Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State 9780198816485, 0198816480

Table of contents :
Cover
Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Brave New Worlds, Brave New Words, and Brave New Rooms
Early Modernist Utopianism: Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, and D.H. Lawrence
Reassessing Modernist Interdisciplinarity
Trajectories
1: Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future of Modernism
Initial Appreciations
The Threatened National Future
Decline and Fall
Growing Reservations: Frederick Etchells and Wyndham Lewis
2: Aldous Huxley and the “Brave New World” of Architectural Modernism
Architecture and Governance
Brave New World, Eyeless in Gaza, and the Future of British Literature
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: World War II Draws the Dystopian Future Nearer
3: “Swastika arms of passage leading to nothing”: Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “New” Britain
The New Architecture and “The New Britain”
The New Britain and the Old Literary Modernisms
“The mischief was in her own and other rooms”: The Politicization of Architectural Style
“This did not look like home; but it looked like something—possibly a story”: Language and Architecture Intersect
“The thin air which had taken the house’s place”: Rethinking Modernism
4: Planning for War and Peace: Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and the Dystopian Documentary
Towards a New Britain: Modern Architecture at War
Documenting the Future: The British Documentary Movement and Things to Come
Betjeman’s Anti-Planning Documentaries and Literature
Orwell’s Leftist Anti-Planning
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Evelyn Waugh’s Near Future
Love Among the Ruins
Epilogue: Modernist Afterlives: J. G. Ballard’s “Handful Of Dust”
Bibliography
Index

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OX F O R D M I D - C E N T U RY ST U D I E S The Oxford Mid-Century Studies series publishes monographs in several disciplinary and creative areas in order to create a thick description of culture in the thirty-year period around the Second World War. With a focus on the 1930s through the 1960s, the series concentrates on fiction, poetry, film, photography, theatre, as well as art, architecture, design, and other media. The mid-century is an age of shifting groups and movements, from existentialism through abstract expressionism to confessional, serial, electronic, and pop art styles. The series charts such intellectual movements, even as it aids and abets the very best scholarly thinking about the power of art in a world under new techno-political compulsions, whether nuclear-apocalyptic, Cold War-propagandized, transnational, neo-imperial, super-powered, or postcolonial. Series editors Allan Hepburn, McGill University Adam Piette, University of Sheffield Lyndsey Stonebridge, University of East Anglia

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Reconstructing Modernism British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State A SH L EY M A H E R

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Ashley Maher 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931723 ISBN 978–0–19–881648–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198816485.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgments I am grateful for the research funding that made Reconstructing Modernism possible. A Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis and Mellon Foundation funding supported early work on this project, and a Stevenson Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford, supported it in its latter stages. The Olin Fellowship Program, the Washington University Department of English, and University College provided additional funding for archival research, and the University of Sydney Department of English helped cover production costs. During my research trips, the kind advice and assistance of the staff at the RIBA Drawings and Archives Collection and at the British Library allowed me to make the most of my time there. I would like to thank the editors of ELH and the Journal of Modern Literature for allowing me to revisit material published in those journals. An early version of Chapter 3 appeared as “ ‘Swastika arms of passage leading to nothing’: Late Modernism and the ‘New’ Britain” (Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press) in ELH, Volume 80, Issue 1, Spring 2013, pages 251–85. Short sections from the introduction and Chapter  1 were published as “ ‘Three-Dimensional’ Modernism: The Language of Architecture and British Literary Periodicals” (Copyright © 2019 Indiana University Press) in the Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 43, Issue 1, Fall 2019, pages 71–83. The thoughtful responses of the anonymous readers at both journals sharpened my thinking at key moments for the project. Additional thanks go to the estates of J.  G.  Ballard, John Betjeman, Wyndham Lewis, and George Orwell, as well as to the British Library, the Imperial War Museum, the RIBA Collections, and the Tate, for granting permission to incorporate material from their holdings. Material from the J. G. Ballard Archives by J. G. Ballard. Copyright © J. G. Ballard, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited. “Huxley Hall”, “Inexpensive Progress”, “The Planster’s Vision” & “The Town Clerk’s Views” from Collected Poems by John Betjeman © 1955, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2001. Reproduced by permission of John Murray, an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. “On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory” by George Orwell (Copyright © George Orwell, 1934). Reproduced by permission of

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vi Acknowledgments Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell. I was fortunate to receive feedback on this work from many different people. Several chapters of this book profited from the responses of fellow presenters, seminar members, and panel attendees at conferences of the Modernist Studies Association as well as the House in the Mind Conference at Wadham College, Oxford. I have likewise benefited immensely from the wisdom and support of mentors and colleagues at Washington University in St Louis, the University of Oxford, and the University of Sydney. I would particularly like to thank Barbara Barrow, Dillon Brown, Kate Fama, Paul Giles, Sarah Gleeson-White, Nick Halmi, Isabelle Hesse, Charlotte Kirchhelle, Claas Kirchhelle, Joe Loewenstein, Peter Marks, Bill Maxwell, Melanie Micir, Anca Parvulescu, Vince Sherry, Tiffany Stern, Anna Teekell, Abram Van Engen, and Laura Varnam for their encouragement and their invaluable comments on the work in progress. I am greatly indebted to the series editors—Allan Hepburn, Adam Piette, and Lyndsey Stonebridge—for their incisive responses to my proposal and for welcoming this project into the Mid-Century Studies Series. A special— and very warm—thanks goes to Allan for the care with which he has shepherