
their beds close together or slept in the same bed—overcoming, as far as
might be, the separation of birth” (DH 69). Here again we see Bowen’s
nostalgia for a fusion that precedes and precludes symbolic language.
Although Portia is now living with her much older half-brother,
Thomas Quayne, and his wife Anna, her memories of life with her
mother are more vivid than they. Early in the novel, Portia is talking to
Thomas when suddenly,
she only looked through him, and Thomas felt the force of not
being seen. . . . What she did see was the pension on the crag in
Switzerland, that had been wrapped in rain the whole afternoon.
Swiss summer rain is dark, and makes a tent for the mind. Precarious
high-upness had been an element in their life up there, which had
been the end of their life together. That night they came back from
Lucerne on the late steamer, they had looked up, seen the village
lights at star-level through the rain, and felt that that was their dear
home. (DH 39)
Portia’s communion with her mother seems to last into the present,
to refuse to be relegated to the past. During their time of moving from
pension to pension, just being together made any place their “dear
home.” The description of the place “wrapped in rain” suggests a cozy
warmth. The odd phrase “precarious high-upness,” DiBattista argues, is
another eruption of the maternal sublime: “Such verbal oddities are a
linguistic sign that we are in the vicinity of the maternal sublime” (233).
And another unusual pronoun bolsters DiBattista’s case. Soon after this
passage, the text represents Portia thinking about the June evening
when her mother died at six o’clock. “A whir from Thomas’s clock—it
was just going to strike six. Six, but not six in June. At this hour, the
plateau must be in snow. . . . Thomas sits so fallen-in, waiting for Anna,
that his clock makes the only sound in his room. But our street must be
completely silent with snow, and there must be snow on our balcony”
(DH 40). The two pronouns—this “our” and the “you” of The House in
Paris—“not only signal, but precipitate, a sudden access to the maternal
sublime. . . . ‘Our’ strangely but undeniably comprehends the mother,
Portia, and the narrator in one sublime moment of quiet communion”

(DiBattista 233–4).
A web of sublimity also surrounds the mother–child pair in Bowen’s
1963 novel, The Little Girls. As in The House in Paris, the mother–child
relationship appears only in the central section of the novel, set in the
past. “Mrs Piggott and Dicey had . . . spun round themselves a tangi-
ble web, through whose transparency, layers deep, one glimpsed some
fixed, perhaps haunted, other dimension. Feverel Cottage, from what
one knew of their history, had not been their abode for long: yet who
now could picture them anywhere but here?” (LG 77). Like Portia and
Irene, Dicey and Mrs. Piggott can make any place a “dear home.” The
realm of “heaven or art” that characterizes Leopold and Karen’s ideal
communion and the “precarious high-upness” that characterizes Portia
and Irene’s life in Switzerland here become the “perhaps haunted, other
dimension” of a pre- or even anti-symbolic maternal presence.
Indeed, Mrs. Piggott expects motherly love to bear magical fruit, and
is dismayed when she cannot divine where Dicey is: “Had she possessed
a crystal, it would have been useless—she would have ‘gazed’ unavail-
ingly, trying to ravish some, any, picture out of the lasting emptiness.
One should be able to ‘see’—how could one not? How could Mrs Piggott
not, in the case of Dicey?” (LG 82). Here again Bowen demonstrates
her awareness that mother–child bonds do not have magical powers.
Nevertheless, the nostalgia for transcendent mother–child relationships
encircles the relationships she depicts.
In her last novel, Eva Trout (1968), the mother and child relation-
ship also conjures the pre-linguistic maternal bond: they communicate
through telepathy. The little boy, Jeremy, is deaf, but until their rela-
tionship starts to break down toward the end of the novel, his mother
never has to touch him to get this attention; he simply knows when
she wants to talk to him and what she wants to say. When asked if the
boy reads lips, Eva answers, “[o]nly mine, and those he need not.” Her
friend replies, “[e]xtra-sensory” (ET 172). This novel goes furthest, then,
in depicting the mother–child communion in a pre-symbolic realm.
Eva and Jeremy’s extrasensory bond was established during the eight
years they spent in America, after she bought him on the black market
when he was about three months old. This period takes place between
sections of the novel; its retrospective narration adds to its unreal
atmosphere. Their time in the United States was spent watching movies
and television, “lord[ing] it in a visual universe” (ET 208). “His and her
cinematographic existence, with no sound-track, in successive American
cities made still more similar by their continuous manner of being in
Maren Linett 79
them, had had a sufficiency which was perfect. Sublimated monotony

had cocooned the two of them, making them near as twins in a womb.
Their repetitive doings became rites” (ET 207). The word “rites” adds to
the mystical aura around the relationship: they make what amounts to
their own religion. And again the pair live peripatetic lives but create
their own sufficiency, making anywhere home.3
In her memoirs, Bowen describes her own relationship with her
mother in terms that parallel some of her characters’. When Bowen’s
father had a nervous breakdown, Bowen and her mother Florence
moved to England, where they lived in a series of villas. In each neigh-
borhood, they made a game of visiting houses that were for sale and
imaging their lives in those houses. Bowen writes, “What a suppositious
existence ours came to be, in these one-after-another fantasy buildings,
pavilions of love” (PC 29). The “suppositious” existence recalls both
Portia and Irene imagining others’ lives and Eva and Jeremy living as
though their lives were movies. And Bowen’s description of her moth-
er’s love has a romantic quality that suggests the “layers deep” other
dimension inhabited by Dicey and Mrs. Piggott. In Seven Winters she
writes, “When she was not with me she thought of me constantly, and
planned ways in which we could meet and could be alone” (29). The
continual setting of mother–child pairs in the past and in alternate
dimensions and the mystical qualities that surround mother–child love
paint a nostalgic glaze over these representations.
Nostalgia as cover-story
But beneath this nostalgia lies a pattern of abandonment and betrayal

that is repressed and displaced by the texts. The more benign form of
abandonment lodged within the mother–child bond in Bowen’s writings
is the mother’s mental abstraction, which makes her seem as though
she’s disappeared, undermining the child’s illusion of communion. In
Seven Winters Bowen writes that her mother “could withdraw into such
a complete abstraction that she appeared to enter another world” (30).
In the draft version the line is “She would withdraw, sometimes dis-
concertingly, into such complete abstraction that she appeared to have
entered another world” (Manuscript of SW). For the final version Bowen
deleted the indication of displeasure (“disconcertingly”) and changed
“would,” which suggests a habitual disappearance, to “could,” which
suggests a rarer event. In this memoir she also notes that her mother
“often moved some way away from things and people she loved, as
though to convince herself that they did exist” (SW 28). The final clause
of this sentence explains and justifies the fact that her mother was con-
tinually moving away from her.
Her mother’s distance from Bowen was instantiated by the governess
she kept. Bowen writes:
She explained to me candidly that she kept a governess because she

did not want to scold me herself. To have had to keep saying “Do
this,” “Don’t do that,” and “No,” to me would have been, as she saw
it, a peril to everything. So, to interpose between my mother and me,
to prevent our spending the best part of our days together, was the
curious function of every governess. (28)
As Victoria Stewart points out, “the governess . . . forms a barrier

between them. . . . Better, surely, for Bowen’s mother to have to tell
her daughter off, than, in delegating this duty, to distance herself from
her child” (346). Bowen prefaces her explanation of the governess by
saying, “If my mother was a perfectionist, she had the kind of wisdom
that goes with that make-up” (SW 28). The use of the word “wisdom”
marks her habitual defense of her mother. Throughout the memoir,
Bowen suppresses any disappointment about her mother’s mental
abstraction or the interposing governess.
In her essay “The Idea of France,” she does describe feeling left out,
but not because of her mother’s mental travel. In this 1944 essay, Bowen
again mentions her mother’s ability to go “far away.” Places where her
mother had been “still existed as vividly for her as did the scenes of
her everyday life in Ireland. She loved to make them known to me by
her talk; she loved still better, I think, to enjoy them in silence, all by
herself. I came to understand that when her eyes wore an entranced,
vague look, she was far away . . . ” (PPT 62). Any negative feelings she
may have about these disappearances are displaced: what she ostensibly
minds, instead, is when her mother and aunts speak French so that she
will not understand. “Directly my mother and aunts began their French
conversation, their faces would animate and their voices quicken;
mystery, exclusiveness, and elation were in the air.—And I? I suffered:
as only the vain and inquisitive child can” (63–4). This passage shares
with the previous the image of her mother’s inaccessible face. Only in
this second moment does she admit that she suffers; and with the words
“vain and inquisitive” she blames her suffering on herself. By defending
the mother’s abstraction, Bowen in some ways seeks to preserve the fan-
tasy of the pre-symbolic mother–daughter relationship: the mother and
child are so much at one that the mother’s mental abstraction cannot
Maren Linett 81
negatively affect, cannot even mean anything to, the child. On the
other hand, there is also a gesture here toward recognizing the mother’s
inalienable otherness. By defending the mother, Bowen recognizes, as
Madelon Sprengnether puts it, “that such a condition of plenitude does
not exist, can never exist, except at the cost of the subjectivity of the
mother herself” (233). The defenses thereby undermine the nostalgic
fantasy that they also work to preserve.
In contrast to her autobiographical defenses, Bowen’s fiction suggests
that such markers of the mother’s otherness can affect a child power-
fully. Bowen portrays a mother with a similar capacity to be elsewhere
in The Little Girls. For Mrs. Piggott it is books rather than memories that
take her away. When she reads, “her surroundings . . . were nowhere.
Feverel Cottage, the sofa, the time of day not merely did not exist for
Mrs. Piggott, they did not exist” (LG 78). Bowen does continue to pro-
tect the imagined mother–child bond, however; the child who feels
obliterated by Mrs. Piggott’s absorption is not her daughter, Dicey, but
Dicey’s friend Clare (Mumbo). When Clare visits Dicey’s home without
Dicey, and finds Mrs. Piggott reading, blotting out her surroundings,
she is overcome by “an annihilated feeling. She burned with envy of
anything’s having the power to make this happen. Oh, to be as destruc-
tive as a story! . . . She tossed the interlocked puzzle into the air, muffed
the return catch and heard it fall” (LG 78). Clare’s impassioned response
to Mrs. Piggott’s mental disappearance highlights the absence of such a
response in the narrative’s treatment of Dicey.
And the novel suggests that Mrs. Piggott would be even more reluc-
tant to pull herself out of her book if the child were her own:
At [the puzzle dropping to the floor], a protesting stir took place

deep in the being of Mrs. Piggott. She could be felt battling against
reluctance. Alas, now she was in the throes of knowing there was
something she ought to do or say. Not going so far as to lower the
scarlet book . . . she resignedly said: “Oh, Dicey?”
“I’m Clare, Mrs Piggott.’”
“Oh, Clare!—Good evening,” said Dicey’s mother, friendly as ever
and made more so by what clearly was a reprieve. (LG 78)
Mrs. Piggott’s relief compounds the sense that Clare’s feeling of anni-
hilation in the face of this separateness stands in for the daughter’s.4
The assertion that the moment is a reprieve for Mrs. Piggott delineates
her otherness to her child, recognizing the mother’s resistance to the
maternal sublime.
Mental abstraction becomes even more harmful in Eva Trout when

Jeremy is kidnapped from Miss Applethwaite’s, where he is learning
to sculpt. When Eva asks Applethwaite to describe the woman who
took Jeremy, she cannot remember what the kidnapper looked like.
Eva is overwrought, saying, “You lost little time in letting Jeremy go.”
Applethwaite tries to defend herself by explaining, “You have to realise
that I was working. Then, it is difficult not to be lost to everything”
(ET 219). So, while in her autobiographical essays Bowen defends her
mother’s mental abstraction, in fiction she shows that children can be
enraged or even harmed when those who are caring for them become
lost in their own thoughts.
These local griefs and feelings of betrayal, rage, and loss at the moth-
er’s inaccessibility pepper Bowen’s writing, though they are approached
indirectly. The deeper grief of losing her mother is also dealt with
obliquely. Many of Bowen’s characters have lost parents, or never had
them. It’s not that she sidesteps the topic. But the most vivid treatments
of betrayal and the most vivid treatments of loss and grief are ostensibly
not about mothers. For example, in The Death of the Heart, Portia misses
her dead mother; her grief is portrayed briefly but directly in passages
such as the one about their “precarious high-upness.” But Portia has no
feelings of anger or betrayal toward Irene. Instead, Bowen enacts a dou-
ble displacement. She splits the mother into two mother-figures: a lov-
ing, once-accessible mother in Irene and a betraying, distant, guardian
in Anna. And she muddies the waters of betrayal by having Anna also
feel betrayed by Portia because the girl has turned her into an amusing
character for her diary.
Portia, for her part, feels betrayed that Anna has read her diary, and
then that Anna sends her off to the seaside while she and Thomas
travel on the continent. The theme of betrayal in fact permeates the
novel: Anna’s closest friend, St. Quentin, breaks Anna’s confidence by
telling Portia that Anna has read her diary. Eddie, the young man Portia
loves, holds hands with another young woman when he comes to visit
Portia at the seaside, devastating her. Such an intense focus on betrayal
highlights the perfect sympathy and trust that existed between Portia
and Irene, and heightens the contrast between that relationship and
Portia’s wary and remote relationship with Anna and the others in her
life after Irene has died. By splitting the mother-figures in this novel,
Bowen enacts feelings of outrage and betrayal while still protecting the
mother–child bond.
Grief over the loss of the mother is written powerfully into The Little
Girls but displaced from the fictional death of Dicey’s mother and, by
Maren Linett 83
implication, from the real death of Bowen’s. At the end of the middle
section of the novel, Dicey runs after Clare to say goodbye before Dicey
and her mother move to Cumberland for the August holidays. As she
runs she becomes more and more desperate to be heard by Clare. The
intensity of the scene is surprising, out of proportion to the girls’ rela-
tionship—as strong as it is, they do not anticipate its ending, and so a
goodbye seems superfluous. “Say good-bye to Mumbo?” Dicey first asks.
But when her mother explains she may not see Clare for a long time,
she sets off. Clare does not see her.
The sobbing runner, desperate, could not shout. Too great the wind,
too little her breath. Wasting seconds by halting, she tangled her
arms up into signals and pointings—might not somebody see her
from the encampment? Might not somebody see her and shout to
Mumbo? Somebody saw, did shout—but did Mumbo hear? Not she.
Nor was she seeing anything: on, on pig-headedly she was pegging.
Now she was nearing the place where you climbed up.
“Mu-u-u-umb-O!”
Now she was at it. Now she was climbing up, scornfully hauling
the tent-things after her. Now, on to her feet, she dragged the unfor-
tunates across the grass of the wall’s top, to hurl them (as though to
perdition) ahead of her. And now?
Alone in the middle of the empty sands wailed Dicey.
“Mum-BO-O-O!”
The rough child, up there against the unkind sky, on the rough
grass, glanced at and over the sands once. She threw a hand up into
a rough, general wave. Then she leaped down on the land side of the
sea wall. She had disappeared. (133)
I quote this scene at length to give the flavor of its odd diction and inten-
sity. Dicey’s desperate sobs are too powerful to be about her relationship
to Clare, whom she assumes she will see again in several weeks. The
scene’s intensity demonstrates Bowen’s probably unconscious displace-
ment of Dicey’s grief for her mother. The archaic diction—“too great the
wind, too little her breath”; “on pig-headedly she was pegging”; “Did
Mumbo hear? Not she”—signals, as DiBattista says about The Death of
the Heart, that we are in the vicinity of the maternal sublime. The asser-
tion that Clare is seeing nothing recalls the mentally absent mothers
of the oeuvre. The reference to hurling the tent-things “as though to
perdition” adds a sense of finality to the separation. The sea wall over
which Clare disappears seems symbolic of ultimate separation. Indeed,
Clare’s nickname even contains the syllable “mum,” as the drawn-out

orthography emphasizes. This scene clearly encapsulates grief for the
loss of the mother. Mrs. Piggott disappears from the novel here, and we
later learn she died while she and Dicey were in Cumberland. Without
discussing the way the scene displaces Dicey’s / Bowen’s grief, Wyatt-
Brown describes the scene like this: Clare “drives off triumphantly with
her father, leaving Dinah screaming her name at the top of her lungs
like an angry infant deprived of her mother” (175).
Fictional moments such as these express the outrage and betrayal
Bowen felt at the death of her mother. These feelings, by her own much
later account, were suppressed. When she entered a new school after her
mother died, she did poorly. Her “stupidity . . . may have been due to
denied sorrow” (PC 52). “I entered Harpenden Hall, at mid-term, still in
a state of shock. It was something to find myself making a fresh start.
The less said the better: I had what I see can go with total bereavement,
a sense of disfigurement, mortification, disgrace” (PC 47). Even in 1972
as she drafted Pictures and Conversations, Bowen repeats what must have
been her attitude as a child: “the less said the better.” Her only outward
expression of mourning for her mother was wearing black. She clung
to her “black” because, as she later considered, “That gone, there would
be nothing, so far as I knew, ever again. For I could not remember her,
think of her, speak of her or suffer to hear her spoken of” (PC 48).
Her inability to think or speak of her mother not only kept her
from really accepting her mother’s death but also made it difficult for
others to comfort her. Glendinning writes that after Florence Bowen
died, Bowen shared a room with her cousin Audrey. “Audrey heard her
sobbing in the night. But she could never talk about it, or about her
mother, and so Audrey couldn’t either. . . . Elizabeth was thirteen when
her mother died and, in Audrey’s opinion, she never really got over
it. One of the words at which her stammer consistently baulked was
“mother” (Glendinning 32). Spencer Curtis Brown similarly notes that
the death of Bowen’s mother was “a loss so devastating that to the end
of her life she would not willingly refer to it” (PC xx). This suppression
of her grief clearly animates Bowen’s repeated return to scenes of loss
and abandonment. The failure to mourn, like the nostalgia to which it
gives rise, is also a refusal of separateness, as when Leopold compensates
for his mother’s absence by imagining a more sublime presence than
could be possible in reality. Such a refusal motivates Bowen’s nostalgic
portraits of the maternal sublime.
The rage that peppers Bowen’s work, though, the eruption of the
voices of angry infants deprived of their mothers, comes not only, as
Maren Linett 85
I hope to have demonstrated, from her mother’s death. Bowen’s writ-

ings about her mother and about fictional mothers give the impression
of what could be described, paradoxically, as an ever-present absence.
And there was another aspect of her mother’s death that compounded
its effect of abandonment: Florence Bowen looked forward to dying
and going to heaven. In Pictures and Conversations Bowen writes, “That
summer, Florence, my mother, was told by a Dublin doctor, to her
delight, that she would be in Heaven six months hence. (It was to be less
than six months)” (48, italics added). Glendinning adds detail to this
story: “When the three of them [Bowen and her parents] went over to
Ireland in the summer of 1912, she had an operation and was told she
had six months to live. . . . Her brother George and his wife, Edie, were
staying at Bowen’s Court, and Florence told Edie: ‘I have good news,
now I’m going to see what Heaven’s like’” (Glendinning 31). Bowen’s
mother’s delight in the impending final separation from her family
could but have seemed heartless to her young daughter.
Florence Bowen’s eagerness for heaven is echoed in a poignant pas-
sage in Eva Trout, where the word “dimension,” already important in
Bowen’s depictions of mothers and children, comes to bear additional
weight. When Eva returns with Jeremy to England, she brings him also
into the world of speech. Eva can communicate, however awkwardly,
with everyone around them; he cannot. During the “inaudible years” in
America, they were isolated together. But in England, Jeremy is isolated
alone.
She had not computed the cost for him of entry into another dimen-
sion. What he had been thrust into the middle of was the inconceiv-
able; and the worst was its not being so for her. He was alone in it.
Void for him, this area was at the same time dense with experiences
which by claiming her made her alien, and it could be possible that
he hated it—it could not be possible that he hated her. (ET 209)
It is hard not to read this passage as describing in somewhat abstract

terms Bowen’s emotional state when her mother was looking forward
to death: the other dimension; the inconceivable; Jeremy’s aloneness in
this inconceivable; the experiences that claim his mother and make her
alien; the child’s hatred of the situation, and importantly, the child’s
inability to hate the mother.
Jeremy may not be able to hate Eva, but he can kill her. The feelings
of abandonment, betrayal, and rage that are suppressed throughout the
oeuvre culminate in Eva Trout. The novel not-so-subtly accuses Eva of
wanting to get rid of Jeremy: three characters indict her on his behalf.
Father Clavering-Haight reacts with righteous anger when Eva tells him
she is in love with Henry, a Cambridge undergraduate she has known
since her childhood.
“Talking of boys,” he began, in a threatening tone . . . “Your first

charge must be the one you made off with. When you did that,
you did the most awesome thing . . . You incurred him—humanly
speaking—by criminality. Regard yourself as wholly committed to
him. Anything else you may want you may have to sacrifice. . . . The
circumstances are dreadful: he’s in your power.” (ET 206)
Eva evades responsibility here by answering, more accurately than she

knows, “No, Father Clavering-Haight, I am in his.”
Soon after this conversation, Jeremy is kidnapped from the sculp-
tress’s house. Miss Applethwaite wonders why Eva jumps to the worst
conclusion, that she will never see him again. She asks Eva,
“You never felt he could become an encumbrance?”

“What? I don’t understand.”
“You might not want to. The little boy, I mean—as he is. . . .
I am sorry, but it is a known fact that people most dread what they
subconsciously desire, or, if not desire, could assent to with little
trouble. Suppose you have a lover, or wished-for lover, or wished-
for husband, who could come into conflict with the exactions of
Jeremy?” (ET 221)
Eva’s outrage at Applethwaite’s accusations may or may not cover a

sense of guilt. But the novel continues to build its case against Eva when
Mme Bonnard—with whom Jeremy is living while learning to speak
and lip-read French—joins in criticizing Eva.
Eva wants Jeremy to go back to the Bonnards’ early so that she can
head off on a fake marriage journey with Henry.5 Mme Bonnard asks,
“You feel it is now out of your power to injure Jeremy? You insist that
he watch your departure with another person? In that event, allow me
to warn you. —It is still in your power to offend him” (ET 289). Like
the others, this third warning makes little impact on Eva. She continues
with her plans to depart with Henry, with Jeremy at the station to see
them off.
When Jeremy arrives at the station, he has a gun. He prances around
like a boy in a film, and observers are so certain there are cameras
Maren Linett 87
present that they assure each other that the gun is a “stage dummy”
and that “he’s only acting!” (ET 298). When he sees Eva, “he sped like
a boy on the screen towards the irradiated figure, waving his weapon in
salute” (ET 302). When he reaches her, the gun goes off and “a woman
bystander to whom nothing was anything had the quickest reflex—she
snatched him back before he could fall over the dead body” (ET 302).
Whether the gun goes off on purpose or by accident is left unexplained.
Certainly, since “it could not be possible that he hated her,” it was
not a consciously planned murder. But could it be a result of Jeremy’s
unexpressed, indeed inexpressible, feelings of abandonment and rage?
The ignored warnings suggest so, as does the imagery with which Eva
is described in this scene. In the published novel she is described as
“luminous” and as “tall as a candle” (ET 294), and at the moment of her
death, as “the irradiated figure.” In the manuscript, additional words
stress her symbolic stature: “Making a spurt, he ran sped like a boy on
the screen toward the radiant, image-like irradiated figure, figure in the
distance, waving his weapon in salute.” “Radiant, image-like,” Eva is
not only Jeremy’s particular mother but mother, Eve, humanity’s first
mother. If we view the murder in these mythical terms, it seems to bear
out Kristeva’s assertion that “[m]atricide is our vital necessity, the sine-
qua-non condition of our individuation” (28). In its fictional particular-
ity, Eva’s murder expresses the rage layered beneath Bowen’s nostalgic
portraits of mothers and children.
There is also a sense, however, in which Eva is a self-portrait. Bowen
had a stutter, which is transformed into Eva’s inarticulateness. Bowen
felt that she “was born with no idea what people are like” (Pictures
and Conversations 58), without “a so-called normal relation to society”
(Mulberry Tree 223). Eva is an outsider to human culture; one window
into her difference is how amazed she is by other children at her
first boarding school: “Even the smallest seemed wonderfully physi-
cally complete to Eva, who had been left unfinished. So these were
humans, and this was what it was like being amongst them?” (ET
48). Both Eva and Bowen buy houses in Kent, where Bowen spent
several years of her childhood alone with her mother. To the extent
that Bowen identifies with Eva, then, there is a suicidal note in Eva’s
murder. Kristeva explains how aggressiveness can turn inward as a
result of grief:
According to classic psychoanalytic theory (Abraham, Freud, and

Melanie Klein), depression, like mourning, conceals an aggressive-
ness toward the lost object, thus revealing the ambivalence of the
depressed person with respect to the object of mourning. “I love that

object” is what that person seems to say about the lost object, “but
even more so I hate it; because I love it, and in order not to lose it,
I imbed it in myself; but because I hate it, that other within myself is
a bad self, I am bad, I am non-existent, I shall kill myself.” (11)
Eva’s murder, then, can be seen not only as a fictional matricide but also
as a symbolic suicide.
Within the diegesis, Jeremy can commit this murder only after his
relationship with his mother has deteriorated. What has driven a wedge
between them, the novel suggests, is their dual entry into language.
Jeremy begins to learn to speak and lip-read French, and Eva, who is so
inarticulate as to seem “like a displaced person” (ET 10), begins to want
to speak.
The fact was, since the return to England her mistrust of or

objection to verbal intercourse—which she had understood to be
fundamental—began to be undermined. . . . Incalculable desires had
been implanted. . . .
She was ready to talk. Did this make her traitorous to the years
with Jeremy?—the inaudible years?” (ET 207)
Since Jeremy too is learning to speak, the answer to this question

remains ambiguous. But something has gone permanently wrong
between them. Now that they are both focused on communicating
orally, their “accustomed communications [break] down.” Jeremy “no
longer obeyed her, not out of rebelliousness but from genuine lack of
knowledge of what was wanted” (ET 239). The entry into language, in a
sort of caricature of the Lacanian process, brings to an end the mother–
child bond.6 “[H]is and her universe was over. It had not been shattered;
simply, it had ended. It was a thing of the past” (ET 240).
The focus on language suggests that in her final novel Bowen is
revisiting the nostalgic portrayals of mothers and children in her previ-
ous fiction. The realm of “heaven or art” in which a mother and child
can communicate perfectly is approximated in the early years of Eva’s
life with Jeremy, the “inaudible” American years. In making a story
out of the destruction of their “extra-sensory” communication, Bowen
returns to the powerful conceit of The House in Paris. In Eva Trout she
acknowledges, with heartbreaking finality, that even in art, mothers
and children cannot communicate perfectly, that such a fantasy is
pure nostalgia. This acknowledgement reveals “the fallacy of positing a
Maren Linett 89
pre-Oedipal moment as pure, unitary, unmediated” (Huffer 18). It

accepts, finally, the otherness of the mother, undermining the apparent
plenitude of the mother–child pairs throughout the oeuvre.
Notes
I would like to thank Tammy Clewell for transformative suggestions about an
earlier version of this essay.
1. One might read the linguistic experiments of modernism more broadly—the
free play of its language, the uncertain meanings of its ambiguous sentences,
the valuing of sound over sense—as evidence of a longing to escape from the
symbolic and return to the semiotic. Woolf associates “moments of being,”
the quest for which structures her modernist experiments, with her early
memory of the flowers on her mother’s dress. Joyce’s depiction of Bloom com-
ing “home” to the “promised land” of Molly’s “rump” can easily be read as
nostalgia for maternal plenitude while the language of Ulysses itself, especially
in its final chapter, seeks to evade the strictures of the symbolic in favor of
uncontained semiotic play. D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway, on the
other hand, evince longing not for the maternal body but for spaces outside
the symbolic order of western culture, as for example in The Virgin and the
Gipsy (the Romany camp) and The Sun Also Rises (the Basque peasants). These
novels disavow the feminine, but we can nevertheless read the longed-for
spaces as implicitly maternal through their association with the semiotic, and
explain the textual misogyny as a defense against that longing. The nostalgic
returns home (“nostos”) envisioned in modernist texts are as varied as the
texts themselves.
2. I discuss Max’s search for authenticity and “background” in “Modes of
Dislocation: Jewishness and Deafness in Elizabeth Bowen.”
3. Eva and Jeremy’s cocooned existence is even more intense in the draft ver-
sions, where they live in a solipsistic bubble:
From large or smalls screens, illusion overspilled onto . . . all they beheld.
Society revolved at a distance from them like a ferris wheel dangling buck-
ets of people. They were on their own. . . . They were within a story to
which they imparted the only sense, and which had bearing only upon
themselves. The one wonder, to them, of the exterior world was that
anything should be exterior to themselves—and <could anything be so,
and exist?> did there, indeed, exist anything that was? (manuscript of
Eva Trout)
4. Clare’s own mother also wishes not to be disturbed from her mental world.
When Clare approaches her in their back garden, the text says, “Not till she
reached the flowerbed opposite the monkey-puzzle did the mother realize
the child was near her. Just possibly, could she have wished things otherwise?
Solitude gave her an opportunity to muse” (LG 113). In the typescript the
line is not a question: “Just possibly, she could have wished things otherwise”
(manuscript of The Little Girls).
5. Eva would prefer really to marry Henry but when he hesitates, asks him to
stage a fake wedding instead. Just before she dies, he declares his intention to
lawfully marry her. His declaration prompts the first tears she has ever cried.
6. For intriguing psychoanalytic and lesbian readings of Bowen, see renée c.
hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing, New York: New York
Works cited
Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Cult of Nostalgia.” The Listener (August 9, 1951): 225–6.
——. The Death of the Heart. 1938. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
——. Eva Trout or Changing Scenes. 1968. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.
——. The House in Paris. 1935. New York: Anchor Books, 2002.
——. The Little Girls. 1963. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
——. Manuscript of Eva Trout. Elizabeth Bowen Collection, Harry R. Ransom
Center, University of Texas at Austin.
——. Manuscript of The Little Girls. Elizabeth Bowen Collection, Harry R. Ransom
——. Manuscript of Seven Winters. Elizabeth Bowen Collection. Harry R. Ransom
——. The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. Hermione Lee. London:
Virago, 1986.
——. Pictures and Conversations. 1974. London: Allan Lane, 1975.
——. People, Places, and Things. Ed. Allan Hepburn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
——. Seven Winters and Afterthoughts. 1950. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.
DiBattista, Maria. “Elizabeth Bowen and the Maternal Sublime.” Troubled
Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance. Ed. Allan Hepburn. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2007. 219–38.
Huffer, Lynne. Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question
of Difference. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Kelly, Marian. “The Power of the Past: Structural Nostalgia in Elizabeth Bowen’s
The House in Paris and The Little Girls.” Style 36.1 (Spring 2002): 1–18.
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia
Linett, Maren. “Modes of Dislocation: Jewishness and Deafness in Elizabeth
Bowen,” forthcoming in Studies in the Novel 45.2 (Summer 2013).
Sprengnether, Madelon. The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Stewart, Victoria. “‘That Eternal “Now”’: Memory and Subjectivity in Elizabeth
Bowen’s Seven Winters,” Modern Fiction Studies 53.2 (Summer 2007): 334–50.
Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Virginia Woolf Reader. Ed. Mitchell
A. Leaska. New York: Harcourt, 1984.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. “The Liberation of Mourning in Elizabeth Bowen’s The
Little Girls and Eva Trout.” Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity.
Ed. Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1993. 164–86.
Part II
Locations
5
“Permanent preservation for
the benefit of the nation”:
The Country House, Preservation,
and Nostalgia in Vita
Sackville-West’s The Edwardians
and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Sarah Edwards
In the 1920s following the Great War, a whole range of societies con-
cerned with the preservation of historic buildings and natural scenery
constructed new relationships between Englishness and modernity.
These debates remade class and gender identities, which in turn shaped
the fate of the country house. Increasingly, the great house seemed a
relic of a rural and aristocratic past, rather than an integral part of a
modern suburbanized countryside which was accessible to all by the
automobile (Mandler, Fall 172). The daughter of the great estate of
Knole, Vita Sackville-West, explored issues of inheritance in a number of
her works; in The Edwardians (1930), her popular novel, she raised this
theme in relation to the recent past of the Edwardian period. Several
years earlier, Virginia Woolf had published Orlando, which critics have
called a “love letter” to her friend and former lover Sackville-West. In this
novel, Orlando pursues her claim as a female heir to inheriting a lavish
country estate that was not only a thinly disguised version of Knole,
but also which Sackville-West could not inherit because of her gender.
Furthermore, Virginia Woolf devoted a little-noticed section of her novel
to the Edwardian period and the modernization of the home.1
I suggest in this essay that both writers invoke Edwardian literary motifs
to explore a certain kind of nostalgic response to the country house,
which serves as a metonym of English tradition and identity. From the
beginning, Woolf’s and Sackville-West’s relationship had been mediated
through Knole: when they first met in 1922, Woolf read Sackville-West’s
historical account Knole and the Sackvilles and later reproduced details
93
of the house’s architecture and interiors in Orlando. Sackville-West com-

mented on her friend’s novel: “I feel like one of those wax figures in a
shop window, on which you have hung a robe stitched with jewels. It is
like being alone in a dark room with a treasure chest full of rubies and
nuggets and brocades” (Sackville-West 11 Oct 1928). As Sackville-West’s
remarks suggest, her works also employ several discourses, notably from
sales, advertising and heritage museums, which increasingly circulated
in debates about the preservation of the country house in the 1920s and
1930s. I will explore, then, how Sackville-West and Woolf situated their
writings in preservation discourses of the period and engaged in these
debates by outlining their characters’ attachment to the material objects
of the country house. The impulse to preserve the material relics of their
actual and fictional homes may seem to denote a regressive, static form
of nostalgia or what Svetlana Boym has defined as “restorative nostalgia”
which “proposes to build the lost home” as it once existed in a previous
era (41). Indeed, homesickness is the one of the earliest meanings of
nostalgia; however, both of these authors, as I will argue, undertake the
project of restoration and re-building of the country house in ways that
complicate the conservative politics of nostalgia.
It is important to establish from the outset that preservation was
not necessarily a backward-looking nostalgic enterprise. Christopher
Bailey observes that the inter-war preservationist movement was a
“subcategory of English modernism” that encompassed notions of
orderly progress informed by new professional groups trained in urban
planning and design (Bailey 35). Sackville-West, to an even greater
extent than Woolf, probes the diverse contemporary meanings of
“preservation” to debate the merits of preserving a past that sanctioned
literary and economic inequalities; she also considers how the social
and symbolic roles of the country house might be re-fashioned to serve
modern society. In fact, both authors develop a form of what Boym
calls “reflective nostalgia”, which I will term “functional nostalgia”;
their work acknowledges painful, even sentimental longings for a
pre-war golden age, which they simultaneously recognize as an impor-
tant transitional era on the cusp of modernity. Both writers, as they
construct new ways of connecting past and present, seek to preserve
the cherished material and emotional legacies while also thoroughly
modernizing the country house (Boym 41).
The preservation movement developed from a wide range of late
Victorian political, social, and aesthetic concerns that included con-
servative supporters of the landed classes and radical socialist advocates
for the healthy benefits of rural life. William Morris founded the Society
Sarah Edwards 95
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877; the National Trust was
established in 1892 by an urban housing reformer, Octavia Hill. The
Trust aimed to promote “the permanent preservation for the benefit of
the nation, lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty and
historic interest” (Trevelyan 9). However, by 1923, the Trust had so few
subscribers that the historian G. M. Trevelyan published a pamphlet
appeal on their behalf, “Must England’s Beauty Perish?” This text was
written in the shadow of post-war ribbon and suburban development
and the consequent expansion of residential areas into the surrounding
countryside.2 Trevelyan referred to suburban builders as “exploiters,”
who were interested only in profit and lacked any expertise in archi-
tecture or town planning. There had been many recent sales of large
country estates, due to a number of factors: personal and financial suf-
fering as a result of the Great War, agricultural depression, heavy death
duties, and taxation. It was in this context, then, that the countryside
was being “penetrated” by middle and working-class people who sought
to purchase ill-designed, often jerry-built, suburban homes, epitomized
for Trevelyan by the hideous “bungalow,” that many believed were
despoiling the rural landscape.
For families such as the Sackville-Wests, however, Trevelyan’s defini-
tion of preservation made the option of donating to the National Trust as
unappealing as selling to a hotel proprietor who planned to convert the
great estate into a “building site or a tearoom,” a scenario which Sackville-
West depicted poignantly in her earlier novel The Heir (The Heir 71).
As Patrick Murray notes, the Trust favored “monumental symbols of
English culture” or architectural embodiments of English political,
religious and literary tradition, such as country houses (27). Indeed,
Trevelyan likened the Trust itself to an “ark,” offering “permanent
safety” to its inhabitants (9). They would “preserve, not indeed locked
away, but as the public heritage” these country houses, whose “proper
use is to be dwelt in” (11). Both of these statements refer, then, to owners
such as Sackville-West who rented their houses while still residing there.
Knole had been opened to visitors before the war, an increasingly com-
mon practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and,
in 1946, was handled and subsidized by the National Trust, with the
family retaining private living spaces, the park, and many of the house’s
material objects.3 It was this truce, admittedly an uneasy one, between
the ongoing function of the house as a private family home on the one
hand and a site of preservation of a national past that was financially
supported with public monies on the other, which rendered Trevelyan’s
notion of preservation out of touch with the exigencies of the present.
The very concept and function of preservation in the context of

this arrangement elicited wide debate. Indeed, architect Sir Clough
Williams-Ellis, who like Trevelyan protested about suburban sprawl in
his evocatively titled book on architectural history and design, England
and the Octopus, questioned which version of the past the Trust sought
to preserve. In this work, he noted that the fairy tale imagery which
characterized accounts of England’s past was largely fictitious. By con-
trast, he used the language of preservation to describe the active work
of men and women who “preserved” country houses for present-day
England during the war, suggesting the extent to which preservation of
the past served contemporaneous needs for a more inclusive, democratic
sense of a shared history that encompassed the social relationships and
domestic histories of all social classes.4 Williams-Ellis pointedly criti-
cized the Trust’s deployment of the concept of preservation as promot-
ing an antiquated, hegemonic and tourist-oriented version of national
identity: “we have indeed become almost a museum in which are pre-
served here and there carefully selected and ticketed specimens of what
England was. The National Trust is England’s executor”5 (108). Many
government officials had not wished to devote national funds to main-
taining privately-owned houses in their entirety, especially when the
public seemed largely indifferent to the fate of the country estate which
had increasingly come to house museum collections, thus echoing
Clough-Ellis’s accurately pessimistic assessment of historic preservation
as merely transforming the house into a museum (Mandler, Fall 161).
Furthermore, the relationship between owner and curator could prove
just as insensitive to the house as a repository of personal memories and
rituals as could the commercial world.
In a 1928 letter written to her husband Harold Nicolson, Sackville-
West recounted her experience of selling some of Knole’s interiors
to a museum: “Leigh . . . is doing the probate valuation on the tex-
tiles (carpets and furniture) at Knole, on behalf of the Museum, with
some other experts . . . I do not like this sort of inquest on my poor
Knole—horrid inquisitive men poking about, and lifting up the petti-
coats of the chairs” (Sackville-West 22 Nov 1928). This passage recounts
a sense of violation, whereby male “experts” reduce history to a col-
lection of preserved material objects, and fail to locate these objects
within a domestic family history. In The Heir (1922), Sackville-West also
critiqued “the auctioneer’s bombast that advertised for others the qual-
ity of his possessions”, such as “the Oak Parlour, an apartment 20 ft by
25 ft, partially panelled in linen-fold in a state of the finest preservation.
Was that his library? It couldn’t be, so accurate, so precise? Why, the
Sarah Edwards 97
room was living!” (51). Within the context of contemporary advertising,

then, fine preservation merely serves to enhance the room’s aesthetic
appeal and mercantile value. In this discourse, the room is uncoupled
from its function as a living embodiment and transmitter of historical
memory to the visitors, who indicate their lack of personal connection
to the country estate by despoiling it with litter (62). As Sackville-West
declared in English Country Houses (1941)—“the soul of the house . . .
the atmosphere of a house are as much a part of the house as the archi-
tecture of the house, or the furnishings within it. Divorced from life, it
dies” (English Country Houses 48). In The Edwardians, it is this living sense
of family tradition that prompts Viola to say to her brother Sebastian,
heir to the estate: “you adore Chevron, and it would break your heart
to see it turned into a national museum” (243). By the late 1920s, then,
it seemed clear that preservation could not be reduced to a simple nos-
talgia where either the past was rendered dead and consigned to the
museum or raised as a bulwark against social progress and change.6
By contrast, and more in keeping with the spirit of Sackville-West’s
vision, Patrick Abercrombie’s The Preservation of Rural England (1926),
which preceded his formation of The Council for the Preservation of
Rural England (CPRE) later that year, linked preservation to reform.
While the CPRE utilized language similar to the National Trust when
they bemoaned the “rash of bungalows” and declared their aim to
“preserve beauty and to see that what is added to the face of the land is
not unbeautiful” (“War on ugly buildings” 1926), their reforming ethos
was indicated by Abercrombie’s sub-title: the control of development by
means of rural planning. Sackville-West, who made several speeches to
the National Trust in May and November 1928, appeared to endorse
this model as well; she prioritized not only a “beautiful” but also a func-
tional and modern environment, rather than the preservation of objects
and buildings only for the sake of tradition and antiquity. In another
letter to Harold, she recounted:
I said that it was all very well for the National Trust to preserve the
old beauties of England, but what about the new beauties? What
about the new roads and avenues? . . . Wouldn’t the National Trust
be doing good work if it supervised these things a bit too, and—since
it was no good trying to resist change—see whether beauty couldn’t
be made out of these things also? (Sackville-West 6 Nov 1928)
Clearly, Sackville-West deliberately opposed the “simple” or purely

“restorative” nostalgia of the National Trust which located beauty in
the forms of the past. She recognized, instead, the need to responsi-
bly “supervise” rural development in the face of social “change” and
embrace the possibilities for leadership and creativity in the effort to
create “new beauties”. Similarily, the futility of resisting change in the
very efforts to direct preservation of the past is evident in the rhetoric
of the CPRE which advocated that country houses should remain with
their aristocratic owners, who should adopt a model of responsible
ownership with guidance from enlightened experts—in this case,
middle-class architects and planners—about restoration or conversion
plans. The CPRE thus envisaged a “nation estate,” for while accord-
ing to Abercrombie the country house represented the Englishman’s
ideal, “the large-scale private paradise is already obsolescent,” due to its
extravagant maintenance requirements and lack of productivity (80).
Given the attitude of near resignation or at least futility with which
preservation discourses acknowledged the inevitability of change, it is
not surprising to discover that these texts share a common narrative of
decline which is firmly positioned at the start of the “railway age,” the
period of the industrial “machine” characterized by images of illness
and philistinism. The Great War, a national tragedy many deemed to be
the result of mechanized slaughter, has also been regarded as a further
catalyst for uncontrolled suburban growth, as evidenced, for instance,
in the belief that “those who survived the war destroyed” the English
landscape (Trevelyan 15). Within this historical trajectory, then, the
Edwardian age is simultaneously incorporated into an account of dis-
ruptive modernity and also characterized as a site of nostalgic longing,
as the following reference to Brooke indicates: “where, men will say, was
this England that we read of in the old poets from Chaucer to Rupert
Brooke . . . the England to save which the young men went to die in the
Great War?” (Trevelyan 15). It is this ambivalence about the Edwardian
country house, imagined as a liminal place that is caught between a
secure aristocratic past and an uncertain future, and where the demo-
cratic ideas of youth are haunted by the values and objects of the past,
that I turn to explore in Sackville-West’s The Edwardians.
The Edwardian age is popularly viewed as an “endless summer,”
implying a timeless pastoral idyll. Edwardian novels similarly identify
the country house as an unchanging microcosm of pre-industrial feudal
society. For example, in H. G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay, the Bladesover coun-
try house is described as a “little working-model . . . of the whole world”
(13). Similarly, in Woolf’s Orlando, as the protagonist declares, the estate
“looked a town rather than a house”; it is a “vast, yet ordered building”
built “by workmen whose names are unknown” and “here have lived,
Sarah Edwards 99
for more centuries that I can count, the obscure generations of my own
obscure family” (51). The design of the house reflects its organic link
to the ancient land. In The Heir, as Sackville-West’s narrator describes,
Blackboys is “in design quite simple . . . it was married to the lie of the
land” (16–18) and for Orlando, the impression of unity between man-
made house and natural landscape suggests a “single architect with one
idea in his head” (51). For Wells, however, Bladesover’s decline mirrored
Edwardian social agitation—the decline of aristocracy and agriculture,
and rising labour unrest—that would ultimately destroy this system.
Rather than invoking the sense of endless summer, the Edwardian
period is compared to the transitional season of autumn, much “like an
early day in fine October”, even while the “hand of change” is “unfelt,
unseen” by the Edwardians themselves (15).
In Orlando, Woolf’s brief inclusion of the Edwardian age similarly
marks its transitional status; it signals the passing of the Victorian era
and the emergence of modernity. In dating modernity’s arrival, Woolf
claimed, provocatively and famously in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”,
that only with the demise of the Edwardian age, “on or about December
1910, human character changed” (319). However, the Edwardian period
in Orlando not only signals personal and literary fulfilment for the
heroine since she gives birth to her son and secures the publication of
her manuscript; the period is also characterized by invigorating signs of
cultural modernity. Much of this brief section focuses on the moderni-
zation of the home, and thus it is worth considering the relationship
between the new Edwardian house and the restoration of the country
house in the remainder of the novel. Far from evoking a pastoral scene
of clear-cut nostalgic longing for the Edwardians, Woolf represents
the impact of technology on the home, such as electric lighting: “At a
touch, a whole room was lit; hundreds of rooms were lit; and one was
precisely the same as the other. One could see everything . . . there
was no privacy; none of those lingering shadows and odd corners that
there used to be” (147). Through this use of contrasts, Woolf empha-
sizes that the bright colours, open spaces, and clean lines of Edwardian
house design were renovations both of the cluttered Victorian interior:
“curtains and covers had been frizzled up and the walls were bare so
that new brilliantly coloured pictures of real things like streets, umbrel-
las, apples, were hung in frames, or painted upon the wood” and of the
class-bound, patriarchal family that its spaces enabled. “Those women
in aprons carrying wobbly lamps which they put down carefully on
this table and on that” have disappeared in an age of labor-saving
households and wider employment opportunities for the servant class
and “families were much smaller”, as middle-class Edwardian women

restricted their childbearing (147). Nevertheless, Woolf’s novel expresses
an ambivalent attitude toward the domestic and social changes resulting
from Edwardian technological and cultural development. She laments
the loss of individuality and privacy in the bright modern house,
which implicitly erases the traces of the past (“lingering shadows” are
obliterated and “bare walls” are covered with “new” decorations), as
Sackville-West had insisted on the inter-relationship between “the soul
of the house” and “the furnishings within it” (English Country Houses
48). Woolf had famously rejected the “Edwardian tools” of material
description; the Edwardian novelists, most notably Arnold Bennett, as
Woolf claims, “have laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things.
They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce
the human beings who live there” (“Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” 331).
Nevertheless, the material objects that abound in her novel possess a
symbolic function in the debates about preservation and modernity,
nostalgia and social critique. In Orlando the material fabric of the
ancient house unmistakably influences Orlando’s sense of history,
familial inheritance, and identity as he progresses through the centuries
to 1928. Although Woolf’s text is less immersed in the language of con-
temporary preservation than Sackville-West’s, she nonetheless engages
these debates in her fiction, and, here, it is important to understand,
Woolf emphasizes the importance of Orlando’s sensitive modernization
of tradition.
Sackville-West’s novel is centrally concerned with contemporary
issues of preservation, nostalgia, and inheritance that developed in the
Edwardian period. The Edwardians begins in July 1905 and explores vari-
ous meanings of cultural inheritance through the responses of an aristo-
cratic family to their ancestral home. Chevron is also as self-contained
as a rural, small town, where both family and servants have lived for
generations and where “any outsider was regarded with suspicion and
disdain” (22). The guests, or “outsiders,” embody versions of modernity.
As in the novels of Edwardian writers, many pivotal scenes are set in
summer, as the garden is a site for social rituals. At the garden party, the
hero and heir, Sebastian, observes “the sprinkled figures of his mother’s
guests, some sitting under the trees, some strolling about . . . their
laughter and the tap of the croquet mallets” (11). This garden appears as
an Eden-like place, “a world where pleasure fell like a ripened peach for
the outstretching of a hand” and which conveyed “an order of things
which appeared unchangeable” (15, 51). And yet, Sackville-West also
critiques the ostensible timeless perfection of the scene by employing
Sarah Edwards 101
spatial metaphors that increase the sense of distance from the unfold-
ing events: “life is a long stretch full of variety” (The Edwardians 9).
She emphasizes the monotonous and interchangeable quality of this
“long stretch” of summer afternoons, weekends and holidays; “all their
days were the same; had been the same for an eternity of years” (16).
Sackville-West’s Edwardian summer may suggest security and stable
meaning, but it also conveys stasis and social boredom.
Throughout the text, Sebastian is tempted by the prospect of escape
from the endless garden parties. His friend Leonard Antequil predicts
Sebastian’s future as heir of Chevron, seeing him as a tragic Icarus figure
who desires but fails to escape his privileged confines. As Antequil
states, “you will never jump as far as a planet; never even further than
the limits of your own park. You are fenced in” (91). Like Orlando,
Sebastian and Antequil employ spatial metaphors that suggest a vast-
ness of landscape from which it appears sometimes impossible or unde-
sirable to completely leave. “[A]ll this he could see from the free height
of the roof”; similarly Orlando walks uphill to obtain a panoramic
view of the family estate—“counting, gazing, recognising. That was his
father’s house” (The Edwardians 11; Orlando 8). Jefferson Hunter notes
that in Edwardian country-house fiction wide views, used as a vantage
point to examine a range of rituals and English identities, looked out
with complacency in suspended time and concentrated space (190).
Interestingly, Sackville-West identifies Edwardian complacency with
an outmoded type of woman, a generation of older females who stand
in her novel for Chevron’s rituals and who are described as stifling the
protagonist’s sense of self. Chevron appears, more precisely, as a domes-
ticated, feminized space: “the green lawn appeared . . . like a green
cloth . . . with the little domes of the parasols moving against it” (The
Edwardians 20). When it came to her family’s estate which she wrote
about in Knole and the Sackvilles, Sackville-West uncritically imagined
the lavish house as a space of maternal plenitude, likening the place to
“some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had
many lovers and seen many generations come and go” (18). In The
Heir, which was similarly uncritical of the patriarchal, aristocratic land-
owning system that Knole represented, the house appears thus: “like a
woman gracious, humorous and dominant, the house remained quiet
at the centre . . . ample and maternal” (42). However, in The Edwardians,
this maternal dominance clearly comes under critical scrutiny, for it
constrains the proto-socialist heir Sebastian, who feels “engulfed once
more in the bevy of his mother’s guests. Weekends were always like
this” (12).
Rita Felski has discussed how many twentieth-century thinkers “have

placed femininity and modernity in an antithetical relationship”; she
explains in this context that nostalgia has often been expressed as a
longing for a “prehistoric” or pre-Oedipal time associated with mother
nature or the maternal body (39). One can trace in Sackville-West’s
works, then, a gradual shift away from this simple nostalgic conflation
of maternal femininity and an unchanging country house and toward
a more reflective nostalgia, one that acknowledges the patriarchal gen-
der roles that restrain the relationship of sons and daughters to the
house. Through her material descriptions, Sackville-West reveals that
the “ancient and hierarchical etiquette” of Chevron has in reality been
catapulted into historical time by Edwardian innovations, which in the
novel include such modern eruptions as croquet, motor cars, and new
servant uniforms (The Edwardians 12).
David Matless has observed that rural planners from the CPRE charac-
terized themselves as masculine adventurers, explorers and experts, sur-
veying and mapping land for development (14). In addition to figuring
an older generation of female characters as responsible for the perpetu-
ation of an unchanged country-house tradition, Sackville-West similarly
identifies this masculine adventure and exploration as an Edwardian
trait that poses a deliberate challenge to the blind perpetuation of the
past, blind in the sense that it takes no account of modern change.
She describes Antequil as an Edwardian hero who stands as the chief
“outsider” and “onlooker” while pondering the country house’s future
(The Edwardians 71). A Polar explorer seemingly modelled on Robert
Falcon Scott, who led the 1910–1912 Terra Nova Expedition only to
discover that a Norwegian party had reached the South Pole before they
arrived, Antequil arrives as a guest who feels excluded from the rituals of
“a Sunday afternoon under the trees of Chevron, listening to chatter in
which he could not take part” (The Edwardians 19). He recollects his pre-
vious summers, which were characterized by change and travel. He was
once “marooned for a whole winter [the English summer] somewhere
near the South Pole in a snow hut with four companions, one of whom
had gone mad” (27–8). This “man of the people” emerges in Sackville-
West’s novel as a new model for British masculinity and celebrity, the
“lion of the moment” whose exploits are “reported in all the papers”
(27–8). Following Scott’s failure to win the British race for the Pole, as
well as the tragic return journey from the South Pole during which he
and his expedition party had died, his reputation soared in the 1920s;
the Scott Polar Research Institute was founded at Cambridge in 1920.
Read in this context, Sackville-West grants Antequil a complicated role.
Sarah Edwards 103
He is construed as an Edwardian symbol of British progress, but one who

also suggests an image of defeated adventure and heroism. The figure
of Antequil offers, then, a full exploration of the complicated legacy of
the Edwardian country house at a historical moment that some saw as
a sign of decline and others as a harbinger of modern reform.
Sackville-West’s commentary on the future of the country house is
relayed entirely through Antequil. For him, the house is “dead as a
museum” (80). His resistance to what might be called the museumi-
fication of the country house echoes the language of contemporary
debates about preservation of the national heritage, debates in which
Sackville-West was so deeply invested. At Chevron, the material objects
that abound in Edwardian country-house fiction—“the silver tripods,
the portraits, the tapestry” are described as having “no mystery attach-
ing to them—nothing except the very obvious interest of their age,
their state of preservation, their intrinsic beauty” (79–80). Despite the
preservation of “natural beauty” that the National Trust emphasized,
the lack of functional importance of these objects makes them socially
irrelevant to the Edwardians, let alone to future generations. Antequil
continually echoes the equation of preservation with death: the rooms
look like “splendid tombs” and the silver light in the galleries creates
bony, skeletal shadows (81). As the narrator remarks of Antequil, “he
caught a moment exactly at its passing”; this Edwardian house appears
to be “a rock at which the waters were nibbling” (70, 57). Antequil and
Sebastian oscillate in their views of the house, seeing it sometimes as an
“anachronism, an exquisite survival” and other times as “dying from
the top” (70, 81). Their bifurcated view of the house as both surviving
and dying echoes the ambivalence about the relevance of the country
house for both Edwardian and contemporary Britain.
The characters of The Edwardians mirror the house’s uncertain place
between past and present values. As a successful model of Edwardian
masculine modernity, Antequil must be integrated into the existing
order, and, as the narrator remarks, “it tickled him . . . because one had
tried to reach the South Pole, one should be invited to Chevron” (56).
Yet, for Sackville-West’s audience, Antequil and Chevron were equally
ironic and doomed Edwardian figures. At the novel’s end, Antequil
and Sebastian meet at the coronation of George V and decide to escape
together on a new three-year adventure, which echoes the Terra Nova
Expedition. The novel foreshadows the possibility of a simarily tragic
outcome for the characters, when both are associated with death and
preservation: Sebastian is an “effigy” who is doomed to “mummery” and
Antequil is an “exhibit” (81, 342, 58). Furthermore, as Antequil observes
to Sebastian with grim prescience, even if they do return “there may

be a war by then, which will kill you off” (349). In Sackville-West’s sub-
sequent novel, Family History, published in 1932, we learn that Sebastian
and Chevron are spared this fate but the character still struggles to rec-
oncile his aristocratic legacy with his socialist beliefs. The divided self of
the “eccentric duke” is reflected in the duality of his lifestyle; he “buries
himself in the country” for half of each year and attempts to escape
his legacy by travelling the world during the othe half (173). The lack
of narrative closure for Sebastian reflects the continuity between the
Edwardian era and the 1930s: both periods are seen as transitional and
marked by ambivalent attitudes about the country house.
In seeking to grant a new lease on the country house, Sackville-West
grants the privileged point of view to Antequil, who suggests the extent
to which the house possesses an enduring, albeit uncanny, trace of life
that is irreducible to the museum; “the great rooms of state that were
never used now, but preserved their ancient furnishings . . . seemed . . .
to still flutter with a life that had but barely departed from them”
(The Edwardians 79). The personification of well-loved objects simi-
larly occurs throughout Sackville-West’s descriptions of Knole, where,
for example, the chairs in the gallery sit in “lovely, silent rows, for
ever holding out their arms and forever disappointed” (Knole and the
Sackvilles 27). Similarly, in Woolf’s Orlando, her fictional heroine, mod-
elled on Sackville-West, “fancied that the rooms brightened as she came
in . . . They had known each other for close on four centuries now . . .
She knew their sorrows and joys . . . In this window-seat, she had writ-
ten her first verses; in that chapel, she had been married” (156). For
both writers, the “soul” of the house, and the link to its ancestral his-
tory, is embodied in such material containers of memory.
Most significantly, perhaps, both writers seek to contribute to the
country house as part of a living tradition, as well as to shape their own
sense of self by advocating the type of renovation to the house that
would accommodate new forms of modern life. Sackville-West recounts
playing an active role in renovating Knole at the close of the Edwardian
era, when the house is still allied with life: “here I have become an
architect, and go about with two carpenters, and a hammer and a good
measure, and the result of much tapping of walls is that we are going to
have another bedroom for people staying” (Sackville-West 21 Feb 1912).
Woolf’s Orlando wishes to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors and
“add another stone to the house” but feels that would be “superfluous”.
This is not nostalgia, but an aesthetic appreciation of the “orderly and
symmetrical” completeness of the architecture (Orlando 51). Indeed, “it
Sarah Edwards 105
seemed vain and arrogant in the extreme to try to better that anony-
mous work of creation; the labours of those vanished hands” (51). These
musings occur as Orlando ponders the nature of literary and ancestral
inheritance and the seemingly “vain and arrogant” aspirations of the
modern, individual author/architect compared to the “obscure noble-
men, forgotten builders” (51–2). As he struggles to compose a perora-
tion, however, Orlando’s desire for individual immortality becomes
merged with his role as keeper of tradition, when he declares “whatever
the peroration wanted, that was what the house stood in need of”
(52). As Sackville-West becomes an architect and employs her vision
and creativity to shape her personal legacy, open the house to a wider
community and encourage modern craftsmanship (as she “go[es] about
with two carpenters”), similarly Orlando resolves his identity conflicts
by becoming an interior designer and embarking on a furnishing spree.
Woolf foregrounds the significance of this apparently impulsive and
eccentric act by including an indented list of furniture, which includes
“sixty-seven walnut tree tables . . . Venice glasses . . . [and] ninety-seven
cushions” (53). This re-making of the interior transforms Orlando’s
notion of the appropriate subject of literary works; the protagonist que-
ries, “could one mention furniture in a peroration? Could one speak of
chairs and tables and mats to lie besides people’s beds?” (52). Woolf’s
inclusion of a small section of the “tedious” list suggests that her answer
is affirmative, for Orlando “had matter now . . . to fill out his perora-
tion”; but “he felt that still something was lacking”. However, the func-
tion of the furniture in house and the peroration need to be elaborated.
The new chairs are described as lacking “people sitting in them” and
so necessitate the “very splendid entertainments” that keep the “three
hundred and sixty-five bedrooms . . . full for a month at a time” (52–4).
Writing in 1928, then, Woolf mocks Orlando’s “tedious” catalogue of
furniture as an end in itself, endorsing, rather, its importance as a record
of the revitalization of a country-house tradition that inspires modern
creativity and community.
When Sackville-West, like Woolf, comes closest to conveying a sense
of the country house and its material objects as retaining a trace of
life and resisting the reduction to a lifeless museum, she employs the
rich rhetoric of haunting. Antequil’s ambivalence about Chevron’s
uncanny, half-living status is finally imaged as a ghostliness. Indeed,
ghosts abound in both Sackville-West’s and Woolf’s work and symbol-
ize various types of inheritance and dispossession. Anthony Vidler has
drawn attention to the importance of the “haunted house” in nostalgic
discourses; he addresses the centrality of the disrupted home within
concepts of both nostalgia and the uncanny, whereby “the uncanny has
been interpreted as a dominant constituent of modern nostalgia, with
a corresponding spatiality” (Vidler x).7 In 1928, soon after her father’s
death and her dispossession of Knole, Sackville-West raises the ghost
trope in several letters to Harold:
I went up to Knole after dark and wandered about the garden . . .

I mean, I had the sensation of having the place so completely to
myself, that I might have been the only person alive in the world—
and not the world of today, mark you, but the world of at least 300
years ago. I might have been the ghost of Lady Anne Clifford. Oh
ghosts, ghosts. Dada, Knole. (Sackville-West 16 May 1928)
And next day: “I have not yet got over my nocturnal visit to Knole.
I’ve never felt so like a ghost in my life and (not laugh) I kept thinking
I should see Dada at any moment at the end of one of the long grass
walks” (Sackville-West 17 May 1928). Here the space of Knole engenders
an uncanny conflation of past and present, with a corresponding con-
fusion for Sackville-West’s sense of self. However, it is notable that she
does not finally witness the ghost of her father, whose death symbolized
patriarchal tradition and the loss of Knole. Instead, she narrates her own
ghostly identification with Lady Anne Clifford, a literary female ances-
tor who ultimately won her battle to inherit her own family estate.8
As Erica Johnson observes, ghosts suggest a traumatic history, just as
haunting indicates repressed stories that nevertheless reemerge and
trouble official histories (110). The dispossessed Sackville-West, then,
imagines herself as the heiress to her overlooked female ancestors who
still haunt the house and fight for its survival, and she does so in con-
trast to the male line, which is regarded as decisively dead.
In Orlando, the protagonist wanders through “the galleries, through
the banqueting-halls, up the staircases, into the bedrooms” (Orlando
33), as does Sackville-West’s outsider figure, Antequil. These wanderings
are similarly associated with the imagery of death: “Orlando now took
a strange delight in death and decay” (33) and with the uncanny: “the
house was haunted by a great variety of ghosts” (33). However, unlike
Antequil, the presumptive heir Orlando must confront these ghosts;
like Sackville-West’s haunting of the garden at Knole, Orlando “must
descend into the crypt where his ancestors lay, coffin upon coffin”
(33–4). At this time, the male Orlando considers only the conventional
themes of returning to dust—“nothing remains of all these Princes”—
and achieving immortality through art (34). But as he becomes infected
Sarah Edwards 107
with the “disease of reading” and “it was the fatal nature of this disease
to substitute a phantom for reality”, Orlando neglects his ancestral
inheritance. When he opens a book, and later takes to writing, “the
nine acres of stone which were his house vanished; one hundred and
fifty indoor servants disappeared” (35). Here, the imagery of ghostliness
represents the absent or irresponsible owner whose failure to maintain
and modernize could lead to the death of the estate and its community
(as Sackville-West’s Sebastian ultimately abandons Chevron for half of
each year). As he progresses through history, Orlando learns to reconcile
his ancestral obligations and individual aspirations. The gender reversal,
however, leads the female Orlando to experience a sense of existential
and gender ghostliness and to feel “uncertain whether she was alive
or dead”. After her long absence, as the narrator remarks, it is declared
“she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property whatever,
that she was a woman, which amounted to much the same thing” (82).
Like Sackville-West, she flees to her estate to confirm her identity, where
her changed gender is deemed irrelevant to her ancestral role. Indeed,
neither human nor animal servants “showed an instant’s suspicion that
Orlando was not the Orlando they had known”(83). In their challenge
to structures of inheritance informed by patriarchal and aristocratic
traditions, and their commitment to reform, Sackville-West and Woolf
offer an important feminist appeal to preserving and renovating the
country house for modern times.
In The Edwardians, it is Viola, Sebastian’s twin sister, who represents
nascent modernity. She contrasts sharply with her mother and her
mother’s generation, whose lives are “a rite . . . performed in the serv-
ice of . . . the society that she decorated” and who similarly advise her
on the “preservation” of her beauty: “this eternal hair, these eternal
clothes! They wear a woman out before her time” (156, 38). Sebastian
says of his sister that “she wants to be a separate person, and not just a
piece fitted into a picture,” indicating her resistance to female objectifi-
cation and identification with traditional familial roles in the ancestral
portraits that line the walls; Viola wants to inherit and shape the house,
instead of being identified with it (The Edwardians 313–14). As Sophie
Blanch has observed, Viola typifies the Edwardian aristocratic girl who
inherits models of femininity that are naturalized and rigidly enforced
by a dominant matriarch (78). The use of fairy tale imagery underscores
the archetypal and limited roles available to her. When Sebastian’s
mistress drops a mirror which fails to break due to the thickness of the
luxurious carpet, these material objects are “symbols of a life she could
not escape. Their respective solidity and thickness conquered her”
(The Edwardians 174). In order to redefine herself, Viola leaves Chevron

in 1910 to live alone in London, and at this juncture the novel ends,
when “the reign of King Edward the Seventh was over and the days of
decent behaviour ended” (344). In Family History, Viola has married
Antequil and their socialist and pacifist beliefs are embodied in their
new home, which is the very antithesis of the country house (DeSalvo
212). This household is distinguished by its informality, lack of serv-
ants, discussion of ideas, and inclusion of women in all facets of life
(Family History 163).
Like Woolf, Sackville-West considers the end of an era as a moment for
retrospection. The choice of failed hero Scott as a model of Edwardian
progress and Viola’s abandonment of the Edwardian country house
implies that Sackville-West ultimately concurred with Woolf’s belief
that the modernity which emerged around December 1910 marked
the end of the country house tradition. Admittedly, Sackville-West in
particular evokes a nostalgia of doom for the patriarchal, aristocratic
Edwardian country house. The reader is invited to both luxuriate in
textual details of interiors and lifestyles, as well as mourn for the death
of a flawed system. The immersion in detail, and the distance created
by contemporary discourses of preservation, enables this dual focus.
For both writers, it would seem, the simple or restorative nostalgia
that seeks to preserve the country house as a museum only hastened
its death in the modern world. However, Sackville-West and Woolf
develop what may be called a functional nostalgia. Their dispossessed
heirs seek to connect past and present by preserving treasured objects
and rituals, as the containers of memory. Such preservation must,
however, be functional; the heirs also seek to supplement the material
relics of the past with modern objects and ideas that speak to the con-
temporary lives of family and a wider community. Orlando realizes that
“the house was no longer hers entirely. . . . It belonged to time now; to
history” (Orlando 157); She can encounter ghosts and her past selves in
its relics, but the two hundred servants have disappeared in accordance
with modern living. Sackville-West’s characters are consigned either to
the past or granted the promise of a future, in accordance with their
attitudes toward history. The metaphorical death and the childlessness
of her brother Sebastian suggest that the daughter Viola, like Orlando,
may one day inherit her ancestral home. What Viola typifies, finally,
is Sackville-West’s open-ended commitment to a modern, beautiful,
and socially inclusive house in the country. Even if Chevron is not pre-
served, as Viola declares optimistically,“something else will be built in
[its] place” (The Edwardians 245).
Sarah Edwards 109
Notes
1. Woolf and Sackville-West met in 1922, were lovers throughout the 1920s and
remained friends and correspondents until Woolf’s death in 1941.
2. Ribbon development refers to the building of houses along the communica-
tion routes of residential areas: for example, near railway lines. For contem-
porary criticism of this policy, and proposed solutions, see the Town Planning
Act (1909), the Housing Act (1919), Raymond Unwin, Nothing Gained by
Overcrowding (1912) and the Restriction of Ribbon Development Act (1935).
3. In 1936, the National Trust formed the Country House Committee in
response to the demolition of some houses. The National Trust Act of 1937
allowed the Trust to receive houses and/or lands as tax-free gifts.
4. The Edwardians also tells the stories of servant families who have worked at
Chevron for generations.
5. Clough-Williams anticipates Robert Hewison’s 1987 criticism of “history as
heritage” in The Heritage Industry, whereby a simplified and idealized past is
commodified in museums, often, but not always, for financial gain.
6. Fred Davis has coined the term “simple nostalgia” to indicate an unreflective
preference for the past. Sackville-West shows here how this form of nostalgia
fails to bring the past into communion with the present, and leads to the
equation of preservation with death.
7. The concept of the uncanny is drawn from the overlapping meanings of
unheimlich (“unhomely”) and heimlich (“homely”); “nostalgia” is derived
from the Greek words nostos (“returning home”) and algos (“pain”).
8. Lady Anne Clifford was married to Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset, and
in 1649 inherited the Clifford estates in northern England, which included
Skipton Castle.
Works cited
Abercrombie, Patrick. The Preservation of Rural England. London: The Council for
the Preservation of Rural England, 1926.
Anon. “War on ugly buildings.” The Guardian 3 September 1926, no p.n.
Bailey, Christopher. “Progress and Preservation: The Role of Rural Industries in
the Making of the Modern Image of the Countryside.” Journal of Design History
9 (1996): 35–53.
Blanch, Sophie. “Contested Wills: Reclaiming the Daughter’s Inheritance in Vita
Sackville-West’s The Edwardians.” Critical Survey 19.1 (2007): 73–83.
DeSalvo, Louise A. “Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-
West and Virginia Woolf.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8.2
(1982): 195–214.
Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Hewison, Robert. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London:
Methuen, 1987.
Hunter, Jefferson. Edwardian Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Johnson, Erica L. “Giving Up the Ghost: National and Literary Haunting in
Orlando.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.1 (2004): 110–28.
Mandler, Peter. “Against ‘Englishness’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural
Nostalgia, 1850–1940.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7, 6th series
(1997): 155–75.
——. The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1999.
Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 2001.
Murray, Patrick Joseph. “The Council for the Preservation of Rural England,
Suburbia and the Politics of Preservation.” Prose Studies 32.1 (2010): 25–37.
Sackville-West, Vita. Letters to Harold Nicholson: 21 Feb 1912; 16 May 1928; 17
May 1928; 11 Oct. 1928; 6 Nov. 1928; 27 Nov. 1928. Sackville-West Collection,
Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, IN.
——. English Country Houses. London: Prion Books, 1996.
——. Family History. London: Virago Modern Classics, 1990.
——. Knole and the Sackvilles. London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1969.
——. The Edwardians. London: Virago, 2008.
——. The Heir. London: Hesperus Press Limited, 2008.
Trevelyan, G. M. Must England’s Beauty Perish? A Plea on Behalf of the National
Trust. London: Faber and Gwyer, 1929.
Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
Wells, H. G. Tono-Bungay. London: Penguin, 2005.
Williams-Ellis, Clough. England and the Octopus. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1928.
Woolf, Virginia. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard
Woolf. Vol. 1 London: Hogarth, 1966. 319–37. 4 vols. 1966–67.
——. Orlando: A Biography. Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1995.
6
Modernist Urban Nostalgia and
British Metropolitan Writing,
1908–1934
Barry J. Faulk
Virtually every reader of British modernist literature is familiar with

how nostalgia in the period often takes the specific form of a longing
for the vanished or vanishing rural forms of life, typically associated
with the literary tradition surrounding the country house and insight-
fully analyzed by Sarah Edwards in her contribution to this collection.
In contrast, this essay locates a type of modernist nostalgia within the
metropolitan London scene and addresses how this longing appeared
and functioned within the discourse on music hall produced by urban
writers in the early twentieth century. Indeed, much of the writing on
popular entertainment in the British metropolis in this era often philos-
ophized regarding the diminishing popularity of music hall, the nation’s
first mass entertainment, and its replacement by cinema as the primary
leisure activity in Britain. The transformation was thought to reflect
broader changes within the city, including the increased mechanization
of the metropolis. The response of modernists to the city went against
the grain of modernist ideology, which, by and large, did not fondly
recall the Victorian age. Indeed, in this case, the demise of community
implied in the passing of music hall London actually occasioned a lot
of hand-wringing by literary intellectuals. I argue here that modernist
nostalgia for music hall was not merely a higher form of whining, but
quickly became a forum where the social effects of new forms of moder-
nity were critically examined. My essay traces this development in urban
writing of the era, beginning with Arthur Symons’s travel writing on
London, taken up by T. S. Eliot in his most famous account of music hall,
that is, his obituary remarks on singer Marie Lloyd, and concluding with
Thomas Burke’s 1934 retrospective view of urban entertainment.
Even in its own day, the discourse of urban nostalgia constituted a
substantial archive of modernist evaluation of popular culture. Symons,
111
Eliot, and Burke each had a clear sense that the world of theatre and
music hall that captured their imagination now existed, to paraphrase
Andrew Gibson, “definitively on the other side of a historical divide”
(293). As such, their writings about urban nostalgia offer primarily a
mode of critical reflection: a way for writers to regard and remark on
the disappearance of one form of popular entertainment, with strong
ties to the Victorian era, and the modern rise of mass media such as
cinema and telegraph. From the start, the expression of urban nostal-
gia sought to foster critical thinking in regard to mass entertainment
and the social relations it established. Nostalgic writing also offered a
means to critique crude versions of progressive ideology that equated
scientific advance, or the spread of global mass culture, with social
progress.
Modernist urban nostalgia may be understood as a thread in a larger
fabric that constitutes a modernist discourse of evaluation concerned
with the popular arts. The range of the discourse involved here belies a
view long held of modernist writers as either demonizing mass culture,
among those who wrote about it, or refusing to engage with the popular
arts, among those who did not. The shifting, subtle evaluative response
of writers like Symons and Burke to popular entertainment, especially
popular music, has little in common with the dogmatic views long
ascribed to modernist writers on this topic. As a mode of critical writ-
ing, modernist urban nostalgia challenges the picture many of us still
have of modern writers as being especially anxious about or dismissive
in regard to popular culture. Modernist urban nostalgia often makes
discriminating judgments between different forms of popular art, dem-
onstrating that modernist writers engaged popular culture in nuanced
ways that scholarship has only begun to acknowledge.
Modern and modernist writers, for example, quickly acclimated
themselves to the revolutionary aspects of urban popular music in the
late Victorian and Modernist eras. It is true that many middle-class par-
tisans of the urban entertainment of music hall savored what they took
to be the essentially English character of variety singers and comics, that
is, the “folk” character of performers understood as expressing timeless
truths about a people. However, the music hall broke with preconcep-
tions about the unique transcendent character of music. Exclusively
an urban phenomenon, music hall represented an unprecedented spa-
tializing of music, challenging idealized notions of music’s necessary
link to transcendence. It was no longer easy to consider popular songs
themselves, now composed by an emerging class of songwriting profes-
sionals, as the authentic voice of the people, transcending history. Yet
Barry J. Faulk 113
modernist writers mostly championed what they recognized to be the

new mass and secular character of music.
While modernist commentary on popular music especially focused
on this new but decisive association of music with the metropolis,
modernist British intellectuals, many of whom came of age in the fin de
siècle, could hardly avoid thinking about the popular arts separate from
the concerns of late Victorian biopolitics. Since the 1850s, London itself
had been the subject of professional discourses that addressed prac-
tices of data collection and policy formulation relating to health and
hygiene. Rather than focus on the individual, the traditional subject of
aesthetics, biopolitical inquiry considered the consequences that culture
and cultural forms of life had on public behavior. Modernist nostalgia
was primarily a discourse of evaluation: but it was always entangled in
a broader, biopolitical criticism and its concerns. The primary task of
biopolitical criticism is the management of populations by the regula-
tion of culture.1 As we will see in Burke’s case, the critical reception in
the late Victorian/modern period to music hall and popular music set
a precedent for the later modernist reception of popular arts such as
cinema. Writing criticism of the popular arts might begin as evaluation,
in a subjective, personal register, in keeping with Kant’s account of the
judgment of taste. But the critical investigation of culture in biopolitics
aims at the recentralizing of cultural authority, even when it lingers, as
it does in Symons’s writing, on the play of meaning, which is also why
so much of the writing of Victorian medical and educational profession-
als, including that of Matthew Arnold, either references or presumes an
idea of the State.
The meaning of biopolitics in the work of Michel Foucault is a compli-
cated matter; for the purposes of this essay, I use the term to describe the
official communication of a class of experts seeking to manage—through
the practice of criticism—the conduct of an unruly population, or at least
a population that professional knowledge has described as “uncivilized”
and thus unmanageable. Terry Eagleton’s definition of I. A. Richards’
critical pedagogy as “the enlightened manipulation of popular psychol-
ogy in the service of social control” is also relevant here (15). Biopolitics
is by no means foreign to aesthetic modernism; revolutionary avant-
gardes in Germany and the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century
routinely adopted a biopolitical perspective on art, understanding its
potential to construct a version of the human subject “whose percep-
tions and responses are geared to action, solidarity, and the flux of urban
experience (Eagleton 15). The modern British writers who focused on the
city shared many of these typically avant-garde concerns.2
The major tropes of modernist urban nostalgia were set in Arthur

Symons’s long essay, London: a Book of Aspects, ostensibly a travel guide
to the metropolis, first published as a small volume in 1908. That a late
Victorian writer helped formulate the characteristic preoccupations of
British modernist writers regarding urbanism is not as surprising as it
might first seem. As Peter Brooker notes, modernism became part of
literary London, not by producing “a single new type of ‘the modern-
ist bohemian’” but by its “strategic adoption” of various nineteenth-
century “bohemian personae”; the result was an “in-folding of the
modern and pre-modern” that characterized the era of the early 1900s
(8, 41). The modernist character of the “London” essay is partly the
result of Symons’s special subject matter. Symons had come to London
from Wales in order to make a career as both a poet and critic. A devotee
of Charles Baudelaire, attendant at Mallarmé’s Tuesday literary gather-
ings, and the person responsible for persuading Paul Verlaine to lecture
in London, Symons quickly became an important emissary for French
poetry in London. As Michael Bracewell has noted, the Decadent move-
ment provided his “moment of being,” as Virginia Woolf describes it,
“when one’s consciousness seems fully engaged in the present” (305).
In addition, his participation in the movement resembled the intensity
of belonging to an urban subculture; in both instances, a shared style
also signifies a dissident relation to the mainstream. The experience,
Bracewell continues, fused “memory and geography” into “a single sen-
sation” for Symons (305). As a result, Symons’s recollections of walking
around London, which comprise the bulk of the essay, offer introspec-
tive insights into both the city and his writing career.
After an opening account of contrasting scenes in the city, in a pain-
terly mode, the essay takes a sharp, polemical turn. “London was once
habitable, in spite of itself,” Symons writes. But: “The machines have
killed it. Charles Lamb could not live in this mechanical city, out of
which everything old and human has been driven by wheels and ham-
mers and the fluids of noise and speed” (170). Symons continues in
this vein:
We live by touching buttons and ringing bells, a new purely practi-

cal magic sets us in communication with the ends of the earth. We
can have abominable mockeries of the arts of music and of speech
whizzing in our ears out of metal mouths. We have outdone the
wildest prophetic buffooneries of Villiers de l’Isle Adam . . . here any
gramophone can give us the equivalent of his “chemical analysis of
the last breath”. (172)
Barry J. Faulk 115
This passionate jeremiad, with its critique of a modern, mechanized

way of life and its presumably dehumanizing effect on the urban
masses, would become the central trope of urban modernist nostalgia.
However, the critique appears to us now as one-dimensional as the tech-
nological fetishism it attempts to oppose. In fairness, Symons’s attack
on mechanism is also an attempt to resist the gentrification of the city:
“When the Strand was widened, Holywell street, one of the oldest and
quaintest streets in London, was pulled down . . . and many dingy and
twisting lanes which could well be spared” (181). Nostalgia here pro-
vides a means to name the social forces that were transforming urban
society into warring groups of rich and poor.
Against this vision of the mechanical city, Symons poses a counter-
memory of his years lodging in the Temple area, when he would nightly
travel, flâneur-style, into Soho and beyond into Leicester Square The Soho
district is depicted as a twilit interzone, in the heart of the city yet set
apart from it. Its immigrant population and temporary crowds of night-
time inhabitants—theatre, music hall, and restaurant goers—complete
the picture of an exotic urban space. In Symons’s description of the area,
the foreign quarter of London radiates from Leicester Square, or

winds inward to that point as a centre. Its foreign aspect, that fact
that it was a part of Soho, interested me. In Leicester Square, and in
all the tiny streets running into it, you are never in the really normal
London: it is an escape, a sort of shamefaced and sordid and yet irre-
sistible reminder of Paris and Italy. (183)
The Soho that Symons knew in the 1890s stood in an uncanny relation
to the rest of the metropolis. It boasted a glamorous nightlife, with
fine dining establishments (including the first Italian restaurants in the
city) and glamorous music halls, such as the Empire and the Alhambra,
Symons’s favorite venues, and the Crown, the pub conveniently located
in between the theatres. Soho was a destination for the gourmand, and
pockmarked with dilapidated homes and seedy, run-down streets. Robert
Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde presents it
as the perfect home for Mr. Hyde, providing a place where the charac-
ter could have his way outside the scrutiny of Dr. Jekyll’s middle-class
neighbors. The area’s reputation as an immigrant settlement—“sordid,
ostentatious”—completes the picture that Symons draws of Soho as an
Othered space (184).
It is here that we see the more self-interested aims of Symons’s particu-
lar brand of modernist urban nostalgia: they are colored by his yearning
for a moment when his own writing had a clearer social function, and
seemed more relevant to its cultural and historical moment. His lament
also touches on class issues: the representation of Soho as home for
the poor as well as exotic destination for the urban critic underwrote
the critic’s own credibility with his readership. The publishing history
of the “London” text is pertinent here. As Brooker points out, Symons
recycled the long essay in whole or section in essays written fifteen
years apart: his attempt at a “mechanical but defiant affirmation of a
retreating past” (35). At the same time, a defensive note enters the writ-
er’s account of his early career as well as his recollections of his fellow
Decadents, aptly summarized by Brooker as a fear of both “failure and
lost reputation” (38). Symons’s recollection of Soho is meant to identify
a marginal space, defined as marginal by oppressive structures. By align-
ing himself with a site of resistance to normative Englishness, Symons
recalls a time when writers had agency, when they defiantly chose to be
on the margins. Most of all, Symons is desperately trying to recall and
affirm a time when Decadent style was more than a risible stereotype to
a younger generation of writers.
Symons’s views on music hall are of a piece with his characteriza-
tion of the Soho district itself. He dismisses the “spoken vulgarities of
most music-hall singing,” and reserves his praise only for the music
hall ballet, depicted as an exhilarating yet contradictory mix of natu-
ral and artificial sensuality (109). Symons’s remarks on music hall are
subordinated to his broader representation of Soho as an other-space,
what Foucault describes as a “heterotopia.” Foucault characterizes these
spaces as outside binary logic, blurring the line between the real and
the imagined city. They exist in relation to mapped space, but “in such
a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they
happen to designate” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 24). The music hall
gradually came to be regarded as a significant social institution in large
part because of its more intellectual defenders like Symons. Reflecting
the national character, the theatres that Symons frequented almost
exclusively had strong associations with foreign places extra-territorial
to Englishness, as did the rest of Soho. Symons’s beloved Empire music
hall, for example, had been French owned since it reopened as an
opulent variety theater in 1887 in Leicester Square; as Brooker notes,
the Empire’s manager, Daniel Nichols (whose actual name was Daniel
Nicholas Thevenon) consciously “cultivated a lavish French atmos-
phere,” mixing the more traditional comic acts of English variety with
risqué tableaux vivants, where models posed semi-nude in elaborately
crafted mock-ups of scenes from classical mythology (29). Nearby the
Barry J. Faulk 117
Empire was the exotically named “Alhambra,” another venue that mixed
English variety with continental style, most prominently in its elaborate
ballet, boasting a crowded stage of young women dancing. Symons
recycles many passages from his earlier feature essay on the Alhambra,
published over ten years before, in the “London” essay, further elaborat-
ing the blend of reportage and recollection that characterizes the piece.
It is Symons’s fetishized image of deviant Soho, more than the music
hall itself, that he offers as an alternative to the fully mechanized, inor-
ganic world that threatens to become London’s future.3
Above all, urban modernist nostalgia names a longing for and pro-
vides a means of recapturing a lost cultural authority for the London
writer. As early as 1908, Symons would express a longing to return to
a world where the flâneur could engage the city simply by wandering
through it aimlessly.
I am able to remember how I used to turn out of the Temple and walk
slowly towards Charing Cross, elbowing my way meditatively, making
up sonnets in my head while I missed no attractive face on the pave-
ment or on the top of an omnibus, pleasantly conscious of the shops
yet undistracted by them, happy because I was in the midst of people,
and happier still because they were all unknown to me. (178)
It is a perfect expression of the libidinal impulse at the heart of the

project of flânerie, the faith in the power of imagination to assert posses-
sion of all that it sees. Praising the music hall, then, is part of Symons’s
agenda-laden modernist nostalgia. His longing for a London before
the machines is also an attempt to recapture an era when the flâneur
was still a daring, charismatic role for the artist-hero. Symons explic-
itly invokes Baudelaire—“Baudelaire’s phrase, ‘a bath of multitude,’
seemed to have been made for me”—but he everywhere presumes the
procedures of late Victorian “slumming” as they evolved in London
in the 1890s. Slumming in London codified certain ideas about urban
space and class that had evolved since the 1870s. By the mid-1890s, the
urban poor had been exoticized in so many cultural texts, whether in
the popular press, social tracts, or best selling novels like Stevenson’s,
that many impoverished districts in the metropolis, particularly in the
mythologized East End, were visited by a segment of the middle-class,
who traveled there in search of the kind of mystery and adventure that
had seemingly vanished from areas of the respectable classes (Newland
105). Fin de siècle slummers dimly perceived London as a microcosm
of the British Empire, with the “Other” worlds apart yet close: a heady
combination for the thrill-seeking spectator. Music hall is an essential

part of the scenery in Symons’s heterotopia, along with the urban poor
and immigrant Other. A change in the urban scenery poses a threat to
Symons’s authority as a writer, as well as his identity as a spectator.
Symons’s “London” essay touches on the major themes of modernist
urban nostalgia; it critiques the growing mechanization of urban life
and expresses longing for music hall, not on account of the music of the
halls, but as a metaphor for urban community on a more human scale.
“London” also sets the template for modernist urban nostalgia in its
instrumentalist notion of music hall culture. The important role of the
halls in Symons’s imagination is explained by the special meaning it has
in a specific configuration of the bohemian habitus, as well as within a
broader social nexus that especially empowered the male bohemian as
the privileged spectator of the urban scene.
Both Symons’s enthusiastic response to music hall and his animus to
technology have roots in the critique of post-Cartesian science waged in
the Romantic and later Symbolist tradition. These art movements were
fascinated with depth models of perception and subjectivity as a counter
weight to the Cartesian, as well as later positivist, model of the mind.4
At the same time, Symons’s comments here disclose the biopolitical
character of his criticism. His fascination with music hall is inseparable
from his perception that these urban spaces determine, even legitimate,
a mode of behavior: in this case, the “bad” behavior of male bohemians.
“London” attempts to historicize the nineteenth-century city. However,
the chief legacy of his criticism of the halls is the assertion that modern
popular culture has authorized specific forms of conduct. He also sets
a precedent for the characteristic modernist assertion that a mode of
perception capable of processing urban flux constitutes a value in itself:
also a biopolitical judgment.
T. S. Eliot’s own formulations on popular culture turn on the hinge that
Symons forged between taste and conduct. The most famous example of
modernist nostalgia for music hall is likely Eliot’s eulogy for one of music-
hall’s most celebrated performers, Marie Lloyd. The news of her death
gradually takes over the writer’s “London Letter” of November 1922. The
column ends with a forecast of apocalyptic doom for Londoners, equat-
ing them with the fate of Melanesians unable to adapt to the introduc-
tion of technology into the life of the tribe. There are clear echoes of
Symons’s observations about London’s Faustian pact with machinery.
When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every
music instrument has been replaced by 100 gramaphones [sic],5 when
Barry J. Faulk 119
every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor cars, . . . when
applied science has done everything possible with the materials on
this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surpris-
ing if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the
fate of the Melanesians. You will see that the death of Marie Lloyd
has had a depressing effect, and that I am quite incapable of taking
any interest in literary events in England in the last two months, if
any have taken place. (Dial 73 [December 1922] 663)
It is a remarkable statement, not least perhaps for being the most

unequivocal endorsement of the late Victorian discourse of literary
bohemia by a key figure of literary modernism. Eliot had worked hard
in his first book of criticism, The Sacred Wood (1919), to distance himself
from Symons the critic, but here Eliot is remarkably free of any “anxiety
of influence.” The image of a futuristic urban dystopia closely parallels
Symons’s allusions to the nihilistic sci-fi of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Eliot’s
mash-up of bohemian nostalgia with the cutting-edge anthropology that
invokes the work on Melanesian culture by W. H. R. Rivers provides an
icy modernist edge to Symons’s more lyrical elegy to a lost city.6 Yet it
also suggests the shared concern of these critics with biopolitics, a shared
anxiety about the degrading effects of technology on popular psychol-
ogy also held by I. A. Richards, who complained of “the more sinister
potentialities of the cinema and the loudspeaker” (Eagleton 14).
It is also worth noting here that the transition from music hall to
Rivers and anthropology is less the literary equivalent of the cinematic
jump cut than an organic development, the next logical step, for an
essay that celebrates the affirmative, vital properties of the interactive
musical/performance style that Eliot values about Lloyd. If the col-
laborative, improvisational mode of music hall represents the positive
aspects of culture, then the story of the Melanesians provides a grim
object lesson about the potentially catastrophic impact of “bad” culture
on whole populations. It is a remarkable formulation of a fundamen-
tally biopolitical concern, the spiritual hygiene of the “masses.”
The published Waste Land would appear to represent a conservative,
moralistic take on popular music and its effects. The typist who “puts a
record on the gramophone” as a prophylactic against feeling too much
after her afternoon suggests the corruption of an older musical culture,
contrasted with the apparently deeper, more authentic musical experi-
ence of hearing a busker’s “mandoline,” in the scene which immedi-
ately follows (l. 256). However, we know that Eliot’s rough drafts of
the poem before Pound’s edits would have resulted not only in a wider
ranging collage of high and low culture texts, but an essentially more
nuanced picture of popular music and its reliance on new technolo-
gies of musical production. Moreover, the subtle shades that enter this
depiction of popular culture are more in keeping with Eliot’s personal
engagement with the Metropolis as a vortex, which signaled a type of
celebration of the dynamic forces of modernization and technology, not
unlike Symons’s earlier mode of flanerie.
The very literariness of Eliot’s major contribution to modernist nos-
talgia is pertinent here: not because it indicates that his grief over the
death of Lloyd is somehow inauthentic, but since it suggests a greater
ambivalence in Eliot regarding the new forms of modernity. Sebastian
D. G. Knowles reads the famous passage as evidence of an emerging
modernist aesthetic that would privilege live performance as unmedi-
ated and vital, and demonize mechanical reproduction on account of
its static character. Accordingly, Knowles reads Eliot’s “jeremiad” against
modern, mechanized London as expressing the writer’s contempt for
“the modern civilization from which he spent most of his writing
life trying to escape” (7). Yet a number of other Eliot scholars have
presented a different portrait of Eliot’s experience of the metropole; it
seems that at the very moment that Eliot mourned Lloyd’s passing and
with it, the end of music hall as subcultural presence in the city, the
writer was both familiar with and accepting of the new forms of urban
modernity, nearly all of them mechanized. As David Chinitz observes,
Eliot’s patronage of English music halls and dance halls insured that he
was “exposed to jazz as it evolved” (40). The poet had immigrated to
England at the same time that American jazz had crossed the channel to
find a place in British music hall. The gramophone may have threatened
to engulf all meaningful cultural activity with the passing of Lloyd; yet
Eliot managed to overcome his anxieties regarding new media enough
to insist on playing his favorite 78 records and singing along, much to
the surprise of dinner guests (Spender 40). The ecstasies of jazz could
be had by listening to records as well as by dancing, and Eliot and his
wife Vivien were indeed active in the London dance scene. They were
patrons at the Hammersmith Palais in the early twenties, a venue that
featured New Orleans jazz bands played by African-American musicians,
at the same time as he mourned Lloyd’s death in print. A former roller-
skating rink transformed in 1919 into a dance ‘palais,’ the space could
accommodate as many as 5,000 dancing Londoners a night (Chinitz
40). Tom and Vivian were familiar enough with the popular “Grizzly
Bear” dance that he made the tongue-in-cheek offer to instruct Virginia
Woolf in the dance steps as an after-dinner diversion (Schuchard 235).
Barry J. Faulk 121
As was earlier noted, the dance hall experience provided an opportunity

for the romantic couple to forge affective bonds, to be in a crowd and
apart from it. The results were more intensely affirmative of the chang-
ing cultural landscape of modernity than the more diffuse camaraderie
experienced by the music hall audience.
Eliot’s fascination with the rhythms of jazz implies that he had
become accustomed to the novelty of the second wave of global popu-
lar culture represented by the dance hall, which would push music
hall aside. For this reason, Eliot’s account of music hall has an element
of bad faith: not because his rigid modernist stance precluded a more
“authentic” response to popular culture, but because evidence suggests
that he was repressing what he had learned about the global, mecha-
nized character of the music hall in his writing. Eliot’s characterization
of music hall still relies more heavily on a vision of London taken
by late Victorians like Symons than on what he knew from his own
experience as an American émigré. The writer chose to repeat Symons’s
version of modernist nostalgia rather than stake out new ground in his
account of urban modernity.
Thomas Burke, best known as the writer of highly exoticized accounts
of Chinese immigrants living in London’s Limehouse, was himself a critic
of literary modernism, particularly the avant-garde Vorticist movement.
Yet in voluminous writing on London life and particularly its entertain-
ment, he echoes the characteristic concerns of modernist urban writ-
ing.7 Although he wrote one of the first critical appreciations of Charlie
Chaplin, he too was nostalgic for the “fading of the music-hall from the
London scene” and criticized aspects of nascent film-going culture (Nights
133). Despite Burke’s admiration for Chaplin and his films, he mainly
expressed misgivings about the transformation of London into a movie-
going metropolis.8 He linked cinema-going to the spread of an alienating,
mechanized culture, related to the decline of community within and
between the different social classes. Nostalgic views of the city had pro-
vided him with a critical optic from the beginning of his writing career;
Out and About London, an urban travelogue, is presented as an exploration
of a felt contrast in London before and after World War One.
The reasons for the resemblance between Burke’s urban writing and
modernist commentary on the metropolis are clear enough: Burke was
a bohemian writer of the same generation, gender, and social class of
the “Men of 1914.” He participated in the same urban nexus, the café
society that Ezra Pound recalled as constituting “a sort of society or
social order or dis-order” in London before the War (qtd. in Brooker 8).
Burke also closely resembled Pound and Lewis in having experience of
London bohemia, and a critique of the Decadent bohemian as ineffec-

tual and passé in twentieth-century modernity.9 The affinity between
Burke and the modernists results from their shared London-centrism.
As we saw earlier with Symons, bohemian writers believed themselves
to be oppositional, writing from a marginal space outside bourgeois
culture, a position they had willfully chosen. At the same time, writing
from this ex-centric position from within the metropolitan center often
had the opposite effect: it reinforced the idea that the city had a unified
identity as a bi-polar region.
Although I argue here that Burke’s urban writing attained consider-
able conceptual subtlety, he shared the biopolitical orientation of other
modern writers. In particular, they reproduced the late-Victorian notion
of a binary opposition separating East London from the West, and its
implied hierarchy of city-dwellers. His popular writing on London,
including his many stories of Asian life in the Limehouse district,
both relied on and powerfully reinforced an earlier stereotype of the
metropolis as bifurcated between a dangerous, impoverished East End,
and prosperous areas in the West. His representations of Londoners con-
firmed many stereotypes about the city’s social landscape. Burke depicts
the West End of London as the seat of power, learning, affluence, and
respectability, and the East End as an ominous space, populated by the
criminal poor and threateningly exotic immigrants. At the same time,
his travel writings about London obsessively return to the unique pleas-
ures to be had by going east, at least for those fortunate enough to not
live there. Burke’s East End extends endless opportunities to an adven-
turous middle-class participant-observer for revelry and for fraternizing
in alternative modes of art and amusement.
His short précis of the significant differences between East and West
London, is from a longer essay on Limehouse from “A Chinese Night,”
but is clearly meant to describe the East End as a whole:
Now it is a good tip when tired of the West, and, as the phrase goes,
to go East, young man . . . For the East is eternally fresh, because it is
alive. The West, like all things of fashion, is but a corpse electrified.
They are so tired, these lily-clad ladies and white-fronted gentlemen,
of their bloodless, wine-whipped frivolities. But Eastward . . . there,
large and full, blossoms Life—a rather repellent Life, perhaps, for Life
is always that. (Nights 57)
Burke’s distinct topography of London imagines the Chinese commu-

nity in Limehouse, gang brawls in Hoxton, Jewish life in Whitechapel,
Barry J. Faulk 123
and the London music hall as alike in being Other spaces within the
metropolis, sites of a crude, though not degenerate, culture. On the con-
trary, these heterotopias contain a deviant culture imagined to be free of
the traits of degenerative culture that Burke detects in the over-refined
West. But these heterotopias Burke writes about from the perspective of
urban nostalgia, that is, as having been lost:
To-day Limehouse is without salt or savor; flat and unprofitable; and

of all that it once held of colour and mystery and the macabre, one
must write in the past tense. The missionaries and the Defense of the
Realm Act have together stripped it of all that furtive adventure that
formerly held such lure for the Westerner. (Out 40)
Although Burke’s tales of Limehouse would elaborate on the idea of the

Asian as Other, it is not surprising that he has only harsh criticism for
the municipal planners and philanthropists who plan to reform those
living in the area.
Burke’s early travel writing about London energetically assumed the
task of restoring a conceptual unity to an imperial metropolis fissured
by the uneven distribution of wealth and well-being. The contents page
for Burke’s Nights in London, published in 1918, illustrates this broader
project; they include accounts of evenings spent in Limehouse and
Hoxton, Clerkenwell and Chelsea, travelogues that traverse the whole
city, and that establish aesthetic unity to the city simply by their inclu-
sion within the text: a unity impossible to secure in the face of London’s
imaginary spatial schism. The alienation of the metropolis from itself,
in addition to a middle-class readership interested in and afraid to know
too much about the culturally vital but dangerous districts of the city
they inhabit, constituted a crisis that was ripe for expert intervention.
Hence the entry of the adventurous bohemian writer, who could secure
his credentials by reassembling the broken halves of the city together,
in book form. Burke’s writings give credence to the notion that the
metropolis is a totality—but only in the consciousness of the travel
writer and reader. The travel guide aspires to recreate a unity to London,
at the price of setting it outside of history.
Yet while Symons often treated music hall entertainment as an exotic
object outside of history, Burke himself was keenly aware of historical
changes in the music hall format. In a lengthy account written before
the First World War, detailing the world of music hall London, Burke
complains that the star performers are “beginning, unfortunately for
their audiences, to take themselves seriously. This is a pity . . . As soon as
art becomes self-conscious, its end is near; and that, I am afraid, is what
is happening to-day” (Nights 43). Burke expands upon the idea:
A quieter note has crept into the whole thing, a more facile
technique . . . [developed] at the expense of every one of those more
robust and essential qualities. The old entertainers captured us by
deliberate unprovoked assault on our attention. But to-day they do not
take us by storm. They woo us and win us slowly, by happy craft; . . . it
is technique you are admiring—nothing more. (43)
What is most interesting, perhaps, is that Burke turns the complaint

against the halls into a description of a specifically modern aesthetic cri-
sis: “All modern art—the novel, the picture, the play, the song—is dying
of technique” (43). The passage is remarkable for a number of reasons.
First, there is his insistence that the notion of crisis has a new meaning
in modernity. Second, and even more remarkable, there is the progres-
sive character of Burke the evaluator: he makes it clear that art exists
as a totality, and no dividing line separates literature from the popular
arts. If there is the suggestion here that music hall constitutes an unso-
phisticated artistic endeavor, Burke nonetheless treats all art forms as if
they exist in a continuum, rather than a hierarchy. While overlooking
the possibility that some art forms—blues, flamenco—could be both
fundamental and sophisticated, Burke utterly lacks an idea of a cultural
divide separating high and low art, analogous to the class divide other-
wise projected in his writings of the period.
At the same time, while Burke makes strides in treating popular cul-
ture as a realm worth considering, his late Victorian roots plainly show
and his remarks on the music hall convey his biopolitical interests. Like
Symons, Burke is keenly concerned with the sort of behaviors associated
with cultural forms. That both writers idealize “bad” conduct on the
part of urban bohemian men provides evidence of their broader interest
in conduct as well as taste. Burke’s interest in the link between art and
popular psychology comes to the fore in his account of modern cinema.
His most extensive comparison between music hall and cinema, from
London in My Time (1934), makes a nostalgic point about the compara-
tive value of music hall as a builder of urban community, especially in
comparison with the alienating effect of the cinema. Again, Burke’s
reading of the relation between the different cultural forms and their
respective audiences suggest his biopolitical concerns.
Burke insists that the cinema’s chief difference from music hall is
that the former no longer binds audiences together. “In a music-hall
Barry J. Faulk 125
the people were together, often packed tightly together; and they could
see and hear each other. But in the movie-palace they gather in the
dark, and, however full the place may be, there is no feeling of being
together” (139). Burke lays the stress here is not on art, but on the effect
of art on the populace, on the general life: “In the past, people were
individuals who liked, now and then, to gather at a music-hall and
be one of a great mass. To-day, in our general life, we are but one of a
mass, and can only recover our individuality by going to the movies
and enclosing ourselves in the opaque bit of gloom allotted to us” (140).
Cinema isolates and alienates; in contrast, music hall unified its urban
audience: “Watch the people coming from a movie-palace. They come
out frowning. They come out without speaking. They come as though
there were nothing in life worth living for” (143). This separating effect
has its influence chiefly on “young working-people” who “would rather
go alone to see a bad movie than go with two or three others to see a
good music-hall. But it may be that unconsciously they like the movies
and their surroundings for the opportunity they give for withdrawal
into themselves and escape from crowd action” (140–1). Clearly, there is
much handwringing in the passage, and even more generalizing about
the conduct of various social groups who do not get a chance to speak
for themselves in the text. Interestingly, however, Burke’s expression of
urban modernist nostalgia does allow for the possibility that cinema
could provide a new means of mental adaptation for urban youth:
a momentary withdrawal from the crowd, a distance from group activ-
ity, that functions as a sort of individual psychic therapy.
Burke’s early surveys of the London scene celebrate the liberating
possibilities that specifically theatrical spaces offered to working-class
performers, as well as to the bohemian seeking to imagine an inner
distance from their own class. Burke seems here to turn against the
modernity of his earlier urban writing, reimagining the music hall audi-
ence as a sort of organic, quasi-rural community, distinct from urban
filmgoers. Still, the point of Burke’s complaint about the social effect
of mechanized modernity is not to exalt organic society over a social
relation deemed more artificial, but to contrast the properties of culture
in an modern urban environment: a matter of biopolitics. The capac-
ity of cinema to isolate the spectator is believed to prompt a reflective
moment that Burke appears to equate, in a Foucauldian sense, with
self-discipline.
While Burke’s fiction writing demonstrates his commitment to real-
ism, his art criticism reveals his interest in key concerns of Modernist aes-
thetics. Burke’s modernist aesthetic is also expressed in his historicizing
of music hall itself, as part of modernity’s ongoing, endless rejection

of the past. Music hall entertainment had its roots in a late Victorian
social world that had ceased in the present age: “Classes no longer live
in their own tight compartments, and . . . individual and typical oddity
have been obliterated” (135). As a result, music hall “had to give way
to a new and younger kind of entertainment—lighter, thinner, more
polished, more conscious of itself” (133–4); dance bands and film are
Burke’s examples of more modern activities. In fact, Burke’s account of
a transition in Britain from music hall to cinema anticipates the particu-
lars of most later scholarly accounts of the same topic.
Burke’s modernist approach is most strikingly evident in his com-
ments on urban popular song, with his startling remarks on inor-
ganic modes of perception. Burke’s no-frills approach to writing is far
removed from the complex theorizing of modernist memory found in
Marcel Proust or Walter Benjamin, but he nonetheless has a modern-
ist notion of memory as creative perception. In this case, the nostalgia
trope allows Burke to elaborate his own unorthodox view of memory
and perception, moving decisively away from what Howard Eiland calls
the “instrumental concept of memory as recorder and storehouse” (xiii).
The premise of Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is that the chance
reencounter with material traces of our past could initiate a process in
which the individual might be able to imaginatively recapture lost time.
The objects that spark memory would inevitably be unique and per-
sonal to the memoirist: yet freed from the tenacious hold of the present,
it became possible to recapture, or construct, “lost time.” This passage
amounts to Burke’s version of Proust’s madeleine:
What chiefly comes to mind when thinking of music-hall is its

songs. I don’t know what was in the air at that time, from 1897 to
1909, but all the songs I remember, especially the wildly comic songs
had in their melodies a pathos that beat unbearably on the heart. . . .
The airs of those songs, when I recall them, evoke for me the sadness
of London streets in October twilights; crying children; the throb
of London life coming muted over intervening roofs. Many a time,
when wandering through rainy suburban byways, I have had my
blood chilled almost to tears by a distant organ playing the latest
comic song . . .
There is a certain song of the past by which I date all the happen-
ings of a certain two years. I cannot name those two years; I only
know that during that period the nerves of the London streets were
tingling with a plaintive melody that whenever I recall a few bars of
Barry J. Faulk 127
it I recall also all my affairs and all the London scenes of that period.
(135–6, 138–9)
What is distinctive about both passages is their insistent spatialization

of memory itself; no longer a mental faculty, it is reconceived as some-
thing closer to an energy flow, part of the urban sensorium. Above all,
memory is defined as a process, rather than an inert thing. Here Burke
the realist writer echoes the modernist avant gardes he disliked, valuing
popular art for creating new modes of perception capable of incorporat-
ing urban flux.
Admittedly, Burke repeats the critique of technology typical of mod-
ernist urban nostalgia, pitting the urban vernacular mnemonic made
possible by music hall with the experience of hearing music by means of
the gramophone and the wireless; however, even at his most reaction-
ary, Burke makes subtle evaluative points in support of my fundamental
contention that the discourse of urban nostalgia constituted a mode
of critical reflection about the disappearance of a Victorian popular art
form and the rise of modern mass media. Burke writes:
One reason why they [music hall songs] had a long life and sank into
the public mind was that there were not then the mechanical means
that exist to-day for thrusting them upon the entire British public in
one week . . . Mechanical devices transport them to millions of ears
soon after their introduction, and his potential audience is soon used
up. Thus the public has none of that long-continued acquaintance
with songs, as part of an age’s voice, which enabled people of the
past to link them with their little private epochs. (137–8)
The comparison is clear: in both epochs, memory no longer exists

solely inside the body; it is more of an apparatus, a hybrid of organism
and highly artificial environment. Rather than an attempt to opt out
of modernity, Burke’s fondness for an earlier version of urban memory
mostly signifies his preference for one modern practice over a similar
one existing on the same plane, and which he simply regards to be less
interesting.
Popular culture, especially popular music, constituted a revolution-
ary development in metropolitan life; its omnipresence in the modern
city represented a decisive break from a centuries long tradition in
the West that regarded music as the most exalted art form, as well as
a unique vehicle for transcendent experience. The new, aggressively
urban cast of popular music challenged this older notion of music,
unsettling a longstanding equation of the art form with otherworldli-

ness. The secularization of music represented by popular song stands
at the beginning of a historical arc that culminates in the disenchant-
ment of postmodern culture and its characteristic discomfort with
any art that aims to be more than ironic commentary or more than
entertainment.
The expression of modernist nostalgia in early twentieth-century
urban writing must be evaluated within this broader perspective.
Although the critical judgments of modernist writers on popular cul-
ture expressed contradictions inherent to critical writing of the age,
writers like Symons and Burke epitomize a surprisingly fluid mode of
artistic evaluation. Whatever misgivings modernist writers expressed
about the new mechanized forms of popular culture, they nonetheless
affirmed—whether explicitly, as in the case of Symons and Burke, or
implicitly, as in the case of Eliot—the most radical aspect of popular
music: its secular character as urban culture. These writers may express
nostalgia for music hall, but in so doing, they celebrate a decisively
modern music form, cut off from its pre-capitalist roots in “folk” song.
Rather than attempt to revive older, residual ideas about musical tran-
scendence, they embrace the new worldly aspect of commercial music.
Most important, and in sharp contrast to an older scholarly conception
of the modernists, they take for granted the possibility that intelligent
people can form meaningful relationships with popular culture. In this
regard, the discourse of modernist urban nostalgia constitutes an impor-
tant form of critical reflection and marks a crucial secularizing turn in
the idea of culture.
Notes
1. In a biopolitical regime, Foucault notes, population will be “the final end of
government,” adding: “What can the end of government be? Certainly not
just to govern, but to improve the condition of the population, to increase its
wealth, its longevity, and its health” (Security 105).
2. Again, I. A. Richards’ critical pronouncements epitomize the biopolitical
project, as when he asserts that the need to “secure a stable and general sys-
tem of public behavior . . . by any means whatsoever” (Principles of Literary
Criticism 23).
3. In Out and About London, Thomas Burke offers a similar view of Soho as
London heterotopia, qualified by his nostalgic view that the region was at its
most vital in the years before WWI (58–69).
4. Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle remains the classic account of the continuity
of Modernist anti-positivism with earlier Romanticism and Symbolism.
Barry J. Faulk 129
5. Sebastian D. G. Knowles speculates that Eliot’s misspelling of gramophone

may have been “a deliberate misspelling to artfully decline knowledge of a
newfangled item that had been in the public consciousness for at least twenty
years and is a by 1917 a $33 million industry” (7).
6. W. H. R. Rivers’s Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia and Bronislaw
Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific were both published in the same
year as Eliot’s London Letter on Lloyd; as D. G. Knowles notes, Eliot was
ahead of the curve in recognizing the new ethnography, based on participant-
witness of indigenous people, as the cutting-edge of anthropology, making
the armchair-survey of Sir James Frazer seem obsolete, just as jazz replaced
music hall song as exemplar of modernity.
7. Julian Wolfreys argues for a kinship between T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and
Burke’s London in My Time based on the writers’ shared view of London as
irrevocably and irreversibly changed in the aftermath of the First World War
(Wolfreys 199–201).
8. For more on Burke’s relation to Chaplin, see Witchard, 232–3.
9. Burke criticized the pretensions of the 19th-century bohemian artist
figure popularized by Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème; see Out,
22–7.
Works cited
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A Cultural History. Malden, MA: Polity, 2005.
Bracewell, Michael. “Punk.” London From Punk to Blair. Ed. Gibson & Kerr.
London: Reaktion Books, 2003. 301–7.
Brooker, Peter. Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. New York:
Palgrave—now Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Burke, Thomas. Out and About London. New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1919.
——. Nights in London. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1918.
——. London in My Time. London: Rich & Cowan, 1934.
Chinitz, David. T. S. Eliot and the Culture Divide. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2005.
Eagleton, Terry. Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others.
New York: Verso, 2003.
Eiland, Howard. Translator’s Foreword. Berlin Childhood Around 1900. By Walter
Benjamin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2006.
Eliot, T. S. “London Letter.” Dial December 1923: 659–63.
——. “Marie Lloyd.” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York:
Harcourt, 1975.
——. “The Beating of a Drum.” The Nation and the Athenaeum 34.1 (6 Oct. 1923):
11–12.
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——. Security, Territory, and Population: Lectures at College de France, 1977–78
New York: Picador, 2009.
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London: Reaktion Books, 2003. 292–301.
Knowles, Sebastian D. G. “Death by Gramophone.” Journal of Modern Literature
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Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Art and Life. New York:
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Allen Tate. New York: Dell, 1966. 38–64.
Symons, Arthur. “London: A Book of Aspects.” Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands.
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7
Katherine Mansfield,
D. H. Lawrence, and
Imperialist Nostalgia
Carey Snyder
[Y]ou want to go back and be like a savage. . . . You

want a life of pure sensation and “passion.”
(D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love)
D. H. Lawrence was among the period’s most passionate advocates of a

nostalgic return to the primitive to revitalize modern civilization. In his
roman-à-clef Women in Love, Lawrence envisioned Katherine Mansfield
as a kindred spirit in this quest to reconnect with primal origins by
using her as a model for the character Gudrun Brangwen, a sculptor
whose strange little carvings are “full of primitive passion” and who, at
one point, performs an impromptu vegetation dance (32, 157). Though
other facets of Lawrence’s Mansfield portrait are hardly flattering, the
linking of Gudrun/Mansfield to primitive rites and emotions bespeaks
a perceived affinity with this fellow artist from the fringe. Mansfield’s
early writings affirm that she initially embraced nostalgic primitivism,
but by the time she met Lawrence in 1913, having been confronted with
metropolitan prejudices casting her in the role of colonial-primitive, she
was already rejecting this view. Scholars have examined Mansfield’s
relationship with Lawrence, but neglected to factor in these writers’
different positions within a metropolitan literary culture obsessed
with cultures and artifacts deemed primitive. Focusing on Mansfield’s
Rhythm years (1912–1913), this chapter will argue that “the little savage
from New Zealand” (as she was dubbed when she arrived in England)
ultimately rejected the Lawrencian brand of primitivism, still under
construction during this period.1
Epitomizing Mansfield’s brief flirtation with primitivism is her short
story “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped,” probably composed in 1910,
and published in Rhythm two years later. Narrated from the perspective
131
of a young girl, the story expresses an ineluctable longing to return

not just to childhood, but to a prior, innocent state associated with
the Maori people in the Romantic primitivist view. In this way, the
themes of “Pearl Button” resonate with a major motif in Lawrence’s
work—one that can be glimpsed in his story “The Soiled Rose” (pub-
lished in Rhythm’s successor, The Blue Review, in 1913) and that receives
full articulation in the essay “Indians and an Englishman” (published
in John Middleton Murry’s journal, The Adelphi, in 1923). All these texts
share a yearning to return to an idealized past characteristic of a mode
of longing that anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has called “imperialist
nostalgia,” wherein traditional cultures’ demise registers “not moral
indignation, but an elegiac mode of perception” (107). Imperialist nos-
talgia assumes a posture of “innocent yearning” to efface metropolitan
observers’ complicity with processes hastening the destruction of indig-
enous cultures. Rosaldo explains that imperialist nostalgia relies upon a
paradox: “someone deliberately alters a life form and then regrets that
things have not remained as they were. . . . ‘We’ valorize innovation
and then yearn for more stable worlds, whether these reside in our own
past, in other cultures, or in the conflation of the two” (108). Of his
own fieldwork in the Philippines, Rosaldo writes, “the very processes
that aided my presence among the Ilongots were bringing devastating
changes on them” (119).
As a response to processes of globalization propelled by new technolo-
gies of travel and communication, imperialist nostalgia can be seen as
a specifically modern form of longing for an era when cultural differ-
ences seemed more distinct. Like Ian Baucom’s concept of “postimperial
melancholy,” this impulse to fetishize an idealized past entails one of
the “willed amnesias of empire” (Baucom 172). In Baucom’s study, the
English country house emerges as a potent symbol for past imperial
glory—one that strategically effaces the traffic in slaves, commodities,
and capital that enabled such structures to be built. Mourning the decay
of the country house as a national symbol amounts to lamenting the
crumbling of a mere façade of English grandeur, one that masked a
history of exploitation. Postimperial melancholy, then, is a nostalgia
for the age of empire itself. Imperial nostalgia differs significantly in its
source of melancholia: rather than mourning for empire, one mourns
the destruction of supposedly pristine native cultures. One becomes an
innocent bystander aghast at empire’s effects, willfully forgetting one’s
entanglement in imperial histories.
Imperialist nostalgia also bears some resemblance to the nostalgic
response of metropolitan English writers to eighteenth-century land
Carey Snyder 133
enclosures, which, as Raymond Williams has argued, were seen to

destroy what appeared in retrospect as an idyllic rural life (138). In
contrast, however, as a modern, metropolitan subject, Rosaldo yearns
for a past twice removed: part of a society that has long since forsaken
the agrarian past, he laments the vanishing of indigenous cultures that
symbolize an even more remote past, even as his presence contributes
to their demise. Claude Lévi-Strauss expresses a similar anguish in his
classic travelogue, Tristes Tropiques (1955), in which the anthropologist,
on a quest to discover untainted “savagery” in South America, bemoans
that the “first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth,
thrown into the face of mankind” (24). Prefiguring the distinctly mod-
ern phenomenon of imperialist nostalgia that Rosaldo and Lévi-Strauss
both exemplify, Lawrence longs to reclaim a primal past that he iden-
tifies with native peoples. Yet beneath Lawrence’s yearning to return
to a “savage” past—a yearning that Mansfield briefly shared—lay the
paradox that his globetrotting quest for primitive alternatives to moder-
nity relied upon modern technologies of travel and communication
that were disrupting indigenous ways of life. Mansfield is caught in a
similar bind, but given the position of exotic colonial foisted upon her,
she would come to reject metropolitan primitivism and its attendant
imperialist nostalgia.
The Mansfield–Lawrence connection
Mansfield and Murry first met Lawrence in June 1913, in the London
editorial office of the couple’s journal, The Blue Review, which had just
published Lawrence’s “The Soiled Rose”. In his review of Women in Love,
Murry called Lawrence “the outlaw of modern English literature” (qtd
in Alpers 340); as a colonial, Mansfield shared this sense of being on the
margins of English society. A turbulent friendship ensued, one that ulti-
mately endured because of a deep sense of connection among the three
writers, despite personal and professional jealousies and philosophi-
cal differences. The trio was in frequent contact and correspondence
from 1913 to 1916, with Mansfield and Murry serving as witnesses to
Lawrence’s wedding to Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen) in July 1914.
The three writers also collaborated on the short-lived journal, Signature,
in 1915. In 1916, Mansfield and Murry were persuaded to rent a cot-
tage near the Lawrences in Cornwall, but this experiment in communal
living failed disastrously. Mansfield decried Lawrence’s periodic explo-
sions of rage that she feared bordered on insanity and an intolerable
domestic situation that included bouts of violence (Letters of KM 1: 261).
Lawrence’s outbursts were likely fueled by a host of personal and pro-

fessional frustrations: following the obscenity trials for The Rainbow, he
had increasing difficulty getting his work into print; also, the war cast
a deeply pessimistic spirit over Lawrence (like many others), one exac-
erbated by a military examination that he found humiliating, though
it exempted him from service. Lawrence’s desire for what he termed
a “blood-brotherhood” with Murry—an intense homosocial friend-
ship—added further tension to the couples’ relationships. In May 1916,
Mansfield wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell, the socialite at the center
of the Garsington artistic salon, “It really is quite over for now—our
relationship with Lawrence” (Letters of KM 267). For his part, hearing
that Mansfield had been gossiping about him and Frieda, Lawrence felt
betrayed, a feeling redoubled by Philip Morrell’s threats of a libel suit
for the scathing portrayal of Lady Ottoline in Lawrence’s manuscript of
Women in Love: Lawrence began to wonder, “Why I give myself away
to them—Otts & Murries etc!” (Letters of DHL 112). Thus “the Murries”
oscillated, in Lawrence’s mind, from kindred spirits on the social fringe
to treacherous friends allied with a modernism co-opted by the bour-
geoisie, as this grouping with the “Otts” suggests. Despite the rupture
in their friendship, on the eve of their last meeting in 1918, Mansfield
wrote of Lawrence, “we are unthinkably alike” (Notebooks II: 143); like-
wise, Lawrence attempted to renew his connection with Mansfield right
before her death in 1923.
Scholars of the Mansfield–Lawrence relationship, including Lydia
Blanchard and Mark Kincaid-Weekes, have understood the tension
between them to be rooted in professional as well as personal jealousy,
while other critics, such as Carol Siegel and Leo Hamalian, attribute
their conflicts to differing views of female subjectivity and sexuality.
I want to argue that Mansfield came to reject not just Lawrence’s view
of women’s experience but also his thoroughgoing primitivism, which
worked in conjunction with a degrading view of femininity. As I’ve
already observed, the call to reconnect with primal origins is a refrain in
Lawrence’s work, one elaborated in his posthumously published essay,
“The Novel and Feelings”:
[W]e ourselves only exist because of the life that bounds and leaps
into our limbs and our consciousness, from out of the original dark
forest within us. We may wish to exclude this inbounding, inleaping
life. We may wish to be as our domesticated animals are, tame. . . .
Yet unless we proceed to connect ourselves up with our primeval
sources, we shall degenerate. . . . Now we have to return. Now again
Carey Snyder 135
the old Adam must lift his face and his breast, and un-tame himself.
(Phoenix 757–8)
Lawrence’s nostalgic embrace of the human evolutionary past was

antipathetic to both Murry and Mansfield. Murry recalls that when
he himself sided with Mansfield in the tug-of-war for his affection in
Cornwall, “Lawrence became more urgent to bind one to him. He talked
of the blood-brotherhood between us—some pre-Christian blood-rite
in keeping with the primeval rocks about us” (409). Murry was frankly
baffled by this mystical talk of primeval male bonding. Mansfield was
equally dismissive of Lawrence’s call to rediscover the “dark forest
within,” satirizing it, along with Lawrence’s tempestuous temper, in
a letter from Cornwall: “I cannot discuss blood affinity to beasts for
instance if I have to keep ducking to avoid the flat irons and saucepans.
And I shall never see sex in trees, sex in the running brooks, sex in stones
& sex in everything” (4 May 1916; Letters of KM 262). For Mansfield,
Lawrence’s exaltation of an all-defining sexuality was entangled with
his turn to the primal and the bestial, which, as her tone here suggests,
she found degrading and even comical.
An unpublished 1920 review of The Lost Girl also conveys Mansfield’s
impatience with Lawrence’s atavistic idealization of the animal within;
Mansfield complains that in this novel, Lawrence “denies Life—I mean
human life. His hero and heroine are non-human. They are animals on
the prowl” (Letters IV 138). The Lost Girl of the title is Alvina Houghton,
the daughter of a Midlands merchant, a new woman who trains as a
midwife and eventually marries Ciccio Marasca, an Italian actor who
plays a member of a fictitious “Red Indian” tribe, called Natcha-Kee-
Tawaras. Mansfield protests, “The whole is false,” and singles out
Lawrence’s inclusion of the “preposterous Indian troupe” as especially
contrived (138). She objects to Lawrence’s reduction of his female
protagonist to a mere animal:
Take her youth—her thriving on the horse-play with the doctors.

They might be beasts butting each other—no more. . . . Oh, don’t
forget where Alvina feels “a trill in her bowels” and discovers herself
with child. A TRILL—what does that mean—And why is it so pecu-
liarly offensive from a man? Because it is not on this plane that the
emotions of others are conveyed to our imagination. (ibid)
Mansfield is doubly offended that it is a male author who presumes to

circumscribe his heroine’s identity by her sexuality and reproductive
function. Carol Siegel concludes, “Lawrence’s sin against art seems to

be that he creates a female character who experiences life physically
despite her emotional sensitivity. . . . His vision is of a triumphant
female sexuality, an intelligent woman’s life built around sexual fulfill-
ment” (300). But Mansfield does not object to Lawrence’s depiction of
“triumphant female sexuality” here; she objects to what she regards as
the debasing physicality of The Lost Girl’s heroine. More specifically, she
rejects the way that Lawrence views female sexuality through a primi-
tivist lens. Clearly by the time she encounters the animalistic Alvina,
Mansfield has rejected Lawrence’s primitivism. The earlier Mansfield of
the Urwera Notebook and “Pearl Button” is much closer to Lawrence’s
view, as we shall see.
Barbarism in Arcady
The thwarted romance of “The Soiled Rose,” the Lawrence story published
in Mansfield and Murry’s Blue Review, was presumably more congenial to
Mansfield than his later depiction of hero and heroine as “animals on
the prowl.” Centering on an artist whose London life and education have
alienated him from his rural roots, this story is replete with nostalgia both
for lost youth and for pastoral England. The protagonist, John Adderly
Syson, now married, returns to the countryside of his childhood to visit
his former love, Hilda Millership, a farmer’s daughter who has urged him
to climb the social ladder even though it meant leaving her behind. If
nostalgia etymologically connotes pathological homesickness, Syson’s
predicament is that his home has become a foreign country:2 “For this was
his past, the country he had abandoned, in which he was now only a visi-
tor. Wood pigeons cooed overhead, and the air was full of the brightness
of myriad birds singing” (Blue Review 1: 9). To this creature of modernity,
the English countryside has become anachronistic: Syson pines for the
very land before him, cast out from its glories. “The Soiled Rose” brims
with pastoral imagery—a profusion of daffodils and primroses; a bright
kingfisher flashing by; hazel spreading “glad little hands downwards” (6).
Lawrence’s protagonist self-consciously underscores the theme, telling
Hilda that the lunch she has prepared of fresh eggs and stewed gooseber-
ries “is perfectly arcadian and delightful,” and that her fiancé, a game-
keeper prefiguring the more famous one in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “is very
bonny—also in Arcady” (12, 15). Syson’s gentle irony does not undercut
the rueful sense that the forces of modernity have, indeed, carried this
character away from his youthful Arcadia, just as, in a larger sense, they
are carrying England away from the rural idyll of the past.
Carey Snyder 137
Syson has forsaken not just the bucolic countryside for London, but
the might-have-been of a passionate, sacred tie to an innately majestic
young woman, the healing, spiritual sexuality that Lawrence so often
offers as an antidote to modernity’s ills. As in his later fiction, Lawrence
glides easily from the pastoral to the primitive in this story, invoking
paganism and barbarism in association with the farmer’s daughter with
aristocratic bearing. In this way, nostalgia reaches a long arm beyond
England’s pastoral past to ancient times and even prehistory. The
Arcadian Hilda muses,
“They did well . . . to have various altars to various gods, in [the?]

old days”
“Ah yes!” [Syson] agreed. “And which have you turned to now?”
“Do you think I have left the old one?” she asked pathetically.
“No, not really. It was your highest, the one you kneeled at with
me” (15)
Hilda’s paganism seemingly marks her at once as a Lawrencian natural

woman, in tune with the species’ primal drives, and a new woman, free
from social mores, worshipping at Venus’s altar. Yet a series of irrevoca-
ble choices bars these characters from the unrequited passion of their
youth. Flirting still with that lost possibility, Hilda brings Syson into
the gamekeeper’s cottage, and pulling a rabbit-skin fur from the wall,
wraps it around herself, “laugh[ing] at Syson from out of this barbaric
mantle” (17). Aligned with pagan gods and barbaric mantles, Hilda
represents, albeit fleetingly, the past, not just for the pining narrator,
but for Western civilization: the toll paid for modern progress. Syson
represses regret for the irretrievable past: “In spite of himself, he was
unutterably miserable, though not regretful. He would not alter what
he had done. Yet he was drearily, hopelessly wretched” (21). Despite
the protagonist’s disavowal, the story is replete with nostalgia—for the
past of an individual, a nation, and even the human species, which
Lawrence feared was forgetting its evolutionary roots. The primitiv-
ism that can be glimpsed in this early story is more fully articulated in
Lawrence’s later writings.
Old red father
Lawrence’s Southwest writings repeatedly sound the note of nostalgia

for New Mexico before conquest, the locus of a profound spirituality
that seems destined to perish. Like ethnographers of the day, Lawrence
worried that the indigenous cultures he saw as spiritually vital were van-
ishing as a rubbishy, materialist modernity spread its tentacles around
the globe. As I have argued in my study on ethnographic modernism,
Lawrence was particularly critical of a tourist industry he believed was
destroying the Southwest Indian way of life, but as an Englishman and
self-proclaimed sensitive observer—in this context, neither conqueror
nor ugly tourist—he did not see himself as part of the problem. In this
respect, Lawrence’s attitude epitomizes Rosaldo’s concept of imperial-
ist nostalgia, which “uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’” to conceal
“complicity with domination” and with processes that have brought
“devastating changes” on indigenous cultures (107, 119). Registering
the impact of modernity, imperialism, and mass tourism, the nostalgia
of Lawrence’s Southwest writings can be seen as a distinctly modern
variant on the Romantic pastoralism of the “Soiled Rose”.3
Brimming with nostalgia for a lost past, Lawrence’s “Indians and an
Englishman” narrates the moment of the writer’s first encounter with
Pueblo Indians in the Southwest. Lawrence opens the essay by satiriz-
ing the legions of tourists who flocked to the region in the interwar
period, in the shape of ubiquitous “motor-cars [that] insist on being
thrilled” and “commerce [that] is a little self-conscious about its own
pioneering purpose,” and by worrying that this vogue of the Indian is
turning native culture into a “farce” (Phoenix 92). Lawrence distances
himself, however, from these intrusive masses and from the artist com-
munity that had drawn him to the Southwest in the first place; he does
so in the self-excusing gesture that Rosaldo describes as characteristic
of imperialist nostalgia: “And here am I, a lone lorn Englishman, tum-
bled out of the known world of the British Empire on to this stage. . . .
Don’t let me for a moment pretend to know anything” (93). In a comic
tone, Lawrence proclaims his innocence here, situating himself as a
bewildered observer of tourists, artists, highbrows, and Indians alike. Of
course Lawrence was fully dependent on the same infrastructure that
enabled other tourists and artists to throng to the region—including
electricity and plumbing, the newly completed Atchison Topeka Santa
Fe Railroad, and a network of hotel-restaurant-museum complexes
known as “Harvey Houses,” which aggressively promoted tourism in
the area. Proclaiming himself a lone spiritual sojourner, Lawrence disa-
vows his complicity with forces of modernization that were dramati-
cally altering native life.
The essay charts Lawrence’s retreat from the Southwest’s tourist-
choked railway platforms and marketplaces to a secluded kiva, where
he observes an Apache ceremony. Shifting abruptly to an elegiac mode,
Carey Snyder 139
Lawrence describes being mesmerized by the plangent sound of a

drum and voices chanting, then overcome by “an acute sadness, and
a nostalgia, unbearably yearning for something, and a sickness of the
soul” (95). At least partly, what Lawrence yearns for, in response to the
hyper-materialism and mechanization of modern life, is a perceived lost
cultural wholeness, as suggested by his response to a tribal elder preach-
ing: “There was a deep pathos, for me, in the old, mask-like, virile figure,
with its metallic courage of persistence, old memory, and its twanging
male voice. . . . So dauntless a persistence in the piece of living red earth
seated on the naked earth, before the fire” (98). Transforming a living
man into a fossilized relic (a persistent, “mask-like” object), Lawrence
laments from the sidelines the passing of the Apache culture; from his
perspective, the potential collapse registers, in Rosaldo’s terms, “not
moral indignation, but an elegiac mode of perception” (107). Lawrence
is nostalgic not only for the tribal integrity of the Southwest, but also,
within an evolutionary framework, for his own past, which he sees
embodied in these indigenous people. He imaginatively construes his
relationship with Pueblo Indians in filial terms, refusing to leave when
told that whites are not allowed to observe the ceremony, yet hailing the
tribal elder familiarly as “old red father” (99). In reconfiguring a history
of European colonization in familial terms and fashioning himself as a
sensitive cultural observer, Lawrence adopts a posture of deference and
liberalism, disavowing his place in racial and cultural hierarchies. In this
way, Lawrence’s brand of primitivism participates in the false conscious-
ness that Rosaldo attributes to imperialist nostalgia, which “makes
racial domination appear innocent and pure” (107). One of Mansfield’s
earliest stories, written before she had met Lawrence, engages in a simi-
lar mystification of interracial relationships and colonial history and in
a primitivist yearning to “go back” to simpler times.
Maori nostalgia
Mansfield’s “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped” has been called

“Lawrencian” (avant la lettre) in its idealization of the “emotional
warmth and colour of the Maoris’ lives” in contrast to the “dull and
regimented existence of those who belong to established society”
(Dunbar 41). Unique in Mansfield’s oeuvre in its focus on Maori life,
“Pearl Button” grew out of the author’s observations of and interactions
with the Maori people during a 1907 camping trip to the north island
of New Zealand, which she recorded in her posthumously published
Urewera Notebook. The story was published in Rhythm in September,
1912 under the pseudonym Lili Heron, but Murry speculates that it was
written in 1910, which seems likely and which may explain her use of
a pseudonym, since its nostalgic primitivism echoes the attitudes found
in Mansfield’s earlier notebook, while being completely out of step
with her satirical rejection of primitivism in her other Rhythm writings.4
Narrated from the perspective of the young Pearl Button who eagerly
follows a group of Maoris to their settlement and then to the seashore
only to be rescued by forbidding-looking men in blue coats, this story
expresses a longing to return not just to the passionate intensity of
childhood, but to what is figured in Romantic primitivist terms as the
childhood of humanity. “Pearl Button” engages in a form of imperialist
nostalgia in its seemingly innocent yearning to recover what is imag-
ined as the Maori’s preferable, primal relationship to nature and to one
another, as well as in its apparent obfuscation of the colonial history
that has altered that way of life.
The juxtaposition of the repressive confinement of Pākehā (i.e., white)
settler society and the freedom and spontaneity of the Maori people is
set in motion by the story’s first sentence, which figures Pearl swinging
“on a little gate in front of the House of Boxes” (36). To be female in
Pearl’s society means growing up to be boxed and fenced in, isolated by
a routine of domestic drudgery, like Pearl’s mother, “ironing-because-its-
Tuesday” (37); men don’t fare much better, trapped in their offices, all
in a row. The story’s celebration of Pearl’s freedom to evade the prison
house of adulthood is deeply Romantic, evoking the Wordsworthian
“child of nature” most fully articulated in the poet’s “Ode: Intimations
of Immortality” and his Lucy Gray poems. Childhood emerges in these
works as a period of “infinite possibility” characterized by “vivid and
at times visionary perception” and “emotional spontaneity”; crucially,
as Linda M. Austin has recently argued, it is “a state from which all
mature minds feel estranged” (Austin 83). As in Wordsworth’s poems,
the tone of Mansfield’s story is elegiac, for the reader knows that Pearl’s
escape from the dullness of adult life is only temporary. “Pearl Button”
perpetuates Romantic nostalgia for childhood spontaneity and inten-
sity through the story’s primitivist opposition of the dreary, regimented
life of settler society and the jubilant freedom of the Maori people. This
sense of vivacious freedom is first evoked by a pair of Maori women who
wander by in colorful dress, evincing sympathy for Pearl (“You all alone
by yourself?”) and inviting her to accompany them back to their settle-
ment: “We got beautiful things to show you” (37). Through Mansfield’s
primitivist lens, the Maori people are depicted laughing, affably chat-
ting, and hugging and kissing the delighted, if bewildered, Pearl, who
Carey Snyder 141
“had never been happy like this” before (38). Not only warmly commu-
nal, the Maori are also viewed in stereotypical primitivist terms as close
to nature—giving Pearl fruit, sitting on the earth, and introducing her
to the magnificent sea. This idealized view of indigenous people is also
a Romantic construction—here serving an imperial nostalgia that seems
to erase a history of violent settlement and forced relocation of the
Maori people, a history that can be glimpsed like a palimpsest behind
Mansfield’s Maori idyll.
The colorful Maori women wear no shoes or stockings; Pearl, in con-
trast, is a prim, fully accessorized lady-in-miniature: invited to sit on the
dusty floor of the whare (the Maori term for dwelling), she “carefully
pulled up her pinafore and dress and sat on her petticoat as she had
been taught to sit in dirty places” (37). Just as Pearl fears chastisement
for soiling her dress, she first cowers from the crashing breakers of the
sea, before, shorn of shoes and stockings, she lets out a shriek of delight
as the foam breaks over her toes. Already, Pearl has been acculturated
to a life of sober restraint—a process she temporarily reverses, by “going
native” with the Maoris for an afternoon. For the Maoris are imagined
as childlike in their joie de vivre. A Maori man performs a comic mime
for Pearl, humoring the young girl out of her reserve: “[He] made a
funny face at her and pulled a great big peach out of his pocket and
flicked it to her as though it were a marble” (38). Pearl is allowed to let
the juice run down her front, in clear violation of the ladylike code of
her upbringing. The Maori are permissive guardians because, the story
suggests, they are little more than children themselves.
This view echoes that expressed in Mansfield’s Urewera Notebook, which
records the euphoric release of young Mansfield (then Beauchamp)
from the constraints of bourgeois Wellington society, during a two-
month camping trip in the Urewera district in 1907. Pearl’s liberation
from the repressive culture of the House of Boxes is modeled on nine-
teen year-old Mansfield’s similarly libratory experience roughing it on
the North island of New Zealand—hiking rugged terrain, getting dirty,
bathing in hot mineral pools, and interacting with the Tuhoe tribe
of Maoris, who were still relatively untouched by European intrusion
(Mansfield, Urewera 59). Thrilled with the landscape, the people, and
the novelty of tent-living, Mansfield writes, “we are like children here
all happiness” (20). For the budding author, camping in the Ureweras
meant regaining the freedom of childhood by temporarily shedding the
repressive customs of drawing-room society. Like Lawrence, Mansfield
envisions “returning to the primitive” as a means of revitalizing the
tattered modern soul.
The idealizing lens through which Mansfield views the Maoris is

evident in a notebook entry that records an encounter with the native
population near Rangitaki: “met a most fascinating Maori—an old
splendid man . . . [The] woman squatted in front of the whare—she,
too, was very beautiful—strongly Maori—and when we had shaken
hands she unwrapped her offspring . . . [S]uch a darling thing—I wanted
it for a doll” (44). Primitivist rhetoric celebrating the beauty and splen-
dor of native people merges with a fantasy of appropriation—the settler
wanting the “darling” Maori baby “for a doll”. “Pearl Button” seems to
reverse this fantasy by envisioning Maori women as surrogate mothers
for a precious Pākehā girl, one of whom takes Pearl to her bosom and
bestows maternal kisses on her. Indeed, Michelle Elleray convincingly
reads this story as expressive of “the desire of the settler to be desired
by . . . the indigene” (21). But, as already noted, the Maori in the
story are depicted as little more than children themselves, embodying
childhood’s ideally uninhibited spontaneity, playfulness, and joy. As in
“Pearl Button,” in the Urewera Notebook, Mansfield envisions the Maori
in Romantic terms as communal, childlike, and close to nature.
While Mansfield idealized the Maoris who were most resistant to
European penetration, she was “utterly disappointed” by those who
had assimilated to European ways (Gordon 59). Like Lawrence, for
the most part Mansfield did not see herself as part of the problem
of cultural adulteration that she lamented. However, her complacent
primitivism is punctured by fleeting acknowledgement of the violence
of colonial history. Saikat Majumdar observes that Mansfield’s Urewera
Notebook “reflects a perception of the romance and beauty of Maori life
and people. . . . A historical awareness of Maori anger and the marks of
trauma and violence intrudes far less often”—but intrude it does (128).
Camping near the site of an 1866 attack by British forces that decimated
a party of Maoris, for instance, Mansfield records “visions of long dead
Maoris—of forgotten battles and vanished feuds—stirred in me—till
I ran through the dark glade on to a bare hill” (37). Mansfield’s fleeing
the scene, that is, her uneasy response to this reminder of a violent
colonial past, hints at a sense of complicity not glimpsed in Lawrence’s
writings. Perhaps Mansfield does not go so far as articulating moral out-
rage about New Zealand’s history of genocide, but she is disturbed by a
history that seems to hail her personally in this scene.
“Pearl Button” seems to ignore the devastation of indigenous culture
wrought by colonialism insofar as the story represents Maori culture
in idealized terms as though it were pristine. Writing of Mansfield’s
mature fiction that excludes notice of the indigenous population
Carey Snyder 143
altogether, Shelia Whittick speculates that despite this apparent omission,

“for the perceptive and acutely observant commentator that Mansfield
undoubtedly was, there can have been no overlooking the ignominious
foundations—notably land theft and racial oppression—on which had
been constructed the thriving settler society to which she and her nouveau
riche family belonged” (60).5 The child’s perspective that frames “Pearl
Button”—this fantasy of settler-adopted-by-indigene—serves to mystify
if not disavow the history to which Whittick refers. Mansfield’s ideal-
ized portrait of Maori life seems to eclipse the “ignominious founda-
tions” of settler society. Yet what makes the story elegiac not only for
lost childhood but also for a culture imperiled by colonization is the
ironic framework that presents Pearl’s willing adventure as an abduc-
tion: the shouts and whistles of the constables who come to reclaim the
white Pearl from her Maori kidnappers allude subtly to a history of con-
quest and internment that makes the Maori way of life seem suddenly
vulnerable to incursion by a hostile hegemonic culture. The harmoni-
ous and indigenous way of life is not only a lost possibility for Pearl and
her stultifying society; it is also imperiled by the prohibitive authority
and outside influence represented by the men in blue coats. The story’s
ominous ending renders the idealized portrait of the Maoris all the
more nostalgic, by invoking the history of the contact zone that the
rest of the story represses. At the same time, it hints at a level of aware-
ness about such repression that Rosaldo’s model of imperialist nostalgia
cannot quite accommodate, for Rosaldo assumes a binary of colonizer/
colonized that does not easily apply to the divided subject position of a
female writer from the colonies, albeit one of English descent.
“Little savage from New Zealand”
While “Pearl Button” shows Mansfield’s initial though somewhat quali-

fied embrace of Romantic primitivism, her other Rhythm contributions
implicitly mock the Western European fascination with exotic cultures
and artifacts in which Mansfield by birth was implicated. Although
she was white and from a prosperous background, Mansfield’s colonial
status marked her as an outsider whose membership in metropolitan
literary cultures was always provisional. From the start, Mansfield was
regarded through the lens of primitivist clichés in the metropole—
dubbed not only “Little Savage,” but also “Tiger,” “marmozet,” and
“female of the underworld”.6 By contributing a series of tales which figure
New Zealand as a rough and “barbaric” country to a magazine associ-
ated with the wildness of Fauvism, Mansfield appears at first glance to
have parlayed her demeaned colonial identity into a source of cultural

capital. However, as a brief consideration of one of these stories will
show, Mansfield’s other Rhythm stories frustrate metropolitan expecta-
tions for exotic themed literature.7
Rather than focusing on idealized indigenes in a Lawrencian mode,
“The Woman at the Store” thwarts metropolitan expectations by
exploring what Angela Smith has called “the savagery of a group of
Pākehā New Zealanders” (88). The story centers on three travelers’
excursion to a dilapidated store in the rugged backcountry to visit a
supposedly alluring, promiscuous woman, who has been dragged from
the relatively bustling coast to the remote interior by her sheep-shearing
husband. With her front teeth knocked out, “red pulpy hands,” dirty
boots, and “nothing but sticks and wires under that pinafore,” the
unnamed Woman of the title is presented as a spectacle of degradation;
the hardships of frontier life have, as she puts it, “broken my spirit and
spoiled my looks, and wot for?” (Rhythm 1:4, 11). In the closing para-
graphs, through a disturbing sketch, the Woman’s half-crazy daughter
reveals that her mother has murdered her father, leaving the narrator
and her companion wondering what will become of their friend Jo, the
Woman’s new paramour. As a woman and a colonial, hence doubly
marginalized in metropolitan culture, Mansfield distances herself from
modern primitivism and its attendant imperialist nostalgia by present-
ing a portrait of degradation, violence, and lunacy in settler life.
In sharp contrast to the pastoral primitivism of Lawrence’s “Soiled
Rose” and Mansfield’s own “Pearl Button,” the landscape of “Woman
at the Store” is desolate and degraded: heat and pumice dust assault the
travelers; spider webs thickly coat the flora; the shrill cry of a flock of
larks recalls the shriek of pencils on slate. The narrator observes, “There
is no twilight to our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when
everything appears grotesque—it frightens—as though the savage spirit
of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw” (13). Given
the vast distance between Mansfield’s subject matter and the Romantic
primitivism then in vogue, the “savage spirit” seems to sneer not
only at the settler who presumes to occupy the wild country (only to
descend into violence and madness), but at metropolitan pretensions
that would idealize “savagery”. When the narrator remarks that the
“only people who come through now are Maoris and sundowners,”
the reader understands that the Maori people no longer emblematize
lost vitality and cultural wholeness, as in “Pearl Button,” but rather
serve as an index of the once beautiful Woman’s degradation and social
desolation (16). Inscribing the New Zealand frontier as a brutal, bleak
Carey Snyder 145
land that modern time has forgotten, the story presents an anti-idyll
of colonial life.
The motif of backwardness is reinforced in the Women’s dwelling
by the old pages of English magazines, a kind of makeshift décor, that
plaster her walls. The most recent depicts Queen Victoria’s 1897 Jubilee,
which, taking place at least ten years before the presumed time period
of the story, implicitly celebrated a triumphant imperial history from
which this forgotten land has been excluded. Torn from their metro-
politan and historical context, these magazine clippings now function
in part like souvenirs, as discussed in Susan Stewart’s book, On Longing.
According to Stewart, “souvenirs may be seen as emblematic of the
nostalgia that all narrative reveals—the longing for its place of origin”
(xii). Certainly, this model of longing could describe the relationship of
the colonial periphery to its metropolitan site of “origin”; indeed, Saikat
Majumdar reads “Woman at the Store” in this way, as “marked by an
irrevocable yearning for the metropolis” (120). Adorning the walls of
the forlorn periphery, the pages from the English magazines bespeak
the Woman’s nostalgia for metroplitan origins; however, Mansfield’s
story undercuts not only imperialist nostalgia but also the settler’s
desire “for reunion and incorporation” with the motherland, to borrow
Stewart’s phrasing (xii). If souvenirs typically represent “the exotic in
time and place,” as Stewart argues (xii), these periodical pages function
as souvenirs in reverse, relics from an estranged homeland that under-
score how far the settler class has strayed. Unlike the anachronistic
spaces that Lawrence celebrates as utopian counterparts to modernity,
the New Zealand backblocks are framed in this story as derelict zones,
inhabited by a degenerate settler class rather than idealized natives.
The nostalgic mode is further undercut by the figure of the young
girl in this story, who is both a victim of frontier degeneracy and its
epitome. The unnamed girl of “Woman at the Store” perverts the child-
hood qualities of joy and spontaneity that Pearl Button has learned
to embrace. An image of the sullen girl “picking flies from the treacle
paper” encapsulates the callous and macabre relationship to nature that
her violent upbringing has instilled in her (19). Her repulsive drawings,
the “creations of a lunatic,” foreground the fearful near-madness that
has driven her mother to commit homicide. Understandably bitter,
erratic, and unruly, this character thwarts the romantic impulse to ideal-
ize childhood, just as the story as a whole blasts the impulse to eulogize
primitive qualities and exotic lands. In lieu of the backward glance of
Romantic primitivism, “The Woman at the Store” pushes the reader
to embrace modernity, with its convenient plumbing, dazzling array
of consumer choices, and cosmopolitan opportunities for companion-

ship. The final line underscores the obscurity of the whole locale—cut
off from the pulse of metropolitan culture—and enacts a kind of wish-
fulfillment of erasure: “A bend in the road, and the whole place disap-
peared” (21). Forlorn, degenerate, and fearful, the colonial periphery is
framed as a geographic zone that has been left behind; but far from a
past to reclaim in imperialist-nostalgic mode, it is one to escape.
Reading Mansfield’s Rhythm writings in dialogue with Lawrence’s fic-
tion complicates our understanding of the period’s pervasive primitivism.
However peripheral Lawrence was to mainstream English literary culture,
he was not liable to be constructed as a “little savage” in the metropole.
Lawrence’s idealization of a primal past was enabled, to some degree, by
his privileged position within gender and racial hierarchies. For Mansfield,
I have argued, it was a different story. Like the lunatic drawings of the wild
girl in the story, “Woman at the Store” thwarts the metropolitan desire for
the quaint exoticism in which Mansfield was uncomfortably implicated,
exploding the structure of feeling that sustains primitivist nostalgia.
Notes
1. The phrase “little savage” was used by the principal of Queen’s College in
London, which Katherine Beauchamp (later Mansfield) attended from 1903
to 1906 (Boddy 2). Starting with her story, “The Woman at the Store” (Spring
1912), Mansfield contributed regularly to John Middleton Murry’s little maga-
zine Rhythm (which ran from June 1911 to March 1913) and its short-lived
successor The Blue Review (May–July 1913). Mansfield joined Murry as assist-
ant editor in June 1912.
2. My phrasing here alludes to David Lowenthal’s book, The Past is a Foreign
Country (10).
3. Lawrence repeatedly frames his nostalgia for the Southwest as a response to
modernity, to the “railroads, shops, motor-cars, and hotels [that] stretch over
the surface of the whole earth” (“New Mexico” 141). His essay, “New Mexico,”
illustrates this point vividly: “Curious as it may sound, it was New Mexico that
liberated me from the present era of civilization, the great era of material and
mechanical development” (142).
4. Murry, “Introduction” to Something Childish and Other Stories (New York: Knopf,
1924).
5. Whittick argues that in stories like “The Garden Party,” Mansfield addresses
colonial history through displacement, translating issues of race into those of
class (60).
6. The principal at Queen’s College in London reportedly called her “little
savage” (Boddy 2); novelist Gilbert Canaan dubbed Mansfield and Murry
“two tigers” (Alpers 146); Hastings asserts that Orage called Mansfield
“marmozet” (Carswell 75); and Dora Carrington called her a “female of the
Carey Snyder 147
underworld” (Smith 4), calling attention to Mansfield’s antipodal origins as

well as her bohemian lifestyle.
7. The other Rhythm stories in this group are “Ole Tar” ( January 1913) and
“Millie” ( June 1913). See also “Sunday Lunch” ( January 1913) for a satire of
metropolitan primitivism.
Works cited
Alpers, Anthony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. New York: Viking P, 1980.
Austin, Linda. M. “Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy.”
Studies in Romanticism 42: 1 (Spring 2003), 75–98.
Baucom, Ian. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity.
Princeton UP, 1999.
Blanchard, Lydia. “The Savage Pilgrimage of DHL and KM: A Study in Literary
Influence, Anxiety, and Subversion”. Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of
Literary History. 47: 1 (1986), 48–65.
Boddy, Gillian “Katherine Mansfield, the Colonial.” Short Fiction in the New
Literatures in English. 1–7. Nice: Fac. des Lettres & Sciences Humaines, 1989.
Carswell, John. Life and Letters: A. R. Orage, Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield,
John Middleton Murry, S. S. Koteliansky: 1906–1957. London: New Directions,
1978.
Dunbar, Pamela. Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short
Stories. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1917.
Elleray, Michelle. “When Girls Go Bush: Katherine Mansfield Ventures Out.” New
Literature Review 38 (Winter 2002) 19–27.
Hamalian, Leo. D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers. Associated U P, 1996.
Kincaid-Weekes, Mark. “Rage against the Murrys: ‘Inexplicable’ or ‘Psychopathic.’”
D. H. Lawrence in Italy and England. Ed. George Donaldson and Mara Kalins.
London: Macmillan, 1999.
Lawrence, D. H. Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
——. The Letters of D. H Lawrence: Volume 4 June 1921–March 1924. Ed. Warren
Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1987.
——. “New Mexico”. Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward E.
McDonald. 141–5. NY: Viking P 1936.
——. “The Soiled Rose” The Blue Review May 1913 (Vol. 1, No. 1): 6–23.
——. Women in Love (1920). NY: Viking, 1960.
Lévi -Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques (1955). Translated from the French by John
and Doreen Weightman. NY: Penguin Books, 1992.
Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Majumdar, Saikat. “Katherine Mansfield and the Fragility of Pākehā Boredom.”
Modern Fiction Studies. 55 (1) (Spring 2009), 119–41.
Mansfield, Katherine. “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped.” Under pseudonym,
Lili Heron. Rhythm (September 1912) 2:9.
——. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, Complete Edition. Ed. Margaret Scott.
Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2002.
——. The Urewera Notebook: Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Ian A. Gordon. Oxford U P,
1978.
——. “Woman at the Store.” Rhythm (Spring 1912) 1:4, 7–21.

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest. NY: Routledge, 1995.
O’Sullivan, Vincent and Margaret Scott, eds., The Collected Letters of Katherine
Mansfield. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996. Volumes I–IV (1984–1996).
Rosaldo, Renato. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Representations, 26, Special Issue:
Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989), 107–22.
Siegel, Carol. “Virginia Woolf’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Responses to
D. H. Lawrence’s Fiction”. The D. H. Lawrence Review 21:3 (1989) 291–312.
Smith, Angela. Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave—now
Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Snyder, Carey. British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Ethnographic Modernism
from Wells to Woolf. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
the Collection. Durham and London: Duke U P, 1993.
Whittick, Shelia. “Problems of otherness, hybridity and identity: the psycho-
logical legacy of Katherine Mansfield’s colonial background in her early
New Zealand Stories.” Ideologies dans le monde Anglo-Saxon, 13 (2002), 55–72.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
8
“There’ll be no more fishing this
side the grave”: Radical Nostalgia
in George Orwell’s Coming Up
for Air
Patricia Rae
In “Nostalgia and its Discontents,” Svetlana Boym offers a counter-

intuitive interpretation of those stories where nostalgia is proven mis-
guided: stories, specifically, that remind us that we can never “go home
again.” “So much has been made of the happy homecoming,” she writes,
“that it is time to do justice to [these] stories of non-return . . . [The]
inability to return home is both a personal tragedy and an enabling
force” (16). The paradoxical truth that failure at pursuing nostalgia may
be “enabling” in other respects is a crucial premise for understanding
George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up for Air, a book whose treatment of
nostalgia is widely misunderstood.
Often regarded as Orwell’s most nostalgic, and therefore most con-
servative, piece of writing, Coming Up for Air is set at the time of writing,
the anxious year 1938. It tells the story of the middle-aged suburban-
ite George Bowling, who is jittery with premonitions of war. Needing
therapy, Bowling decides to slip away to his hometown, Lower Binfield,
to go fishing. His goal appears to be to recover the simple pleasures of
the Edwardian era before the “bad times” begin again. For many crit-
ics, Bowling and Orwell are one and the same, and Bowling’s nostalgic
journey is evidence that Orwell himself was, as Isaac Rosenfeld has
argued, “a conservative in feeling”1 (172). In this reading, Orwell sold
out the political radicalism that had prompted him to fight in Spain,
trading in revolutionary politics for dreams of restoring an older social
order. My goal in this essay is to dispute this reading by showing that
the novel does not express nostalgia, but rather assesses it. The result
of that assessment, I’ll be arguing, is a renewed commitment not to the
past, but to a future of significant social change.
149
Coming Up for Air exemplifies a distinctively “modernist” sort of

nostalgia, weaving together several historically determined aspects of
nostalgic longing common in interwar writing, particularly writing that
takes the experience of the Great War and the impending doom of the
next one as an overt theme. These aspects include the longing for an
experience of an authentic self in touch with its own past, a concept
represented metaphorically through images of water; the wish for famil-
iar consolations and pastoral salves capable of remedying the brutality
of war experience; and the desire to discover in the British countryside
Arcadian landscapes unspoiled by modernization and mechanized
fighting. Orwell’s novel brings together these variations on modernist
nostalgia to show how they converge upon a point of crisis at the end
of the 1930s. All that Bowling hopes to find in the pools and streams
of Lower Binfield recedes from him, partly because of the imaginary
nature of his quest. Ultimately this book, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a
tale of entrapment: its hero seeks to get outside of an oppressive world,
only to find that there is no outside; his dreams of a “Golden Country”
are being carefully managed by the very capitalist and nationalist forces
from which he longs to escape.2 The novel’s progressive political mes-
sage emerges from Bowling’s recognition of this failure, for if the char-
acter learns he cannot return “home,” then he must ask, “What next?”
Orwell’s protagonist cannot restore the past and so, consequently, he
must turn his eyes towards the future. In what follows, I show that
Bowling is both self-conscious and pragmatic about his nostalgic jour-
ney. He sets out asking himself such questions; the “radical” politics of
the novel emerge when he has found his answers.
“Green thoughts”: reflective nostalgia and proleptic elegy
The first misconception to be addressed about Coming Up for Air is that

George Bowling and George Orwell are one and the same. It is important
to note that while Bowling is a veteran of the trenches, Orwell, born in
1903, was a mere schoolboy during the war. The difference between
Bowling’s generation and Orwell’s is in fact central to the novel’s plot:
a jingoistic call-to-arms heard by members of an older generation with
firsthand familiarity of the Great War triggers Bowling’s disdain and his
decision to set out for Lower Binfield. Early on, he attends a Left Book
Club meeting with his wife Hilda, and is profoundly alienated by the
tone in which the participants discuss taking up arms in support of the
Spanish Republic. The stirring speech of a Communist speaker reminds
him of the inflammatory rhetoric of twenty years earlier, and he tries
Patricia Rae 151
to caution the young idealists swayed by it: “In 1914 we thought it

was going to be a glorious business. Well it wasn’t. It was just a bloody
mess” (160). At the same time as he objects to the speaker’s methods,
however, he can feel himself succumbing to the badgering, his better
knowledge and self-control slipping away: it is as if “something has
got inside your skull,” he explains, “and is hammering down on your
brain” (156). What Orwell depicts in the Left Book Club scene is the
tendency he laments in several essays on the movement for Spain: its
appeal to emotion, not reason; its hurtling of ready-made phrases; its
dehumanization of the enemy. These rhetorical strategies, he notes, are
reminiscent of the journalism of the day and the tactics employed by
the totalitarian enemy:
It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without

stopping. It’s a ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-
organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over
and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let’s all get together and have a
good hate. (156)
What Bowling senses in this rhetorical display is what Orwell calls else-
where the “fascising process” transforming Britain in this new hour of
crisis, a process slowly making it resemble the totalitarian enemy.3 This
strikes Bowling as a harbinger of what the world will be like when the
war is over. At times, he fears it is inevitable that Britain will become
a world of “processions and . . . posters with enormous faces, and . . .
crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen
themselves into thinking that they really worship him . . .” (157). All
of this adds urgency to the effort to recover a sense of self. Bowling
hopes that, given a chance to fish again in Lower Binfield, he will be
able to recover the spirit he knew before jingoism ever impinged upon
his consciousness.
But Bowling is not unselfconscious in his nostalgia for a more inno-
cent world. Several times he remarks ruefully that in his memories of
life “before the war” it is “always summer” (37). His childhood seems
now to have been one of long hot afternoons in “great green juicy
meadows” (38). Yet he knows that the actual world was far from ideal.
His acquaintances had included slum children who slept “five in a
bed” (41). Recruiting sergeants preyed upon drunken, innocent farm
boys, persuading them to sacrifice their lives in the Boer War (43). It
was a world where jingoism and racism flourished and where his father
struggled vainly to maintain his corn and seed business in the face of
burgeoning capitalist monopolies (42). Bowling knows all this, but still
has faith in the consolatory power of pastoral images: “the dust in the
lane, and the warm greeny light” (40). Bowling continues in this nostal-
gic vein: “You can’t face [war,]” he observes, “until you’ve got the right
feeling inside you” (177). The “right” feeling, from his point of view, is
the peaceful one inspired by memories of primroses, beech woods, and
fish-filled waters. Thus, he will revisit “the beech trees round Binfield
House, and the towpath down by Burford Weir” and “let the feeling of
[this landscape] soak into [him],” trusting that this will help him “get
[his] nerve back before the bad times begin” (176).
As I have explained elsewhere, Bowling’s expression of nostalgia may
be understood as an exercise in “proleptic elegy,” a feature of British
writing in the late 1930s wherein writers unnerved by the prospect of
another war indulge in proleptic re-enactments of familiar consolations.4
That is, like others, Bowling indulges a longing for “pastoral oases” in
advance of the moment when such consolations are actually needed.
The impulse is to store memories of those precious moments in the
countryside so that they can be called upon in some future act of nostal-
gia. The genre of proleptic elegy manifests a “Janus-faced” perspective on
grief: that is, it combines a “looking forward” to sorrows not yet realized
with a “memory” of sorrows already experienced. Proleptic elegists write
in anticipation of sorrow, where the expected loss is of a familiar kind.
When Bowling sets out to go fishing at Lower Binfield, it is partly as a
proleptic elegist: he aims not only to sink back into his “fundamental
self,” but also to remind himself of his authentic inner self, so he will
soon be able to call upon that self to withstand the pressures of wartime.
Bowling is consumed simultaneously by sad memories of “things that
happened ten or twenty years ago,” of “mental pictures of shellbursts,”
and by regarding his fellow citizens as “turkeys in November,” headed
for slaughter (26–7). Even Bowling’s job as an insurance salesman seems
designed to underscore his expertise in and preparedness for disaster.
Orwell’s novel establishes a link, then, between self-conscious nostal-
gia and anticipated mourning. In Bowling’s self-conscious quest to build
up his inner resources, he engages in a form of what we might call “psy-
chological rearmament.” We find other proleptic elegists of the period
doing the same thing, Wordsworthian figures who anticipate how their
travels to the countryside will provide comforting sustenance. That is,
they anticipate finding themselves in the future looking back upon
memories of this pre-war British past. Bowling likens his little vacation
to the effort of a giant turtle to “come up for air” before the current of
history carries him into a new catastrophe (177).
Patricia Rae 153
Commodified nostalgia between the wars
Far from merely a literary phenomenon, Bowling’s Arcadian quest for

Lower Binfield typifies a burgeoning interest in the countryside among
middle and working class Britons in the 1930s that was actively cul-
tivated by both business and government. Encouraged by landmark
“Holidays with Pay” legislation in 1938, as well as a general increase
in disposable income for leisure activities, a number of railway, car,
and tire companies, as well as local and national tourist organizations,
encouraged holiday-makers to roam over Britain’s green hills and enjoy
its sparkling waterways.5 The national Tourist Association persuaded
the government to subsidize advertisements depicting the beauties of
the British landscape, citing the increase in similar enticements from
continental Europe (Beckerson 148). Orwell may well have had such
appeals and advertisements in mind when representing Bowling’s desire
for a holiday break. A glance at Mass Observation reports from the late
1930s reveals many testimonies from men just like him, who appreciate
opportunities to relive their “youthful escapades” in the hills.6
Enthusiasm for travel to the British countryside largely transcended
political and class divisions. Left-wing activists, as C. E. M. Joad has
pointed out, saw it as the “people’s right” to enjoy fresh air and sun-
shine as relief from the dreariness of the factory and the suburb (64). The
workers, their union leaders claimed, had as much a right as anyone to
discover their “yeoman roots.” Upper and middle-class conservatives, on
the other hand, found comfort in the countryside’s reminders of a feudal-
ist social structure, whose vestiges, in lavish country homes, were under
assault by the international workers’ movement. For proleptic elegists of
all stripes, what mattered above all about the countryside was the com-
fort the mere thought of it might provide once war began: its potential
as a real or imagined “pastoral oasis” amidst the hardship and the sorrow.
As early as 1931, Edmund Blunden reflected that “specters of brutality,
war and discord” lurked behind the “shows of ivied steeples and swelling
haystacks” in this “genuine Arcadia” (“Preservation” 352). Britons must
do everything possible, he insisted, to preserve this green world: “to
make some part of England ‘for ever England’” (357; my italics).
Blunden’s allusion to Rupert Brooke’s famous 1914 sonnet “The
Soldier” reflects an appreciation for the role of the countryside in
pastoral elegy, a common genre in the consolatory literature of the
Great War.7 As Peter Sacks has noted, poetic elegy typically operates by
performing a “substitutive turn,” in which the mourner’s attention is
diverted from thoughts of the lost loved one to some new object (5). In
the war poetry, the substitute is commonly a pastoral Garden, a green

Britain to be restored at war’s end. In Brooke’s far-off corner of a foreign
field, a dead soldier becomes “a body of England’s, breathing English
air, / Washed by the rivers, / blest by suns of home” (108). It is easy
to understand why proleptic elegists in the late 1930s might regard an
effort to become reacquainted with the countryside as a crucial sort of
psychological rearmament (Hynes 390). To use Blunden’s phrase, the
countryside provided a key source of “spiritual patriotism” for the days
to come (358).
The countryside had also functioned for the soldiers as a site of
personal freedom, as Orwell himself discussed in such works as The
Lion and the Unicorn (1941) and The English People (1947). Privacy and
autonomy were seminal values for British liberalism and an appre-
ciation for them was in Orwell’s view an essential part of the national
character. Soldier poetry and memoirs from the Great War recount how
soldiers looked to green landscapes for reminders of what it was to be
free-spirited boys, not yet shackled to military discipline. In the impor-
tant 1940 essay “Inside the Whale,” where he discusses war memoirs
amongst other forms of modernist writing, Orwell observes how a very
similar association between country life and personal freedom fueled a
love in his own generation for “Nature poets” like W. H. Hudson and
A. E. Housman: “Most boys had in their minds a vision of an idealized
ploughman, gipsy, poacher, or game-keeper, always pictured as a wild,
free, roving blade, living a life of rabbit-snaring, cockfighting, horses,
beer, and women” (94). Housman’s poetry in particular, he recalls,
appealed to young men of his generation for its “blasphemous, anti-
nomian, ‘cynical’ strain, which appealed to their alienation from the
Old Men who had run the war” (95). The importance of this feeling
became ever more apparent as the interwar years went on, and the mass
“delirium” associated with Fascism grew. The specter of Fascist crowds,
moving as a single, mechanized body, meant that the strength to be
oneself mattered more than ever. For many Britons, the antinomian
spirit was a point of pride, a sign of national difference.
With this tradition behind it, the English countryside became a
highly marketable commodity in the interwar years. Countless men
just like Bowling spent weekends exploring the hills and waterways,
refreshing themselves with “heritage” snacks, including cream teas at
mock Tudor tea-shops or real ale at country pubs refurbished in the
period style. Magazines for car owners, as David Lowenthal has pointed
out, frequently invoked Blunden’s “spiritual patriotism”: “The pretty
villages, the old farmsteads, besides numberless quaint features to be
Patricia Rae 155
found in our old towns, all reach out from those bygone centuries and
captivate us with their reminiscences of ancient peace” (19).
From Orwell’s perspective, Bowling’s quest to refresh himself at Lower
Binfield and replenish the stores of his memory with Arcadian dreams
simply had to fail, for he recognized that there was an ecology entailed
in both real and imagined versions of the British Arcadia. As the craving
for “country” pursuits in the late 1930s grew, many began to wonder
aloud whether the landscape, and the correlative celebration of it, could
withstand the consequences of growing popularity. The concern led to
the emergence of an “Amenities Front,” a broad coalition of concerned
citizens and organizations, including the National Trust and the Council
for the Preservation of Rural England, whose goal was to safeguard the
natural beauties of the countryside and its “heritage” properties while
still fueling enthusiasm for them.8 The Amenities Front disseminated
its ideals in collections like the 1937 Britain and the Beast and in the
pages of magazines such as Country Life, The Field, Countryside, and
The Yorkshire Dalesman. These writings are often proleptically elegiac
in orientation, agonizing about whether familiar consolations will be
viable given the challenges ahead. As Geoffrey M. Boumphrey observes
in his contribution to Britain and the Beast, “in 1918 it could be said
with some truth that . . . our country was still in most parts a green and
pleasant land. What is it today? And what will it be tomorrow?” (101).
Literary writers were asking the same questions about the language of
Arcadianism, wondering whether the landscape could hold up to the
tourism and heavy use.9
The journey home
Bowling sets out for Lower Binfield conscious of a coalition of author-

ity figures in hot pursuit: “the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the
Temperance League, the Bank of England, Lord Beaverbrook, Hitler
and Stalin on a tandem bicycle, the bench of Bishops, Mussolini, the
Pope—all of them after me” (183). With such powers mobilized against
him, we suspect his dreams of escape may be doomed from the start.
Indeed, when he reaches his old home town he is shocked to find it
utterly ruined. Now a mid-sized industrial city, Lower Binfield bears no
resemblance at all to the idyllic images of memory. Thanks to various
entrepreneurial efforts, the place has become a simulacrum of itself.
It is now the site of “fake-picturesque” housing developments and
“sham-Tudor” residential colonies (188, 229). Its natural charms have
been domesticated: a favorite copse of trees has been turned into the
“Pixy Glen,” a little park for “health-food cranks” and fans of “Nature
and the open air” (226). Images of British “heritage”—the stuff of
“spiritual patriotism”—are for sale everywhere. Bowling’s childhood
home has become a quaint little tea-shop, whose owners capitalize
on its “antiqueness” (198). The pub bearing his name, “The George,”
where his father had enjoyed his half-pint “every Saturday for over
thirty years” is now home to a “fake medieval” restaurant where no
one knows his name (196–7). Binfield House, the Manor Home, has
been turned into a “Loony Bin,” an obliquely ironic reference, perhaps,
to the psychological therapy, as dispensed in the pages of Country Life
magazine, of such idyllic images of country estates (207).
Most devastating of all, though, is what has happened to all that
precious, fish-filled water, a concern the novel shares with popular dis-
courses of the day, including Sir William Beach Thomas’s “The Home
Counties,” published in 1937 in Britain and the Beast: “[T]he cow-pond
where I caught my first fish,” Bowling is dismayed to see, has been
“drained and filled up and built over” (211). In Lower Binfield, the
banks of the Thames are now thronged with middle-aged men just like
Bowling, suggesting the extent to which the popularity of the activity
has driven away the very benefits these fishermen remember and seek:
Nobody was catching anything. A crowd like that would be enough

to scare every fish in creation. But actually, as I watched the floats
rocking up and down among the ice-cream tubs and the paper bags,
I doubted whether there were any fish to catch. Are there still fish in
the Thames? I suppose there must be. And yet I’ll swear the Thames
water isn’t the same as it used to be. Its colour is quite different. Of
course you think that’s merely my imagination, but I tell you it isn’t
so. I know the water has changed. I remember the Thames water as
it used to be, a kind of luminous green that you could see deep into,
and the shoals of dace cruising round the weeds. You couldn’t see
three inches into the water now. It’s all brown and dirty, with a film
of oil on it from the motor-boats, not to mention the fag-ends and
the paper bags. (214)
Earlier in the novel, Orwell has invoked a common modernist metaphor

for the authentic self, originating with Henri Bergson and William James:
a liquid “pool” or “stream” lying beneath the superficial self of normal,
habitual interaction. Being able to see beyond the surface into the “one
true pool” within (173), Bowling has noted to himself, is the equivalent
of maintaining private memories and personal freedom. In this scene at
Patricia Rae 157
Lower Binfield, however, Bowling discovers that he is divided from that

true self; the commercialization of the quest for authenticity has turned
an experience of private communion into a social activity, cluttering the
surface of the water and polluting its essence. The moment recalls Eliot’s
symbolic use of the Thames in The Waste Land, except that, where Eliot’s
river is without garbage, Orwell’s river is full of it. In 1922, Eliot had
been concerned with the absence of the sort of festivities that produced
“empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes,
cigarette ends / Or other testimony of summer nights” (ll. 176–9); now,
two decades later, Orwell is exposing the ecological cost of two decades
of exploiting the river’s Arcadian consolations.
By interweaving the fates of literal and symbolic bodies of water,
Orwell begins to hint at the ecological limits of the English Arcadia both
as actual place and as therapeutic mental image. The commercialization
of Arcadia seems to be pushing the discourse of Arcadianism towards
some tipping point, beyond which it will have lost its consolatory and
restorative power. Not easily defeated, Bowling decides to check out the
pools near Binfield House, but this hope, too, founders on the shore
of commodified authenticity. He discovers that the larger pool is now
home to the “Upper Binfield Model Yacht Club,” a place where a new
generation of children plays under close adult supervision. The small
pool that had housed his most precious fish, the elusive, monstrous
carp, is now nothing but a “rubbish-dump” (228). No one especially
regrets its passing; the mosquitoes had become a threat to bourgeois
comfort (229). Orwell reinforces the point about the degeneration of
Bowling’s cherished pond with a cruel joke involving his long lost first
love, Elsie Waters. She, too, has degenerated beyond recognition: she is
a “fat hag” married to a tobacconist (217). Bowling barely recognizes
her and she does not recognize him; consequently, no hope exists of
regaining contact with the young lovers they once were.
Even more than the attention he accords to Elsie’s lumpy body,
Orwell dwells at length on the physical changes in Bowling that make
him unrecognizable, even to himself. Bowling’s obfuscating layers of
fat grow as he consumes commodified versions of authentic food, from
fish-filled sausages and “home-made” cakes made of “margarine and
egg-substitute,” to beer brewed out of chemicals, instead of hops (23,
199, 207). The more pints of such beer he consumes at “The George,”
the more his “inner boy” recedes; Bowling’s girth makes little “Georgie
Bowling” just as unrecognizable to Elsie and almost everyone else in the
new Lower Binfield as he is to himself (202). In fostering a Prufrockian
self-consciousness in which he cannot help but see himself as others
see him, Bowling understands that he is no longer continuous with the

boy he once was; he sees himself as nothing more than a stereotypical
consumer, “a fat tripper in a blue suit doing a bit of sightseeing” (202).
With all of these assaults on the waters of memory, Orwell explores the
consequences of what Elizabeth Outka, who contributes the “Afterword”
to this collection, has called “the paradoxical impulse to construct
authenticity” in early twentieth-century Britain (12). In her important
study, Outka emphasizes the commercial enterprises that marketed
authenticity prior to World War I; what I have been exploring here is
how Orwell captures the phenomenon in a later and perhaps even more
acute phase in the development of the commodified authentic. The
heavy catering to Arcadian impulses through tourism and commercial-
ism in the late 1930s had the effect of destroying both the landscape
and the very ideal of the landscaped ensconced in literary traditions for
a very long time. The more intensely Britons sought out the ideal in the
1930s, the more they could not help but recognize it as lost, unavail-
able, certainly, as a consolatory device in the new world war.
Confronting the consequences of marketed authenticity is the first
stage in Bowling’s disillusionment; it is followed by a second recogni-
tion having more to do with a vision of this space as a peaceful Arcadia,
a prelapsarian haven associated with fishing, the activity Bowling has
long considered to be “the opposite of war” (85). Bowling’s trip to Lower
Binfield has been all about fleeing a Britain that is increasingly jingoistic
and not entirely different from its totalitarian enemy. Now he learns
that the “fascising process” is alive and well even in Lower Binfield,
as militarism has infected the town. Far from the rebellious spirits of
his own childhood, for example, the town’s children play obediently
under supervision at the Model Yacht Club and slavishly follow the
commands of their teacher, Miss Todgers; Bowling spots them march-
ing around town, shouting slogans and carrying banners announcing
their preparedness for war (210). Moreover, the local stocking factory
now makes bombs and British planes from a nearby aerodrome engage
in military exercises. In what is a definitive episode for Bowling, one of
these practice bombs drops accidentally, blowing a greengrocer’s shop
out of existence (235). Bowling, who has been walking nearby, spots a
human leg in the rubble and despairs that nothing is sacred: “the blood
is beginning to get mixed up with the marmalade” (236). In recogniz-
ing that there is no escape, that the Arcadian England of his dreams has
been effaced by commercialism and militarism, Bowling packs his bags
in preparation for departure. “The old life’s finished,” he says, “and to
go about looking for it is just a waste of time” (237).
Patricia Rae 159
Bowling’s discovery that he cannot “go home again”—a fundamental

discovery in the modernist discourse on nostalgia, as many essays in this
collection attest—is representative in this instance of a wider break with
Arcadian discourses in the late 1930s. By this I do not mean to imply
that Orwell’s novel constitutes an outright abandonment of nostalgia;
Bowling may give up on the idea that a weekend break in the country-
side can replenish his sense of authentic selfhood, but what neither the
protagonist nor writer abandons is the belief in the very importance of
attempting to hold on to an authentic inner self, possessed of its own
private memories and the freedom to act in an unconventional and
unprescribed way. Though Orwell wants his readers to understand that
the authentic self cannot be bought—and this in itself constitutes one
of the novel’s important messages—he in no way renounces the ideal:
a self both capable of embodying contradictory thoughts and resistant
to interpolation and ventriloquization by gramophonic speech.
Orwell continues through the 1940s to scorn the commodification
of authenticity and to reject all sentimental Manichean discourses that
set an idyllic Britain in diametric opposition to its fascist enemy.10 At
the same time, he implies that preserving the authentic self is vitally
important to this project. More specifically, he continues to criticize
efforts to “sell” Arcadian dreams precisely because such commodifying
practices threaten to trade away genuine selfhood. A little-known 1946
essay, “Pleasure Spots,” makes his position on the matter abundantly
clear. The essay recalls the atmosphere that men like Bowling faced in
1939. Many of them, Orwell notes, were drawn to the sort of artificially
pleasing environments that Auden had in mind in “September 1, 1939”:
establishments where the “lights . . . never go out” and the “music . . .
always play[s]” (“Pleasure” 31). Orwell notes how the attraction to
such venues continued into the war years, pointing to the contempo-
raneous emergence of the “pleasure resort,” the sort of vacation place
where Britons, and especially soldiers, went to escape the “rigours of
war” (“Pleasure Spots” 29). These new resorts, filled as they were with
artificial light and heated swimming pools, marked the apotheosis of
Bowlingesque dreams of “high summer” (30). The problem with such
places, Orwell complains, is that their amenities function to contain,
even anesthetize, those who visit them. If the managers of the travel
business had their way, Orwell claims in an unmistakable reference to
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” “Alph, the sacred river, would be dammed
up to make an artificially warmed bathing pool, while the sunless sea
would be illuminated from below with pink electric lights . . .” (30).
Such amenities, according to Orwell, exert an effect that is diametrically
opposed to the exigencies of the historical moment, for they weaken a

man’s “consciousness,” “dull his curiosity,” and corrupt the very fount
of creative thinking (32). Clearly, Orwell saw the commodification of
authenticity as threatening the ideal of the authentic, Bergsonian self,
a self in which the past interpenetrates the present and thus points the
consciousness in unpredictable directions.
It is worth noting that Orwell’s last and greatest novel, Nineteen
Eighty-Four, persists in perpetuating the value of the authentic self.
Indeed, one way of reading the novel is as a cautionary tale about look-
ing for authenticity in all the wrong places. The hero, Winston Smith,
is in some ways Bowling; Smith, too, displays nostalgia for a lost self
beaten out of him by booming amplifiers and surveying telescreens.
Frightened by the Party’s annihilation of collective memory, its reduc-
tion of society to an “endless present in which the Party is always right”
(162), Smith attempts to recover a self that remembers, a self that will
give him the strength to judge the propaganda for himself. Where he
goes wrong, in the logic of Orwell’s novel, is in attempting to recover
his sense of the past by purchasing relics from Mr. Charrington’s nos-
talgia shop, as well as by attempting to escape with his lover Julia to a
place that has occupied his dreams, the “Golden Country,” an artificial
Arcadia outside of London, with alluring streams and fishing ponds
(130). He, too, ends up being fooled by the promise such attractions
hold, but to an even more insidious degree than that experienced
by Bowling. Both the junk shop and the “Golden Country” turn out
to be traps set by the Thought Police. The old prints hanging on
Charrington’s wall hide bugs and cameras; the birdsong Winston enjoys
in the “Golden Country” is artificially programmed. Evoking, perhaps,
those artificial “pleasure domes” Orwell critiqued in his nonfiction, the
“Golden Country” is the brainchild of the torturer O’Brien, who uses
the promise of a “place where there is no darkness” to lure Winston into
Room 101, where he commences the final assault on the hero’s sense of
self (27). Orwell never wants us to doubt that Winston is right in want-
ing to regain contact with an authentic version of himself, as well as
with the continuous, organic memory somehow contained deep within
him. Orwell does, I think, want us to view the story of his entrapment
as a warning against the way governments and business exploit nostal-
gia to contain and neutralize dissent. Orwell’s picture of nostalgia gone
wrong is one of the most important elements in his complex portrait
of life in a totalitarian society, a society in his estimation as evocative
of mid-twentieth-century Britain as of the more obviously totalitarian
regimes with which it is more commonly associated.
Patricia Rae 161
A new Britain
One question remains of those I set out at the start to address: how
we get from the story of Bowling’s failed journey to Orwell’s advocacy
of a progressive, even revolutionary, politics. The key here will be in
remembering that the journey is on one level the test not just of a
landscape, but of a discourse. The landscape of 1930s Britain is taxed
by overuse; so, too, is the consolatory potential of representations of
it. When Bowling concludes that “there’ll be no more fishing this side
the grave” (CUA 237), he is not just talking about the sorry state of the
literal ponds and rivers but also about the fact that even the idea of an
Arcadian British countryside is too worn and depleted to sustain him
during the tough times ahead. Orwell’s message, then, is that the famil-
iar nostalgic discourse about a pre-war Arcadia will not be viable in this
next world war. Irrevocably altered by the commodifying practices of
the day, the English countryside can no longer be figured as a prelapsar-
ian Paradise. In denying 1930s Britain its potential as a lost garden in
any future pastoral poetry, Orwell concurs with many other proleptic
elegists at the end of the decade, writers who refused the consolations
of rural landscape for a number of pressing cultural concerns, includ-
ing the inequality and increasing social conflicts between the haves
and have-nots, the futility of already having fought a war intended to
end wars, and the rise of totalitarian regimes on the European conti-
nent. This repudiation of restorative nostalgia for the 1930s dominated
British politics for four decades, at least until the Thatcher revolution
sought to dismantle post-World War II reforms and return Britain to a
pre-war ethic of self-sufficiency based on a backward-looking and nos-
talgic notion of heritage.
Bowling’s rejection of pastoral dreaming, then, is symptomatic of a
widespread political movement against nostalgia in Britain at the outset
of World War II. Despite the British Government’s revival of the trope
of Arcadia in the propaganda posters of the day, as in Frank Newbould’s
famous series, “Your Britain: Fight for it Now,” many commentators,
ordinary citizens, and Labour politicians strenuously objected to the old
familiar strategy. They exhorted others and especially poets, to use Louis
Macneice’s words, to “sing us no more idylls, no more pastorals, / No more
epics of the English earth” (59). To them, there could no longer be any
viable longing to return to the “world before the war.” And, with the
discourse of nostalgia so tattered, many Britons began to redirect their
dreams away from the “past” towards the “future,” just as the Labour
Party set about defining a broad agenda for social reform. Orwell’s
writings on Britain in the early 1940s, such as The Lion and the Unicorn,
consistently look forward in this way. It is not that he ceases entirely to
be patriotic, but that for him loving Britain means imagining it anew.
He characterizes the only viable consolation for Britons at the war’s end
as a complete overhaul of the socio-economic system. As Britain recon-
structs its policies regarding health, education, and housing, Orwell
claims, it will only be conservatives (“Lord Halifax, and all his tribe”)
who will be looking to recover “things . . . exactly as they were before”
(Lion 429). Orwell is steadfast in this view, claiming that “only revolu-
tion can save England” and declaring that if “the London gutters . . .
have to run with blood” to achieve it, so be it (271–2).11
Coming Up for Air, then, in no way signals Orwell’s turn towards a con-
servative politics. The novel doesn’t simply express nostalgia, but uses
the story of a nostalgic Everyman to expose this form of personal and
collective longing as a failed strategy for war-time and its aftermath.12
Orwell’s text offers a realistic picture of the despoliation of the British
countryside by capitalist interests and, at the same time, points to the
overuse and demise of the well-worn consolatory discourses that per-
petuated the longing for an Arcadian “home.” It does all of this while
leaving us in no doubt that Orwell believes Bowling is right to want
to be true to himself and to resist the forces of commodification and
militarism. And, finally, the novel hints at a program of social reform
that might emerge in place of the discredited Arcadian imaginings. We
might justifiably say, then, that at the end of his journey Bowling does
“return home,” but home in an entirely new sense: a place in which he
resolves to discover an authentic version of himself and own up to his
responsibility to ensure a safe home and health and education for his
wife and children. All going well, Britain would follow his lead when
this next war has finally run its course.
Notes
1. See John Cogley 156, Raymond Williams 275, and John Rodden 233. For an
account of others holding this view, see Robert Lee, 101.
2. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell describes the green place where he arrives
with Julia as “the Golden Country—almost”; since he also tells us this is a
place he has previously seen “in a dream” (130), we can conclude that he
senses it does not fulfill his ideals, that it is an inadequate version of the
imagined space.
3. Orwell uses the term in a 4 Jan. 1939 letter to Herbert Read, where he looks
back on “the pre-war fascising processes” (CW XI, 313).
4. See Patricia Rae, “Double Sorrow.”
Patricia Rae 163
5. See John Beckerson on the 1938 “Holidays with Pay” legislation and its
effects, 133–57; for a discussion of increases in disposable income and the
growth of the leisure industry in the 1930s, see Clifford O’Neill 228–44, John
Urry 16–39, and Stephen Jones 93–5.
6. See Cross’s citations from Mass Observation interviews with British holiday-
makers, 44.
7. According to Orwell, Blunden himself idealized the countryside in his
poetry. Reviewing Blunden’s book Cricket Country, in 1944, Orwell notes that
“the essential thing in this book, as in nearly everything that Mr. Blunden
writes, is his nostalgia for the golden age before 1914, when the world was
peaceful as it has never since been” (CW, XVI, 162).
8. See especially Lord Horder of Ashford, “Quiet—A Physician Prescribes,”
176–82 in Williams-Ellis, ed. Britain and the Beast.
9. Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) is just one example of another novel
that puts the discourse of Arcadianism itself under scrutiny.
10. Orwell’s strongest arguments against the categorical demonizing of an
enemy, a problem he identifies in many political and social circumstances,
appear in the 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism” (CW XVII, 141–55). There,
he defines “nationalism” as “the habit of assuming that human beings can
be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions, or tens of millions
of people, can be confidently labeled ‘good’ or ‘bad’” (141).
11. For a lucid analysis of Orwell’s “own particular brand of revolutionary patri-
otism,” see John Newsinger 65.
12. Hence the error of critical statements, like Patrick Reilly’s, that in Orwell’s
novel “The boyhood Arcadia turns out to be a paradise as heartbreakingly
lost as egalitarian Barcelona” (Reilly 218). What fails is the strategy of nostal-
gia; this clears the way to fighting for egalitarian changes in the after-war.
Works cited
Auden, W. H. The Dyer’s Hand. New York: Random House, 1956. 407–28.
——. The English Auden. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber,
1977.
Beckerson, John. “Marketing British Tourism: Government Approaches to the
Stimulation of a Service Sector, 1880–1950,” in The Making of Modern Tourism:
The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000. Ed. Harlmut Berghoff,
Barbara Korte, Rolf Schnieder and Christopher Harvie. London: Palgrave—now
Palgrave Macmillon, 2002. 133–57.
Blunden, Edmund. Undertones of War. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.
——. “The Preservation of England.” Votive Tablets: Studies Chiefly Appreciative of
English Authors and Books. London: Cobden and Sanderson, 1931. 352–62.
Boumphrey, Geoffrey M. “Shall the Towns Kill or Save the Country?” Ed. Clough
Williams-Ellis, Britain and the Beast, 101–12.
——. “Nostalgia and its Discontents.” The Hedgehog Review. Summer, 2007,
7–18.
Cogley, John. Review of Coming Up for Air, Commonweal 3 February 1950, 466–7;
rpt. in Jeffrey Meyers, ed., George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, 156–7.
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land, in Collected Poems 1909–1962. NY and London:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963.
Hynes, Samuel Lynn. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture.
New York: Atheneum, 1991.
Joad, C. E. M. “The People’s Claim,” in Britain and the Beast. Ed. Clough Williams-
Ellis. London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1937. 64–85.
Jones, Stephen G. “The Leisure Industry in Britain, 1918–39.” The Service
Industries Journal, 5: 1 (1985), 90–106.
Lee, Robert A. Orwell’s Fiction. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame Press, 1969.
Lowenthal, David. “Nostalgia tells it like it wasn’t.” The Imagined Past: History &
Nostalgia. Ed. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase. Manchester: Manchester
Macneice, Louis. Autumn Journal. London: Faber & Faber, 1998.
Mass Observation archive on-line. http://www.amdigital.co.uk/collections/Mass-
Observation-Online.aspx.
Mass Observation. The Journey Home. London: John Murray, 1944.
Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. George Orwell: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1975.
Morris Motors Ltd. The Morris Owner’s Road Book, Oxford, 1926.
Newsinger, John. Orwell’s Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave—now Palgrave Macmillan,
1999.
O’Neill, Clifford. “‘The Most Magical Corner of England’: Preservation and
the Development of the Lake District, 1919–39.” John K. Walton, Histories
of Tourism: Representation, Identities and Conflict. North York: Channel View
Publications, 2005.
Orwell, George. The Collected Works of George Orwell. Ed. Peter Davison. 12 Vols.
London: Secker & Warburg, 1998.
——. Coming Up for Air. Collected Works, vol 7.
——. The English People. Collected Works, vol. 3.
——. “Inside the Whale.” Collected Works, vol. 12.
——. The Lion and the Unicorn. Collected Works, vol. 12.
——. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Collected Works, vol. 9.
——. “Pleasure Spots.” Collected Works. vol. 19.
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1930s Britain.” Ed. Patricia Rae. Modernism and Mourning. Louisburg: Bucknell
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Patricia Rae 165
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9
Dissolving Landscapes:
W. H. Auden’s Protean Nostalgia
Eve Sorum
Soon after arriving in the United States in 1939, a singularly unnostalgic

W. H. Auden wrote in a letter to a friend, “God willing, I never wish to
see England again” (qtd. in Mendelson, “Preface” xx). Critics have had
good reason to characterize Auden as a poet who evades the temptation
of idealizing the past, particularly given his clear-eyed embrace of the
present in poems like “Another Time” (1940), where the speaker claims
that, like the flowers and “the beasts that need not remember” (line 3),
“It is today in which we live” (4).1 He contrasts his attitude with the
“So many” (5) who “would be / Lost, if they could, in history (7–8). Yet
Auden is also famous for his shifting allegiances, as seen in his renuncia-
tion of British citizenship, his changing opinion of his own poems, and
his transformation from both agnostic to believer, and political partisan
to political skeptic.2 While this essay begins by examining Auden’s early,
outwardly anti-nostalgic poetry, it focuses primarily on later work: par-
ticularly, “In Praise of Limestone” (1948), in which Auden reassesses the
value of nostalgia by turning to the limestone landscape of his youth—a
landscape that he finds again in Italy in the late 1940s. In doing so,
Auden amends the genre of what Aaron Santesso calls the “nostalgia
poem” (12), a poem defined by its idealization of a past state and its
attempt “to motivate a personal emotional reaction in the reader” (16).
“In Praise of Limestone” offers a new object of nostalgia that speaks to
Auden’s desire—and, perhaps, even to a modernist desire in general—to
embrace change even while adhering to a past ideal. Such an urge,
the poem makes clear, has both aesthetic and ethical implications:
limestone not only triggers the homesickness with which nostalgia is
etymologically wedded; it also provides the foundation of a particular
kind of art and the setting for relationships based on acceptance and
inclusion, rather than judgment.
166
Eve Sorum 167
Historically, nostalgia has been defined as the longing for an ideal

past place—a medical condition that was regarded as curable, at least
during the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when nostalgia
was seen as a physical ailment and when, as critic Linda Hutcheon
notes, the sufferer actually could return home (193). The possibility
of a cure disappeared, however, when nostalgia began to be seen as a
psychological affliction, a mental longing for a lost time rather than a
definable and (perhaps) still existing lost place (194).3 Consequently,
contemporary critics refer to the unappeasable nature of nostalgic long-
ing; indeed, according to Hutcheon, nostalgia “may depend precisely
on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and
appeal” (195, her emphasis). This definition points to a focus on the
experience of homesickness itself, rather than on the ultimate object of
that longing: a shift from an emphasis on place to an increased atten-
tion to time. Losing the specificity of a desired object, this formulation
transforms nostalgia from an individual desire to a more universal one.
In fact, Svetlana Boym has argued that nostalgia early on implied a rela-
tionship “between personal and collective memory” (xvi), a definition
adopted by philosophers like Kant, for whom “philosophy was seen as
nostalgia for a better world” (13). But if this understanding of nostalgia
emphasizes subjective longing, it also raises a question about the object
of nostalgia, asking, that is, whether the object is universal and abstract
or individual and place-bound. This divide coincides with the distinc-
tion Boym makes between “reflective” and “restorative” nostalgias,
where the reflective version “thrives in the algia, the longing itself” and
corresponds with the universalizing of the object, while the restorative
stresses the nostos, the painfulness of longing, and thereby highlights
the specificity of the object.
I argue that “In Praise of Limestone” does not simply challenge the
divide between the nostos and algia, but actually upends the very dis-
tinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia, as well as presents
a particularly modernist form of nostalgia: one that attempts to elide
spatial and temporal longings. In doing so, Auden’s poem suggests a
different understanding not only of the nature of the nostalgic object,
but also of the ethical implications of different forms of homesickness.
In Boym’s estimation, the more ethically and politically cogent version
of nostalgia is the reflective type, for it does not focus on a particular
object of nostalgia in lieu of all others, but rather embodies a universal-
ized longing for a better life and therefore increases “one’s sensitivity
to the dilemmas of life and moral freedom” (Boym 13). Yet critic John
J. Su sees an alternative that reveals the ethical import of restorative
nostalgia. Unlike Su’s contribution to this volume, in which he focuses

on the politics of E. M. Forster’s fictional representations of nostalgia,
his ground-breaking book Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel
underscores the ethical implications of fictional nostalgias. Su sets out
to counter the “rejection of place,” which has flourished, he points out,
because of the belief that having ties to a historically and geographically
defined place “limits individuals by locating them within a community;
freedom from place, on this understanding, implies the freedom to
redefine oneself according to the pattern of one’s own making” (24).
Instead, Su notes that unmoored desire does not, in fact, reflect the
experience of most nostalgics, who “tend to long for very specific place
and time bound objects” (4). What Su argues, quite convincingly, is that
“every conception of place posits an ethics,” which means that “iden-
tification with physically remote or imaginary places often implies the
desire to redefine the ethics associated with the localities an individual
inhabits” (22). Consequently, as Su’s formulation invites us to conclude,
when the longing itself becomes the point, nostalgia no longer has the
power to present a better outcome or version of the world.
Anti-nostalgia in early Auden
Far from expressing the ethical import of nostalgia, Auden’s earlier

poems exhibit an absence of and even resentment towards the nostalgic
impulse. As David Rosen writes, Auden’s juvenilia may reflect a nostalgic
vision, but after 1927 his work looks “forward to the exclusion of looking
back” (147, his emphasis). In the same strain, Auden biographer and
critic Edward Mendelson describes how Auden saw “Wordsworthian
nature-worship as an illusory nostalgia” (Early Auden 83), while Jahan
Ramazani views Auden as “eschewing the nostalgias of Yeats, Eliot, and
Pound” (Poetry of Mourning 206). In “1929,” a poem that stands as the
“centerpiece” of his first two published collections (Mendelson, Early
Auden 70), Auden simultaneously describes nostalgia as intrinsic to
humans and as something to be rejected. The speaker recites the story
of coming into being as a story of alienation: “Is first baby, warm in
mother, / Before born and still mother, / Time passes and now is other”
(Collected 62–4). Within this poem and others from the period, the
past moment is not idealized. Here the speaker embraces the present,
reminding himself “To love my life, not as other, / Not as bird’s life, not
as child’s, / ‘Cannot’, I said, ‘being no child now nor a bird’” (90–2).
Even in this poem characterized by truncated diction and leaps in asso-
ciation, the single, unsentimentalized “Cannot” stands out as a central
Eve Sorum 169
statement about the attitude one should take about the past. The stoic
tone of these lines indicates that we should read the “Cannot” not sim-
ply as suggesting the desirability of existing in the present (not as bird,
child, or other), but also as indicating the functional impossibility of
doing otherwise (since he uses “cannot” instead of “should not”). Here,
it seems, is a writer who rejects even the concept of an idealized past;
as he says in “Spain” (albeit with a calmness that he later questioned)
“History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon”
(Selected 103–4).
This desire to accept the present suggests a new way of thinking about
the individual’s relationship to the past—a perspective that Auden
attributes to Freud in his elegy, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939).
Auden cites Freud as inspiring precisely this sort of clear-eyed and
unnostalgic retrospection, noting approvingly that “he merely told/
The unhappy Present to recite the Past/ like a poetry lesson” (33–5) so
that it would be “able to approach the Future as a friend” (41). This
vision of the past as poetry to be learned indicates above all a structural
connection between the refusal of nostalgia and the poetic imagination:
Freud shows us how to read the patterns in the past in order to identify
the points of stress, just as a reader recites a poem effortlessly until he
or she “faltered at the line / where long ago the accusations had begun”
(36–7). Auden’s definition of poetry in his essay “Squares and Oblongs”
(1948) points further to the connection he makes in the Freud elegy; in
the later piece he argues that we must see “Poetry as a game of knowl-
edge, a bringing to consciousness, but naming them, of emotions and
their hidden relationships” (Prose II, 345). The backward glance involves
attention to the past, but only in service of forward movement—not at
all the loop of displaced longing inherent to nostalgia.
Given this anti-nostalgic impulse underlying Auden’s very conception
of poetry, it is not surprising that the physical locations most repeat-
edly memorialized in his early writing are those that deflect idealiza-
tion because of their anti-picturesque elements. Indeed, we cannot get
much further away from the original place of nostos—the mountains of
Switzerland missed so strongly by Swiss mercenaries in the seventeenth
century4—than Auden’s denatured landscape of northern England,
which is littered with carcasses of industrial pillage. In one of Auden’s
earliest published poems, “The Watershed” (1927), we see almost a
parody of the pastoralism that functioned as one of the more familiar
“nostalgic tropes” used (and reimagined) in eighteenth-century poetry
(Santesso 25). Auden sets the scene with his description of “Snatches
of tramline running to the wood, / An industry already comatose, / Yet
sparsely living” (Collected 4–6). This space rejects attempts to under-

stand or humanize it; in fact, humans are eerily absent in this water-
shed, and the poem warns the stranger to leave, since “This land, cut
off, will not communicate” (21). As he puts it more bluntly in “Letter
to Lord Byron” (1936), a poem written while traveling in Iceland and
thinking back to the English countryside and history, “Tramlines and
slag heaps, pieces of machinery, / That was, and still is, my ideal scenery”
(Part II, 69–70). Four years later, in “New Year Letter” (1940), Auden
gives a geological overview of sections of England, including the “ local-
ity I love, / The limestone moors that stretch from Brough” (1101–2). He
describes how “Always my boy of wish returns / to those peat-stained
deserted burns” (1117–8), and “from the relics of old mines / Derives
his algebraic signs” (1124–5). With the accumulation of these references
to the industrial wastelands of England, Auden begins to seem less
anti-nostalgic than simply nostalgic for an unexpected object—an early
version of his rethinking of the object within the nostalgic equation.
Yet we still see an irony about the nostalgic impulse in Auden’s focus
on the incongruity between the supposed object of nostalgic desire
and its generally undesirable attributes. Such a remove from nostalgic
experience is expanded upon further in “New Year Letter”; Auden notes
how the landscape is rendered symbolic, even mathematical, having
more import in the abstract than it does in its presence and effectively
becoming its own language. With this focus on the symbolic and on
the way that the landscape actually gains in meaning from this distant
perspective, Auden circumvents the desire to return to that moment,
instead reminding us that “we are conscripts to our age” (1165) and
must be “patriots of the Now” (1169). The past space functions as a code
for Auden’s former self, accessible only to that “boy of wish,” not to the
man of the present moment. This nostalgic experience is both disowned
and, ultimately, unattainable, thereby rendering it a safe subject.
Homesick for limestone
Yet by the late forties Auden’s object of homesickness begins to shift,

connecting Auden more closely to the modernist project, even as he
worked to sever many ties from his poetic past. The relationship between
nostalgia and modernism had been characterized by tension from the
beginning. On the one hand, the contemporary definition of nostalgia
as an de-medicalized, sentimental desire for a past moment chronologi-
cally parallels the rise of modernist literature (and the Oxford English
Dictionary gives its first citation from a sociology text from 1900). On
Eve Sorum 171
the other, the lingering backward glance of nostalgia seems to conflict

with the defining trope of modernism: the image of the yawning chasm
between past and present so famously articulated in Woolf’s claim that
“on or about December 1910 human character changed” (421). Such a
metaphor for the modern experience suggests that it is defined by its
dismissal and even destruction of the past, rather than any sort of long-
ing for it. However, this apocalyptic version of modernism has been
contested from the beginning; even in a foundational essay like Eliot’s
“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the argument emerges for an
“historical sense” (14) that defines modernist poetry. Of course, a belief
in historical continuity is not the same as nostalgia; Stephen Spender’s
definition of the “modern” writer as aware of both the gulf between
past and present and the futility of “trying to get back into the past by
ignoring our present” (78) points to this difference. Rather than obvi-
ate it, such a gulf can breed nostalgia, and Spender sees this outcome
as constructive of the period’s zeitgeist; the modern writer becomes the
“modern nostalgic” who “feels that an irreparable break has taken place
between the past and the present, in society and in man’s soul,” and
the “murdered past is reborn as a vision more present than anything the
present has to offer” (209). The sentimentalism associated with nostal-
gia was anathema to writers like Eliot and Ezra Pound, who, according
to Spender, tried to mask their nostalgia with irony directed toward
their poetic personas, thereby putting “nostalgia itself into perspective,
by making it appear not just as hatred of the present and yearning for
the past, but as a modern state of mind, a symptom of the decline that
was also modern” (213). Of course, when made systemic, longing for an
ideal past can lead to dangerous social consequences, and Spender warns
that the “sirens of nostalgia sang the speeches of Mussolini” (219).
In this formulation, nostalgia emerges in modernist poetry (and in
the politically conservative element of it, in particular), even when
rhetorically deflected. For the post-World War I group of British writ-
ers to which Spender and Auden belonged, nostalgia could even seem
generationally systemic. What compounded the fact, according to their
friend Christopher Isherwood, that young writers were “suffering, more
of less subconsciously, from a feeling of shame that we hadn’t been
old enough to take part in the European war” (qtd. in Hynes 21), was
a sense of disillusionment about the present age and, in Britain, about
the status of the nation. In The Contemporary and his Soul (1931), Irwin
Edman argues that the fact that “the retreat to and the nostalgia for
the past is especially acute in this generation is not surprising” (107),
because “the contemporary feels himself a waif and a wanderer,” with
“nowhere that he can call home” (119). Homesickness functions as an

endemic state of mind for a generation that feels displaced both tem-
porally and physically.
Spender notes that Auden “in his early work seemed the poet of mech-
anized civilization,” while in later work he “only introduces the imagery
of the world of machinery to treat it with contempt and boredom” (224).
Spender’s claim, however, does not align with Auden’s continued fond-
ness for the mines and chemical factories of his youth. In a late essay
on “Reading,” for example, Auden includes such features of mechaniza-
tion in a list of what would appear in his Eden (7), suggesting his new
emphasis on the “limestone uplands” that appear both in his transi-
tional poem “New Year’s Letter” and in the later essay on “Reading,”
as well as other poems that bring up limestone including “In Transit,”
“Thanksgiving for a Habitat,” “Amor Loci,” and “Prologue at Sixty”. This
attention to limestone does not entail a corresponding movement to ide-
alize a rural or semi-industrial past; as he writes in a 1938 essay “Morality
in an Age of Change,” it is a “romantic confusion” to revere the goodness
of the peasant over the cosmopolitan, since “to suggest that we should
all return to the life of the peasant is to deny the possibility of moral
progress” (Prose I 478). A good society, he cautions, is only good accord-
ing to the kind of choices provided to its members and the development
such societies undergo: “morality is only possible in a world which is
constantly changing and presenting a fresh series of choices” (481).5 As
he more starkly puts it in the fifth poem of the “Shorts” sequence (1940),
“Do we want to return to the womb? Not at all” (1).
While Auden regards returning to a past ideal as an ethical dead end,
he also forges his own productive version of nostalgic desire by refusing
the dichotomy of reflective versus restorative. Unlike the critic Susan
Stewart’s view of nostalgia as “a sadness without an object” (23), Auden
negotiates the relationship between nostos and algia in a landscape of
Italian limestone hills that seems to embody both elements. This loca-
tion is represented as perpetually changing and therefore always subject
to a sense of longing, yet the very propensity to change constitutes a
kind of consistency and suggests, therefore, a new type of nostalgic
focus. Auden’s version of nostalgia is possible, we realize, because this
new object of nostalgia is defined by its protean nature; as “In Praise of
Limestone” presents it, limestone “form[s] the one landscape that we,
the inconstant ones, / Are consistently homesick for” precisely because
it changes—the rock “dissolves in water” (1–2). Here the “inconstant
ones” seem representative of the most human version of the artist, one
who is connected to material bodies, whether his own or that of the
Eve Sorum 173
land. Yet there is also an inconstancy on a more literal and geographic

level; Auden is one of the tribe of travelers and expatriates, someone
who renounced his home citizenship, thereby taking what Samuel
Hynes calls the “basic trope of the generation”—travel—and literal-
izing it in one of the most extreme ways (229). Inconstancy becomes
the subject of the poem itself, for the limestone landscape works as the
geological manifestation of this state of mind and type of art.
It is tempting to read “In Praise of Limestone,” which Mendelson
describes as a poem that “sounds like nothing he has written before”
(Later Auden 292), as Auden’s turn to a traditional version of nostalgia
for the homeland that has been displaced onto a foreign country. As
Auden wrote to his friend Elizabeth Mayer in May 1948, “I hadn’t real-
ized till I came how like Italy is to my ‘Mutterland,’ the Pennines. Am
in fact starting on a poem, ‘In Praise of Limestone,’ the theme of which
is that that rock creates the only human landscape” (qtd. in Mendelson,
Later Auden 290). As such, Auden’s homesickness would seem to align
with Boym’s restorative nostalgia and the emphasis on the nostos.
Indeed, the limestone hills actually reveal a kind of constancy within
the inconstant viewer; his homesickness always emerges in the face
of this landscape because it embodies a resonant ideal. “What could
be more like Mother” (11), Auden asks of this scene. Moreover, the
inhabitants of this land are figured as unburdened boys, one of whom
“lounges / Against a rock displaying his dildo, never doubting / That for
all his faults he is loved” (12–14). As Mendelson notes, the artifice of the
dildo signals the aestheticization of the male sex in the face of the more
important and defining female body of the landscape (Later Auden 293).
Shame disappears in the face of this nurturing setting; unselfconscious
presentation is left. And yet, I want to suggest, in this landscape change
is not threatening; Auden’s description, in fact, suggests the opposite:
. . . Mark these rounded slopes

With their surface fragrance of thyme and beneath
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear these springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distances and definite places . . . (3–10)
The scene suggests the anti-sublime with its rounded hills and wel-
coming ravines. Each geologic or natural formation both nurtures and
delights: the springs “chuckle” and provide home and sustenance for the
fish; even the cliffs function to “entertain,” not awe. The implications of
this kind of relationship between the natural elements extend further:
“From weathered outcrop / To hill-top temple, from appearing waters
to / Conspicuous fountains” (15–17)—this transformation is almost
inevitable, “ingenious but short steps” (18). Thus the dissolving and pli-
able limestone landscape presents not only a version of how to relate,
but also of how to create. It is the source of at least one kind of art.
Auden’s homesickness, with its insistence on the nurturing and gener-
ative aspects of the limestone landscape, seems aligned with what Caren
Kaplan describes as the prototype of “Euro-American constructions of
exile,” in which “nostalgia is rooted in the notion that it is ‘natural’ to be
at ‘home’ and that separation from that location can never be assuaged
by anything but return” (33). However, the particularity of this ur-land-
scape disrupts reading Auden’s poem as simply giving in to a regressive
longing for a past ideal. The limestone is so resonant, Auden writes,
because it changes, evolves, and is acted upon. It is useful here to return
to his essay on “Morality in an Age of Change,” for Auden establishes
a connection between change and morality, arguing that “any change
toward a greater freedom of action is a morally good change” (Prose I 478).
Moreover, such a mutable rock has social reverberations; Auden claims,
“Marx seems to me correct in his view that physical conditions and the
forms of economic production have dictated the forms of communities:
e.g. the geographical peculiarities of the Aegean peninsula produced
small democratic city-states” (479). Those who live in the limestone
landscape, Auden posits, are not judgmental or absolute:
. . . unable
To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral
And not to be pacified by a clever line
Or a good lay: for, accustomed to a stone that responds,
They have never had to veil their faces in awe
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed. (26–31)
With the invocation of amoral gods, Auden gestures towards the ethical
implications of the limestone landscape, and the poem presents more
than longing for a lost geographic and ethical Eden. Pertinent here is
Su’s question, “can nostalgia ever assist ethics?” (3), as is his argument
that place entails an ethics, “an idea of how humans might interact
with each other and their environment” (22). Similarly, Auden envi-
sions a morality determined by place, both of which are all formed by
Eve Sorum 175
contingency. Neither absolute nor eternal, both place and morality are
defined, most importantly, by what could be called a sense of empa-
thy beyond the strictures of good and evil. For instance, no judgment
follows when “one of them goes to the bad” since such a fall “could
happen to all.” Surrounded by a landscape acted upon by both natural
and human elements, there is, as Rainer Emig puts it, a “paradoxical
constancy of inconstancy” (171). Auden’s retrieval of the object of
nostalgia suggests an attempt to reconcile not simply the version of
homesickness that seems restrictive and backwards-oriented, but also
the dichotomy between a place-bound ethics and an ethics based on
freedom from belonging. Consequently, freedom from local ties would
not necessarily have to be “the precondition of ethical agency” (Su 40),
as Auden seems to have presumed when he decides to leave England in
order to escape both internal and external pressure to write poetry that
promotes particular causes.6
Constancy may be lulling, but the fact that the constant element is
change upends such potential stasis. This form of change is closer to
evolution than rupture; it does not engender the fear that “all that is
solid melts into air” (Marx 21), but rather suggests the need for flexibil-
ity and openness. In recognizing this, Auden first debunks the idealiza-
tion of the landscape in his early stanzas. Addressing the audience—a
specific “you” whose presence turns this piece into a love poem—Auden
reminds us that “this land is not the sweet home that it looks / Nor
its peace the historical calm of a site / Where something was settled
once and for all” (60–2). Instead, this place serves a specific function
that counters its soothing surface: it “calls into question / All the Great
Powers assume; it disturbs our rights” (68–9). The “rights” seem to oper-
ate on two levels here: on the one hand, they refer to assumed ethical
and political stances—what we think of as “right,” whether in terms
of morality, aesthetics, or law. On the other, they reference what we
believe is granted or owed to us—what we claim as our due, our right.
These two rights tend to blend and merge; we determine what is correct,
in part, by what we assume is given. The danger lies in this conjunc-
tion: what happens when we base our ethics simply on what we see or
what we have been given? In response, Auden gives us the example of
the poet who creates the “antimythological myth” by trying to avoid
metaphor in the lines, “Admired for his earnest habit of calling / The
sun the sun” (70–1), as well as the example of the scientist who wants
to search out the answers to “Nature’s/ Remotest aspects” (75–6). The
poet’s move away from the fantastical does not mean a move into phys-
ical reality, but an urge towards rational answers—the antimyths that
provide reasons for the unexplained. Both poet and scientist believe in
the realm of the scientific truth and in the virtue of trying to determine
the limits of human knowledge; such an endeavor is rendered almost
ridiculous by the presence of the statues and the native inhabitants,
both “modifications of matter” (86) that speak to the importance and
reality of the physical and the corporeal.
It is precisely this ability to be modified—to change form and
use—that Auden wants to celebrate. Limestone, as a rock, proves exem-
plary of this mutability. As John Hildebidle writes in his article on the
“mineralogy” of the poem, limestone “is a very precise physical instance
of the Middle Way” (66)—a way that is defined, Hildebidle argues, by
an enriching and productive doubleness that points back to the “incon-
stant” ones who are “consistently homesick” (67). Through metamor-
phosis limestone can become marble, the stone forming the statues
and fountains that indicate an alternative to the poet and scientist who
want to move beyond the physical and into the realm of formula and
theory. As a mutable object of nostalgia, the limestone allows Auden to
circumvent what Santesso describes as a trap: “nostalgia, as a mode of
idealization that aims to be ‘realistic,’ must always fail” (183). Instead,
Auden presents an object of nostalgia in which the realism is embodied
in its mutability. But the limestone also points to the basis of art that
Auden wants to promote; the rock is formed from the slow decompo-
sition and solidification of organic matter, making it a stone derived
from the mutable material world. Just as the body is the basis of art, the
poet embraces change and the earthly, even when, as Auden describes
in the poem, he is one “whose greatest comfort is music / Which can
be made anywhere, is invisible, / And does not smell” (81–3). Auden’s
nostalgic experience of landscape produces an aesthetic grounded on an
acceptance of that which cannot transcend, but that which does trans-
mogrify. Place thereby embodies time and time becomes embedded in
place, upending the very distinction that Boym’s influential theory of
nostalgia has posited.
The ethical implications of this aesthetic become clear when we read
“In Praise of Limestone” in relation to several poems that flanked it
in different editions. When first printed in Nones (1950), “In Praise of
Limestone” appears as the second poem in the book, coming right after
“Prime,” which Auden later published as the first part of the “Horae
Canonicae” poem cycle. Despite this later reordering, the original pair-
ing is instructive and complementary. In “Prime,” Auden describes the
experience of waking as a coming into self-awareness and sensation.
The first moments mark a return to Eden when Auden is “Adam still
Eve Sorum 177
previous to any act” (32). Yet, with “I draw breath” (33), the most
unconscious and primal bodily act of all, Auden moves from a state of
unknowing to self-consciousness: “that is of course to wish / No mat-
ter what, to be wise” (33–4). The body here is firmly linked to history,
decay, and death, as “my accomplice now, / My assassin to be” (43–4).
This critical perspective on the body shifts and is tempered with the
move to “In Praise of Limestone,” which compares the landscape to a
feminine body (“What could be more like Mother”). In highlighting
the poem’s effort to critique the evasive strategy of its own comparison,
Mendelson writes, “Poet, scientist, and ‘I’ are reproached for refusing to
look directly at the real person, for wishing to escape the solid reality of
the flesh” (Later Auden 296). The dialogue the speaker has with himself
in poem’s final stanza points to a movement beyond the bleak associa-
tion between the body and decay, and instead gestures toward regenera-
tive possibilities, whether they are organic and earthly, as in the stone,
or mysterious and fantastic, as in the line, “if bodies rise from the dead”
(85). Auden brings together Christian resurrection and earthly decom-
position, describing a world that celebrates the connection as one that
nurtures “faultless love / Or the life to come” (91–2). By pointing out
the link between the organic and the eternal that limestone renders evi-
dent, Auden argues for an art form that embraces, rather than evades,
its earthly origins.
Embracing limestone involves inhabiting a specific place and giving
up the fantasy of constant movement—a condition that Auden reflects
upon in “In Transit” (1950), written during the same period as “In Praise
of Limestone,” but which seems in many ways a stepping-stone to that
poem. “In Transit” takes place in the anonymous and liminal space of
the airport terminal and airplane; as Nicholas Jenkins points out, Auden
also used the poem in Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 to signal his
transition to a new mode of poetry. He placed “In Transit” at the begin-
ning of “1948–57” section, the period when he moved from the United
States to Italy ( Jenkins 52). Yet even in this poem, which harkens back
to Auden’s “Consider” (1930) with its perspective of the “helmeted
airman” (1), the tone has changed. Although the speaker imagines the
longing of “an ambitious lad” (15) who is “Dreaming of elsewhere and
our godlike freedom” (16) and speaks with remove about his own past
rootedness—“Somewhere are places where we have really been, dear
spaces” (17)—by the end of the poem the reality seems to reside in the
interaction between nature and people where “Motives and natural
processes are stirred by spring” (43). The poem points back to the land,
even as the airplane view reveals the constantly changing nature of
even the most ancient terrain; the verbs Auden uses in this final stanza
indicate the unstable and regenerative nature of place: “are stirred” (43),
“grow” (44), “feel the will to live renewed” (45), “re-opens” (48). We
return to the perspective of “In Praise of Limestone,” for the speaker’s
position floating above is unenviable, making him one of a “class of
souls” (40) who “leave no trace on this plane or on each other” (32).
By suggesting that we do not want, perhaps should not want, to
exist in the seeming movement of flight, Auden points again to
the implications of using the limestone landscape as a guide. While
physical motion leads to a distance and abstraction that allows for no
change, Auden’s nostalgia for limestone enables transformation. With
this formulation Auden implies a version of nostalgia that melds and
combines the restorative and the reflective, presenting a synthesis that
Boym’s typology does not explore. Abstaining from the ironic dis-
tance that characterized his earlier explorations of ideal places, Auden
instead offers a sincere and progressive form of nostalgia. “In Praise
of Limestone,” as the speaker declares, “calls into question” (68) the
desire to ignore both what is fleeting and falliable and what cannot be
rationally explained. Thus, while Auden definitively draws back from
connecting the ethical and the poetic during his later periods, disown-
ing poems like “Spain” and famously proclaiming “poetry makes noth-
ing happen: it survives” (“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” 36), his limestone
landscape presents an ethical and aesthetic nostalgia in which the ideal
is embodied not in an idealized and unchanging past, but in a landscape
that is the source of empathetic human relationships and art forms
rooted in the material world.
Notes
Many thanks to John Fulton, Paul Sorum, and Tammy Clewell for their invalu-
able feedback on earlier drafts.
1. References to the poems will come from Collected Poems unless otherwise
noted.
2. Mendelson treats these shifts (and others) in both volumes of his biography
(see chapter 6 in Later Auden for a discussion of his return to the church and
chapter 14 in Early Auden for Auden’s reasons for turning against “Spain” and
“September 1, 1939”). Also interesting is Stan Smith’s introduction to The
Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. When discussing the prevailing vision
of an “English Auden” and an “American Auden” (a view that the Companion
upholds in its essays), Smith argues, “Auden in later life deconstructed such
binaries by adopting a third provisional location, reinventing himself as a
European” (10).
Eve Sorum 179
3. Already in the eighteenth century, the nostalgia poem responded to these

deferred and hopeless desires, expressing them through tropes that include
images of ruins, naïve pastoral worlds, examples of an idealized childhood,
and, increasingly, historical situations, language, and poetic forms (Santesso
38, 54, 72, 78).
4. See Boym’s chapter 1 or Santesso’s introduction.
5. Auden uses the term “moral” in this essay, thereby focusing on the issue of
intrinsic right and wrong. I use the term “ethics” and “ethical” more often in
my own discussion because I am concentrating on the way that Auden’s place-
based morality suggests certain effects on social and individual behavior.
6. See Mendelson’s Early Auden (346–7) for a discussion of Auden’s emigration.
Works cited
Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage
International, 1991.
——. English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939. Ed. Edward
Mendelson. London: Faber, 1977.
——. Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse: Volume I, 1926–1938. Ed. Edward
Mendelson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
——. Prose: Volume II, 1939–1948. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2002.
——. “Reading.” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. London: Faber and Faber,
1962. 3–12.
——. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage International,
1989.
Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. New York: Oxford
Edman, Irwin. The Contemporary and His Soul. New York: J. Cape & H. Smith,
1931.
Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Essays. London: Faber
and Faber, 1972. 13–22.
Emig, Rainier. W. H. Auden: Towards a Postmodern Poetics. New York: St. Martin’s
Press—now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Hildebidle, John. “The Mineralogy of ‘In Praise of Limestone.’” The Kenyon
Review, New Series 8.2 (1986): 75–85. JSTOR. Web. 13 Jan 2010.
Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” Methods for the Study
of Literature as Cultural Memory. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. 189–207.
Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the
1930s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
Jenkins, Nicholas. “Auden in America.” The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden.
Ed. Stan Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 39–54.
Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Bantam,
1992.
Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. New York: Viking, 1981.
——. Preface. English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939. By
W. H. Auden. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber, 1977. xiii–xxii.
——. Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Nicholls, Peter. “The Poetics of Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to
Modernist Poetry. Ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007. 51–67.
“nostalgia, n.” OED Online. September 2009. Oxford University Press. 11 August
2010, http://dictionary.oed.com./cgi/entry/00327373.
Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Rosen, David. Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry. New Haven: Yale
Santesso, Aaron. A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia. Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2006.
Smith, Stan. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Ed. Stan
Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 1–14.
Spender, Stephen. The Struggle of the Modern. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963.
the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Su, John J. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. New York: Cambridge
Vinem, Richard. A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge,
MA: De Capo Press, 2001.
Weinstein, Philip. Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell
Woolf, Virginia. “Character in Fiction.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume III:
1919–1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1988. 420–38.
Part III
Aesthetics
10
Rupert Brooke’s Ambivalent
Mourning, Ezra Pound’s
Anticipatory Nostalgia
Meredith Martin
In 1940 Allen Tate (who would be named consultant to the Library of

Congress, or Poet Laureate, in 1943) ends his essay “Understanding
Modern Poetry” with the salvo: “[m]odern poetry is difficult because
we have lost the art of reading any poetry that will not read itself to us;
and thus our trouble is a fundamental problem of education. . . . We had
better begin, young, to read the classical languages, and a little later the
philosophers. There is probably no other way” (274). In Ezra Pound’s
Pisan Canto 81, written in 1945, Pound dramatizes his version of a liter-
ary history in which modern poetry rejects English metrical tradition,
based on the classical languages, by breaking free from the shackles of
regular rhythms and moving steadfastly into a new age. He famously
proclaims, at least as far as one can proclaim in a parenthetical state-
ment: “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave” (l.55). Pound’s
declaration conveys something evocative, especially considering that it
was written from prison; a worn out manifesto, the line tries to assert
that the work of “breaking the pentameter” began a movement that
flooded modern poetry with the “new.” Hugh Kenner calls this section
of The Cantos a “courtship of the English decasyllabic” and charts the
way that Pound writes the history of English meter “from Chaucer to
1945” into the Pisan Cantos, wondering whether there exists “another
passage in literature that can number among the protagonists in its
drama the meter itself?” (493). To this I would answer: Yes. There are
many such passages, but our vision of literary history, filtered through
Pound’s backward glance in the 1940s, has been blurred by the collapse
of meter’s various meanings into one narrative, one history, one kind of
poem. The period between 1860 and 1930 was a time in which multiple
concepts of English meter competed for acceptance. When we think of
English meter, especially if we study twentieth-century poetry, we think
183
of metrical feet, of iambs and trochees, and counting them in a line into
pentameters; however, the period that gave rise to what we call experi-
mental modernism was also a period in which “English meter” was not
as stable a concept as we have been taught.1
The narrative of disruption that Pound suggests is a narrative that
modernist scholars have long maintained. It is both too narrow and,
in part, responsible for our contemporary and oversimplified under-
standing of the aging Victorians, the patriotic Edwardians, the pastoral
Georgians, and even the soldier poets of the First World War. The nar-
ratives of modernist “newness” in the retrospective 1940s collapse a
variety of verse experiments and possibilities into one uncomplicated
category: traditional, metrical, not new, not modern. Pound believes
in a concept of traditional meter in order to attempt to reject or move
beyond it. The process of coming to think that a certain system of
English meter is the right system, is one system at all, is a process
largely mediated by pressures of the education system, and this despite
the myriad practical and ideological disagreements about the nature of
English meter and how it should be taught in the state-funded schools.
How did we come to believe in iambs and pentameters, or, even more
basically, that English meter was English once and for all?
In the familiar narrative of literary modernism told as a history of
form, the move from meter to free verse is often described as a bat-
tle. To cite an example commonly used in classrooms, Pericles Lewis’s
Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (2007) describes what modernist
scholars have missed by focusing purely on formal innovation. He
writes, “Free verse abandoned traditional versification methods includ-
ing meter, rhyme, and stanza forms; it also often violated standard
syntax” and “[t]he victory of free verse over traditional meters [was]
decisively won in English by Ezra Pound and his friends” (3, 4). This is
how we teach modernism and, in many ways, the advent of free verse
assuages much anxiety over all that we do not know about metrical
form; especially all that we do not know about how contested it was
in the period leading up to the First World War. There are numerous
examples of the anxiety that scholars felt about the fate of meter in the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: it was the fate, in their
mind, of English literature as a whole. Writing in 1921, metrist and
historian of prosody T. S. Omond summarizes and complains about the
situation, “This, for certain: that we have as yet no established system
of prosody” (266). The lack of an established system for prosody in
English created quite a bit of anxiety for educators, poets, and proso-
dists because it called into question the validity of approaching poetry
Meredith Martin 185
formally at all; what happens when students are not trained in the clas-
sical languages but are expected to understand the remnant measures
of those classical languages as an interpretive methodology in English?
The loss of classical education in English, and the complicated feelings
among British poets about what that would mean for poetry, for its
audience, is something that we often read through Pound and other
poets of “experimental modernism” who include classical themes and
figures into their poems on the one hand while rejecting their classi-
cally-trained contemporaries’ use of meter on the other. This essay is
especially concerned with Ezra Pound’s ambivalent relationship to that
most “English” of poets, Rupert Brooke, and how Pound’s definition of
his own work in opposition to that of Brooke’s allowed him to re-write
English literary history in a way that enabled him to appear as if his
“first heave” was indeed just that.
In order to re-tell this history, we have to put Pound’s anxieties about
the newness of his project aside for a moment and turn to another set,
a different set, of metrical anxieties. The argument I want to make,
and the argument that Pound’s self-positioning obfuscates, is that even
before the complexity of metrical experiment and inquiry in the early
twentieth century was lost to us, a number of poets recognized that
it would be. These poets recognized that another kind of loss—a lost
audience, a lost understanding of England—was as inevitable as the
losses of the war. These poets mourned their particular knowledge of
English meter as something both classical and modern, both traditional
and contemporary, in elegies in which meter was a central character,
the protagonist of its own drama of obsolescence. These poets saw the
loss of an audience for poetry as the loss of a certain kind of national
community; a metrical community that had been united by a classical
education and a belief that the dead languages were in fact vital to the
future of English poetry.
Many poets in the early twentieth century, such as Robert Bridges and
Rupert Brooke, who either have been left out of our literary histories or
seen as carryovers from the Victorian era, felt an acute, yet still ambiva-
lent, anticipatory sense of loss for the decline of Greek and Latin in
education. For Bridges and Brooke, this decline meant that the audience
for poetry would be incapable of appreciating or even detecting the true
variety of English meter. That is, without the background of a classical
education, how could a reader know, recognize, or feel “English” meter,
English classical “feet”? Though many poems enact the anticipatory
and ambivalent sense of loss that I describe, Rupert Brooke’s 1911 poem
“Letter to a Live Poet” stands out not only for its complicated treatment
of meter as a central protagonist, but also because Brooke himself came

to stand for a broader loss. For Pound, Brooke was a proto-elegiac figure
who symbolized all that was already dead, packaged, anthologized,
and worth discarding in British poetry and culture. By reading Brooke’s
poem as an ambivalent elegy to a soon-to-be-lost audience for metrical
poetry, indeed, to meter itself, I want to question Pound’s narrative of
a “break” with traditional meter and complicate our assumption that
“meter” itself was a stable concept in a time when the broader con-
texts of education, Englishness, and elegy were undergoing constant
redefinition.
* * *
As scholars like Christopher Stray and Terry Eagleton have noted, the
rise of English literary education displaced Classical education in the
new state funded schools, a move which began with the 1870 Education
Act and which gained momentum and eventual acceptance over the
course of the early twentieth century. In W. H. Auden’s elegy, “Spain
1937,” he writes, “Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek;
/ the fall of a curtain upon the death of a hero.” The absolute value of
Greek was diminishing in England at the same time that the curtain
fell on the generation of young men who died in the First World War.
The loss of these men, alongside the loss of Greek, symbolized for many
a loss of a classically educated officer class, that is, the death of an
idealized version of England-as-Ilium, born out of nineteenth-century
public school culture. Compulsory Greek was abolished as an entry
requirement to Cambridge in 1919 and Oxford in 1920, but not without
protest. By 1921, Henry Newbolt’s best-selling The Teaching of English in
England proclaimed:
The Classics . . . remain, and will always remain, among the best of
our inherited possessions, and for all truly civilized people they will
always be not only a possession but a vital and enduring influence.
Nevertheless, it is now, and will probably be for as long as a time as
we can foresee, impossible to make use of the Classics as a fundamen-
tal part of a national system of education. (13)
For “truly civilized people” the classics still held—and indeed still
holds—a cultural cachet. Latin and Greek tags sprinkled indiscrimi-
nately into conversation or, especially, at the end of parliamentary
speeches, signaled membership into a select group of the elite who had
Meredith Martin 187
attended the same schools. The knowledge of Greek, especially, meant

a particular kind of acuity and rigor.
George Saintsbury, author of the three volume History of English
Prosody from the 12th Century to the Present Day (1906–1910), defended
his vote against the disestablishment of Greek at Oxford in a letter to
the Athenaeum in early 1920: “The unique combination of order and
freedom, of beauty and strength, of the amazing marriage of Logic
and Magic, in Greek are to be found only in the study of Greek itself”
(120).2 The study of English literature, many believed, should come
only after mastery of the classical languages. Saintsbury protested as
early as 1906 that “the full and real appreciation for English literature”
was only possible “by and in the study of the classics.” Saintsbury’s
writing on English meter is infused with his understanding of the clas-
sical languages, so much so that he attests that he can “hear” metrical
foot divisions in English instinctively. Saintsbury’s own background in
Greek and Latin allowed him to argue, again and again, that the “foot”
was the primary division of the English line and the ruling constitu-
ent in English poetry. Though many poets disagreed with Saintsbury’s
theories, the insistent and persistent meshing of classical metrical ter-
minology and an English poetry that stands for all that is good, right,
and patriotic about English national culture makes perfect sense when
read against the background of a complete classical education, in which
young men read ancient Greece as the origin of their own national
characters. Here is a particularly telling definition of English meter,
from Saintsbury, in which English meter takes on characteristics that
promote a kind of “classical Englishness.”
But still there abide these three—iamb, trochee, and anapaest—in the
English aristocracy of poetry. The iamb is with us the staple of poetic
life: it will do any work, take on any colour, prove itself at need the
equal of the other two, which it often summons to reinforce it. The
trochee is the passion of life; not easily adaptable by itself, except
for special moments, comic or tragic, frivolous or plaintive, as it
chooses, but seasoning and inspiriting the iamb constantly and yet
strangely. And the anapaest is the glory of life, though its uses differ
in glory. (526)
The loss of Greek and Latin education was also the loss of a particular
kind of classical English identity that writers like Rupert Brooke seemed
to emblematize. But in so doing Brooke, like others, knowingly mocks
this identity at the same time he mourns its passing in his poems. And
what was comforting about this classical English identity, thus con-
structed, was its appearance of stability and the fact that this national
form of identity did unite certain communities of readers and writers
who had been to the same schools and read the same poems.
In 1907, the day after Rupert Brooke’s twentieth birthday, he wrote
“I am now in the depths of despondency because of my age. . . . I’ve
written almost no verse for ages; and shall never write any more. I’ve
forgotten all rhythm and metre. The words ‘anapestic dimeter acata-
lectic,’ that fired me once, now leave me cold” (Letters xxxvi). At the
same time that the Imagists were gathering in Paris, Brooke was nego-
tiating his commitment to an English poetry composed in classical
meters. Described by a schoolmate as “the best writer of Greek there
has been since the Greeks” as well as “ludicrously good-looking” (Letters
xxxvi), Brooke is best known as a patriotic poet who wrote the iconic
self-elegy “The Soldier.” Some scholars suggest that Brooke’s death on
23, April 1915 heightened the popularity of war poetry and created a
situation by which young soldiers were “turned into poets by the war”
(Hibberd, Casebook 25). He was widely admired, imitated, and mourned
as a national poet; Winston Churchill’s obituary for Brooke, published
on 26, April 1915, conveniently beside a column appealing for more
recruits, memorialized him as one of “England’s noblest sons:”
Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of

mind and body, ruled by high undoubting purpose, he was all that
one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in the days when no
sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is
that which is most freely proffered. (Hibberd, Casebook 38)
Brooke’s life was emblematic of the courageous, classically educated

upper-class gentleman, and his death stood for the loss of an England
in which the nobility saw their Englishness through the lens of their
classical educations.
Though he only earned a second in the famous Classical Tripos at
Cambridge in 1909, his attention to and mastery of classical forms is
evident in the section titled “experiments” of his best-selling, post-
humous Collected Poems, published in the year of his death. Brooke’s
“experiments” were mostly in “choriambics” and, like the experiments
of Tennyson, Swinburne, Arnold, and Bridges, the poems were exer-
cises, viewed as a series of difficult problems to overcome. But Brooke’s
investment in Greek was more than “sad mechanic exercise.”3 It was
also an investment in England, that is, in a certain concept of the
Meredith Martin 189
English gentleman and the English poet that he saw slipping away.
In his long poem “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,” written while he
was abroad in Berlin in 1912 (and published in both The Poetry Review
and the anthology Georgian Poets), he contrasts the beauty of the “May
fields all golden” with his unhappy condition in Germany “sweating,
sick and hot” and intersperses his comparison with xenophobic stere-
otypes of beer-drinking Germans, a culture where things are “verboten”
as opposed to the “unregulated sun” of England. Though these poems
would seem to contrast the constraints of German culture with the
freedoms of England, the strictures of his own Classical education
appear in his idealization of England’s beauty. As Brooke turns toward
his extended pastoral meditation on Grantchester, he quotes a Greek
tag, fusing his longing for home with his intimate knowledge of Greek:
the line, which means “if I could only be” is translated by Brooke as
“would I were / In Grantchester, in Grantchester.” Before the war, the
classical, pastoral Englishness is still pure, quite unlike “the old lie” that
Wilfred Owen and Pound expose in their later war poems.
But Brooke’s relationship to this classical, pastoral Englishness was
already complicated and ambivalent before the war. Brooke goes so far
as to cast his moods in metrical terms. He is aloof and jaunty about his
Greek studies, writing, in 1907, what he describes as a “beautiful poem
of the Doleful kind” titled “A song, Explanatory of Strange Sense of
Incompatibility between Self and Universe, and, In Praise of Decease”
(Letters 89). These short poems are incredibly ironic, at once flaunting
his specialized knowledge at the same time that he mocks both this
education in meter, as well as himself:
I. Things are a brute

And I am sad and sick;
Oh! You are a Spondee in the Fourth Foot,
And I am a final Cretíc.
II. Things are beasts:
Alas! And Alack!
If Life is a succession of Choreic Anapaests,
When, O When, shall we arrive at the Paroemiac?
Brooke presents a series of Greek metrical ‘in’ jokes that nevertheless

point to his own ability to recognize the absurdity of the system at the
same time that he employs it. He adds, in parenthesis “I hope the tech-
nical terms are right” (90). Right or not, the characteristics that these
meters obtain are interesting: to be a spondee in the fourth foot is to
end the metrical line, to complete it. To end a line with a cretic, a “final
cretic” actually violates a famous metrical law, called, aptly enough, the
“law of the final cretic,” which, by putting a metrical mark over the
final syllable in “cretíc,” marks Brooke’s sendup. To explain, we have to
pronounce the “cretic” as if it is part of a cretic foot, but we therefore
mispronounce it. It is as if Brooke is saying that the verse is complete,
but he is the rule breaker. Like Coleridge’s “Lessons for a Boy” in which
he teaches his grandson about the rules of meter by employing them
(“the trochee trips from long to short”), here, Brooke employs Greek
meter in English to talk about his own classical persona as someone who
knows the rules intimately, defines himself by them, but is still aware
of the possibility, and necessity, of breaking them. It is an interesting
line Brooke walks: on the one hand, he certainly believes in the meters
he has learned in Greek, and gestures to the success of the classics as a
broader guide for life, but on the other hand, he also shows his aware-
ness of having been raised to believe this, asking “If life is a succession
of these systems,” when shall we arrive at the end?4 The “Paroemiac” is
an even more obscure term referring to a line that will not continue to
the next, or the end of the line in both metrical and allegorical terms.
In this ironic letter, Brooke, whether he knows it or not, anticipates his
own obsolescence as a classically trained poet.
* * *
If Brooke was ambivalent about his own poetic education, one might
think that he would be ambivalent as well about the more blatant
experiments of Pound and the others of his era; however, he was
quite clear in his views. In a 1909 review of Pound’s Personae, in The
Cambridge Review, Brooke claims that when Pound “writes in metre, the
result is quite good;” and Brooke continues to say that,
though Mr. Pound shows he is a poet, he has fallen, it appears, under

the dangerous influence of Whitman, and writes many poems in
unmetrical sprawling lengths that, in his hands, have nothing to
commend them. In these forms he generally, not always, fails to
express much beauty. He rather wantonly adopts them, no doubt, in
youthful protest against the flood of metrical minor verse of today.
A little quiet reasoning is all he needs. (59)
The “flood of metrical minor verse” is a kind of poetry that does not
operate on the same level of formal awareness that Brooke employs
Meredith Martin 191
even in his own minor verses; it is verse written without the foundation
of classical meters, without the understanding of variation and mastery
that a classical education affords. Brooke recognizes that Pound has
this mastery, but he is disheartened that Pound chooses not to flaunt
it. Though Brooke cannot fully embrace Pound’s particular kind of
classicism, he is interested in it and has hopes that Pound will come
around to his own view. Brooke writes: “It is certain now (thanks in
part to Mr. Saintsbury), as it has long been obvious, that the foot is
immensely important in English prosody. It is still more certain that
the line is” (59). Brooke notices that many of Pound’s verses are iam-
bic, but wonders what Pound is up to by throwing off the measure of
the line. Of interest here is not necessarily Brooke’s reading of Pound,
but Brooke’s admission, via Saintsbury’s hard work, that he has been
convinced that the classical foot is the true measure of English poetry.
That is, it would perhaps be obvious to the classically educated Brooke
that “the foot” is immensely important in English prosody; it was not
until the popularization, promotion, and dissemination of “the foot”
in the Edwardian period that even poets who we today assume to be
old-fashioned metrists actually accepted English meter based on a clas-
sical model. Meter meant more than just a regular alternating line to a
poet in the early twentieth century. It might mean a variety of things:
a classical knowledge, a marching, Satinsbury-esque classical Englishness
(or classics-as-Englishness), or an alternation of both of these things.
And it almost always meant an awareness of form and a level of meta-
metrical communication with others who would know and be able to
read those forms.
When A. E. Housman was appointed professor of Latin at Cambridge
in 1911, Brooke wrote a scathing parody of the poet, choosing death by
a dead language and mocking writers of “watered down” verses: “Such
gave the world their best—and quickly / Poured out that watered best
again, /—And age has found them, tired and sickly, / Mouthing youth’s
flabby dead refrain.” He writes, in a later stanza, “E’en Greek might
tempt a man to singing, / But Latin is the lifeless tongue.” He portrays
Housman as escaping while he can, “undishonoured, clean and clear /
you teach and lecture, safe in prose.” It may seem like Brooke is cast-
ing off the study of classics altogether, but the companion piece to this
poem shows that his relationship to the classics, and to the classical
terms for meter in English, is much more ambivalent.
Brooke’s “Letter to a Live Poet,” also to Housman and published in
the Saturday Westminster, attempts to negotiate the loss of traditional
verse forms in English, that is, English meter measured by classical
metrical feet, at the same time that he knowingly makes fun of their
terms. Composed mostly in blank verse, the poem, like his the poems in
the letter, attempts to exemplify some of the verse structures it mocks,
praises, and mourns.
1 Sir, since the last Elizabethan died,

2 Or, rather, that more Paradisal muse,
3 Blind with much light, passed to the light more glorious
4 Or deeper blindness, no man’s hand, as thine,
5 Has, on the world’s most noblest chord of song,
6 Struck certain magic strains. Ears satiate
7 With the clamorous, timorous whisperings of to-day,
8 Thrilled to perceive once more the spacious voice
9 And serene utterance of old. We heard
10 — With rapturous breath half-held, as a dreamer dreams
11 Who dares not know it dreaming, lest he wake —
12 The odorous, amorous style of poetry,
13 The melancholy knocking of those lines,
14 The long, low soughing of pentameters,
15 — Or the sharp of rhyme as a bird’s cry —
16 And the innumerable truant polysyllables
17 Multitudinously twittering like a bee.
18 Fulfilled our hearts were with the music then,
19 And all the evenings sighed it to the dawn,
20 And all the lovers heard it from all the trees.
21 All of the accents upon all the norms!
22 — And ah! the stress of the penultimate!
23 We never knew blank verse could have such feet.
Addressing the “live” poet, Brooke compares him to those who are dead;
the last Elizabethan, to blind Milton. But then the poem gets confusing.
How can the “ears” be “satiated” with “clamorous, timorous whisper-
ings of to-day” and also be thrilled to hear an “utterance of old,” that is,
a “voice” recalling an older, more metrical style? The “ears” are repeated
in the word “heard” and the listeners recall, in an image of a fading
dream, the beauty of ancient poetry, exemplified in Brooke’s “long low
soughing pentameters” and his own “innumerable truant polysyllables”
that “multitudinously twitter.” In line eighteen the syntax pulls us to
a present in which these beautiful verses are now silent: “fulfilled our
hearts were with the music then.” Our hearts and ears are engaged, and
a kind of unity is achieved between the natural world, the listening
Meredith Martin 193
lovers, and the meter itself: “all the evenings” sigh and brighten into
a hopeful dawn, all the accents are in all of the right places. This line,
twenty-one, is a bit wrenching. Though we might want to believe, lulled
by the “sighing” tone, that the accents are part of this beautiful har-
mony, we have to force the line into pentameter by an odd stress on the
word “upon,” which reminds us that that word is not a “norm.” “Upon,”
then, sticks out, as the meter should be organic but is somehow over-
laid, with the accents coming from the outside rather than from within.
The poem could be easily read as a kind of homage to Housman, but
the meter subtly undermines this praise and belies its own pathos. In
line twenty-three, Brooke reverts to the norm of iambic pentameter, the
most regular “foot” a pentameter line can have, to say “we never knew
blank verse could have such feet.” The pathos here, of hearts fulfilled,
of evening “sighing to the dawn,” of an old beauty restored, is com-
plicated by Brooke’s ironic nudge: we always knew “blank verse” was
iambic. Is he dramatizing a moment when we remember something we
should have known all along, the “we never knew” a kind of reproach
that brings us back to the “then” when our ears are finally satiate, our
hearts fulfilled? Though the meter itself reveals ambivalence, these
first twenty-four lines seem to praise the “live” poet for his recovery of
the lost art of writing in harmonious meters. Brooke mourns the lost
moment of recognition and identification available when we remember
or become aware that a meter, a song we know so well, has become a
part of who we are. That is, it takes a particular kind of metrical mastery,
a classical English mastery, to playfully and artfully write this poem at
the same time that its series of “in-jokes” are speaking to a particular
metrical community; a community that would be aware of meter as a
concept that is at once classical and English, historically variant, and,
when employed ironically, can undermine our assumptions about what
and how a poem’s form can mean.
The second section of the poem asks where poetry has gone and, spe-
cifically, where poetry infused with this once-known meter has gone;
these meters also mean something in addition to the complicity of their
employment, something about English character, something “imperial,”
“combative” and “gaunt” and “passionate,” natural to Brooke and all
Englishmen. The “it” is meter itself, those “accents” upon the norms
and meter, here, has become a protagonist that has perhaps left the
stage for good.
24 Where is it now? Oh, more than ever, now

25 I sometimes think no poetry is read
26 Save where some sepultured Caesura bled,

27 Royally incarnadining all the line.
28 Is the imperial iamb laid to rest,
29 And the young trochee, having done enough?
30 Ah! turn again! Sing so to us, who are sick
31 Of seeming-simple rhymes, bizarre emotions,
32 Decked in the simple verses of the day.
The poem moves into a kind of morbid parody: the pronoun, the “it”
of line twenty-four, which refers to lost “poetry,” is itself lost in the
mourning of its constituent parts, its meter and its grammar. “No poetry
is read save where some sepultured Caesura bled.” That is, there is no
poetry except for when the metrical midline pause—the caesura—is
transformed into its root—cut—to cut the line in two halves, to be
unburied and bleeding in the flesh-colored red of “incarnadine,” the
“royal” “flesh” of the poem bleeding out. There is no metrical poetry
“read” except for when there is violence done to it, as it appears now.
The regal burial continues in the next line: the “imperial” iamb is being
“laid to rest” and the trochee dies young, obsolete before its time. The
“turn again” of line thirty, the “sing so to us,” is a call for these metri-
cal feet to come back from the dead, to perhaps save the reader from
the “seeming-simple rhymes, bizarre emotions, / Decked in the simple
verses of the day” that with which he can have no communion or
recognition. This is a plea for metrical complexity and identification,
where affect does not come from “a little gloom” or from “modern
despair,” but from the “gaunt anapests,” the “combative accents,” the
“stress where no stress should be” and from the recognition of those
meters, the sense of belonging and community that the ability to rec-
ognize and name them affords.
The mocking nostalgia of “where is it now?” in line twenty-four gets
replaced by the kind of alienating “call to arms” (or call to “feet” rather)
that again signals an ambivalence—the “thrill of all the tribrachs in the
world.” This is one step further than a pyrrhic victory, as a tribrach is
three unaccented syllables rather than two. All of these parts, pieces,
and disembodied protagonists of the verse become “prouder pronouns”
than the dawn, echoing the unity of the first section but with a mili-
taristic, tribrachic victory, where “the thunder of the trumpets of the
noun” falls on deaf ears and suggests that this understanding of meter
will not prevail. The pentameter of these last ten lines is all over the
place, expanded out to six or seven beats, and contracted, in the final
exclamation, to a loud, three beats separated by none other than three
Meredith Martin 195
tribrachs, a silence that is almost shouted. What is this poem telling

us, or rather, what is my reading of the poem telling us? Brooke’s poem
makes metered poetry a character in order to dramatize the options
for poetry in 1911: either complicated, meta-metrically aware poetry
striving to experiment with form and reveal its histories, or a simple,
bombastic marching meter, the kind of verses against which Pound
was also reacting. The two poets, then, were both experimenting to
make something new out of something old; Pound just chose to con-
solidate everything “old” under a misreading of metrical complexity in
the Georgian era. Indeed, Pound’s formulation of the “Georgian” poet
renders Brooke’s poetry simply a form of nostalgia to be rejected, but
Brooke’s work is much more complicated than a simple reclamation of
forms—Brooke is contemplating the future of poetry by his careful and
complicated consideration of its pasts.
In 1912, Brooke’s “Old Vicarage, Grantchester” was published in the
February 1912 issue of The Poetry Review, the same magazine as Ezra
Pound’s poem with a Greek title, “Doria.” Pound’s poem was reprinted
and collected in Ripostes and in his edited 1914 volume Des Imagistes;
it was reprinted as well in Harriet Monroe’s 1917 The New Poetry. The
title was “somewhat mysteriously printed in Greek” and means “Doria,”
which Richard Aldington, in 1956, dismissively speculates that “if this
means anything it means ‘Doric’ in the feminine singular and possibly
is addressed to a particular person and is meant to suggest a mood of
Doric austerity” (11). In Greek “Doria” signifies “gift” and scholars
have speculated that it refers to Dorothy Shakespear, Pound’s future
wife.5 Aldington’s misreading, or attempt at disregarding the Greek
altogether, proves that the audience Brooke was mourning had indeed
passed away.
[Doria]
Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are—
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of grey waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
The shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.
Pound’s poem, too, evokes nostalgia for a lost language, a language for-
gotten. Whereas Brooke would use his classical meters as a gesture to a
community that would perhaps not be able to understand them much
longer, Pound used his Greek to write to his future wife, to signal his
polyglottic modernism, and to require that a new kind of elite reader-
ship would emerge to replace the classical English concept of poetry,
an elite readership that would become a professional class of teachers
and scholars distinct from the masses for a different reason. “To break
the pentameter, that was the first heave”: Pound’s line, of course, is in
pentameter, or can be read as pentameter without much wrenching, ris-
ing from an iamb to three anapests to a final, emphatic stressed syllable.
Pound’s poetry—all modern poetry—replaced the difficulty of learning
classical languages, the nuances, problems, and inadequacies of classical
meter in English. Foreshadowing his own obsolescence, “Letter to a Live
Poet” is an elegy for Brooke’s eventual ghostly existence—or rather, his
absence in a literary present that doesn’t know how to read him.
Notes
1. See Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National
Culture, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012).
2. Saintsbury was a prolific late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century critic
and a founding member of the English Association.
3. Tennyson, In Memoriam, V.
4. Brooke’s wartime death might well be implicated here as a response to the
very question he asks. As many scholars have noted, the educational system
that taught him classical meter was also the education system that instilled
in him the “value” of sacrificing life for god, king, and country. See Meredith
Martin “Therapeutic Measures: Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart”, Modernism/
Modernity 50.1, 2007 for discussion of meter and patriotic sacrifice in World
War One or The Rise and Fall of Meter.
5. See Helen Dennis’s “Pound, Women, and Gender” in The Cambridge Compa-
nion to Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 264–83.
Works cited
Aldington, Richard. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Hurst: The Peacocks Press, 1954.
Brooke, Rupert. Letters of Rupert Brooke. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. London: Faber and
Faber, 1955.
——. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke with a Memoir. Ed. Edward Blunden.
London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1936.
——. The Prose of Rupert Brooke. Ed. Christopher Hassall. London: Sidgwick and
Jackson, 1956.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. London: Blackwell, 1983.
Meredith Martin 197
Hibberd, Dominic, ed. Poetry of the First World War: A Casebook. London:
Macmillan, 1981.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. California: University of California Press, 1983.
Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge
Newbolt, Henry. The Teaching of English in England. London: HMSO, 1921.
Omond, T. S. English Metrists. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921.
Pound, Ezra. The Pisan Cantos. Ed. Richard Sieburth. New York: New Directions,
1970.
Saintsbury, George. The History of English Prosody, From the Twelfth Century to the
Present Day, in three volumes. London: Macmillan, 1906, 1908, 1910.
——. “Compulsory Greek at Oxford”, Letter to the Editor, The Classical Weekly,
January 23, 1920: 120–1.
Stray, Christopher. Classics Transformed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Tate, Allen, The English Journal, 29. 4 (1940): 263–74.
Tennyson. Alfred Lord. In Memoriam. Ed. Erik Gray. New York: Norton, 1993.
11
The Beloved Republic: Nostalgia
and the Political Aesthetic of
E. M. Forster
John J. Su
The relationship between modernism and nostalgia in the case of

E. M. Forster might be summed up simply: he is not a modernist
because of the form of his nostalgia. Sometimes granted honorary status
as a modernist on the basis of his last novel, A Passage to India (1924),
Forster has been viewed as a nostalgic throwback to Edwardian or even
Victorian sensibilities.1 Since Lionel Trilling’s wartime study E. M. Forster
(1943), readings of Forster have remained remarkably consistent: the
preeminent moralist of his age, yet not a “great” artist; an embodiment
of “values,” which are transmitted perhaps too transparently through
his fiction; an outspoken defender of liberalism, yet anemic in his writ-
ings, unwilling to be revolutionary in aesthetics or politics.2 For his
critics and defenders alike, Forster’s voice can be heard most clearly
through the narrator of Howards End (1910), pining for the disappearing
country houses and the rural Englishness for which they stand, uneasy
about industrial modernization, motor cars, and the chaos of the city.
If Forster were viewed as more central to the modernist canon, how-
ever, his nostalgia might question long-standing assumptions about
the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The relative disregard
for the topic of nostalgia among scholars of literary modernism has
been motivated not only by the pronouncements of more canoni-
cal modernists regarding their radical break with the past; it has also
been motivated by anxieties about connections between nostalgia and
what Michael North has called the “massive authoritarian fantasies”
of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound (186). The so-called
political aesthetic of modernist authors served to reconcile contradic-
tions that plagued liberal capitalist democracy: between individual and
society, individual needs and abstract individualism, freedom and coer-
cion. The coincidence of modernist aesthetic visions and the rhetoric
198
John J. Su 199
of fascism, however, led North and others to confirm earlier injunc-

tions against “aestheticizing politics” made by Walter Benjamin and
Theodor Adorno.3 The reconciliations presented in art, according to
this line of thinking, are at best delusive and more likely repressive fan-
tasies that require the active erasure of difference. Nostalgia, according
to this line of thinking, represents a mode of aestheticizing the past—
rendering it beautiful by means of a deliberate and often pernicious
amnesia.4
The fantasy of reconciling political antitheses through the aesthetic
mediation of art was central to Forster’s vision throughout his career,
apparent in novels such as Howards End (1910) and in the essays, lec-
tures, and radio speeches collected in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951).
Yet even during liberalism’s so-called “dark years” of the 1930s–40s,
when so many of his contemporaries were dismissing it as outdated and
ineffectual, Forster publicly defended liberal democracy. By exploring
why his political aesthetic never devolved into the fascism predicted
by Frankfurt School Critical Theory, modernist studies scholarship
could provide a crucial contribution to understanding various forms of
modernism, and have broader implications for the reemerging inter-
est in aesthetics throughout the humanities. Indeed, it is striking that
modernist studies has transformed so radically since the late 1990s, yet
North’s assessment remains largely unquestioned.
I will argue that Forster’s nostalgia played a crucial role in shaping
his political aesthetic in ways that made it irreconcilable with authori-
tarianism. Rather than bracketing off Forster’s nostalgic rhetoric from
his putatively more central concerns, I will argue that his political
aesthetic required a nostalgic mode of representing the past in order
to emphasize what will be addressed below as the unique and limited
form of knowledge that art provides. The consistent pattern of identify-
ing himself as an anachronism, belonging to “the fag-end of Victorian
liberalism” (Two Cheers for Democracy 67), was crucial to Forster’s project
of distinguishing between evidence-based and experiential knowledges.
Such a distinction allowed Forster to locate within art a source of
knowledge that cannot be reduced to empirical sense data. Nostalgia,
in other words, does not function as a tool of ideological mystification,
providing an image of reconciliation by concealing enduring social ten-
sions. Rather, it functions as a way of interpreting the world such that
the present is judged in relation to unfulfilled longings and aspirations.
Such a mode of interpretation is crucial to Forster’s particular form of
liberalism, which is associated less with universalizing abstract rights
than in addressing unfulfilled human needs.
To understand the relationship between aesthetics and politics in

Forster’s writings, then, requires moving beyond simplistic dismissals
of nostalgia as a form of amnesia; it also requires restoring the historic-
ity of nostalgia as an evolving phenomenon responsive to changes in
culture, politics, and economics. Forster’s works mark a crucial moment
in literary history, as the function of nostalgia shifts away from the
production of what Nicholas Dames calls “amnesiac selves” in Victorian
literature toward the selective reconstruction of effaced histories that
critics, including myself, have identified in post-World War II anglo-
phone literatures.5 Dames argues that the nineteenth-century novel
gives nostalgia a distinct cultural purpose for the first time: the “amelio-
ration or cancellation of the past” (6). According to this idea, the novels
of Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Thackeray, and Collins present memory as a
potential threat to self-control and regulation; in this context, nostalgia
provided a crucial technique for rendering the ever unruly past into a
coherent future-oriented narrative necessary for legitimizing Victorian
notions of selfhood. These “amnesiac selves” promoted a life that,
according to Dames, was “no longer burdened by the past, a life lived
as a coherent tale, summarizable, pointed, and finally moralizable” (7).
In Forster, by contrast, nostalgia is less a form of personal or collective
amnesia than a response to it. As will become more fully apparent over
the course of this essay, nostalgia takes the forms it does in Forster’s
work as a response to shifts in global capitalism and Great Britain’s role
within the world economic system—what Forster describes as the “huge
economic movement which has been taking the whole world, Great
Britain included, from agriculture towards industrialism” (Two Cheers
for Democracy 281).6
Some of Forster’s most explicit meditations on the relationship
between aesthetics and politics emerge during and immediately after
World War II. In an address before the American Academy of Arts and
Letters in 1949 entitled “Art for Art’s Sake, ” for example, Forster begins
with the familiar aestheticist opposition between art and politics only
to assert that the former fulfills the promise of the latter:
A work of art, we are all agreed, is a unique product. But why? It is

not unique because it is clever or noble or beautiful or enlightened
or original or sincere or idealistic or useful or educational—it may
embody any of those qualities—but because it is the only material
object in the universe which may possess internal harmony. All the
others have been pressed into shape from outside, and when their
mould is removed they collapse. The work of art stands up by itself,
John J. Su 201
and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been
promised by society, but always delusively. . . . Art for art’s sake?
I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the
one orderly product which our muddling race has produced. (Two
Cheers for Democracy 101)
Politicians and statesmen confuse regulations with aesthetic order,

producing a series of “disorders” that, for Forster, dominate the history
of human civilizations (99). The two world wars were not markers of
a civilization that was once brilliant and now in decline; calamitous
violence is seen by Forster as the norm, erupting at regular intervals.
The “internal harmony” of the artwork, then, preserves what cannot
remain in the world.
If art fulfills the promises that societies never keep, Forster nonethe-
less insists that aesthetic order is not a model for human political order.
Immediately after asserting the importance of art for art’s sake, Forster
deflates his own claim by insisting that art is only one relevant feature
of human existence: “Man lives, and ought to live, in a complex world,
full of conflicting claims, and if we simplified them down into the
aesthetic he would be sterilised” (98). Harmony, in other words, is not
defined in terms of the absence of conflict or uniform consensus on
questions of taste or politics. Howards End might present a fantasy of
reconciling social and political tensions through the marriage between
the cultured Schlegels and the business-minded Wilcoxes.7 In the lived
world, however, similar reconciliation is neither possible nor even nec-
essarily desirable.
Understanding why Forster would propose an aesthetic reconcilia-
tion that cannot be reproduced in life has been hampered by academic
discussions of the political aesthetic as they emerged through the 1980s
and 1990s—discussions that produced interesting but misleading inter-
pretations of Forster’s work. Alan Sinfield noted more than two decades
ago that the reconciliation between the two families depends on the
wealth of the Wilcoxes and their total collapse of resistance against the
Schlegel’s plans for the country house (41). The assumption guiding his
reading is that the enduring tension at the end of the novel suggests an
ideological “faultline”—a problem that Forster was unwilling or unable
to acknowledge. However, Forster deliberately ends the novel with
not one but a whole set of unresolved or deferred problems: Margaret
remains childless, and hence Howards End once again has no direct
heir; Helen’s bastard child, the probable heir, is without a father and has
a most tenuous claim to the country house; Margaret is still married,
and her husband Henry Wilcox could at any time attempt to reassert
his authority; Charles Wilcox, imprisoned for indirectly killing Leonard
Bast, will eventually be released from prison, and would certainly har-
bor no generous feelings toward the Schlegels.
Far from presenting a straightforward allegory for resolving national
tensions, then, Howards End actively undercuts the capacity of readers
even to interpret the precise nature of the crises facing England. “One
may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister,” declares the nar-
rator in the novel’s first line (3). The emphasis on arbitrariness and
the lack of a principle for organizing the narrative gravitate against
the notion that an historical narrative could discern the nature of the
problems facing England or the novel’s characters. The characters them-
selves repeatedly make errors in judgment, even in fields where they are
presumed to possess expertise. For all of his supposed business acumen,
Henry Wilcox gives disastrous business advice to Leonard Bast, costing
the man his job and driving him into abject poverty. Similarly gross
errors are made by the other Wilcoxes, the hot-blooded Helen Schlegel,
and Margaret Schlegel—the supposed incarnation of the narrator and,
by extension, the novelist.8 The narrator himself makes absurdly elitist
claims that are difficult to take at face value. Declarations such as “Some
are born cultured; the rest had better go in for whatever comes easy.
To see life steadily and to see it whole was not for the likes of [Leonard
Bast]” seems shockingly callous and not altogether consistent with the
careful portrayal of the ways in which Bast’s struggle to “improve” him-
self through aesthetic education is limited by his class position rather
than genetic ability (47).
The failure of aesthetic education in Howards End identifies the basic
problem facing both aesthetic and political judgments: the impos-
sibility of establishing universal criteria or uniform standards of taste.
The absence of a readily accessible standard of taste leads Bast to value
lowbrow paintings and sentimental fiction, for which the narrator
mocks him. But the narrator’s own inability to provide clear criteria for
discerning the validity of competing claims is equally striking, and has
more significant implications. The novel is organized in terms of a series
of oppositions, the one between the Schlegel and Wilcox families being
perhaps the most significant. However, the opposition between England
and Germany is hardly less prominent. In a crucial early scene of the
novel, Margaret Schlegel witnesses a “haughty nephew” from Germany
and her equally ridiculous Aunt Juley on separate occasions arguing
that Germany and England respectively were “appointed by God to
govern the world” (25). “Were both these loud-voiced parties right?”
John J. Su 203
Margaret wonders (25). Margaret’s inability to discern how to adjudicate

these claims and the failure of the otherwise intrusive narrator to settle
the issue point to a significant problem—a problem compounded by the
unwillingness of Margaret’s nephew and Aunt Juley to enter into direct
dialogue.
The similar absence of a set of criteria for judgment undercuts a
straightforward allegorical reading of the Schlegel and Wilcox families,
with the curious result that it becomes increasingly difficult to distin-
guish between “muddle, ” which the novel clearly rejects, and “con-
nection, ” which it endorses. Indeed, “Only connect . . .” is the novel’s
epigraph. Muddle is the villain of the piece, and it is the stumbling
block to connection. Enraged by Henry’s hypocritical attitude toward
Helen’s affair with Leonard Bast (Henry had an affair while still married
to the first Mrs. Wilcox), Margaret declares to her husband:
You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a
mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from
the house. Do you see the connection? . . . No one has ever told you
what you are—muddled, criminally muddled. (263)
The characterization of Henry recalls an earlier scene in which he is

faulted for being “[i]ncapable of grouping the past” (221). Henry cannot
distinguish in his memory between sexual encounters before and after
his marriage. “Unchastity and infidelity were as confused to him as to
the Middle Ages” (221), and so Henry feels no guilt for his unfaithful-
ness and no sympathy for Helen’s indiscretion. However, if muddling
involves collapsing interpretive categories into an undifferentiated set
of experiences, connection seems to invite a similar kind of mental
activity. Margaret insists that Henry must break down distinctions
between Helen’s and his own activities in order to feel sympathy for
her. Margaret’s own inconsistent terminologies further complicate the
distinction between muddling and connection. In her “sermon” on
connection, she declares: “Only connect the prose and the passion,
and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest”
(159). Previously, however, prose is opposed to romance not passion
(149), and Margaret identifies herself (rather than Henry) with prose in
contrast to Helen’s romance. Before that, Margaret opposes romance to
history (91), seemingly aligning herself with romance in contrast to the
“orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians” (91).
Indeed, Margaret’s own muddling of terminology appears to be the
characteristic mode of the novel. The plot begins with the opposition
between the Schlegels and Wilcoxes, but traces their eventual connec-
tion. The opposition between country and city, which serves as the
crucial metaphor for social tensions produced by industrialization, like-
wise breaks down in at least one key scene. The narratorial commentary
opening chapter 19 focuses on what constitutes England. The narrator
describes a country scene, and a view that shows “all the glorious downs
of central England” (143). The very next sentence, however, evokes the
city: “Nor is suburbia absent. ” Perhaps the most significant muddling
occurs on the question of knowledge. The novel understands the differ-
ence between Margaret and Henry in terms of how they view and inter-
pret the world. Recalling the terminology used to describe Bast’s failure
to acquire an aesthetic education, the narrator asserts: “It is impossible
to see modern life steadily and see it whole, and she had chosen to see it
whole. Mr. Wilcox saw steadily” (138). Yet, on finally visiting Howards
End, Margaret has a brief vision of moving beyond separate modes of
knowing: “In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life stead-
ily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal
youth, connect—connect without bitterness until all men are brothers”
(229). Not only does this passage disrupt the rigid separation between
two modes of viewing, but it also destabilizes the meaning of the terms
individually. The structure of the sentence implies that steadiness is
linked to transitoriness and wholeness is linked to eternal youth. This
characterization differs from earlier passages, however, in which steadi-
ness is linked to concentration (160) and wholeness appears linked to
the capacity to allow all events and experiences to “flash into the field”
of perception (138). The end result is that the series of oppositions
established for readers to interpret the structure of the novel continually
proves the impossibility of organizing the world into a set of neat and
stable oppositions.
The very intrusiveness of the narrator confirms what the novel articu-
lates as the impossibility of identifying clear rationales for judgment,
stable terms for interpretation, and a neutral viewpoint from which to
adjudicate disputes. As noted earlier, the narrator is rendered unreliable
or at least partial by his elitist presumptions and often dismissive atti-
tude toward Leonard Bast. Beyond serving as an unreliable interpretive
lens, however, the narrator is deployed by Forster at crucial moments in
the text to confuse interpretation. After introducing the Schlegels and
the Wilcoxes, for example, the narrator repeatedly disrupts reader iden-
tification with the former. The narrator characterizes the Schlegels in
terms that resonate with the sterility Forster identified with a purely aes-
thetic world: “the world would be a gray, bloodless place were it entirely
John J. Su 205
composed of Miss Schlegels” (Howards End 24), and he emphasizes their

Germanic, not English, ancestry. On the question of who should inherit
Howards End, the narrator improbably sides with the Wilcoxes, even
though Ruth Wilcox clearly indicated her desire for Margaret to be heir.
The narrator declares:
It is rather a moment when the commentator should step forward.

Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think
not. The appeal was too flimsy. It was not legal; it had been written
in illness, and under the spell of a sudden friendship; it was contrary
to the dead woman’s intentions in the past and to her very nature,
so far as that nature was understood by them. To them Howards
End was a house; they could not know that to her it had been a
spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir. And—pushing one step
further in these mists—may they not have decided even better than
they supposed? Is it credible that the possessions of the spirit can be
bequeathed at all? (84)
The narrator rejects the credibility of the Schlegels’ claim to the

house, then undercuts his own point by noting the spiritual quality
Mrs. Wilcox attributed to the house. He then argues that the rationali-
zations of the Wilcoxes are even more credible than they themselves
could have recognized, suggesting that the legitimacy of an argument
may not depend on the presuppositions that led individuals to make the
argument in the first place. The lack of narratorial objectivity indicates
the relative incapacity of any individual to possess reliable knowledge.
The novel’s reluctance to provide a single vantage point for judgment
can be seen in light of Henry Wilcox’s tendency to base judgments on
a highly simplified and selective view of the past. After the funeral of
his wife, Henry consolidates three decades of married life into a single
generalized portrait of his wife that bears notable similarities to the
deliberately nostalgic narratives of Austen and Thackeray: “He remem-
bered his wife’s even goodness during thirty years. Not anything in
detail—not courtship or early raptures—but just the unvarying virtue,
that seemed to him a woman’s noblest quality” (76). The process of
filtering the past into pleasurable vagary is apparent in both personal
life and business, and the novel takes pains to highlight what Henry has
forgotten: everything from minor slips as to whether or not Margaret
has visited Howards End to more significant lapses regarding the iden-
tity of Leonard Bast and his role in causing that man’s misery. Perhaps
the most significant and hypocritical memory lapse, however, becomes
apparent when he discovers that Helen is bearing Bast’s child out of

wedlock. His moral outrage, which manifests itself in his unwillingness
to allow Helen even to spend the night in his house, is possible only
because he refuses to recall his own sexual infidelities. Indeed, the text
notes that he “blotted” out Margaret’s references to them (262).
The novel makes clear through its portrayal of the Wilcoxes that the
cultural function previously attributed to nostalgia by the Victorian
novel has been transferred to narratives associated with industrial mod-
ernization. Henry Wilcox emblematizes the sentiment in a conversation
in which he dismisses the misery experienced by Leonard Bast and his
own part in causing it: “The poor are poor, and one’s sorry for them,
but there it is. As civilization moves forward, the shoe is bound to pinch
in places, and it’s absurd to pretend that anyone is responsible person-
ally” (163). The relentlessly forward-looking attitude described here
encourages a kind of amnesia about the consequences of capitalism
for specific individuals. The process of “replacing painful particularities
with pleasurable vagaries” (Amnesiac Selves 238), which Dames takes
to be emblematic of nostalgia in the Victorian novel, is identified in
Howards End with a narrative of progress articulated by Henry and his
fellow “capitalists” (112). The painful particularities experienced by Bast
become, in Henry’s speech, replaced by the pleasurable vagaries of the
“upward” movement of civilization. The novel even suggests that the
technologies of industrial modernization help to produce the selective
amnesia that previously had been elicited through nostalgia. The nar-
rator’s economical description of Margaret’s motor ride from London to
Howards End highlights a process of summarizing, consolidating, and
distancing that occurs for those riding in an automobile: “She looked at
the scenery. It heaved and merged like porridge. Presently it congealed.
They had arrived” (169). The details of the glorious English countryside
presented earlier through the narrator’s lens in chapter 19 are rendered
into a vague, undifferentiated “porridge.” And while Margaret does not
find the experience of motoring pleasurable, the Wilcoxes do.
Bereft of its prior cultural function, nostalgia becomes redeployed in
Forster’s fiction as a response to an anxiety apparent everywhere in his
political writings: the relative incapacity of individuals to interpret their
world reliably. In the essays, lectures, and radio broadcasts that consti-
tute Two Cheers for Democracy, Forster reiterates the critique of objectiv-
ity apparent in Howards End. In “The Menace to Freedom” (1935), for
example, he asserts that the primary menace to freedom is not political
or social interference but human nature, “because a million years ago
Man was born in chains” (21). Plato’s allegory of the cave becomes
John J. Su 207
more explicit later in the essay, when Forster reinvokes the image of the
chains: “There is no such person as a philosopher; no one is detached;
the observer, like the observed, is in chains” (22). Tolerance is such a
crucial political value for Forster in ways that it never was for contem-
poraries such as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound because of his recognition of
the limited capacity of individuals to understand, and our tendency to
react violently toward the unknown. Forster rejects anti-Semitism as
“assailing the human mind at its source, and inviting it to create false
categories before exercising judgment” (26). A similar logic underlies
his rejection of love as a guiding principle for politics; in “Tolerance”
(1941), for example, he states: “Love is a great force in private life; it is
indeed the greatest of all things: but love in public affairs does not work.
It has been tried again and again . . . The fact is we can only love what
we know personally. And we cannot know much” (56).
Forster’s modest estimation of our capacity to acquire accurate knowl-
edge about the world made him not only cautious about endorsing
any political system that would have a strong state but also inclined
him to view political solutions in terms of cultivating the awareness
and knowledge of individuals. In “The Menace to Freedom,” he does
not see the solution to the wave of emerging authoritarian regimes
in a reinvigorated set of democratic institutions. Instead, his cause for
optimism is more personal: “we alter ourselves merely by knowing more
about ourselves, and we know more about ourselves yearly” (22). The
knowledge we acquire is not, however, ever sufficient to provide a blue-
print for politics, and his cautiousness on this point is apparent in the
essay’s conclusion: “There is the Beloved Republic to dream about and
to work for through our dreams; the better polity which once seemed to
be approaching on greased wheels” (23). The idea of a Beloved Republic,
in other words, only indirectly informs our awareness of what politics
should look like.
Forster’s cautiousness about the reliability of political judgments
is an outgrowth of his argument about different forms of knowledge
presented in his 1927 Clark Lectures at Cambridge University, which
were published under the title Aspects of the Novel. While this work is
often remembered for its distinction between flat and round charac-
ters, it introduces another distinction that more directly emerges out
of Howards End. As noted earlier, Margaret Schlegel draws a distinc-
tion between the chaotic nature of daily life and the orderly sequence
fabricated by historians, between romance and history—a distinction
that emphasizes the relative incapacity of any single interpretive
schema to render life meaningful in ways that account for all features
of experience. In Aspects of the Novel, Forster reiterates the point that

“perfect knowledge is an illusion” (44), and this recognition of our lim-
ited capacities leads him to establish an opposition between fiction and
history, between experiential and evidence-based knowledges. Forster
declares that “fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the
evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is
something beyond the evidence, and, even if the novelist has not got
it correctly, well—he has tried” (44). Novelists undertake the project of
speculating on the “hidden life” of individuals, those features of exist-
ence that are not observed or recorded. Indeed, according to Forster, the
starting point of fiction is where empirical evidence leaves off. Thus,
knowledge is always limited, not only because everyone has a subjec-
tive bias but also because significant aspects of an individual are simply
unavailable or unverifiable.
Authoritarian politics and historiography, for Forster, are in the end
both predicated on a fundamental unwillingness to respect the validity
of separate realms of being (public versus private) and knowing (eviden-
tial versus experiential).9 Both authoritarian politics and historiography
demonstrate an obsessive, even pathological, need to police all realms
of behavior and thought. Thus, if the opposition between fiction and
history is a gross simplification, it nonetheless enables Forster to render
closeted desires as legitimate forms of knowledge. Experience, as a
form of knowledge produced by the deliberate imbrication of past and
present, draws attention to thoughts and feelings that individuals dare
not act on or even articulate. Our “true” selves, on this understanding,
are defined not primarily by words or deeds, which all can be verified on
the basis of empirical evidence and would constitute historical knowl-
edge. Experiential knowledge values precisely what cannot be verified
as the most “true,” not because it did or did not happen (the question
central to empirical knowledge), but rather because it reveals unfulfilled
human aspirations.
That nostalgia is crucial to preserving and validating experiential
knowledge becomes apparent in a novel that Forster was unwilling
to publish in his own lifetime, Maurice (1971). In the 1960 “Terminal
Note” appended to the novel, Forster asserts that he wanted to repre-
sent in fiction what could not happen in reality: “A happy ending was
imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write it otherwise. I was deter-
mined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain
in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice
and Alec still roam the greenwood” (250). On the basis of his own expe-
rience, Forster did not believe that such an ending would be possible
John J. Su 209
outside of the aesthetic realm. Even in the novel, he refuses to portray a

happy ending directly, only indirectly referring to the idyllic landscape
of “greenwood” in which the lovers might reside. Forster emphasizes
the impossibility of his ending in the Terminal Note, declaring that
the novel itself “belongs to the last moment of the greenwood” (254).
If the point of the aesthetic were to provide a model for life, then the
novel is a disastrous failure because the model cannot be lived out. If,
however, the point is to produce an experience of thoughts and feelings
that haunt the mind despite social prohibitions against enacting them,
then the novel succeeds. Indeed, nostalgia enables both the representa-
tion of the world as it is and the unfulfilled fantasies that are spawned
by it. The two realms might be said to exist in dynamic tension—
ontologically separate yet inseparable in terms of the epistemological
framework Forster establishes for interpreting his novel. The greenwood
thus represents a crucial example of experiential knowledge, one that
invites readers to view everyday life in terms of possibilities that cannot
exist outside of the realm of art and yet which are so tantalizing that
Forster cannot but make them exist within it.
The opposition between evidence and experience is presented more
obliquely in Howards End, though here, too, it provides the necessary
categories for thinking beyond the frame of socially sanctioned knowl-
edge. In the final pages of the novel, the Schlegel sisters struggle with
the knowledge that industrial modernization has become an irreversible
process, one that will demolish England’s country houses. Yet Margaret
implicitly invokes the category of experience to argue for an unrecog-
nized contingency to industrial modernization, declaring:
This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It
may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because
it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can’t
help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that
our house is the future as well as the past. (290)
The novel concedes the unlikelihood of its protagonist’s hope, suggest-

ing that evidence-based knowledge ratifies concerns that Howards End
will be torn down. At the same time, precisely because it is an aesthetic
object, the novel can project Margaret’s hope as more than a delusive
fantasy. The final line of the novel celebrates the rebirth of the land
and the estate as Helen cries excitedly: “The field’s cut! . . . We’ve seen
to the very end, and it’ll be such a crop of hay as never!” (293). In
the novel’s conclusion we see more concretely Forster’s assertion that
fiction achieves what society can only delusively promise. Outside of

the aesthetic realm, time continues: bills remain to be paid, questions
about the maintenance of the country house need to be answered, the
future of Helen’s child has to be determined. The capacity of fiction to
impose boundaries, however, enables the novel to draw an intense, con-
centrated attention on Helen’s experience—an experience whose force
would be rapidly diminished by the quotidian concerns of daily life and
the continued encroachment of modernization.
The processes of nostalgia within the novel, then, function not to
produce amnesia but to focalize particular events such that they can
become experiential knowledge. Helen’s declaration in the final line of
the novel does not erase the candid recognition about the likely future
of Howards End that appeared only paragraphs before. Rather, Forster
makes a deliberate decision to focalize not on the likely future of the
estate but rather on an intermediary point in time, refusing to prioritize
the later moment over the earlier. Both moments exist side-by-side,
fused through nostalgic recollection. Svetlana Boym’s suggestion that
nostalgia is a “rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of his-
tory and progress” is a helpful reminder here in recognizing the stakes
of Forster’s narrative decision to suspend the storyline at the moment
of harvest (xv). Indeed, the narrative needs to present the harvest in
light of a likely, yet not inevitable, endpoint in order to grant sufficient
affective power to the moment for it to be understood as experiential
knowledge.
Ironically, Forster’s argument for experiential knowledge presupposes
the impossibility of standards of adjudication that haunted Howards End.
If universal standards of judgment were available, then readers could
readily decide between the various oppositions that occur throughout
the novel. In other words, if the narrator provided a clear and consistent
set of values, readers could confidently choose Schlegels over Wilcoxes,
country over city, culture over business. Experiential knowledge only
emerges, in the novel, after recognizing that Schlegels cannot exist
without Wilcoxes, the country is no longer sustainable without the city,
and culture presupposes leisure produced by business capital.
Thus, the proper relationship between art and life involves establish-
ing a complementary rather than antagonistic relationship between
empirical and experiential knowledges. The nostalgic reflections on the
past in Howards End and Forster’s nonfictional writings do not seek to
supplant the present or to reject it. Forster’s liberalism, in other words,
is not predicated on repudiating the past in the name of producing an
idyllic future. Nor is his liberalism based on the perfectibility of human
John J. Su 211
nature but rather on establishing the conditions for humans to flourish

within an imperfect and often brutish world. The conclusion of Howards
End can be understood in light of the vision of history asserted in “What
I Believe”:
I realise that all society rests upon force. But all the great creative
actions, all the decent human relations, occur during the intervals
when force has not managed to come to the front. . . . It gets out
sooner or later, and then it destroys us and all the lovely things
which we have made. . . . It is, alas! the ultimate reality on this earth,
but it does not always get to the front. Some people call its absences
“decadence”; I call them “civilization” and find in such interludes
the chief justification for human experiment. (80–1)
Forster concedes the likely future for Howards End—it is, even at its best,
simply one more of the “lovely things which we have made.” But the
concession itself establishes the conditions for Forster to highlight its
existence while it endures. It becomes the enduring image not because
it will outlast the motor car or industrial modernization. Nor will it exist
simply as an aesthetic image, at least according to Forster. Rather, it
establishes a narrative of history that accords attention not to violence,
which is the normative condition of life, but instead to the intervals
of “civilization” that continue to emerge. The task of art, then, is to
shift a reader’s sense of scope such that the relationship among events
can be viewed in ways that weigh relative importance very differently.
Put another way, the evidentiary basis of historical knowledge tends to
focus on wars and conflicts that produce different political, economic,
and social systems. Artworks such as Howards End, in contrast, can
focus on history’s “interludes.” Forster’s story of the fading glory of the
English country house is thus neither an image of a lost past meriting
lamentation nor a cue for identifying a future project; it is, finally, a
reminder to focus attention on worlds that might emerge.
Nostalgia provides a framework for establishing the complementarity
of evidence-based and experiential knowledges. Nostalgia represents a
mode of viewing the past and present simultaneously and as inextrica-
bly though not evenly linked. The knowledge of experience emerges
from the disappointments of life and dissatisfaction with the present, a
dissatisfaction that cannot be addressed because there is no evidential
basis for believing that an alternative and better system of governance
can come into being. Experiential knowledge so often takes the form
of an idealized past, not because experience is inaccurate but because
it can only project a better world out of the materials and moments
a person has lived—the past, in other words. Nostalgia’s capacity to
render a disappointing present in light of an idealized past enables the
artist to articulate more precisely the nature of present dissatisfaction
without presenting a false consolation in an idealized or utopian future.
Put another way, experiential knowledge recognizes the unlikelihood
that the world will be changed by knowledge; Forster insists that such
knowledge must be preserved within art precisely because it may never
be a lived reality.
Thus, the very grounds on which Forster has historically been excluded
from the canon of modernists may, in the end, be the ones that make
him the most modern. The anemia attributed to him by fellow authors
including Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence—the evolutionary rather
than revolutionary proclivities for which Michael Levenson faults him
(79)—indicate a profound cautiousness about knowledge. This is not to
say that Forster embraces paradox or contradiction as an end in itself,
but rather that he views them as a necessary means of identifying the
problems underlying any knowledge claim. Knowledge is always situ-
ated and embedded, a point taken to be a truism now, but one that
risked accusations of disloyalty and treachery in the 1930s. His assertion
of friendship over nation has often been read as a personal creed; it can
also be read as an insistence on valuing what we have experienced over
more abstract pronouncements.10
In turn, Forster encourages literary studies to rethink the often
unqualified endorsement of the aesthetic theories of Frankfurt School
Critical Theory. Michael North’s defense of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound
depended on arguing that contradiction itself is a central function of
their literary texts. Extending Adorno’s argument about the necessary
internal contradictions of art, North writes:
Adorno’s position does suggest that something of value remains in

the reactionary modernism of these three poets. Their desire to close
the gap between individual and community, fact and value, freedom
and necessity, remains a legitimate indictment of the status quo, but
only insofar as their own schemes of reconciliation collapse and in
so doing demonstrate the fundamental contradictions of modern
society. (192)
The emphasis on contradiction and failure in Frankfurt School Critical

Theory, however, leads to a simplistic caricature of aesthetic reconcili-
ation, the “internal harmony” Forster ascribed to art. As this essay has
John J. Su 213
argued, Forster understands art to possess internal harmony in the sense

that it provides a single framework for representing multiple and often
competing worldviews. Harmony does not necessarily conceal tensions,
in other words, but enables readers to understand how reconciliation
proposes a structure for tolerating tension and difference.
Notes
1. A Passage to India was Forster’s fifth published novel; Maurice was written
during 1913–14, but published posthumously.
2. Trilling declares that Forster is “sometimes irritating in his refusal to be
great,” yet he demonstrates an “unremitting concern with moral realism”
(9, 11). Variations on this theme continue to be apparent even in the most
recent scholarship on Forster. Frank Kermode notes that Forster represents
“a talent so considerable and yet so straitly limited” (79). For a history of
Forster reception, see Malcolm Bradbury, “Introduction”; Judith Scherer Herz,
“Introduction: in Search of the Comic Muse”; Alan Wilde, “Introduction”;
David Bradshaw, “Introduction.”
3. Benjamin famously argues that fascism draws aesthetics into the realm of
politics. He declares: “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of
aesthetics into political life” (241).
4. The notion of a linkage between nostalgia and fascism was commonplace
within literary studies even by the early 1980s. In Fredric Jameson’s Marxism
and Form (1972), for example, the linkage is taken for granted as the point
from which Jameson launches his argumentative departure: “But if nostalgia
as a political motivation is most frequently associated with Fascism, there
is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dis-
satisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude,
cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other” (82). Even
in less explicitly politicized definitions of nostalgia, it is not hard to see why
nostalgia is so often linked to conservative, if not fascist, politics. Susan
Stewart, for example, declares: “Hostile to history and its invisible origins,
and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place
of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward
a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality” (23).
5. See, for example, Roberta Rubenstein’s impressive Home Matters: Longing and
Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction or my own Ethics and
Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel.
6. It is striking that Forster makes this claim in an essay devoted to interwar
fiction, “English Prose between 1918 and 1939,” and which was written in
the midst of World War II (1944). Forster declares that shifts in global capi-
talism represent a more significant influence on fiction than war, asserting
that “[t]here are influences in this world more powerful than either peace
or war” (281).
7. Reading Forster’s contradictions as central to his writing runs against the
tradition of Forster scholarship aligning the man and his work, seeing the
latter as an expression of the moral values of the former. This tradition was
cemented by Lionel Trilling’s 1943 E. M. Forster, which asserted that read-
ing Forster was particularly “useful in time of war” (7). The vision of Forster
as the preeminent moralist of his age continued well into the 1980s, when
Alan Wilde reaffirmed Trilling’s status as the definitive interpreter (6). Such
a characterization guaranteed Forster’s relatively peripheral status within
modernist studies as a nostalgic throwback to Edwardian and even Victorian
sensibilities; it also profoundly limited readings of his novels. David Lodge’s
2000 introduction to Howards End is extreme in this regard, but by no
means exceptional. Lodge declares, “There is no difficulty in establishing the
‘meaning’ of Howards End: the story is almost allegorical in design” (xv). The
“clever, cultured and idealistic” Schlegel sisters are opposed to the “prosperous
commercial bourgeoisie” of the Wilcoxes, and ultimately inherit the country
house that is the stand-in for England itself. The novel provides a kind of
transparent narrative for the qualities that should embody the nation.
8. The perception that the novels embody values of the author led to the ten-
dency to read not only the narrator but even the protagonists of Forster’s
novels as extensions of the novelist himself (see, for example, Barrett 156
and Rivenberg 171).
9. By using the deliberately vague phrase “authoritarian politics,” I am
attempting to capture the broad range of references in Forster’s writing. This
range is apparent in the first sentence of his essay “The Menace to Freedom”:
“The menace to freedom is usually conceived in terms of political or social
interference—Communism, Fascism, Grundyism, bureaucratic encroach-
ment, censorship, conscription and so forth” (Two Cheers for Democracy 21).
As the rhetoric of this sentence indicates, however, even this broadly encom-
passing list is seen as inadequate. And in his essay “What I Believe,” he refers
to a personified “Authority” (83).
10. In “What I Believe,” Forster famously quipped: “I hate the idea of causes,
and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my
friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” (Two Cheers for
Democracy 78).
Works cited
Barrett, Elizabeth. “The Advance Beyond Daintiness: Voice and Myth in Howards
End.” In Scherer Herz. 155–66.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. 1968. Edited and with an introduction by
Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.
Bradbury, Malcolm, ed. Forster: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
Bradshaw, David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Dames, Nicholas. Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction,
1810–1870. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings. 1927. London: Edward
Arnold, 1974.
John J. Su 215
——. Howards End. 1910. Introduction and notes by David Lodge. New York:
Penguin, 2000.
——. Maurice. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1971.
——. A Passage to India. 1924. New York: Harvest, 1984.
——. Two Cheers for Democracy. London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1951.
Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of
Literature. Princeton University Press, 1972.
Kermode, Frank. Concerning E. M. Forster. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2009.
Levenson, Michael H. Modernism and the Fate of Individuality. Cambridge:
Lodge, David. “Introduction.” In Howards End by E. M. Forster. vii–xxviii.
North, Michael. The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Cambridge:
Rivenberg, Paul R. “The Role of the Essayist-Commentator in Howards End.” In
Scherer Herz. 167–76.
Rubenstein, Roberta. Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning
in Women’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Scherer Herz, Judith and Robert K. Martin, eds. E. M. Forster: Centenary
Revaluations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.
Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989.
the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Su, John J. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge University
Press, 2005.
Trilling, Lionel. E. M. Forster. Norfolk, CT: New Directions Books, 1943.
Wilde, Alan, ed. Critical Essays on E. M. Forster. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1985.
12
Nostalgia, Mourning, and
Désistance in James Joyce’s Ulysses
Christy L. Burns
James Joyce’s Ulysses draws predominantly on two classic narratives

of trauma—Homer’s The Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The first
follows the wanderings of a warrior king as he wends his way home.
Odysseus’s epic travel and return informed Enlightenment narratives
of the male subject’s maturation and worldly education, making the
wanderer fit to be father and king. His nostalgic yearning for Ithaca is
interrupted by a series of challenges, but upon return he successfully
reclaims a woman as much as a home. By contrast, in Joyce’s other
chosen tale, Prince Hamlet’s inquisitive mind moves him toward the
unraveling of home and self, compounded by his outbreak of suspicion
and anger against women. Both King Hamlet and his son die without
confession; in this Shakespeare’s narrative reveals a contrary strand to
Enlightenment optimism: the problem of emotional blockage related
to the inability to work through mourning. Shakespeare scholars have
long mulled the problematic model of mourning delivered in Hamlet,
one that exposes the destructive and self-undermining rage embedded
in melancholia.1 There is no resettling at home for Hamlet; knowledge
destroys the mind and compels the subject toward violent death. In a
similar turn, modernist writers came hard upon the realities of mecha-
nized war and the destructive uses of science early in the twentieth
century. Joyce’s interweaving of Hamlet and The Odyssey is therefore just
if not kind, allowing Ulysses to speak to modernist desires for a nostalgic
return to happier scenes that signify “home,” while also engaging the
period’s melancholic despair in the face of international aggressions and
the local oppressions of communities motivated by stiff loyalties and
stark prejudices.2
How one reads Ulysses and interprets its ending depends in part on
which mythological figure a reader adopts as the most proximate fellow
216
Christy L. Burns 217
traveler: the disillusioned, madly drunk Hamlet, played by Stephen

Dedalus, or the pained but buoyant Leopold Bloom, an Odysseus
returning home to a sadly rearranged marriage. Many readers have
taken Molly’s closing “yes” as an affirmation of Leopold, and his urina-
tion with Stephen in the garden as a sign that a gentler Oedipal scenario
will win the day, distract Molly’s meanderings, and prop up the nostal-
gically longed-for home, the womanly space in need of a second son.3
While it seems likely that Molly will remain with Leopold, I am, con-
trarily, suggesting that to believe any happy ending involving Stephen’s
closer association with Bloom is mistaken. For Stephen repeats ardently
and up to the novel’s end his most constitutive personal gesture: that of
refusal. This refusal may not destroy Bloom’s salving imaginings, but it
does leave the Blooms with their problem: Molly’s re-affirmation of her
husband ambiguously mixed with her counting the days until her next
assignation with Boylan: “Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday
three O Lord I can’t wait till Monday!” (U18. 594–5).
If Stephen’s refusals and melancholic disposition threaten optimistic
interpretations of Ulysses’ end, Leopold proves to be the buoyant every-
man, traveling past the emotional torments of the day, although this is
while he engages his own ongoing grief. Bloom has multiple past losses
to mourn: the deaths of his father and his son, as well as the lost luster
of his early days with Molly. However, as Bloom suffers remorse, he
intercuts it with a nostalgia that is neither merely a patch over repres-
sion nor a false siren. Stephen, on the other hand, fears the nets of
home, of competitive male friendship, and of the role models offered by
his cyclopean elders, Headmaster Deasy, and his father Simon. Stephen’s
difficulty with mourning may be in some part due to these conflicts, but
the cause apparent on June 16th is his residual struggle with his moth-
er’s insistence on religion, a fight unresolved upon her death. As Freud
noticed, subjects who experienced violent impulses against parental
or other authority figures can manifest neuroses that will be especially
keen if the conflict with a parental figure is repressed or unresolved at
that parent’s death.4 Stephen, in his refusal to eat and bathe, appears
to be suffering from melancholia, the illness in which a subject dwells,
self-critically, statically. He finds no comfort in nostalgia, only briefly
touching potential moments of this sentiment in the “Telemachiad.”
His internal struggles against the female gender, as women resist his
desires and criticize his rebellious intent, leads him away from nostalgic
respite, inclining him toward a more vehement oppositional frame-
work, a kind of “rancor” akin to what Michael Gillespie finds in Joyce’s
earlier works.5
Stephen calls up a few fragmentary memories of his mother: “tasseled

dancecards, powdered with musk . . . A birdcage hung in the sunny win-
dow of her house when she was a girl” (U1. 255–6), and in “Proteus,”
he has a flashback of his time in Paris, having drinks with Kevin Egan.
As with his mother’s memory, he recalls the nostalgia of others, not his
own. Stephen is more likely to mock memory than to sentimentalize
the past. When he conjures up his youth, he thinks of “books you were
going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but
I prefer Q” (U3. 139–40). This self-mockery is integral to Stephen’s disaf-
fection for nostalgia, which develops in Portrait, when he witnesses his
father’s nostalgia on a trip to Cork. Loathing his own sexual appetites
and excesses, Stephen sees the world of emotions as an odd theater of
estrangement. In this, he is akin to the modernist male subject singled
out by Suzanne Clark, who argues that the works of male modernist
authors often deprecate the sentimental as a middle-brow, female vice.
Stephen’s case may suggest that this propensity toward sentimental
nostalgia can also be a male vice (his father’s). While Joyce conforms
to Clark’s assessment in his treatment of Gerty MacDowell’s thoughts
in “Nausicaa,” he gives the capacity for nostalgic pleasure to Leopold
Bloom as he, flâneur for a day, walks the streets of Dublin. Stephen’s
refusal of nostalgia may help him, as a young man, move beyond
attachments and stagnations in his past. But in terms of mourning,
he is arguably stuck in melancholic gloom on June 16th. For Leopold,
nostalgic memory helps him approach mourning, in contrast to
Stephen. Moreover, Bloom’s nostalgic interludes have the curious effect
of softening his rare moments of self-ossification, most conspicuous
at the close of “Cyclops.” The two characters’ differing approaches to
nostalgia and mourning map out the crossroads at which Stephen and
Bloom meet—and depart—determining their constitutive gestures, sug-
gesting a less than resolved ending of Ulysses. The different gendering
of the self, as well, seems to influence their interactive manners, with
Stephen’s more brittle masculine construct leading him back toward
more violent clashes—if often merely in his thoughts—while Bloom’s
ambi-gendering lets in a more caring and empathetic side that lessens
his potential fury, as he oscillates between different attitudes towards
his anticipated losses.
Joyce’s work with mourning and nostalgia brings Ulysses “home” to
our present time, as these issues have re-emerged in new re-theorizations
of culture. Scholars have re-shaped our understanding of nostalgia over
the past few decades. The current critique of nostalgia emerged in the
1980s, during Ronald Reagan’s ascent, which brought with it a nostalgia
for what was believed to be the more orderly era of the 1950s.6 While
the earliest descriptions of nostalgia were also largely negative, as Susan
Stewart’s study of longing shows, Fredric Jameson’s critique of capi-
talism’s refunctioning of the past was decisively dismissive, his target
being a form of nostalgia that is directed toward a past never personally
known, creating a false sense of history. Jameson focused particularly
on the nostalgia film, which seeks not the true historical past but rather
a sense of “pastness” conveyed with the “glossy qualities of the image,
and ‘1930s-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness’ by the attributes of fashion.” This
degradation of memory delivers nothing but a stereotype, a communal
consensus about a place not personally experienced or known. Distance
is crucial to this form of nostalgia, and, as Jameson argues, its work is
to distract viewers from their inability to represent their own current
experience and their loss of a radical past. François Lyotard has also
distinguished nostalgia’s backward glance from a more forward-looking
experimentalism, setting it aside as normative and restrictive of thought
or innovation. In defense of experimental writing, Lyotard contrasts the
avant-garde to cultural nostalgia’s easy erasure of differences, its reach
for simplified narrative forms.7 Lyotard’s critique is resonant as well
with Jacques Lacan’s criticism of the psychoanalytic establishment’s too
easy cures of psychic trauma and neurosis.8 The American Psychological
Association (APA), according to Lacan, looked to expedient methods
that worked only as a repression of the ongoing dissonance of psycho-
logical disorder. However, what I intend to make a case for in what
follows are the ameliorative effects of nostalgia, a type of longing that
does not culminate in stagnant melancholia but aids what this essay
discusses as the ongoing work of mourning.
If nostalgia is the backward glance of longing, it carries remembrance
of pleasure, mixed as it is with an experience of loss. Nostalgic loss
can bring a soft pang or a harsh grief, but it is always intercut with
the delight accompanying memory. Mourning and its more obstinate
extreme, Melancholia, cast their gaze forward, seeing only the emptied
place of the lost moment, the lost love, the lost person now grieved.
The Melancholic grasps at the “object” once held and now lost. Pain
of loss overwhelms all traces of recalled joy. One might say nostalgia
and mourning are the Janus heads of change, with one given to greater
dwelling on happiness in the past, and another stuck (especially as
Melancholic) on a stubborn refusal of the loss of a loved one or—
worse—an infuriating family member who is now beyond reproaches,
revisions, and recovery. Yet these two (or three) terms are not quite so
polarized as Janus might seem; they have subtle slides into differential
experiences, so that one person’s nostalgia may be sweet to dream upon,

while another’s is the cause of repeated longing and grief. But the mel-
ancholic is most bitter, clutches harder on the need to retain what has
already been lost. She or he struggles within the impossible bind, the
compulsion to reclaim what can no longer be had. This is why I suggest
that Bloom’s ability to dip back into sweeter nostalgia helps him move
toward mourning and look toward the future without the bitter refusals
of a melancholic, if princely, stance. Stephen’s polarizing bind can only
be gradually loosened by his self-challenges—to avoid isolation and
shift his attention to others. Bloom offers him that—a sweet fruit, as it
were—even if Stephen cannot gather this in.
When the reader first meets Leopold Bloom in “Calypso,” our new
Odysseus is not given to nostalgia, because he is riveted by the present
moment: “Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gen-
tle summer morning everywhere.” (U 4.7–8). Bloom’s pleasure lies in his
morning routine: teasing the pussens, walking to the shops, and setting
out breakfast. He even enjoys the morning outhouse visit. Yet on June
16th, Bloom will shift in an oscillating movement between nostalgia
for the past and mourning for what might soon be lost. For Bloom
finds good cause to fret about his immediate future when he picks up
the morning mail and sees a letter for Molly: “Mrs Marion Bloom. His
quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand. Mrs Marion” (U4. 244–5).
When asked, Molly tells him the letter is from Blazes Boylan and, at four
that day, he will be “bringing the programme” for her upcoming sing-
ing tour, a tour on which Boylan and not Bloom will accompany Molly
as her manager (U4. 312). Thus begins the odyssey of Bloom, who leaves
his home, telling Molly that he will not return until late evening. And
when he does return, he does not come home alone; he brings Stephen
Dedalus, perhaps to defray the tension, in part to care for Stephen, and
famously with dreams of settling Stephen in his home—a distraction for
Molly and a disruption to Boylan’s private access to her. So Bloom hopes
to stabilize the home space and also gain an intellectual friend.
In Rita Felski’s examination of modernist nostalgia, she notes that
“home” is its frequent locus, particularly an idealized home occupied
by nature-bound woman—“der [sic] Fleisch der stets bejaht” as Joyce
writes when describing Molly Bloom to Frank Budgen.9 Woman is often
cast as the earthy womb full of seed. Molly is, in kind, described as a
“Gea-Tellus” in “Ithaca,” while Bloom recounts his day to her in bed.10
But as Felski also observes: “Woman is aligned with the dead weight
of tradition and conservatism that the active, newly autonomous, and
self-defining subject must seek to transcend. Thus she functions as a
sacrificial victim exemplifying the losses which underpin the ambigu-

ous, but ultimately exhilarating and seductive logic of the modern.”
Crucially, woman is shunted aside by the flâneur, who knows the mod-
ern world by traveling away from (and who will perhaps not return)
home. Bloom and Stephen are flâneurs who leave but continue to
contemplate Molly and Mae, respectively. While Stephen’s sense of his
mother’s traditional insistence fits with Felki’s analysis, Bloom’s return-
ing thoughts of Molly and his evasion of binaries suggest that one tale
of Ulysses challenges the other. Molly is trapped (“Oh Jamesy, let me up
out of this!” U 633), but she has a singing career and a dislike of tradi-
tional women’s sexual mores, particularly those expressed by Dante, the
elderly woman Bloom assists.
For his part, Leopold turns to nostalgia in a familiar way, a
way that deepens affection and reveals a continued attachment. In
“Lestrygonians,” remembering Molly, he thinks: “Never put a dress on
her back like it. Fitted her like a glove, shoulders and hips. Just begin-
ning to plump it out well. Rabbitpie we had that day. People looking
after her. Happier. Happier then. Snug little room that was with the
red wallpaper” (U8. 167–71). Moments later, he recalls: “Windy night
that was I went to fetch her there. . . . Remember her laughing in the
wind, her blizzard collar up. Corner of Harcourt road remember that
gust. Brrfoo! Blew up all her skirts and her boa nearly smothered old
Goodwin. She did get flushed in the wind” (8. 191–3). Notably, Bloom’s
memories of Molly are visual and also aural (Brrfoo! From the wind),
and tactile-tasting (Rabbitpie). The sentimental, the savory, and the
erotic fuse in Bloom’s memories, and Molly’s body is intermingled with
the emotional warmth that Bloom derives from thoughts of the past.
Yet Bloom begins to turn towards such nostalgia soon after he has a
spike of panic, wondering if Boylan might have venereal disease (“ . . .
a dose burning him. If he . . . ? O! Eh? No. . . . No, no, I don’t believe it.
He wouldn’t surely?” U8. 101–6). Nostalgia here swings the pendulum
of Bloom’s emotions back to contentment.
Bloom’s nostalgia does not constitute a displacement of emotion;
rather, it is a flight towards affirmation of domestic happiness over anxi-
ety. Bloom’s nostalgia will participate in this counter swing throughout
the day, though it may often be tinged with sadness. In these gentler
moments of nostalgic recall, Bloom uses the remembrance of happier
days to de-center the scenes of trauma, betrayal, and disaster that his
imagination invokes. Thus he uses memory in a way that differs from
Freud’s description of the “psychical task” of mourning, in which “[e]ach
single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound
to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the

libido is accomplished in respect to it” (“Mourning and Melancholia”
2b). This, Freud argues, enables the “killing death” of the image of the
lost one, rather than Bloom’s work to resurrect an affirming fondness
for Molly and their marriage.11 Stephen, however, struggles with guilt
and aggression towards the loss of his mother; Bloom’s struggle is not
caught in this violence and horror. For Bloom, nostalgia is only ever a
temporary assuagement; in intervals, it enables him to find some partial
release from grief, fear, and blocked agency. It disposes him towards
désistance, a process of mobile (dis)identification that I will be discussing
later in this essay. Provisionally here, I offer an example: Bloom engages
nostalgia as he contemplates parallax in “Lestrygonians”—the chang-
ing perception from alternative places, suggesting the influence of a
double vision or dual perspective on what might (or might not) become
a crisis. And towards the episode’s end, after recalling the long seedcake-
giving kiss with Molly the day he proposed, Bloom thinks, “Me. And me
now. Stuck, the flies buzzed” (U8. 917–18). Thus he moves between his
doubled and different selves. Soft images of the past, a nostalgic recall
of early days with Molly, may lead him to sadness, even as they lend
assuagement and context to his current fears. Memory also helps him
approach and—when emotions are too painful—step back from the
work of mourning. Thus he moves between the poles of emotion and
opposite images of his self, in a rhythmic gesture of (dis)identification.
Throughout the day, Leopold’s use of nostalgia works to detach—
rather than to rivet—his image of “woman.” Consider the “Sirens” epi-
sode, in which Bloom rests, digests a light dinner, and gets caught in the
nostalgic culture of music in the Ormand bar. According to Gail Finny,
the Frankfurt School interpreted the “sirens” episode in The Odyssey as
an indication of the fundamental irrationality of Westerners. Adorno
and Horkheimer read Odysseus’s insistence that he be bound to the
mast of his ship as a sign of the “disciplined male bourgeois individual,
foreshadowing the repression of the body and the feminine that will
determine the development of Western culture.”12 Bloom seems instead
to be bound to Molly and unable to repress the body, challenging the
dominant strain described above. Moreover, Bloom’s experience in the
bar re-genders the seductive voice. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, as
Patricia Mills notes, “the female voice of the siren is linked with the
song of the sensuous world of nature, the lure of the pleasure principle”
(qtd. in Felski 6). Leopold’s experience of the “sirens” is admixed in its
gendering, with memories of Molly and hopes for his pen pal Martha,
intermingled as they are with his emotional response to the songs of
loss and desires sung by the sentimental nostalgic Simon Dedalus and
by Richie Goulding. Delightfully, Joyce reveals Bloom’s loosening iden-
tity as it flows into the melodic experience of voice, nostalgia, and sen-
timental longing. Irish nationalist nostalgia may not appeal to Bloom
(or Joyce), but here nostalgia for love and home work his emotions into
a communal experience of release and pleasure.
As Bloom hears the opening of Richie’s song, All is lost now (U11. 629),
he thinks, “Woman. As easy stop the sea. Yes: all is lost.” (U11. 641). And
soon he responds in lyrical mimicry of the song itself: “A beautiful air,
said Bloom lost Leopold. I know it well.” (U11. 642). As Simon Dedalus
steps up to sing “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” Joyce gives a humorous
account of Leopold’s and Richie’s physical responses:
Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that

flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. . . .
Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not
leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings or reeds or whatdoyou-
callthemdulcimers touching their still ears with words, still hearts of
each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear: sorrow from them
each seemed to from both depart when first they heard. When first
they saw, lost Richie Poldy, mercy of beauty, heard from a person
wouldn’t expect it in the least, her first merciful lovesoft oftloved
word. (U11. 668–9; 674–80)
Showing what Susan Stewart has identified as the lyric’s ability to model
for its audiences a way of encountering death, love, and crises of emo-
tions, this passage in “Sirens” humorously gives us Leopold and Richie
responding to “Si Dedalus’ voice,” as Richie identifies it, following its
emotional turns and relating it to “each his remember lives” as he sings
the line “Sorrow from me seemed to depart.”13 Despite Bloom’s many
thoughts about tenors’ sexual prowess, Simon’s waste of his talent, and
Bloom’s past life, he can still be drawn into a crystalline experience.
Trying to analyze the source of this pull, he slides away from analy-
sis and towards the experiential, sensate mode: “Word?” he ponders,
“Music? No: it’s what’s behind./Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disn-
oded./ Bloom. Flood of warm jamjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow
in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow invading . . . “ (U11. 703–6).
This takes him back to his first meeting with Molly, playing musical
chairs at Mat Dillon’s in Terenure. Mixing this with a hint of Martha,
whose name is mentioned in the song, Bloom thinks of Molly “under
a peartree alone patio this hour in old Madrid. . . . At me. Luring.
Ah, alluring” (U11. 726–34). As Simon, singing Lionel’s words, comes

to a final high note, Bloom is fully drawn in: “—Co-ome, thou lost
one!/Co-ome, thou dear one!/ Alone. One love. One hope. One comfort
me. Martha, chestnote, return!/ —Come . . . ! It soared, a bird, it held
its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb . . . all soaring all around and
the all, the endlessnessnessness . . . —to me! Siopold! Consumed” (U11.
740–52). The musical and, indeed, rhythmic lyric leads Bloom back
to nostalgia and into a “safe” cultural moment of experiencing loss
outside of himself. While we may argue that his masturbation at the
sight of Gerty’s flirtatious flash of legs and bloomers gives him “some
relief” and catharsis, the music in “Sirens” also offers him a focus and
release—much as he will find release again, via the imaginary, in a
Circe’s brothel. This moment in “Sirens” is not to be discarded as mere
masturbatory or narcissistic listening. As Derek Attridge notes, Joyce
“liberates the body from a dictatorial and englobing will, and allows
its organs their own energies and proclivities” by braiding music with
prose in the “Sirens” episode. Attridge goes on to explain that “sexuality
thrives on the separation of the body into separate parts, while a sexu-
ally repressive morality insists on the wholeness and singleness of body
and mind (or soul).”14 As Bloom listens to music, his thoughts trace the
possibilities of recovery by slow pulsing releases, evasions, and then
re-encounters. This model allows Leopold to identify with and distance
himself from his former self, while he finds nostalgic longing in the
voices of Richie Goulding and Simon Dedalus.
Using Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s notion of “désistance,” one can
analyze the workings of nostalgia—and its relation to mourning—in
the text’s two principle characters. This practice of oscillating identi-
fication and dis-identification avoids a more stifling form of closure,
acknowledging the ongoing work of mourning that critics including
Johan Ramazani and Patricia Rae, a contributor to this volume, have
addressed. Yet it also allows for some partial amelioration within
mourning, darkened at times by a deeper state of melancholic suffering.
In Ulysses this form of désistance guides the reader toward a complex
understanding of intersubjective relations and of a subjectivity that
engages, but is not subsumed by, communal forces and their normative
social commands.
In terms of désistance, Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that a subject can
alternately oscillate between desire for, and resistance to, each of the
terms in the Oedipal triangle, shaping one’s identity less on a rigid tri-
angulation locked into polarizing engagements. Instead, rhythmically
the subject is both like and different from the other, desiring and, in
some quarters, turning away from the other, as well as competitively

asserting and bowing in a gesture of allowance. This oscillation occurs
because the subject sees both possibilities of the other, or (dis)identifies
variously with two figures; and the subject also sees his or her own
difference within each of these two figures. So the self is doubled,
and sometimes also the other. Thus, alternately and rhythmically, the
subject identifies and dis-identifies with parental figures and figures of
desire. If, as Jacques Lacan claims, desire is the desire for the desire of
the other, one may identify with the father’s love for the mother (the
authority figure’s attachment to a particular city or country, a child or
object) while also partially dis-identifying with the desire, distancing
from it and looking to the alternative locus of desire.15
* * *
In Ulysses, mourning meets melancholia and walks the streets of Dublin.

Leopold Bloom, who wears black only to attend an acquaintance’s
funeral that day, nonetheless carries within him several enduring strains
of mourning: his grief for the loss of his son Rudy and also of his former
happiness with Molly. He is, moreover, haunted by his father’s suicide
and, in the present, suffers occasional exclusions and insults, being
perceived as an “outsider” and “Jew” in some quarters of Dublin.16 On
June 16th, he is struggling against panic and sadness over other pos-
sibly imminent losses: the break in his wife’s fidelity and, worse, her
departure from his home. While the former undoubtedly transpires, we
are left uncertain but hopeful about Bloom’s ability to escape the sec-
ond loss. Molly seems inclined to stay with Leopold, even if any greater
return to fidelity has not yet taken hold. With all her excitement about
Boylan and ambivalence toward Bloom, Molly nonetheless turns at the
episode’s end toward an affirmation of her husband. Thinking of his
marriage proposal on Howth’s Head, Molly recalls, “I liked him because
I saw he understood or felt what a woman is” (U18. 1588–9). Molly then
famously concludes her internal monologue with a repetition of her
“yes” to Bloom: “yes I said yes I will Yes” (U18. 1608–9).
Bloom’s fortune’s tilt toward the good does not, however, speak for all
characters and communities in Ulysses. In contrast to Molly’s ambiva-
lent turn towards acceptance, Stephen Dedalus has a recurring habit of
negation. As a boy, Stephen learns from The Count of Monte Cristo the
gesture of refusal. At first his imagination is captured by the wonders of
the island cave, which he recreates with flowers and strips of silver. He
next conjures an image of Marseilles, its “sunny trellises” and then of
Mercedes, the Penelope figure who has not waited for Edmond Dantès’s
return. As Stephen visualizes the hero’s meeting with his former love, he
participates vicariously in Dantès’s crucial refusal. When Mercedes offers
food to Dantès, he rejects this “with a sadly proud gesture of refusal,
saying:—Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.”17 Stephen incorporates
this gesture, taking it as a model of proud self-defense, an affirmation of
solitude and elision of rejection by others.18 The subject can thus inter-
nalize an emotion or gesture taken not only from a parental figure but
also from a figure known through literature. Stephen takes his first steps
into melancholic subjectivity here, fusing his experience of falling into
the underclass with his inspiration in reading. With this learned gesture
of refusal, he eventually declines an invitation into the priesthood and
leaves the shores of Ireland. Rather than rebelling or avenging with
violence, he attempts to remove his ego from the scene of desire. This
removal hits a crisis in Ulysses, when his desire for reconciliation with
his dead mother’s ghost and his wish for competitive success among
the Irish literati pulls him towards engagement, challenging his previ-
ous posturing of isolated, superior, ironic outsider. However, Stephen
retains the habit of refusal; though not without cause, he rebuffs Buck
Mulligan’s friendship, disdains Haines’ faltering attempts at conversa-
tion, passes by his Uncle Richie’s home and his imagined hospitality,
fails to become engaged by Leopold’s photo of Molly, tries to refuse his
aid, treats his evening’s savior to an anti-Semitic rhyme in “Ithaca,” and
then, after some chat over cocoa, declines ultimately the hospitality and
connection that Leopold offers. Stephen “desists,” in the English version
of the term, from connection and entanglement.19 He steps away and
does not oscillate between a move forward and a stepping back. Readers
may hope for Stephen’s return to Leopold’s world, but unlike our allow-
able if not irrefutable belief in Molly’s affirmation, we can bet—based
on Stephen’s prior behavioral patterns—that he will not reconsider his
refusal of Leopold’s offer. Stephen may be tempted to abandon this
habit of isolation and negation, in order to become a writer and perhaps
a figure among the literati in Dublin, finding his preferred audiences on
June 16th in the offices of The Freeman’s Journal and in the backroom
of the National Library. But he continually questions whether he can
successfully shed the nets of his own habituated refusals.
As Stephen desists repeatedly throughout the day of June 16th, he
embodies the gesture most in keeping with the English version of desist-
ance, the version that Jacques Derrida associates with a stop, a cessa-
tion in action. The original French version of the term, se desist, carries
with it a juridical connotation as well, making it inappropriate as the
conceptual term for Lacoue-Labarthe’s work. Derrida suggests instead

the term désistance, marking the French term (desistence) by re-spelling
it, replacing the last “e” with an “a” and placing an accent over the first
“e.” The resulting term, désistance, is the word I will apply not only to
Lacoue-Labarthe’s analysis here, but also to Bloom’s means of working
within (if not through) the state of mourning.20
In Typographies, Lacoue-Labarthe argues that the play of oscillating
identity and dis-identification might undercut the binaristic modes of
aggression that may arise from an over-insistent lock on a particular
identity model or relation. Some may think that aggression has little to
do with mourning, but it is the crux of melancholic stasis. The ambiva-
lence present in close attachments, along with competition and more
poignant drives for affirmation, can splinter off the love and adulation
and leave a deep residue of hatred and repressed aggression. In Freud’s
family romance, violence and stiff (dis)identification occur between
generations of the same sex, but post-Freudian work by Julia Reinhard
Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard allows that these dynamics need not be
same-sex aligned. Indeed, revisions in gender alignments potentially
allow misogynist assaults on the woman/mother figure.
One of the problems haunting Stephen is rigidity—a fixity of the
self and an interpretation of others as the same—rigid and oppressive.
Yet one might argue that he develops this fixity less in response to
his mother, more in reply to his two “masters”—“The imperial British
state . . . and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church” (U1. 643–4).
He is born into a context of British control and oppression in Ireland,
subject as well to the dictates of the Catholic Church. While his mother
turns to the Church, insisting that her son must kneel and pray, Simon
Dedalus espouses nostalgic nationalism. In general, Stephen rejects nos-
talgia as maudlin, recoiling at the display of his father’s nostalgia for his
school days on their trip to Cork.21 If for Stephen home is tinged with
nostalgic memories of his mother’s past, it is more decisively framed by
his horror of decaying flesh and his refusal of traditional norms, which
women come to represent. In his critical presentation on Shakespeare
in the National Library, Stephen casts the playwright as an avenger,
implicitly branding Ann Hathaway with infamy in his plays for taking
sexual control in their first encounter.22 This is more than Shakespeare’s
or Stephen’s bias; Joyce’s own art marks a turn against the older woman
who controls or condemns, showing the hostility locked in the heart of
Freud’s melancholic most clearly when he turns with approbation and
guilt upon the mother. As Susan Stanford Friedman notes, Joyce revised
the more sympathetic portrait of Mae Dedalus between Stephen Hero and
Portrait (which is set close to one year after Mae Joyce’s death in August
1903). Stephen’s mother transforms from his greatest supporter, who
shares his interest in continental literature, into a censorious moralist,
the flagellated fetish of his guilt.23
In “Circe,” Stephen’s grief and will climax in the smashing of a lamp
or “life’s livid flame.” Mae Dedalus’s ghost rises, a victim of marriage.
Worn out and hardened, she now can only offer religious imperatives
to her son’s plea for “the word known to all men.” She offers Stephen
guilt instead of love. Mourning and rage combine in “Circe” to create
a gothic scenario of shock and horror for Stephen. The specter of her
body raises the nightmare, so that he recalls the dream of her coming
to him in her grave clothes, with the “odour of wax and rosewood”
coming off her: “Ghoul! Chewer of corpses! No, mother! Let me be and
let me live” (U1. 278–9). Anti-nostalgic, Stephen is pinned by Catholic
guilt and a revulsion of the body, and so experiences simultaneously the
grief of both spiritual abstraction and bodily decay.
If, as Derrida claims, one must mourn in a way that is open to
death and allows the excess of the other to escape all attempts to
re-incorporate the lost one after death, so Stephen refuses death itself
as well as his mother’s loss. He neither enters Freud’s earlier conception
of mourning (1914) as a system that concludes with an incorporation
of a symbolic other, nor does he accept death as an inevitable experi-
ence. His mother’s ghost may try to instruct him that “all must go
through it,” meaning perhaps death but also marriage. Mae Dedalus’s
memory arises most potently in Nighttown, where Stephens’ sexual
desires have taken him in search of Georgina Johnson, his favorite sex
worker, who he finds gone, “dead and married.” Meanwhile Bloom is
witnessing imaginative fantasies about the transformations of his own
body and that of another brothel mistress—Bella/Bello Cohen, whose
tapping fan will trigger a dominatrix obsession for Bloom. The maso-
chist is threatened by his/or her own death, pressing the severity of
punishment to that limit. Joyce’s sado-masochism is vaudeville comedic
here, but one should not lose sight of the overlay of desire and death.
While Bloom allows his fantasy to unfurl, Stephen refuses and resists,
eventually staging a standoff against a chandelier, smashing it and the
hallucinated ghost of his mother with the ashplant, so that “times livid
flame” leaps in the refusal of the movement of time towards death and
dissolution.24
In “Circe,” the partial working through of Bloom’s abjection is shaped
more as a fantasmatic reclamation and erotic catharsis of his masochis-
tic position—a position felt not merely at home, but surely also on the
streets of Dublin. Joyce’s literary re-figuration of grief and its encoun-

ter is more dramatic in “Circe,” appropriate to the episode’s genre, its
sexual topicality, as well as Joyce’s fine sense of climax in the text. But it
also responds to the contextual pressures and seeming menaces around
Bloom (guilt and commerce’s demand) leading more to binaristic and
aggressive modes, paranoiac and abject, in a pendulum swing of elation
and despair, delight and horror.
How does the subject effect a shift away from aggression, from locking
into desire? One cannot simply will a change in such powerful drives. In
Ulysses, on the one hand, Stephen tries to approach this problem analyt-
ically. In “Scylla and Charybdis,” as his discussion of Shakespeare winds
down into mocked patter, he thinks of his brother: “My whetstone. Him,
then Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech.
They mock to try you. Act. Be acted on” (U9. 977–9). He urges himself
outside of isolation, but the habit of refusal has too strong a hold on his
psyche, shaped as it is by his estheticism, his refusal of the world (and
so acceptance of poverty). As he attempts to change, still he slides back
into polarities and refusals. Bloom, on the other hand, uses the strategy
of nostalgia, not even consciously at times, to distract his inclination to
engage directly. One might be tempted to call it avoidance and repres-
sion strategies, but nostalgia helps him engage and disengage jealous
rage, melancholic depression, and desperate need. Nostalgia—long
regarded as a suspect form of memory and emotion—helps Bloom move
through the present day by connecting with the past; he longs for the
early days with Molly more than envisioning her current “solution” to
the impasse in their marriage.25 I am suggesting here that Bloom’s use of
nostalgia enables a distinctive form of mourning; in Bloom’s oscillating
shifts between continuing grief, nostalgic remembrance, and sensory
assuagement—and with the help of wine, masturbation, and attention
to bodily sensations—he (dis)engages in a gesture of désistance that
preempts violence and enables cross-threaded and alternating releases
of desire and sadness.26 This process—a more tenuous triangulation that
lacks the sacrificial violence of René Girard’s Oedipal scenario—allows
Bloom to be aided by identificatory imaginings of a son substitute
figure.27 Bloom’s is a gesture of allowance, a stepping back without
stepping away. He does not refuse; rather, he reaches towards, retreats
from, and re-approaches the sources of his grief and desire. This works
in contrast to Stephen’s repeated gesture of refusal and gives rise to pos-
sibilities, if no actual fulfillment, by the novel’s end.
Stephen and Bloom at times step back from conflict, although
Stephen’s words often clash and challenge those around him. We
might ask whether these more agonistic gestures bespeak an encrypted

loss—be it a parent, a nation, an ideal, a thwarted love—which tor-
tures its bearer and locks him into a melancholic disposition. In Freud,
Oedipal aggressions are directed against the father, and Joyce draws on
this scenario in Shem and Shaun’s attacks on the Father (as Caesar) in
Finnegans Wake. Like Joyce himself, Stephen’s colonial status in Ireland
drives aggressive attacks on authority, while Bloom, for his part, contin-
ues to mourn, as well as panic over, the memory of his father’s suicide,
even as he cringes in guilt at the stage stereotype of his father’s of chid-
ing him for “running with goy” in “Circe.” But even if Bloom is not the
Irish-oppressed colonial in the eyes of “The Citizen” in “Cyclops,” he
is, decidedly, oppressed as an outsider, an “other” assumed to be Jewish,
in addition to being mocked as the repeatedly (if not actually until
4 o’clock on June 16th) cuckolded husband by a flirtatious wife. Bloom’s
abjection has different roots than Stephen’s, but his ability to divide the
strands of grief and touch back on nostalgic memory helps him accom-
modate loss while living out a process of ceaseless recovering from what
has passed, while Stephen remains arguably stuck in the role of refusal
and rebellion.
Leopold and Stephen’s parting at the close of “Ithaca,” I argue,
presents readers with an anti-climactic dis-union, which results from
Stephen’s repeated gestures of distancing and refusal. His is more
than a habit acquired from literary mimicry. Stephen is caught in
the melancholic crisis of the not-yet-mourning son, and so appears
unable to engage Leopold’s more triangulated and less aggressive form
of désistance, which enables him to engage nostalgic longings while
working his ongoing mourning of what is lost in the past. Moreover,
the open ending of Ulysses, which refuses secure and happy closure,
enacts it own acknowledgement of absence, of the loss of the author’s
physical presence and his ability to resolve uncertainties by describing
his intentions. The conclusion to Joyce’s novel may be read as a tale of
open ended mourning, a version not so much of melancholia as of the
glimmering possibilities that arise when what is engaged is nostalgia.
This nostalgia is not the false siren of postmodern film and late capi-
talism as theorized by Jameson; it is, rather, the struggling desire and
expression of loss given so often in modernist writing. Ulysses is argu-
ably constituted by nostalgia, being set back in the time of Joyce’s first
love for Nora Barnacle; the novel is also laced with desire for the more
traditional Odyssean ending, of closure that brings a full restoration
of home, and, perhaps too, of nation. Still, Joyce refuses conventional
closure, mixing for the reader the pleasure of remembrance alongside
the open word of an uncertain future.28 Stylistically, Joyce has a musical

sense of closure. What his prose orchestrates is a rhythmic movement
towards a linguistic climax at the end of most of Ulysses’s episodes, and
yet, in terms of meaning, Joyce leaves loose ends and unresolved emo-
tions, letting the cadence of Molly’s last words suggest the future pos-
sibility of the closure of unambiguous affirmation.
Ulysses’s ending in irresolution is not a failure—much as we no longer
regard melancholia as an inability to properly mourn. Irresolution as
well can be taken as a step towards the cyclical vision of history that
Joyce pursues further in Finnegans Wake. It also calls upon the context
in which Joyce lived, moving from colonial war, to world war, to dis-
tressed peace, and back again. Thus even the daytime text of Ulysses, a
text of love that might be contrasted with the emphasis on war in the
Wake, can in its mode of psychological realism only spin and unravel
and then spin once again the endeavor to love, affirm, and claim
affection. Molly’s concluding “yes I said yes I will Yes” marks more a
passionate continuance of fluctuating possibilities, a “home” that may
be nostalgic given Joyce’s backward glance, which still refuses stasis
and finality, security and fixivity. What Ulysses’s end marks, then, is
movement: of desire, of rest, and again and again of recirculation,
especially for Leopold and Stephen, that is, for Odysseus and Hamlet
newly transformed into modern men. Joyce leaves us with a parallactic
vision of these two figures, revealing a productive—if not violently
victorious—mode of (dis)identification in Joyce’s Odyssean Bloom,
and a more polarized—if not also successfully visionary—Hamlet
figure in Stephen, whose critique may be harsh but just, lighting war
to Leopold’s uneasy peace.
Notes
1. See Nicolas Abraham’s “The Phantom of Hamlet or the Sixth Act,” and
Lupton and Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis. Hamlet’s
irresolvable secrets, the haunting of unspoken desires, produces a melan-
cholic hermeneutics, one that spirals out of control rather than progressing
in the hoped for wizening circle that moves towards acceptance.
2. Gregory Castle makes a similar case for Stephen’s inability to stitch himself
into the Enlightenment narrative, given the grief of his colonial position.
Discussions of mourning in Joyce’s work have been on-going over the
years. Speaking to its presence in Ulysses are such well-known scholars as
Patrick Colm Hogan, Eric Soros, Richard Brown, Gran Balsano, and most
remarkably—in terms of an extended analysis of property and mourning,
Ravit Reichman.
3. John Gordon, in Joyce and Reality, suggests that Stephen and Bloom’s dreams,
as they predict a coming together that lasts beyond “Ithaca,” suggest that
“at the end of Ulysses there is at least the prospect that Bloom will wake
next morning to find his dream of the previous night has come true,” with
Stephen being offered cream and fruit by an exotic female suggested by a
mysterious man the night before, and Bloom finding Stephen willing to take
up residence in Milly’s empty room (235).
4. See Strachey’s introduction to Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,”
239–42.
5. Less has been written on nostalgia in Joyce, but we have some fine essays by
Gillespie, Declan Kiberd, and Patrick R. O’Malley.
6. See Stephanie Coontz’s argument that this was a false creation: The Way We
Never Were.
7. Lyotard, “What is the Postmodern?”, 14–15.
8. For a discussion of Lacan’s break with American versions of psychology, see
Anthony Wilden’s introduction, esp. pp. 6–7, and the long essay by Lacan
that follows: in Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.
9. Letters of James Joyce Vol. I, p. 169. Cited in Ellmann, James Joyce, 215.
10. Felski notes the earth image of woman, p. 40. See Felski, Rita, The Gender of
Modernity.“Gea-Tellus” is in U17. 2313.
11. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” S.E. 255; LaPlanche and Pontalis set
out the analysis of “killing death” in their discussion of this moment in
Freud, in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 486.
12. Felski uses Finny’s work, so I cited it in Felski, 5.
13. Even the most critical and explosive of avant-garde texts can carry within
them moments that, as Susan Stewart suggests, might provide a lyrical struc-
ture to our experiences (21). By this I mean an image or series of gestures that
opens a way for entering into the difficult encounter with the wholly unfa-
miliar, uncategorizable experience of the death of a loved one. See Stewart’s,
Poetry and the Fate of the Senses.
14. Derek Attridge, “Joyce’s Lipspeech: Syntax and the Subject in ‘Sirens,’” 61, 62.
15. This argument is made several times in the works of Jacques Lacan. I cite
here p. 679, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,”
671–702 in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Coll.
Bruce Fink.
16. In “Ithaca,” we are informed that Leopold has been thrice baptized, made
Protestant by a minister, then again by three fellows “under a pump in the
village of Swords”—one assumes a form of harassment for an assumed Jew—
and finally he is made Catholic (perhaps “again” if his mother is Catholic—
critics can only speculate, since she is “Ellen Higgins” with an Irish accent
in “Circe.”) most likely in preparation for his marriage to Molly. See U17.
540–47.
17. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 65.
18. Later harassment by authority figures and school fellows serves to crystallize
this habituated gesture and Stephen’s relative isolation from communities
and groups.
19. With all of these refusals comes a form of désistance in “Scylla and Charybdis,”
where Stephen tries on the various possible identities of the father artist with
whom he does apparently seek a bond, Shakespeare.
20. Derrida, p. 1 in “Introduction: Desistance,” pp. 1–42 in Typography.

21. On the train out, he “listened without sympathy” to his father’s tale of Cork
and his youth, and cannot himself recall details of his own youth, darkened
by thoughts of his own wayward behaviors pp. 84–5.
22. See my reading of the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode in Gestural Politics,
chapter 3 “’The word is my Wife’: Control of the Feminine,” pp. 51–85.
23. Susan Stanford Friedman, “(Self)Censorship and the Making of Joyce’s
Modernism,” 34–9.
24. Jean-Michel Rabaté argues that, for modernism, “ghosts come to designate
blind spots of knowledge”. Indeed, Mae Dedalus’ apparition provokes
Stephen’s blind rage against the unknowable experience of death. It also
brings up his anxiety about the decaying body, anchored in the maternal
locus of home, womb, and grave.
25. Fredric Jameson is the most familiar scholar to accuse nostalgia of creating
false histories, appealing to reactionary simplification of a past that never
was. See “Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”Also
Jean-François Lyotard has critiqued nostalgia, in contrast to avant-garde
experimentalism, in “What Is the Postmodern?” pp. 1–16 in The Postmodern
Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985.
26. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography.
27. See René Girard, The Scapegoat, see “Giallaume de Machaut and the Jews,”
and “Stereotypes of Persecution,” especially, 1-11, 12-23 respectively.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s work explicitly responds to Girard’s account of com-
munity violence enacted upon the scapegoat. While Girard argues that
violence is always turned in times of catastrophe on a marginal target,
like the Jewish community, the elderly “witches,” the drifter, or the
immigrant, Lacoue-Labarthe points out that it is representation itself that
is the scapegoat, the threat the one image might mimetically reflect and
hence double the original source. His notion of desistance suggests ways of
avoiding the fixity of identity and the vehemence of competitive identifi-
cation.
28. Tammy Clewell finds that in Derrida and in Abraham and Torok, “mourning
has been used to explain the formation of subjectivity.” See “Consolation
Refused: Virginia Woolf, the Great War, Modernist Mourning,” p. 207. She
poses her argument, using Jacques Derrida’s suggestion that “In the conven-
tional sense, mourning allows the lost other to be recovered in the language
of the symbolic so that the subject can refuse to admit that something of
the self has been lost with the other’s departure” (207). Derrida however
shows how failed mourning clarifies a fundamental decentering of self.
“By locating an otherness that resist the subject’s attempt to constitute or
reconsolidate a sense of strongly bounded identity, failed mourning succeeds
in revealing ‘an essential anachrony in our being exposed to the other’”
Derrida 188). “This anachronism,” according to Clewell, “indicates an out-
side that shatters any illusion of strict identity and relates us ‘to the law of
what does not return or come back,’ that is, to the other’s singularity and to
our own mortality” (192, quoting Derrida). She notes that acknowledgement
of the other’s death entails an awareness of our own impending death, “the
mortality we embody as a condition of life.”
See Jacques Derrida, “By Force of Mourning.”
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13
Modernist Nostalgia/Nostalgia for
Modernism: Anthony Powell and
Evelyn Waugh
Marina MacKay
“Do you know, when I first came to him he thought Matisse was a plage,”
scoffs the modernist poet Mark Members in The Acceptance World, the
third novel in Anthony Powell’s postwar sequence, A Dance to the Music
of Time (123). Members is explaining to the narrator, Nick Jenkins, how
his former employer, the Galsworthyesque novelist St. John Clarke, has
suddenly been converted to modernism—in the 1930s, when modern-
ism is becoming a thing of the past. “So there he goes,” remarks another
character: “Head-first into the contemporary world” (29). This essay
discusses two of modernism’s differently untimely admirers, lifelong
friends Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, and aims to describe what
modernism meant to these mid-century novelists whose major works,
Brideshead Revisited (1945) and A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75),
share an insistently retrospective orientation too easily assimilated into
the real-life conservative politics of their authors. In the context of
modernism and nostalgia, what is particularly interesting about these
retrospective projects is that by the time of writing, “modernist nostal-
gia” was not a mode novelists could unthinkingly reprise, but, rather,
modernism itself had become something to be nostalgic for.
High art as high society: the 1920s
Modernism appears routinely in Powell and Waugh’s novels of and

about the 1920s. Not only are characters reading or discussing Proust,
Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, Lewis, and others, but modernist culture
is the very height of social chic. In Powell’s A Question of Upbringing,
for example, Charles Stringham’s socialite mother and her philistine
husband “Buster” take the teenage Stringham to the Russian Ballet as
a matter of course, while the barely literate, let alone literary Bright
237
Young People of Waugh’s Vile Bodies model their party invitations on

Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” and the columns of BLAST, and a derac-
inated Vorticist sculptor akin to Gaudier-Brzeska is among the gossip-
columnist protagonist’s most successful high society fabrications. This
novel’s insistent modernity of manner and matter has attracted some
attention. Brooke Allen and Archie Loss, for instance, have described
the importance of Futurism: Waugh borrows its techniques while reject-
ing its philosophy, Allen argues, while Loss deems Vile Bodies “one of
the best examples of Vorticist and Futurist principles in English prose”
(158). Yet, by definition nothing could be less nostalgic than Futurism—
“Set fire to the library shelves!” Marinetti had urged. “Turn aside the
canals to flood the museums!” (252)—one notes a telling irony in the
appearance, in a novel of 1930, of the aesthetic register formulated by
the enfants terribles of twenty years earlier.
Still, we know it cannot be long after 1922 when, in Brideshead
Revisited, the gay cosmopolitan Anthony Blanche sobbingly recites The
Waste Land through a megaphone from an Oxford window. Blanche,
after all, is thoroughly up to the minute: “he dined with Proust and
Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diaghilev; . . . he had
been cured of drug-taking in California and of an Oedipus complex
in Vienna” (46). Blanche is well attuned to his modernist times—to
modernist culture broadly, but especially its most charismatic literary
products. “I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all,” he announces to the col-
lege rowers on their way to the river (“How I have surprised them! All
b-boatmen are Grace Darlings to me” [33]), and if there is mockery
in this exuberantly camp recitation of Eliot’s portentous lines, it’s a
mockery fine-grained enough to betray the tenacity of the poem’s
hold on Waugh. Witness, for instance, how The Waste Land identifies
river scenes with no-less-futile erotic propositions than those Blanche
makes at Sebastian’s window (Eliot’s departed nymphs [60] and undone
Thames maidens [64] appear in the same section of the poem as the
lines Blanche quotes). And, speaking of abortive erotic enterprises, just
as Tiresias impotently “foresuffers all,” so does Blanche, who soon tries
to warn Charles about the destructive seductions of Sebastian’s mer-
etricious charm, implying that he knows exactly what it means to be
burned by it.
Eliot appears often in Waugh’s fiction, most famously in A Handful
of Dust, which takes its title and epigraph from Eliot’s “I will show you
fear in a handful of dust” (54). Allusions to The Waste Land are less
insistent but little less common in Powell. Usually they are flagged as
such: for example, counting his Second World War losses Nick Jenkins
Marina MacKay 239
is reminded of another war, and of “the lines about Stetson and the
ships at Mylae, how death had undone so many” (Military 113). More
telling are those perhaps only half-conscious moments of infiltration,
as when Nick, having his cards read by the magnificent Mrs. Erdleigh,
anticipates drawing the “drowned Phoenician sailor,” a Tarot figure
who never existed outside Madame Sosostris’s famously “wicked pack
of cards” (Acceptance 11; Eliot 54). One way of accounting for Waugh’s,
though not Powell’s, interest in Eliot would be to view it as fundamen-
tally an attraction to the cultural pessimism of the interwar right, to its
insistent “aesthetics of decay,” to borrow an apt phrase from Tammy
Clewell, the editor of this collection, in her account of Brideshead
Revisited (94). This is what we might think of as “modernist nostalgia”
on the cosmic scale, the futile yearning for a mythical lost wholeness,
the 1920s modernism which held that “progress not only doesn’t hap-
pen, but ought not to happen,” as George Orwell summed it up in 1940.
This was the nostalgia that enabled Eliot, Orwell memorably continued,
“to achieve the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than
it is” (227).
Waugh’s comedy depends on the same “feat,” as do the more lugubri-
ous passages of Brideshead, but his ambivalence about the modern—a
“fruitful ambivalence,” as George McCartney terms it in his rich study
of Waugh and modernism (3)—is probably clearest in the conflict
between his grudging aesthetic attraction to the new and his whole-
hearted political commitment to the old. So while A Handful of Dust
presumably endorses Tony Last’s conservatism as a last stand against
the vapid modernity of Brenda and the Beavers, Tony’s attachment
to his ersatz Victorian country house—“an authentic Pecksniff” (43),
it is oxymoronically termed after the fraudulent architect of Martin
Chuzzlewit—is fittingly punished at the end of the novel, when the
hell reserved for Tony is to spend the rest of his life repeatedly reread-
ing Dickens. Attachments to the pre-modernist past are characterized
as insane fixations productive only of misrepresentations of the lived
present; ironically doubling Tony’s Victorian nostalgia, the local vicar
believes he is preaching at a beleaguered garrison chapel in nineteenth-
century India.
“Du côté de chez Beaver” and “Du côté de chez Todd” are among the
chapters of A Handful of Dust, their titles jokingly reprising volumes of
A la recherche du temps perdu, and it goes without saying that Proustian
modernism underpins the lavish memorial monument of Brideshead
Revisited, as when the narrator Charles Ryder muses on the workings of
memory, “those needle-hooks of experience which catch the attention
when larger matters are at stake, and remain in the mind when they
are forgotten, so that years later it is a bit of gilding, or a certain smell,
or the tone of a clock’s striking which recalls one to a tragedy” (164).
So far, so Proustian, we might say of this evocation of involuntary
and associative memory, but the deflation is almost instantaneous:
“I wonder if it eats the same sort of things as an ordinary tortoise,”
Lady Marchmain interrupts, reminding us that the aide-memoire, the
“needle-hook,” is no madeleine but a tortoise into whose shell Rex
Mottram has had his lover’s initials gaudily inset in diamonds (164).
Throughout this novel there is a deep unease about trying to do
Proustian modernism “straight,” an unease we might take as expressive
of Waugh’s sense that there is something inherently misguided about
trying in the mid-1940s to “do” modernism at all. And this is very much
a novel about aesthetic anachronism; in one of Sebastian’s bitchier
whimsies he supposes that Charles is no better a painter than his teddy
bear, only Aloysius is “rather more modern” (52)
The same embarrassment about aspiring to modernism’s redemptive
seriousness is characteristic of Waugh’s final major work, his Sword of
Honour trilogy. The sequence has a clear debt to Ford Madox Ford’s
Parade’s End tetralogy, in which a distinguished Tory of the old school
enters modern war with illusions to be painfully and inexorably stripped
away. Once again, Waugh echoes a major modernist precursor when he
borrows Ford’s “Last of England” nostalgia, and once again cannot com-
mit to the elevated style attendant on it—indicatively the plot of the
first novel is dominated by a purloined Edwardian lavatory, Apthorpe’s
famous thunderbox. Powell comes closer to Ford in his Second World
War volumes. For instance, The Kindly Ones, which introduces the war,
executes a Fordian temporal twist by deviating from what by then is
an expected chronological sequence to open not in 1939, as the reader
expects, but with a very long flashback to Nick Jenkins’s childhood. This
portrait of a sunny summer’s day in 1914 is substantively as well as sty-
listically reminiscent of Ford’s portrait of the belle époque in Some Do Not,
in which the main threat to the national sense of comfortable security
is felt, comically, to be less the Kaiser than the suffragettes.
Of course, the usual modernist precursor is typically identified as
Proust, although the resemblances between their two sequences are fairly
superficial: their length, for example, makes for a shared preoccupation
with the revelatory power of time. And as Michael Gorra points out,
the comparison has never done Powell any favors, making his sequence
sound like A la recherche for middlebrows, Proust stripped of his diffi-
cult novelty (73). Significantly, though, the attitude to Proust actually
Marina MacKay 241
displayed in the book is uncomplicatedly admiring, wholly devoid of

ambivalence or antagonism, as when in The Military Philosophers Powell
has Nick reading Proust (69, 119–21), and subsequently sent to Cabourg
(Proust’s “Balbec”) after the Normandy landings. As if to preempt the
most suspicious basis on which the comparison with Proust might be
made, Nick tells a military colleague about the town’s literary asso-
ciation only to have his interlocutor respond in a “chilly” way with
“Doesn’t he always write about society people?” (191). It is significant,
for reasons to which I shall return, that Nick has no response to this.
Obviously Powell courts the comparison by opening the sequence
with a long associative chain, although, crucially, associations are public
and shared (historical, pictorial, literary) rather than private (emotional,
familial, sensory). In the opening pages, Nick watches workmen warm-
ing themselves at a fire in winter, which “always makes me think of
the ancient world—legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a
brazier,” and “suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in
hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that
the winged and naked greybeard plays”; then, that image of time and
all its attendant “classical associations” bring Nick to his schooldays
where these associations first entered his consciousness (Question 1–2).
Now the novel proper opens in winter, and the chain of associations
that began with the cold workmen is complete. This first installment,
A Question of Upbringing, follows Nick from school into young adult-
hood, and is full of material capable of eliciting nostalgic yearning, and
yet even from this earliest point nostalgia is Powell’s thematic material
rather than his operative mood, as when the oddball schoolmaster Le
Bas asks pupils to identify melancholy lines from Andrew Lang (“We
may not linger in the heat / Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea”), only
to renounce the poem as “nineteenth-century nostalgia for a classical
past largely of their own imagining” (40–1).
Subsequent efforts at escaping the present are entertainingly exempli-
fied and discredited via the comic relics of the Edwardian past: Horace
Isbister, R.A., passé portraitist of eminent men, and his contemporary,
Edgar Deacon, painter of homoerotic classical subjects naturalistically
depicted (“he disliked the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists almost
equally; and was, naturally, even more opposed to later trends like
Cubism, or the works of the Surrealists” [Buyer’s 4–5]). And then there is
the bad novelist St John Clarke, another public figure “associated with
the opposition to the Post-Impressionists in 1910” (Acceptance 20), and
a double for Edgar Deacon all the way through the series. “Some people
hold that as a bad painter Edgar carries all before him,” the modernist
painter Barnby tells Nick: “I know good judges who think there is lit-
erally no worse one” (Buyer’s 167), while the rising novelist Nick feels
himself qualified to dismantle Clarke’s fiction, its “windy descriptive
passages, two-dimensional characterization, and . . . the emptiness of
the writing’s inner content” (Buyer’s 244).
Running alongside this pairing of the anti-modern Deacon and Clarke,
their early careers intertwined with the Edwardians’ last years, are the
studiously modern younger writers Mark Members and J. G. Quiggin,
perpetually competing for the post of Clarke’s secretary. When we meet
them first in the mid-1920s, Members is a dandyish highbrow poet and
Quiggin his apparent antithesis, a working-class socialist intellectual;
however, the Oxford don Sillery (another Tiresias figure, sexually ambig-
uous and aspiring to omniscience) knows that the difference between
Members and Quiggin is a difference not of social class but of style;
that although they are from the same place and background, they have
consciously elected to present themselves in some more distinctive way:
Members goes for rentier while Quiggin is forcefully plebeian; Members
styles himself a modernist formalist with a taste for psychoanalysis while
Quiggin becomes a politically engaged writer of the Left. Like that of his
surrogate Nick Jenkins, Powell’s literary apprenticeship was somewhat
closer to that of Members than Quiggin, his early novels acutely styl-
ized and utterly apolitical. Casting an interesting light on how Powell
viewed his work vis-à-vis modernism, Nick is surprised to learn that
St. John Clarke has written favorably of his first novel in an essay on the
new writers of the moment, learning only later that Clarke has been con-
verted to modernism tout court. “This conversion explains his friendly
notice of my book,” Nick tells Barnby, whose painting Clarke has also
embraced as part of his “new desire to ally himself with forces against
which, for many years, he had openly warred” (Acceptance 25, 26).
In The Acceptance World the novelist Nick is still working at a publish-
ing firm specializing in art books, and trying, via Members and Quiggin,
to get Clarke to write the introduction to a book about Isbister. The
shape of this novel is determined by its triangulation of Edwardians
(Isbister, Deacon, and Clarke), 1920s modernists (Members), and 1930s
political writers (Quiggin). But looking back at the 1930s from the
postwar perspective, undoubtedly Quiggin rather than Members has
backed the winning horse: “Although he had already benefited from
the tenets of what was possibly a dying doctrine, Members was sharp
enough to be speedily jettisoning appurtenances, already deteriorated,
of an outmoded aestheticism. Quiggin, with his old clothes and astrin-
gent manner, showed a similar sense of what the immediate future
Marina MacKay 243
intimated” (Buyer’s 246). A new cultural atmosphere prevails. Quiggin

admires Members’s poetry but deplores the fact that “his oeuvre is at
present lacking in any real sense of social significance,” advocating
instead “the New School’s poetic diction, in which Communist convic-
tions were expressed in unexpected meter and rhyme” (Acceptance 87).
Members knows that he should reform himself into something closer
to Quiggin, the iconic 1930s writer, though at the end of the decade he
will swap politics for Existentialism (“a little ahead of the fashion” [Lady
Molly’s 221]). Meanwhile even St. John Clarke has made the jump from
modernism to political activism. Nick shows no indication of any such
reformation—and nor did Powell.
High art as social seriousness: the 1930s
Nick is not surprised when Quiggin, who has replaced Members as

Clarke’s secretary, informs him that Clarke wants to approach the
Isbister introduction from a Marxist angle:
Taking into account the fact that St. John Clarke had made the
plunge into “modernism”, the project seemed neither more nor less
extraordinary than tackling Isbister’s pictures from the point of view
of Psychoanalysis, Surrealism, Roman Catholicism, Social Credit, or
any other specialised approach. In fact some such doctrinal method
of attack was then becoming very much the mode . . . The foreword
would now, no doubt, speak of Isbister “laughing up his sleeve” at the
rich men and public notabilities he had painted; though Members,
who, with St. John Clarke, had once visited Isbister’s studio in
St. John’s Wood for some kind of a reception held there, had declared
that nothing could have exceeded the painter’s obsequiousness to his
richer patrons. (117–18)
Nick doesn’t buy Members’s self-interested dismissal of the Marxist

line as simply a crudely political misrepresentation—that Clarke is tak-
ing that line at all reflects how comprehensively Quiggin has replaced
Members in Clarke’s favor. But notwithstanding this qualifying skepti-
cism, and notwithstanding even the unperturbed equanimity linking
Nick with the literary tradition of the English gentleman (Berberich
75–94), there is no real doubt what Nick and his author feel about
“doctrinal” analysis.
One might read this rejection of the “doctrinal” as an inherently
conservative position, easy potshots at the weary predictabilities of
left-leaning criticism (the utterly establishment Isbister subversively

“laughing up his sleeve”) allowing a right-leaning author to masquer-
ade as a champion for the primacy, even autonomy, of the aesthetic.
In reality, I think Powell’s skepticism is more usefully understood as
a deeper questioning of what we would now call “readings” of texts.
Powell’s authorial surrogate cannot see the point of measuring any cul-
tural artifact by a set of values outside of and perhaps wholly alien to it,
and in doing so he raises an interpretative problem no closer to being
resolved now than it was in Powell’s politicized 1930s. In an instance
of cultural recurrence of the kind that dominates the closing volumes
of the sequence (in Powell’s fictional 1960s even Edgar Deacon and
St John Clarke are revived out of obscurity!), the problem Powell
identifies has returned in an extraordinary way in recent years, as crit-
ics begin to find the critical approaches and practices of the past few
decades “stale and unsurprising,” as Rita Felski bluntly describes them
(“Suspicious” 218). She is among a number of critics in a recent issue of
the MLA’s annual Profession expressing this dissatisfaction with what we
would call “suspicious reading,” and what Powell sums up as the “doc-
trinal method of attack.” “Literature’s relation to worldly knowledge is
not only suspicious, subversive, or adversarial,” writes Felski there: “it can
also amplify and replenish our sense of how things are” (“After” 34).
If Felski’s claim cannot be made for the fictional Isbister, it can surely
be made for Powell, whose reputation has always been tainted by per-
ceptions of social irrelevance encouraged by even his best readers. In
his superb (and otherwise sympathetic) reading of the sequence, for
example, Gorra suggests that the fundamental problem is not Powell’s
dependence on coincidence, but his “refusal to explore the social and
economic reasons for . . . such recurrences” (102), while Patrick Swinden
concludes another sensitive account of the sequence with the anticli-
mactic speculation that Powell’s appeal is really snob appeal, readers
admiring “emotional poise, comic detachment, a restrained delicacy”
in what is really “a sort of class collusion” (129)—irrespective of the
fact that class is one of the things the sequence is “poised,” “detached,”
and “restrained” about. Powell’s narrative patterns typically work across
class lines, and are bounded only by the people Nick encounters: the
bleak predicament of the Welsh, working-class Sergeant Pendry, who
shoots himself when his wife leaves him in wartime, is taken as seri-
ously as that of the hard-up critic Maclintick, who gasses himself when
his marriage finally collapses. Shambolic ex-car-polisher Ted Jeavons
is as endearing as his aristocratic wife, and the “social no man’s land”
of their rackety household produces one of the funniest novels in the
Marina MacKay 245
sequence (At Lady Molly’s 157). Even against the grain of Powell’s real-
life conservatism, these books’ inquisitiveness about human behavior is
altogether undiscriminating, a quality Bernard Bergonzi captures well
when he observes how unusual among twentieth-century novelists is
Powell’s “charity,” his assumption that “everybody has something to
be said for them” (127). Perhaps Powell’s quiet dissatisfaction with the
1930s version of the hermeneutics of suspicion (“the doctrinal method
of attack”) is a defensive move, a way of dealing with the apprehension
that his own work would be judged primarily according to political
criteria by which it would probably be found wanting. If so, it was a
necessary defense. As Nick Jenkins’s uncomprehending colleague asks
of Proust, “Doesn’t he always write about society people?”
Waugh, in contrast, had no compunction about caricaturing the
1930s politicizing of writing and reading. At the heart of his Put Out
More Flags (1942) is the artist’s relationship to politics, because, as every-
one scrambles for wartime position, the gay Jewish aesthete Ambrose
Silk wonders if a writer can make a public contribution without selling
out, pondering “Cervantes in the galleys at Lepanto, Milton working
himself blind in the public service” (44). Ambrose has spent the 1930s
rejecting the pressure to politicize. Parsnip and Pimpernell—amusingly
malicious caricatures of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood—
have tried to talk him into “becoming proletarian,” intending that
Ambrose “should employ himself in some ill-paid, unskilled labour of
a mechanical kind” (37–8), but, he declares, “I belong, hopelessly, to
the age of the ivory tower” (38). The “age of the ivory tower,” as Waugh
and Powell’s friend Cyril Connolly historicized it around the same time
in Enemies of Promise and which ran from Pater to Joyce, had produced
generations of writers who “believed in the importance of their art,
in the sanctity of the artist and in his sense of vocation” (29). There
are four roles available to the tower-dweller, Connolly anatomized:
“High Priest,” “Dandy,” “Incorruptible Observer,” and “Detached
Philosopher”—Waugh’s Ambrose Silk is all four—but “What he will not
be is a Fighter or a Helper” (30).
But because the age of the Ivory Tower is comprehensively over,
Ambrose must reconstruct it from memories of the 1920s. He does this
with a journal, Ivory Tower, through which Waugh parodies Connolly’s
own Horizon, “a new magazine to keep culture alive” (94): “For years
now we’ve allowed ourselves to think of nothing but concrete mixers
and tractors” (139). But Ambrose is made to suffer for trying to revive
the early 1920s in the late 1930s, when his aesthetic neutrality is
mistaken for politics wholly antithetical to those he privately holds.
Among his leftwing friends the inauguration of Ivory Tower proves that
“Ambrose has turned fascist”:
“Is it a fascist paper?”

“You bet it is.”
“I heard it was to be called the Ivory Tower.”
“That’s fascist if you like.” (147)
Ultimately Ambrose is martyred along with the aesthete-turned-soldier

Cedric Lyne (“very unhappy in a boring smart regiment because he only
cared about Russian ballet and baroque architecture” [209]) for believ-
ing in the artist’s independence from the claims of the community. It is
no longer possible to believe that, as Cedric thinks, “divided we stand,
united we fall” (268).
Modernism after the 1930s
“It had been a primrose path in the days of Diaghilev,” thinks Ambrose,
longingly recalling a life in modernist Paris as the antidote to the coer-
cive political pressures of his time (48). “My dear, I love being dated,”
Hugo Tolland announces in Powell’s At Lady Molly’s, set in the mid-
1930s: “I hate all this bickering that goes on about politics. I wish I’d
lived in the Twenties when people were amusing” (34). (In the same
novel, Hugo’s titled brother styles himself “Alf” and engages in “social
research” [29], or “living as a tramp” [27]). The inclusion of charac-
ters so passionately nostalgic for the 1920s is probably the most self-
protectively jokey rendering of a phenomenon that runs throughout
Powell and Waugh’s major works: a sense that the end of modernism is
something to be regretted. The cultural climate of the high modernist
period has become an object of longing—explicitly in Waugh, implic-
itly in the subtler Powell—and its major writers and painters alluded to
as markers of what these novelists felt was lost with the passing of the
modernist moment.
The nature of that loss can be deduced from Waugh’s first novel,
Decline and Fall (1928), written while modernism was still felt to be a live
concern. Here, the fall into sophistication of hapless Paul Pennyfeather
through his engagement to the procuress/socialite Margot is signaled
by his substitution of Galsworthy at the start of the novel (“He thought
of smoking a pipe and reading another chapter of The Forsyte Saga
before going to bed” [5]) for more advanced reading (“Paul, with unac-
customed prodigality, bought two new ties . . . and a set of Proust”
Marina MacKay 247
[200]). When he is imprisoned for his fiancée’s crimes she smuggles him
some foie gras and “the new Virginia Woolf” (“It’s only been out two
days” [256]), as if both were desirable commodities of the same kind.
A closing allusion to Arnold Bennett marks Paul’s circular return to the
dreary life of the novel’s beginning (287). Setting glamorous Proust and
Woolf against stodgy Bennett and Galsworthy, Waugh calls on readers’
knowledge of that gap between Edwardians and Georgians that Woolf
herself outlined in the classic modernist manifestos “Mr. Bennett and
Mrs. Brown” and “Modern Fiction.” Famously, the distinction she drew
is between fiction that observes the old conventions and fiction that
won’t, but inextricable from it is the opposition between fiction that
works on its own autonomous terms and novels so bound to real-world
social conditions—“materialists” was her derogatory designation for
Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy (“Modern Fiction” 285)—that “to com-
plete them it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or,
more desperately, to write a cheque” (“Mrs. Bennett” 201).
Woolf could scarcely have known that this tension between the aes-
thetic autonomy and the political utility of fiction would return with a
vengeance a decade later, when the “rarefied” modernists of the 1920s
no longer looked modern in the eyes of the generation that followed
them, because of “the general trend among writers of the ’twenties to
dissociate themselves from current social and political problems,” as
Woolf’s younger Hogarth Press colleague John Lehmann wrote in 1940
(26). “What is noticeable about all these writers is that what ‘purpose’
they have is up in the air,” Orwell observed, looking back on the
1920s in the same year: “There is no attention to the urgent problems
of the moment, above all no politics in the narrower sense” (228–9).
Instructively, however, what Orwell champions in this famous essay is
not what followed the modernism he deemed aestheticist—the politicized
1930s, with its “Boy Scout atmosphere of bare knees and community
singing” (231)—but Henry Miller, writing in the 1930s but spiritually of
the previous decade: “In his books one gets right away from the ‘political
animal’ and back to a viewpoint of a man who believes the world-process
to be outside his control and who in any case hardly wishes to control it”
(242). In Enemies of Promise, Connolly also saw in Miller, along with other
belated modernists like Djuna Barnes, Henry Green, and David Jones, the
promise of “a revival in imaginative writing” (79).
What has been lost with the end of modernism, Powell, Waugh,
Orwell, and Connolly all suggest, and yet might be found again after
the disillusionments of the 1930s is a literature answerable only to
the standards of its form, an independent-minded artistry of intensely
professional discipline akin to what Nick Jenkins describes in Casanova’s

Chinese Restaurant as “that hard, cold-blooded, almost mathematical
pleasure” of writing (15). The art-against-politics notion of modern-
ist fiction was not an outright misconstruction; after all, Woolf’s
“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” had unfavorably contrasted the social
novels of Wells et al. with fiction that is “complete in itself . . . self-
contained,” the work of novelists who are “interested in things in
themselves; in character, in itself; in the book in itself” (201). But given
how unambiguously many modernists had declared their (sometimes
notorious) political commitments by the end of the 1930s, the fact
that modernist aestheticism is being made to stand for modernism as
a whole surely indicates a powerful nostalgia at work among writers of
Powell and Waugh’s generation—a nostalgia working, as nostalgia axi-
omatically does, in the service of a useful, selective version of the past.
And it was useful because it allowed these writers to take courage from
a version of their precursors. Powell’s own writing resembles Connolly’s
definition of the “mandarin” style at its best, the style whose last major
representatives were, Connolly felt, the 1920s modernists, and, above
all, Woolf: “art and patience, the striving for perfection, the horror of
clichés, the creative delight in the material, in the possibilities of the
long sentence and the splendour and subtlety of the composed phrase”
(80). Powell’s style recalls, too, Orwell’s praise for a “flowing, swelling
prose, a prose with rhythms in it, something quite different from the
flat cautious statements and snackbar dialects that are now in fashion”
(215). This may all be “ivory tower,” Connolly and Orwell suppose, but
it might come to mitigate the 1930s tyranny of the political plain style.
“In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive
books,” Orwell mused: “As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort
of pamphleteer” (“Why I Write,” 313). The last moment in which writ-
ers were not “forced” into politics produced the high modernism of the
mid-century imagination.
Ultimately it was his nostalgic commitment to this “modernism” that
helped to ensure Powell’s academic neglect because of the difficulty of
rendering him historically representative. He is scarcely a typical 1930s
writer, still less, it seems, characteristic of the period in which he pro-
duced his major work. A Dance to the Music of Time is “irredeemably
anachronistic,” Dominic Head writes disapprovingly in his introduc-
tion to the postwar novel; it is “out of kilter with the prevailing social
mood” and not “socially responsive” (23). This lingering assumption
that historical timeliness and social relevance constitute primary criteria
for judging creative accomplishment recalls the sociological view of the
Marina MacKay 249
arts that Powell and Waugh engaged in their fiction when they identi-
fied it critically with the political orthodoxies of the 1930s. Against
that idea of creativity, they set the modernisms of the 1920s. Novelists
who extended modernism formally into the mid-century period rather
than, like Powell, thematizing it historically would suffer a similar
neglect. The major modernists are “like cats which have licked the plate
clean,” Waugh and Powell’s old friend Henry Green told an interviewer:
“You’ve got to dream up another dish if you’re to be a writer” (247).
Green has always had admirers, certainly, but never full recognition by
academic critics, for whom his being “an acquired taste,” as Gorra puts
it, should scarcely limit his appeal, although writing modernist novels
in the 1940s evidently has (201).
And I submit, in conclusion, that a mid-century “modernist nostal-
gia” could create novels more complex than the sometimes cartoonishly
conservative real-life politics of writers like Waugh, Green, and Powell
would otherwise allow. Indeed, what remains striking about their best
novels is the difficulty of convincingly deriving a stable political posi-
tion from them, notwithstanding the self-inflicted wound of Waugh’s
absurd public persona, who, like the autobiographical Gilbert Pinfold,
affected to despise everything from Picasso to sunbathing—“everything
in fact that had happened in his own lifetime” (11). As far as the others
are concerned, I suspect the studious political neutrality of their writing
has been lost in the overstated emphasis on Powell’s somewhat nar-
row social range and, conversely, on Green’s extraordinarily wide one:
Green’s factory workers and firemen are as believable as the characters
drawn from the author’s own privileged background, yet, like Powell’s,
his fiction is virtually impervious to strategies of political reading that
would render him either conservative or progressive.
Of course these writers’ sense of modernism as an apolitical endeavor,
a single-minded and exacting aestheticism, is scarcely one to which
most scholars would now subscribe; it was, rather, the “modernism”
of a generation’s symptomatic making in the radicalized 1930s, which
needed a modernism it could use for its own purposes. If other young
writers of that decade found the idea of an exaggeratedly aloof and
apolitical modernism useful as a way of defining their difference from
dauntingly brilliant precursors, it is also true that their recent memo-
ries, selective though they assuredly were, of a modern literature that
did not have to “take sides,” in that indispensible 1930s idiom, allowed
Waugh and Powell to produce novels that are in many respects more
enduringly absorbing in all their anachronistic mandarin elegance than
many of the more politically committed literary documents of their
mid-century time. “I don’t want to be of service to anyone or any-

thing,” Waugh recorded in his diary as he turned to Brideshead Revisited.
“I simply want to do my work as an artist” (548).
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——. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1976.
——. Decline and Fall. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1999.
——. Brideshead Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1999.
——. Vile Bodies. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1999.
——. Put Out More Flags. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 2002.
Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Virginia Woolf Reader. Ed. Mitchell
A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt, 1984. 283–91.
——. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” The Virginia Woolf Reader. Ed. Mitchell
A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt, 1984. 192–212.
Afterword: Nostalgia and
Modernist Anxiety
Elizabeth Outka
Like modernism, nostalgia turns out to be constituted by its very

tensions. As the essays in this volume suggest, nostalgia in the early
twentieth century was rarely simple or simply one thing, but a rich and
varied phenomenon: potentially redemptive and narrow, progressive
and conservative, barren, fruitful, dangerous, and liberating. Nostalgic
desire had many objects, sometimes for places, both real and imaginary,
as the essays in the “Locations” section consider; sometimes for a rural
past, as Robert Hemmings observes in Sassoon’s use of an idyllic period
before the war, and sometimes for a particular urban past, explored by
Barry J. Faulk in his essay on music halls. And nostalgia could have
more surprising targets, such as for the older metrical forms discussed
in Meredith Martin’s essay, or even, as Gabrielle McIntire and Marina
MacKay argue, the hunger for nostalgia and for modernism itself. And
of course, nostalgic longing could be a blend of these and many other
desires. Even the form of nostalgia varies, alternatively functioning as
a conscious memory, a repressed desire, an unfulfillable longing, an
emotion, or some combination. What is clear, though, is that after this
collection and other recent work on modernist nostalgia, any idea that
British, Irish, and American modernists—and modernist critics—only
treat nostalgia with disdain must be discarded.1 The essays here, taken
together, present modernist nostalgia as a changing, slippery concept
that demands careful attention and an innovative approach, one that
is skeptical and inquisitive, both alert to dangers and open to the pos-
sibility that nostalgia in various forms may offer something beneficial
to writers and critics alike.
Here at the end of the collection I want to propose going back to the
beginning—not to the beginning of nostalgic desire in the modernist
era, but to the start of the anxiety over nostalgia in the modernist era.
252
Elizabeth Outka 253
The discomfort has, I want to argue, two distinct periods: the early
twentieth-century anxiety that various modernists had toward nos-
talgia, and the later uneasiness modernist critics have with nostalgia
within the modernist period. Most eras, of course, experience at least
some form of nostalgic longing, along with a corresponding distrust
and uneasiness about such longing. The apprehension that nostalgia
may provoke seems to stem in part from the fear of being taken in—the
fear of being caught believing in a fairy tale or an illusion, and the cor-
responding worry that people who succumb to nostalgic longing may
be distracted from the pressing problems of the current moment. Yet
each era also shapes nostalgia—and the critical reaction to nostalgia—
to its own ends, and this collection explores the particularities of one
moment in nostalgia’s history. Worries over nostalgia in any era are
not unfounded, but such worries do take on particular force and imme-
diacy in the early twentieth century, and, in a parallel anxiety, in the
critical responses to modernism in the last forty years. Even in this col-
lection, which so evocatively reconsiders relations between nostalgia
and modernism, a vein of anxiety over nostalgia can be traced, in both
the modernist writers and the modernist critics themselves.2 I’d like
to suggest that this apprehension surrounding nostalgia stems in part
in the modernist period from twin sources—the shattering effects of
World War I and the rapid rise in consumer culture and corresponding
shifts in advertising. The more recent critical fear of nostalgia in mod-
ernism that I explore in the second part of this Afterword flows from
these sources and also from the urgent need, from the 1980s on, to
redeem modernism from critiques that claimed it clung nostalgically to
a lost wholeness, and to reject its casting as the anemic second cousin
to a more intellectually robust and uncompromising post-modernism.
Understanding some of the intense worry over being taken in by nos-
talgia—both for the modernists and for ourselves—may further clarify
nostalgia’s protean nature, both as a powerful force and as a troubling
obsession.
Modernist nostalgia
After World War I, the Edwardian era famously became the site of nos-
talgic longing. As historian Samuel Hynes points out, “Men and women
after the war looked back at their own pasts as one might look across
a great chasm to a remote, peaceable place on the other side” (xi). The
past became a convenient object of desire, something just out of reach
but still vivid in the imagination. As Hynes and many others have
pointed out, this sense of discontinuity became part of the myth of the
war, and the idea that the previous era was a peaceable time does not
stand up to historic scrutiny. Despite the fact that we can debunk the
myth of a peaceable kingdom, it matters that people felt an outpour-
ing of nostalgia for the pre-war era as an imagined place of safety and
comfort. As several of these essays note, the traumatic experience of
war could produce a nostalgia bordering on pathology, as we find, for
example, in the amnesiac hero of The Return of the Soldier, as addressed
in Bernard Schweizer’s essay. Nostalgia could also serve as an antidote
to trauma, as explored by Hemmings in his discussion of Sassoon. Both
Sassoon and West knew, however, that soldiers often struggled with the
guilt that such nostalgia might bring, threatening as it did to obscure
the darker realities of the war. Nostalgia in the era became double edged:
both a welcomed if imagined escape from war’s trauma, offering a sense
of hope that another reality was possible, but also a threat to the mem-
ory of war, a forgetting that might even lead to further traumas.
The threat that after the war, people might forget or cover over its
hard truths, produced an equally famous backlash against nostalgia,
and indeed against any abstract concept that promised some idyllic
picture of tranquility. Blending with the rebellion against everything
Victorian already present in the pre-war era, this backlash encompassed
many popular sites of nostalgic longing: the idea of a beautiful rural
England that offered an escape from the war seemed to many of the war
poets a false façade fronting a treacherous world; the higher class image
of a civilized, gentile country estate faced cries that this very economic
hierarchy had helped fuel the war. The shifts in gender roles fostered
by the war disrupted nostalgic images of a domestic scene, where a
benign maternal figure gently nurtured her family before a well-tended
fire. Ironically, the war made such nostalgic scenes both more power-
ful and more elusive, and simultaneously produced for many veterans
and writers a rage against these nostalgic pictures and the longing they
might evoke.
As we can see in these essays, the critiques by modernist writers of
nostalgic images assumed several forms. First, after an evocation of the
image, a subsequent denial that the original image was true or was ever
true; Maren Linett’s essay suggests how this critique works in Elizabeth
Bowen’s myth of the mother–son dyad and its eventual destruction.
Second, again after the evocation of the image, the often stark reali-
zation that such a picture is no longer available and never would be
again, as Patricia Rae explores in Orwell’s novel on fishing, and Bernard
Schweizer investigates in Rebecca West’s nostalgia and anti-nostalgia.
Elizabeth Outka 255
Third, a more ambiguous nostalgia that sought both to admire a

particular aspect of the past while staying alert to its problems, as Sarah
Edwards observes in the work of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.
Underlying all these reactions is the pervasive wish on the part of the
writer to avoid being taken in—to avoid placing faith in a mirage that
threatens to obscure harsher truths or that lulls one into a dangerous
forgetting of the darker realities learned in the war.
Nostalgic desire—and the fear of nostalgic desire—were fueled not only
by the war, but also by a less well-known revolutionary force emerging
around the same time: the rapid rise in the selling of nostalgic images
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Marketers, architects,
and writers were evoking nostalgic desire and selling nostalgic images in
novels, advertisements, and housing and community design, as I have
discussed elsewhere at greater length.3 Around the turn of the century,
advertisements shifted from selling particular items to selling particular
lifestyles, often (though certainly not solely) built around images of
domestic tranquility or rural ease. The Garden City Movement and the
model towns at Bournville and Port Sunlight reproduced (in part) older
village models. The popular Ideal Home Show showcased the newest
home improvements alongside carefully crafted recreations of old villages.
Country Life magazine leapt into prominence, and rural scenes of all types
were for sale in ways not previously seen in Britain. Understandably, this
multi-faceted selling of the “Olde England” aesthetic could unsettle writ-
ers and the general public. H. G. Wells, in his novel Tono Bungay, offers
a devastating critique of the polymorphous marketing that was happy
to build any kind of narrative, including appeals to nostalgic images of
rural England, to sell products. And as Patricia Rae notes in her essay on
Orwell, this nostalgic selling not only hid the environmental degrada-
tion of the countryside, but hid the commercial culture’s complicity in
that damage as well. Pairing nostalgia, already a dubious enterprise, with
the equally suspicious consumer culture, only increased the sense in the
early twentieth century that nostalgia was at best a distraction and at
worst a dangerous mask for serious problems.
As the essays in the collection point out, of course, reactions to nos-
talgia were decidedly mixed; while some modernists embraced nostalgia
(though often later rejecting it violently, as Elizabeth Bowen does),
almost every essay in this category still suggests a hesitant, or anxious,
or qualified embrace, and often with excellent reasons. A key exception
to such anxiety, however, runs through several of the essays: the power
conferred by self-consciously constructed nostalgia. In some respects, of
course, nostalgia like everything else is always a construction. But the
nostalgia that seems to inspire particularly acute anxiety is the kind that
seems to be out of the control of the viewer, one that evokes what is seen
as a pure or true past image that is at the same time demonstrably and
forever out of reach: the past we find in Schweizer’s article on Rebecca
West, or the myth of maternal plenitude that Linett explores in Elizabeth
Bowen. Nostalgia potentially becomes more useful, more powerful, and
less dangerous, when it is wielded not as an overpowering longing but as
a self-aware construction, capable of change. Here we find Eve Sorum’s
concept of Auden’s protean nostalgia, Forster’s complex development
of nostalgia in defense of art, as outlined in John Su’s essay, and the
nostalgic désistance of James Joyce in Christy Burns’ analysis. For these
authors, nostalgia becomes a tool, something to be created, disman-
tled, reconfigured, and rebuilt. Such construction might encompass an
author’s own personal formation of nostalgic images for his or her own
consumption, or the creation—and by extension the evocation—of nos-
talgic desire in other readers or viewers through a shaping of particular
scenes or images. So for example, as Robert Hemmings notes, Siegfried
Sassoon could recreate and reconstruct in memory scenes of rural ease
that were in part based on his own pre-war experiences, but that were
envisioned in his present to combat traumatic memories. Such scenes
did predictably produce anxiety that the nostalgia would hide the “true”
memories, but were nevertheless connected to Sassoon’s (partial) recov-
ery. Modernist nostalgia that was less for individual use, and more for
general consumption within a particular art work, is perhaps rendered
less dangerous (or at least, less a cause of anxiety) by another unique
trait: it could also—powerfully—invite its own critique without negat-
ing the longing itself. The nostalgia we find in Auden or Joyce or Woolf
simultaneously suggests or refers to or plays with nostalgic images or
longing, and also, by highlighting its constructed, malleable quality,
invites readers to analyze its construction without necessarily dismiss-
ing it as fraud. Joyce, for example, as Burns’ essay suggests, plays with
various types of nostalgia in relation to mourning, suggesting through
its multiple uses its protean and constructed quality. Likewise, Virginia
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse surely invites readers both to appreciate, nos-
talgically, the lost era of “The Window” section while always maintain-
ing a critical stance towards this very past.
In highlighting such a constructed nostalgia, these writers were in
fact paralleling developments in consumer culture, developments that
sought to disarm anxiety over nostalgia by simultaneously evoking
it while maintaining a critical or ironic distance. The marketing of
nostalgia in this era—from model towns to new homes designed to
Elizabeth Outka 257
look old to shifts in advertising and store design—offered an entic-

ing paradox, both a dash of nostalgic flavor shorn of the dirt or work
that might go into, say, a rural retreat, and the latest, most up-to-date
products. It was a nostalgia that might be constructed and changed and
self-fashioned by the viewer or buyer, taken seriously yet always subject
to change or critique. Indeed, for the marketing strategy to work, buyers
had to see the nostalgic aura as something they wanted, but also see it
as something constructed and thus available for purchase. Such selling
is problematic in a range of ways—it’s right of course to be anxious or
disdainful of nostalgia in many cases—but the power of these sorts of
constructions should not be overlooked, either in the writers or in the
marketing. Understanding such constructions in turn offers a way for
modernist critics to approach nostalgia, for, as I turn to next, anxiety
over nostalgia also has a distinctive history in modernist criticism.
Critical anxiety, critical nostalgia
Just as modernist writers employed various types of nostalgia aimed

at satisfying different kinds of desires, modernist critics often exhibit
various forms of anxiety about such nostalgia, anxiety that arises from
several sources unique to the subject. First, and most overwhelmingly,
critics know the later terrifying uses of nostalgia by various fascist
regimes after WWI, leading up to and encompassing Nazi Germany.
The mixture of nostalgia and politics may produce a version of what
Svetlana Boym has called “restorative” nostalgia, a type that attempts a
“transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” that promises a return
to origins and to an “absolute truth” of a tradition (Boym xviii). One
only need recall the Nazi’s fervent promotion of the supposedly authen-
tic old-fashioned, quaint country store, one that had been contami-
nated by foreign corruption, to see the dangers of this type of nostalgia.
As critic Robert Hemmings summarizes in his book, Modern Nostalgia,
Dangerous consequences result when nostalgia’s contempt for the

present is applied to the political realm, as occurred in the modern
period. The use of modern technology to impose the pattern of pre-
industrial society on modern society produces fascism. . . .While all
forms of nostalgia may not be politically conservative, it is certainly
true that modernist nostalgia in these terms is rightly descried by
critics as reactionary, regressive and dangerously ignoring or distort-
ing the complexities of contemporary life in favour of the imposition
of an idealized construction of past order. (10)
In the twentieth century, appeals to nostalgia have been used to justify

atrocities and to distort national and political aims. And such nostalgia
could also cover over a violent imperial past, as Carey Snyder observes
in D. H. Lawrence’s uncritical embrace of a primitivism that ignores his
own complicity in imperial history. Such efforts have been supported
by the new sophistication of marketing, advertising, and propaganda
that have developed ever more refined ways of packaging nostalgia.
For authors and critics, as John Su notes in Ethics and Nostalgia in the
Contemporary Novel, “A diagnosis of nostalgia typically earns a writer or
scholar condemnation; to be nostalgic is to be ‘out of touch,’ reaction-
ary, even xenophobic” (2). As this collection proves, and as Su himself
goes on to argue, nostalgia is now seen as far more complicated, but the
complicity of nostalgia and the fascist regimes of the twentieth century
will always make discussing nostalgia and modernism a dicey and often
anxious endeavor.
Modernist critics have additional reasons to be anxious, however, as
nostalgia has proven a particular stumbling block for modernist criti-
cism. On the one hand, nostalgia at first glance seemed antithetical to
modernism and the urge to “make it new” and defy tradition. Under
this reading, if a writer was nostalgic, he or she was not truly modern-
ist. Such a simplified reading of modernism has been dispelled in recent
years, but this underlying critical assumption remains a specter in the
criticism. On the other hand, modernist critics have long been fighting
accusations that modernist writers were indeed too nostalgic. In the
last twenty years, as modernist critics know, we have been revising and
reexamining modernism, roughly dating from the first meeting of the
Modernist Studies Association conference in 1999. Tired of having the
post-modernists use modernism as their whipping boy, modernist critics
revolted and reclaimed modernism as an era rich in complications and
deserving of close study. Part of what the critics sought to counter were
charges that modernism itself was problematically nostalgic, searching
for a lost wholeness, as Lyotard famously remarked. All the agony and
despair over fragmentation itself implied, Lyotard’s argument went,
that the modernists dreamed of unity, dreamed of restoring what had
been lost. The new modernisms sought to reject this nostalgic label;
with some of the same fervor the modernists used to distinguish them-
selves from the “old-fashioned” Victorians, modernist critics demanded
a reappraisal of modernism as radical, new, intimately connected to
history and to marketing, and (often) decidedly anti-nostalgic. This
new energy lead to many articles and papers exploring the “but what
IS modernism?” question, one we continue to ask and to answer. The
Elizabeth Outka 259
central claim I am making, though, is that the very revival of modern-

ism was at least in part about defending modernism from charges of
nostalgia, charges that only added to the discomfort surrounding nos-
talgia in the twentieth century.
Now over a decade past the first Modernist Studies Association con-
ference, modernism has been studied from many angles, its definition
alternatively expanded and narrowed, its many characteristics reexam-
ined, overturned, and reconfirmed, its central players in a constant state
of flux and reappraisal, its boundaries widened and crossed and newly
shaped. In fact, this very plasticity should itself be seen as intrinsic
to modernism, a movement defined by its movement, by its flux and
its slippage among a series of contradictions and oppositions. Having
achieved this richness, it is perhaps time for us to take a collective criti-
cal breath, to relish this revival and to see that nostalgia too might be
a concept rich in contradiction, and not necessarily the death knell of
modernism. Modernist nostalgia can indeed be traced to a range of dis-
turbing political manipulations and to a host of commercial imitations;
it can also, as we’ve seen, be linked to progressive and even enlighten-
ing plans for radical change, and, as I have argued elsewhere, its com-
mercial manifestations often had much to teach us. While certainly not
as flexible or as varied as modernism itself, nostalgia can nevertheless be
explored in relationship to modernism by using some of the same vari-
ety of approaches we have successfully brought to modernist studies.
Particular kinds of anti-nostalgia can hold additional risks for
modernism and for scholars of modernism. Critiques that focus on
nostalgia as a blind for something else, or as a false imitation, remain
essential for exploring the more disturbing political implications of
nostalgia. Potentially (though not always) more problematic are cri-
tiques that adopt a sour grapes approach, declaring that the objects of
nostalgia were never that great, that whatever idealized homey image
of maternal comfort or pastoral bliss were imagined, they were false,
misremembered, fundamentally fake, or screens to cover up a sinister
inequality. This sort of anti-nostalgia can act as a temporary balm for
mourning, both for critics and authors: whatever anyone might long
for or miss, it can be declared a mirage (and of course, sometimes it
is a mirage or a cover for troubling ideologies). Elizabeth Bowen, as
Maren Linett points out, can ruthlessly destroy the idyllic mother/child
dyad, the destruction calling the original dyad itself into question.
During and after WWI, debunking became a popular approach and
indeed perhaps an appealing option; faced with little hope of address-
ing nostalgic longing, soldiers and writers could declare such dreams
had little substance in reality, potentially assuaging the sense of loss

when no other remedy was available. As critics, we are trained to do
the same, suspiciously (and often rightly) eying the pastoral scene for
signs of oppressive class relations and viewing images of familial bliss
with knowing smiles. Despite the need to be alert to nostalgia’s prob-
lems, the potential danger here is that we will have nothing to lose.
Nostalgia can in fact be a sign of loss, a witness, as it were, to something
(or someone) missing that is now potentially un-recoverable and for-
ever out of reach. Maintaining nostalgia may thus become an effort to
memorialize, to hold and to lament something still valuable and worth
mourning. To address these efforts by declaring them unnecessary and
misplaced is tempting, but not always the appropriate response. As
critics, to see all modernist nostalgia as something dangerous to mod-
ernism, something we must erase or declare false before modernism
can be accepted or embraced anew, risks missing how nostalgia might
suggest the profound and understandable sense of unrecoverable loss
experienced in the aftermath of war.4
We have to learn to read modernist nostalgia slowly, tracing asso-
ciations among a variety of actors (to borrow terms from sociologist
Bruno Latour5). To theorize about nostalgia, we need to network—to
see nostalgia not as a preformed thing out there for us to uncover,
but as something felt, recorded, constructed, and reconstructed, by
authors, marketers, veterans, and critics. At times we can trace associa-
tions between certain types of nostalgic longing to a host of disturbing
political and social manipulations, and likewise to useful psychological
defenses and memorializations. Modernist nostalgia in particular can
partake of the new understandings of memory in the twentieth century
that arose from Freud, Bergson, William James, and others who saw
memory as something always in flux, often hidden, and made up of
disjointed yet fluid scraps of experience. Unlike the Victorian approach,
outlined by Nicholas Dames, that used nostalgia to reconstruct a more
pleasant past and employ a selective forgetting, modernist nostalgia
loses some of these boundaries, at times drawing on amnesia, but at
other times becoming a calculated, self-conscious stance, or a hapless
inability to face the present, or a prescient vision of a better future.
Transferring some of the multiplicity we have brought to our notions
of modernism, we can approach modernist nostalgia with an open
mind (without setting aside our critical faculties). Just as we can leave
off hand-wringing over what modernism IS, we can in turn consider
nostalgia with curiosity rather than simply suspicion, as indeed this
collection does.
Elizabeth Outka 261
Notes
1. This Afterword, like this collection, focuses on nostalgia and modernism in
Britain, Ireland, and America. More study is needed on nostalgia and modern-
ism outside of these countries and in a transnational context.
2. In this Afterword, whenever I refer to “modernist critics,” I mean critics who
write about modernism, not necessarily people who are critical of modernism
itself.
3. See Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified
Authentic.
4. Indeed, hungering for a “pure” modernism freed from any taint of nostalgia
is itself a nostalgic gesture.
5. Latour uses these terms in describing Actor-Network Theory in his work
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.
Works cited
Hemmings, Robert. Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma, and the Second
World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008.
Hynes, Samuel. The War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture.
New York: Atheneum, 1991.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.
New York: Oxford UP, 2005.
Authentic. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
Su, John J. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2005.
Wells, H. G. Tono-Bungay. 1909. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1989.
Index
Abercrombie, Patrick, 97, 98 and “New Year Letter”, 170, 172

Ackerley, J R, 43 and nostalgic desire, 172
Adorno, Theodor, 199, 212, 222 and “Prime”, 176–7
adulthood, and nostalgia, 26 and “Reading”, 172
advertising, and nostalgia, 255, 256–7 and shifting allegiances of, 166
Aldington, Richard, 195 and “Spain”, 169, 186
Allen, Brooke, 238 and “Squares and Oblongs”, 169
Amenities Front, 155 and symbolic landscape, 170
American Psychological Association and “The Watershed”, 169–70
(APA), 219 Austin, Linda M, 140
anarchism, and nostalgia, 25 authenticity, 158
Arnold, Matthew, 60–1, 113
Attridge, Derek, 224 Bailey, Christopher, 94
Auden, W H, 14, 15, 16, 159 Barnes, Djuna, 247
and “1929”, 168–9 Baucom, Ian, 132
and “Another Time”, 166 Baudelaire, Charles, 58, 114, 117
and anti-nostalgia, 166, 168–70 Benjamin, Walter, 126, 199, 213n3
and “Consider”, 177 Bennett, Arnold, 100
and definition of poetry, 169 Berger, John, 59
and “In Memory of Sigmund Bergonzi, Bernard, 245
Freud”, 169 Bergson, Henri, 156
and “In Praise of Limestone”, 166: biopolitics, 128n1
aesthetic of, 176; changeable and popular culture, 113
nature of limestone, 176; and urban nostalgia, 119, 122, 124,
constancy of change, 175; 125
debunks idealization of landscape, Blanchard, Lydia, 134
175; ethical implications of Blanch, Sophie, 107
landscape, 174–5, 178; exile, The Blue Review (journal), 132, 133,
174; homesickness, 173, 174; 136
inconstancy, 173; landscape, Blunden, Edmund, 47, 153, 154, 163n7
173–4; landscape as feminine Bonnett, Alastair, 25
body, 177; location, 172; Boumphrey, Geoffrey M, 155
modernist nostalgia, 167; Bowen, Elizabeth, 11, 13
progressive form of nostalgia, on appeal of nostalgia, 71
178; protean nature of object of and art’s relationship with time, 71
nostalgia, 172–3, 176; regenerative and The Death of the Heart: betrayal,
possibilities, 177; relationship to 82; mother–child relationship,
other poems, 176–8 76–8, 82
and “In Transit”, 177–8 and Eva Trout: Eva as self-portrait,
and “Letter to Lord Byron”, 170 87; language, 88; matricide, 72,
and mechanization, 172 86–8; mother–child relationship,
and “Morality in an Age of 78–9, 82, 85–7; symbolic suicide,
Change”, 172, 174 87–8
262
Index 263
and The House in Paris, 73–4: Brown, Spencer Curtis, 84

mother–child relationship, 75–6 Burke, Thomas, 14, 15, 111, 121
and The Little Girls, 74–5, 78, 81, and affinity with modernists, 121–2
82–4 and biopolitics, 122, 124, 125
and mother–child relationship, and divided London, 122
72–3, 88–9: abandonment, 79–80, and East London, 122–3
85–6; in The Death of the Heart, and link between art and popular
76–8, 82; defence of her mother, psychology, 124
80, 81; in Eva Trout, 78–9, 82, and London in My Time, 124
85–7; grief over mother’s death, and memory and perception, 126–7
82–5; her mother’s eagerness and misgivings over cinema, 121
for death, 85; in The House in and modernist aesthetics, 124,
Paris, 75–6; in The Little Girls, 125–6
78, 81, 82–4; matricide, 86–8; and music hall, 123–6, 127:
mental abstraction, 79–80, 81–2; contrast with cinema, 124–5
relationship with her own and Nights in London, 123
mother, 79–81 and Out and About London, 121
and Pictures and Conversations, 84, and restoring unity of London,
85, 87 123
and rejection of nostalgia, 73–5
and Seven Winters, 79–80 Canaan, Gilbert, 146n6
and “The Cult of Nostalgia”, 71, 75 Carrington, Dora, 146n6
and “The Idea of France”, 80 Caruth, Cathy, 38
Boym, Svetlana, 3, 48, 49, 51, 94, 149, Caserio, Robert, 31
167, 210, 257 Casey, Edward, 5
Bracewell, Michael, 114 Castle, Gregory, 231n2
Bridges, Robert, 185 Chaplin, Charlie, 121
Brittain, Vera, 54, 60 Childs, Peter, 7
Brooker, Peter, 114, 116 Chinitz, David, 120
Brooke, Rupert, 16, 17, 153, 154 Churchill, Winston, 188
and “A Song”, 189 Clark, Suzanne, 218
and classical education, 188 classical languages
and decline in knowledge of and cultural cachet of, 186–7
classical languages, 185 and decline in knowledge of, 185,
and English identity, 188–9 186
and “Letter to a Live Poet”, 185–6, and English identity, 185, 187–8
191–5 and value of, 187
and meter, 185–6, 188, 189–90, Clewell, Tammy, 233n28, 239
196: criticism of Pound’s use of, Clifford, Lady Anne, 106, 109n8
190–1; “Letter to a Live Poet”, close reading, 9
191–5 Cohen, Debra Rae, 28
and parody of Housman, 191 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 190
and Pound’s view of, 186 Connolly, Cyril, 245, 247
and reputation of, 188 conservatism, and nostalgia, 7
and review of Pound’s Personae, consumer culture, and nostalgia, 255,
190–1 256–7
and “The Old Vicarage, Council for the Preservation of
Grantchester”, 189, 195 Rural England (CPRE), 97, 98,
Brooks, David, 25 102, 155
264 Index
country houses, 93 and “Gerontion” (1920), 54, 55

and ambivalence about, 98, 103 and impersonality, 55, 64–5
as feminized space, 101 and jazz, 120, 121
as microcosm of pre-industrial and “La Figlia Che Piange”, 64, 65
society, 98–9 and memory, 54
and National Trust, 95 and modernist aesthetic, 120
and organic link with land, 99 and music hall, 111: bad faith in
and post-First World War sales of, account of, 121; eulogy for Marie
95 Lloyd, 118–19, 120
and postimperial melancholy, 132 and places of home in poetry of,
and preservation movement, 96–8 57–8
in Sackville-West’s The Edwardians, and “Portrait of a Lady”, 63–4
100–4, 105–6, 107–8 and present and past, 59
in Woolf’s Orlando, 98–9, 104–5, and Prufrock and Other Observations,
106–7, 108 56, 63–4: dedication of, 63
countryside and repudiation of past passions,
and commodification of, 154–5 54–5
and growth of interest in, 153 and resistance to nostalgic
and personal freedom, 154 remembrance, 54, 55
and preservation of, 155 and The Sacred Wood, 119
as source of spiritual patriotism, 154 and “The Dry Savages”, 68, 69
cultural studies, 21n4 and “The Love Song of J Alfred
Prufrock”, 57, 63
Dames, Nicholas, 6, 200, 206, 260 and “Tradition and the Individual
Davis, Fred, 109n6 Talent”, 55, 59, 64, 65, 171
Derrida, Jacques, 226–7, 228 and un-homeliness of characters in
desire, and nostalgia, 5 poetry, 57
désistance, 222, 224–5, 226–7, 229 and unresolved nostalgia, 56
DiBattista, Maria, 76, 77, 83 and urban dystopia, 119
Dickinson, Emily, 58–9 and The Waste Land, 54, 57: absence
Doyle, Laura, 10 of nostalgia, 62–3; past times in,
61–2; popular music, 119–20
Eagleton, Terry, 113, 186 Elleray, Michelle, 142
Edman, Irwin, 171–2 Emig, Rainer, 175
Education Act (1870), 186 English identity, and classical
Eiland, Howard, 126 education, 185, 187–8
Eliot, T S, 11, 13, 15, 198 English literary education, 186
and “A Game of Chess”, 57 and displacement of Classical
and “Ash Wednesday”, 55 education, 186, 187
and “Burnt Norton”, 56, 69n4: ethics, and nostalgia, 167–8, 174
impersonal distancing, 67;
mathematics of nostalgia, 68; fascism
memory and desire, 66; nostalgia and modernist aesthetics, 198–9
in, 65–6, 67; ruminations on and nostalgia, 3, 213n4, 257
nostalgia, 67–8 Felski, Rita, 102, 220–1, 244
and dancing, 120–1 and political formalism, 9–10
and dramatic tension in verse, 54 femininity, and modernity, 102
and Four Quartets, 66, 68 Finny, Gail, 222
and future time, 68–9 Fletcher, Valerie, 69n4
Index 265
Ford, Ford Madox, 240 and political aesthetic, 199:

forgetting impossibility of universal criteria,
and memory, 51 202; role of nostalgia in shaping,
and nostalgia, 6 199
Forster, E M, 16, 18, 43, 45 and relationship between aesthetics
and art as source of knowledge, 199 and politics, 200–1
and art’s internal harmony, 18, 200, and self-identification as
201, 212–13 anachronism, 199
and art’s task, 211 and tolerance, 207
and Aspects of the Novel, 207–8 and Two Cheers for Democracy,
and authoritarian politics and 199: “Art for Art’s Sake”, 200–1;
historiography, 208 “The Menace to Freedom”,
and cautiousness about reliability of 206–7; “Tolerance”, 207; “What I
political judgements, 207 Believe”, 211
and critical assessments of, 198 Foucault, Michel, 113, 128n1
and critique of objectivity, 206–7 and heterotopia, 116
and defence of liberal democracy, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, 199,
199 212, 222
and evidence-based and free verse, 184
experiential knowledge, 199, 208, Freud, Sigmund, 52n1, 169, 217,
209–10: complementarity of, 211; 221–2, 227, 228, 230
relationship between, 210 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 227–8
and forms of knowledge, 207–8 functional nostalgia, 94, 108
and history, vision of, 211 Fussell, Paul, 28–9
and Howard’s End, 198, 199, 201: Futurism, 238
arbitrariness, 202; characters’
errors in judgement, 202; Garden City Movement, 255
conclusion of, 209, 210; Garnett, David, 51
experiential knowledge, 210; ghosts, 105–7, 228
failure of aesthetic education, Gibson, Andrew, 112
202; industrial modernization, Gillespie, Michael, 217
206; muddle and connection, Girard, René, 229, 233n27
203–4; narrative of progress, 206; globalization, and imperialist
narrator’s unreliability, 204–5; nostalgia, 132
opposition between evidence and Gordon, John, 232n3
experience, 209–10; oppositions Gordon, Lyndall, 69n4
in, 202–4; question of knowledge, Gorra, Michael, 240, 244, 249
204; selective view of past, 205–6; Gosse, Edmund, 45
unresolved problems, 201–2 Graves, Robert, 39
and liberalism of, 210–11 Green, Henry, 247, 249
and Maurice: experiential
knowledge, 208, 209; happy Haigh-Wood, Vivienne, 69n4
ending, 208–9 Hale, Emily, 69
and nostalgia, 198: experiential Hamalian, Leo, 134
knowledge, 208, 209; function of, Hassan, Ihab, 8
199, 200, 206, 210, haunted house, and nostalgic
211–12; response to economic discourse, 105–6
developments, 200 Head, Dominic, 248
and paradox and contradiction, 212 Hemmings, Robert, 60, 257
266 Index
Henley, W E, 60 from engagement, 229; “Sirens”

heritage industry, 7 episode, 222–4; uses of, 229
Hewison, Robert, 7 Bloom’s odyssey, 220
Hildebidle, John, 176 Bloom’s sexual fantasies, 228
Hill, Octavia, 95 conclusion of, 230–1
Hofer, Johannes, 4, 26, 37, 52n3 désistance, 222, 224–5, 226–7
Homer’s Odyssey, 216 gendering of the self, 218
homesickness, and nostalgia, 4, 5, 26, Homer’s Odyssey, 216
37, 56–7, 167 interpreting, 216–17
Horkheimer, Max, 222 intersubjective relations, 224
Housman, A E, 154 literary re-figuration of grief, 229
and Brooke’s parody of, 191 Mae Dedalus, 227–8: ghost of, 228
Hudson, W H, 154 melancholy, 225
Huffer, Lynne, 72, 88–9 Molly Bloom, 220, 221, 225
Hughlings Jackson, John, 52n1 mourning, 217–18, 221–2, 225
Hunter, Jefferson, 101 nostalgia, 230
Hutcheon, Linda, 5, 51, 167 sado-masochism, 228
Huyssen, Andreas, 8, 38, 51 Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 216
Hynes, Samuel, 31, 33, 173, 253 Stephen’s disaffection with
nostalgia, 218, 227
Ideal Home Show, 255 Stephen’s melancholy, 217, 218,
ideology, and nostalgia, 6 226, 230
imperialist nostalgia, 132 Stephen’s mourning, 228
and Lawrence, 132, 133, 138, 139 Stephen’s refusals, 225–6, 229, 230
and Mansfield, 132, 140, 141 Stephen’s rigidity, 227
and mourning for destroyed native Stephen’s sexual desires, 228
cultures, 132
and paradox of, 132 Kant, Immanuel, 167
and resemblance to response to Kaplan, Caren, 174
land enclosure, 132–3 Kelly, Marian, 75
Isherwood, Christopher, 171 Kenner, Hugh, 183
Kincaid-Weekes, Mark, 134
Jameson, Fredric, 8, 20n3, 58, 66, Knowles, Sebastian D G, 120, 129n5
213n4, 219, 233n25 Kristeva, Julia, 72, 76, 87–8
James, William, 156
Jenkins, Nicholas, 177 Lacan, Jacques, 219, 225
Joad, C E M, 153 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 227,
Johnson, Erica, 106 233n27
Jones, David, 247 and désistance, 224–5
Joyce, James, and Ulysses, 9, 18–19, land enclosures, 132–3
216 Latour, Bruno, 260
anti-climactic dis-union, 230 Lawrence, D H, 15
Bloom and Stephen as flâneurs, 221 and imperialist nostalgia, 132, 133,
Bloom’s mourning, 225, 229 138, 139
Bloom’s nostalgia, 217, 218, and “Indians and an Englishman”,
220, 221–2: accommodating 132, 138–9: complicity with
loss, 230; désistance, 222, forces of modernization, 138;
229, 230; detaching image of nostalgia in, 139; satire of
“woman”, 222–3; distraction tourists, 138
Index 267
and The Lost Girl, Mansfield’s 140, 141; ironic framework,

review of, 135–6 143; nostalgic primitivism, 140;
and Mansfield: first meeting of, Romanticism in, 140, 141
133; relationship between, 133–4 and imperialist nostalgia, 132,
and “New Mexico”, 146n3 140
and pre-conquest New Mexico, and Lawrence: first meeting of,
nostalgia for, 137–8 133; relationship between, 133–4;
and primitivism, 131, 134–5, 146, review of The Lost Girl, 135–6
258 and primitivism, 131–2, 142, 143:
and “The Novel and Feelings”, distancing from, 144; rejection of,
134–5 134, 136, 146
and “The Soiled Rose”, 132, 136–7: and “The Woman at the Store”,
nostalgia in, 137; pastoralism in, 144–6: as anti-idyll of colonial
136; primitivism in, 137 life, 144–6; landscape, 144;
and Women in Love, 131 thwarting desire for quaint
Lawrence, T E, 39, 45 exoticism, 146
Lehmann, John, 247 and Urewera Notebook, 141–2
Levenson, Michael, 212 Mass Observation, 153
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 133 Matless, David, 102
Lewis, Pericles, 184 Mayer, Elizabeth, 173
Lloyd, Marie, and Eliot’s eulogy, melancholy, 220
118–19 and nostalgia, 5–6, 219
longing, and nostalgia, 2, 5 and postimperial melancholy, 132
Loss, Archie, 238 memory
love, and nostalgia, 27–8 and forgetting, 51
Lowenthal, David, 154–5 and nostalgia, 5, 51
Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 227 and trauma, 38
Lyotard, Jean François Mendelson, Edward, 168, 173, 177,
on Joyce’s Ulysses, 9 178n1
and modernism, 8, 258 Merchant Ivory films, 7
and nostalgia, 7–8, 16, 219 meter
and The Postmodern Condition, 7–8 and anxieties over, 184–5
and postmodernism, 8, 9 and Brooke, 185–6, 188–90, 196:
criticism of Pound’s use of,
McCartney, George, 239 190–1; “Letter to a Live Poet”,
Macneice, Louis, 161 191–5
Majumdar, Saikat, 142, 145 and classical languages, 187
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 129n6 and decline in knowledge of
Mansfield, Katherine, 14, 15 classical languages, 185
and colonial status of, 143–4, and English identity, 185, 187–8
146n6 and modernism, 184
and “How Pearl Button Was and mourning loss of knowledge
Kidnapped”, 131–2, 139–43: of, 185
contrast of white confinement and Pound, 183, 184, 195, 196
and Maori freedom, 140–1; and Saintsbury’s definition, 187
elegiac tone, 140, 143; and various meanings of, 183–4,
idealization of Maori, 139, 142, 191
143; ignores colonial history, Miller, Henry, 247
142, 143; imperialist nostalgia, Mills, Patricia, 222
268 Index
modernism North, Michael, 198, 199, 212

and contested meanings of, 171 nostalgia
and dismissal of the past, 171 and aestheticizing of the past, 199
and diverse meanings of, 2 and alternative forms of, 252
and Lyotard on, 8 and ameliorative effects of, 219
and nostalgia, 25, 170–1, 258–60 and anxiety over, 252–3
and political aesthetic, 198–9 and changes in meaning of, 26
and re-examination of, 7, 258–9 and conservatism, 7
Modernist Studies Association, 258 and consumer culture, 255, 256–7
modernity and debunking of, 258
and femininity, 102 and definitions of, 2, 167, 170
and nostalgia, 25 and de-literalizing of a word, 3–7
Monroe, Harriet, 195 and diverse nature of, 252
Morrell, Lady Ottoline, 134 and ethical implications of, 167–8,
Morrell, Philip, 134 174
Morris, William, 94–5 and etymology of, 56
mourning, 221–2 as form of memory and desire, 2
and aggression, 227 and function of, 199, 200
and nostalgia, 5–6, 219 and heritage industry, 7
Murray, Patrick, 95 and historicity of, 200
Murry, John Middleton, 132, 133, and history of, 3–4
134, 135, 140 and ideological nature of, 6
music hall, 14–15 and impact of World War I, 253–4
and Burke’s writings on London, as interpretative stance, 1
123–6, 127: contrast with cinema, and longing for the past, 26, 58–9
124–5 and medical origins of term, 4, 26,
and decline in popularity of, 111 37, 56, 167
and Eliot’s eulogy for Marie Lloyd, and melancholy, 5–6, 219
118–19, 120: bad faith in, 121; and memory, 51
modernist aesthetic, 120 as mnemonic photography, 59
and modernist writers, 112–13 and modernism, 25, 170–1,
and revolutionary impact of 258–60
popular culture, 127–8 and modernist critics, 257–60
and Symons’ London: A Book of and modernist feature of, 2
Aspects, 116–18 and modernity, 25
and urban nostalgia, 111 and mourning, 5–6, 219
Myers, Charles, 26, 38 and multiple objects of, 252
and negative views of, 7–8, 60,
national identity, and heritage 218–19, 257–8
industry, 7 in nineteenth-century, 5
National Trust, 7, 155 and object of, 167
and criticism of, 96 and pathos, 51
and establishment of, 95 and political use of, 257–8
and Vita Sackville-West, 95 and politics of, 1
Newbolt, Henry, 186 and post-First World War
Newbould, Frank, 161 generation, 171–2
New Modernist Studies, 2 as progressive force, 3
Nichols, Daniel, 116 and radicalism, 25
Nicolson, Harold, 96 and resignifying, 7–11
Index 269
and self-consciously constructed, and “Pleasure Spots”, 159–60

255–6 and “Why I Write”, 248
in seventeenth-century, 4–5 Osmond, T S, 184
and sites of, 11–20 Outka, Elizabeth, 10–11, 158
and Spender on, 1–2 and Consuming Traditions, 10
as strategy for survival, 51
and subjective and emotive pastoralism
remembrance, 60 in British World War I literature,
and symbolic thinking, 66 28–9, 153–4
and temporal dimensions of, 5, 26, in Lawrence, 136
58, 59–60, 167 in Orwell, 152, 161
and tension between past and in West, 28, 29, 31
present, 1, 3 pathos, and nostalgia, 51
and unappeasable nature of, 167 Peters, Roderick, 58, 66, 69n2
political formalism, 9–10
Orwell, George, 14, 15–16, 239, 247, popular culture
248 and modernist evaluation of,
and authentic self, 159, 160 111–12, 128
and Coming Up for Air, 149: as revolutionary development in
anticipated mourning, 152; metropolitan life, 127–8
authentic self, 159; awareness see also music hall; urban nostalgia
of real nature of past, 151–2; postimperial melancholy, 132
Bowling as stereotypical postmodernism, 8–9
consumer, 158; changes in fishing Pound, Ezra, 16, 17–18, 121, 198
waters, 156, 157; differences and Brooke, 185: review of Personae
between Orwell and main by, 190–1; view of, 186
character, 150; disillusionment, and “Doria”, 195–6
158–9; ecological limits of and meter, 183, 184, 195, 196:
English Arcadia, 157; Left Book Brooke’s criticism of use of, 190–1
Club scene, 150–1; militarism, Powell, Anthony, 17, 19–20
158; modernist nostalgia, 150; and academic neglect of, 248–9
nostalgia for innocent world, 151; and The Acceptance World, 237,
objection to propaganda, 151; 242–3
pastoral images, 152; physical and allusions to Eliot, 238–9
changes in Bowling, 157–8; and Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant,
progressive political message of, 248
150, 161–2; proleptic elegy, 152; and A Dance to the Music of Time,
rejection of pastoral dreaming, 237: class, 244–5; cultural
161; ruin of home town, 155–6; recurrence, 244; doctrinal
as tale of entrapment, 150; water skepticism, 243–4, 245;
metaphor, 156–7 escaping the present, 241–2;
and commodification of inquisitiveness about human
authenticity, 159–60 behaviour, 245; modern young
and country life and personal writers in, 242; nostalgia as
freedom, 154 thematic material, 241
and fascising process in Britain, 151 and The Kindly Ones, 240
and “Inside the Whale”, 154 and At Lady Molly’s, 246
and The Lion and the Unicorn, 162 and literary apprenticeship, 242
and Nineteen Eighty-Four, 160 and The Military Philosophers, 241
270 Index
Powell, Anthony – continued Romanticism

and modernism, 237–8: nostalgic and critique of post-Cartesian
commitment to, 248; regret at science, 118
ending of, 246, 247–8 and nostalgia, 5
and nostalgia, 244 Rosaldo, Renato, 132, 133, 138, 139
and political neutrality, 249 Rosen, David, 168
and Proust, comparison with, 240–1 Rosenfeld, Isaac, 149
and A Question of Upbringing, 237–8; Rosen, George, 37
opening of, 241 Roth, Michael, 4, 26
and reputation of, 244 Rubenstein, Roberta, 26
and social irrelevance, 244 rural nostalgia, 111
and style of, 248
preservation movement, 93 Sacks, Peter, 153–4
and countryside, 155 Sackville-West, Vita, 14
and debate over nature of, 96, 97 and The Edwardians, 93, 97,
and development of, 94–5 100–1: country house in,
and Edwardian age, 98 100–4, 105–6, 107–8; critique
as modernist enterprise, 94 of timeless Edwardian summer,
proleptic elegy, 152 100–1; cultural inheritance, 100;
Proust, Marcel, 54, 126 female identity, 107–8; feminized
and Powell, comparison with, space, 101; ghostliness, 105;
240–1 masculinity, 102–3; reflective
psychoanalysis, and mourning and nostalgia, 102
melancholia, 5–6 and English Country Houses, 97
and Family History, 104, 108
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 233n24 and family tradition and country
radicalism, and nostalgia, 25 houses, 97
Radstone, Susannah, 60 and functional nostalgia, 108
Rae, Patricia, 224 and ghosts of Knole, 106
railway spine, 37 and The Heir, 95, 96–7, 99, 101
Ramazani, Jahan, 168, 224 and inheritance, 93
Reagan, Ronald, 218 and Knole and the Sackvilles, 93, 101
reflective nostalgia, 49, 94, 167 and National Trust, 95, 97–8
Reilly, Patrick, 163n12 and preservation discourses, 94,
Reinhard, Kenneth, 227 97–8, 108
Resalso, Renato, 15 and reflective nostalgia, 102
restorative nostalgia, 94, 167–8, 257 and renovation of Knole, 104
Richards, I A, 113, 119, 128n2 and sale of Knole’s interiors, 96–7
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 57 and Virginia Woolf, 93–4
Rivers, W H R, 12, 26, 52n1, 119, Saintsbury, George, 187, 196n2
129n6 Santesso, Aaron, 166, 176
and autognosis, 36, 41 Sassoon, Siegfried, 11, 12–13
and forgetting, 40 and aesthetic values, 50, 51
and Freudianism, 40 and “A Fragment of
and re-education, 41 Autobiography”, 42–3
and “Repression of War and “A Soldier’s Declaration”, 39
Experience”, 44, 49 and autognosis, 36:
and Sassoon, 36, 39–41 autobiographical project, 41–2;
and war neuroses, 40 autognostic goal, 42; in interwar
Index 271
years, 41–5; limitations of, 43; Society for the Preservation of

prose autognosis, 45–50 Ancient Buildings, 94–5
and childhood recollections, 46 souvenirs, 145
and development as prose writer, Spender, Stephen
45–6 on Auden, 172
and The Heart’s Journey, 41 and definition of modern writer,
and homosexuality, absence from 171
writings, 43 and elaborate irony, 2
and Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and modernist nostalgia, 1–2, 3,
46: attitude towards poverty, 171: hatred for the present, 2, 3,
47; concluding image of, 49; 50–1; as productive force, 3
countryside, 48–9; Englishness, and The Struggle of the Modern
47; father-figure in, 47; female (1963), 1–2, 3, 50
characters, 47; idealized setting, Sprengnether, Madelon, 81
46–7; portrayal of home, 47–8; Starobinski, Jean, 5, 37
reflective nostalgia, 49 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 115
and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Stewart, Susan, 20n1, 145, 172, 219,
46, 50 223
and modernism, 50 Stewart, Victoria, 80
and nostalgia as strategy for Stray, Christopher, 186
survival, 51, 52 Su, John J, 167–8, 174, 258
and “Repression of War Summers-Bremner, Eluned, 62
Experience”, 40 Swinden, Patrick, 244
and resistance to dwelling on symbolic thinking, and nostalgia, 66
wartime experience, 43–4: Symbolism, and critique of
“A Footnote on the War”, 44–5 post-Cartesian science, 118
and Rivers, 36, 39–41 Symons, Arthur, 14, 15, 111
and Satirical Poems, 41 and Decadent movement, 114
and shell shock, 39 and flânerie, 117
and Sherston’s Progress, 47, 50 and London: A Book of Aspects,
and tension between nostalgia and 114–18: critique of modern urban
trauma, 36 life, 114–15; music hall, 116–18;
and wartime trauma, 39: diagnosed Soho, 115–16
as victim of, 39, 40–1
Scott, Robert Falcon, 102 Tate, Allen, 183
sentimentalism, and nostalgia, 171 temporality, and nostalgia, 5, 26, 58,
Shakespear, Dorothy, 195 59–60, 167
Shakespeare, William, and Hamlet, Thatcherism, and nostalgia, 7
216 Thomas, Sir William Beach, 156
shell shock, 26–7, 38 Tourist Association, 153
and Sassoon on, 39 trauma
see also trauma and early conceptions of, 37–8
Siegel, Carol, 134, 136 and memory, 38
Signature (journal), 133 and nostalgia, 37–9, 51
simple nostalgia, 109n6 and psychological impact of war
Sinfield, Alan, 201 experience, 38
Sitwell, Osbert, 45 and shell shock, 38
Smith, Angela, 144 Trevelyan, G M, 95, 98
Smith, Stan, 178n1 Trilling, Lionel, 198, 213n2
272 Index
uncanny, 106, 109n7 and Put Out More Flags, 245–6

urban nostalgia, 14–15 and Sword of Honour trilogy, 240
and biopolitics, 113, 119, 122, 124, and Vile Bodies, 238
125 Waugh, Patricia, 8
and Burke’s writings on London, Weekley, Frieda, 133
121–7: divided London, 122; East Wells, H G, 98, 99, 255
London, 122–3; link between art West, Rebecca, 11, 12
and popular psychology, 124; and anticipation of postmodern
memory and perception, 126–7; turn, 32
misgivings over cinema, 121; and exile and homesickness, 29
modernist aesthetics, 124, 125–6; and The Judge, 34n3
music hall, 123–6; music hall and process, 30
and cinema contrasted, 124–5; and quandary of nostalgia, 29
restoring unity of London, 123 and The Return of the Soldier: class
and critical reflection, 112 conflict, 30–1; deconstruction
and Eliot’s eulogy for Marie Lloyd, of pleasure/reality binary, 33–4;
118–19, 120: bad faith in, 121; Edwardian elements in, 30–1;
modernist aesthetic, 120 Georgian motifs of nostalgia, 28;
and modernist evaluation of going back in time, 30; idealized
popular culture, 111–12, 128 place, 27, 28; lost love, 27–8;
and revolutionary impact of medicalization of nostalgia, 27,
popular culture, 127–8 30; modernism’s conundrum,
and Symons’ London: A Book of 34; modernist elements, 31–2;
Aspects, 114–18: critique of nostalgia in, 25–6; pastoralism
modern urban life, 114–15; music in, 28, 29, 31; pleasure/reality
hall, 116–18; Soho, 115–16 binary, 32–3; plot, 26; prioritizing
of reality, 33; process in, 33, 34;
Verdenal, Jean, 56, 63, 69 as referendum on nostalgia, 30;
Verlaine, Paul, 114 selective fixation on the past,
Vidler, Anthony, 105–6 30; textual embodiment of
nostalgia, 28
Watts, George Frederic, 49 Whittick, Sheila, 143
Waugh, Evelyn, 17, 19–20, 237, 250 Wilde, Oscar, 61
and allusions to Eliot, 238, 239 Williams-Ellis, Sir Clough, 96
and ambivalence about the Williams, Raymond, 133
modern, 239 Wilson, Edmund, 128n4
and Brideshead Revisited, 237, 238: Wilson, Janelle, 25, 27
aesthetic anachronism, 240; windage, 37
Proustian modernism, 239–40 Winkiel, Laura, 10
and caricaturing politicizing of Wolfreys, Julian, 129n8
writing and reading, 245–6 Woolf, Virginia, 14
and cultural pessimism of interwar and functional nostalgia, 108
right, 239 and To the Lighthouse, 54, 256
and Decline and Fall, 246–7 and “Modern Fiction”, 247
and Futurism, 238 and “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”,
and A Handful of Dust, 238, 239 99, 100, 247, 248
and modernism, 237–8: regret at and Orlando: country house
ending of, 246–8 in, 98–9, 104–5, 106–7, 108;
and Proustian modernism, 239–40 domestic and social change,
Index 273
99–100; ghostliness, 106–7; and Vita Sackville-West, 93–4

identity conflict, 105; impact of and The Waves, 54
technology on the home, 99; Wordsworth, William, 140
inheritance, 93; material objects World War I, and apprehension over
in, 100; transitional nature of nostalgia, 253–4
Edwardian age, 99 Wyatt-Brown, Anne M, 84
and preservation discourses, 94,
108 Yeats, W B, 54, 198

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Modernism and Nostalgia

Also by Tammy Clewell

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

Introduction: Past “Perfect” and Present “Tense”:

8 “There’ll be no more fishing this side the grave”:

Part III Aesthetics

I wish to thank first and foremost the fourteen contributors to this

Christy L. Burns is Associate Professor of English at the College of

disasters of WWI and the 1918 influenza pandemic radically shifted

including Studies in the Novel, Modernism/Modernity, the Journal of Modern

of golden-age yearning, which he claims were always “tempered with

Spender’s account allows us to recognize modernist nostalgia as a ret-

conclusions about the modernist expression of nostalgia, demonstrating

The de-literalizing of a word

The inaugural history and subsequently shifting significance of nostal-

in the seventeenth century to a depathologized phenomenon in the

a symptomology that included fever, sleeplessness, and appetite loss

It is like—indeed in one basic respect it is—omitting site from world.

Modernism and Nostalgia insists on Casey’s deliteralization of the word,

they seek not to quarantine but to allow nostalgic memories of both

nostalgia emerged as the key term of difference. Both modernism and

films.3 Conversely, Lyotard conceives of the postmodern not as the

Form is not merely a container for content but a vital means of

Less a unified methodology than “a loose assemblage of reading tech-

dismantling of the longstanding view of modernism as a rarified and

its work) offers an interpretative frame flexible enough to capture the

As a whole, Modernism and Nostalgia engages Outka’s understanding of

Sites of modernist nostalgia

Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, as the subtitle sug-

perspectives: a soldier seeking to escape the bloody fighting of the Great

In a nuanced account of these juxtapositions, Hemmings shows how

Orwell’s case, as Rae shows, this difficult discovery leads to progressive

Anthony Powell, and Evelyn Waugh, these essays demonstrate how

new kind of elite readership, a professional class of teachers and schol-

which it draws: Homer’s The Odyssey which reflects the optimistic

modernism as a whole, it also enabled both writers to produce texts that

Roth, Michael S. “The Time of Nostalgia: Medicine, History and Normality in

In her study Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning, Janelle Wilson claims

powerful need to substitute a realm of lovely though wholly fictitious

In addition to expressing the seriousness with which West regarded

nostalgia by going “home,” but rather the more difficult proposition

conflict and feminist stirrings. Indeed, there are intimations of social

This clever reading helps to clarify my own argument. Indeed, it is in

narrative logic, is compounded by the palpably deconstructive (or shall

Towards the end of 1944, Siegfried Sassoon reluctantly agreed to edit

Nostalgia and trauma

Nostalgia is rooted in pathology and the experience of war. The young

The actual occurrence of nostalgia is revealed by a continuing mel-

Hofer’s symptomatology bears an uncanny resemblance to those

of the nineteenth century, physicians began to explore more closely

In the 1930s, Sassoon describes the understanding of wartime trauma

Shell shock. How many a brief bombardment had its long-delayed

He had himself experienced the “sweating suffocation of nightmare,”

Sassoon met Rivers when he was officially, if controversially, diagnosed

Since his neurological training in Germany in the early 1890s, Rivers

“Certainly not” (12). Compared to some of his dramatically incapaci-

“Autognosis” in the interwar years

In a 1921 diary entry Sassoon described the difficulty of knowing

I have formed an inflexible resolve to reveal my real self; my inner

This resolve and understanding of identity based on distinct, multi-

Good-bye; I won’t detain you now; I know

in keeping with Sassoon’s purposeful nostalgia, directed to what he

. . . in those seven odd years I have erected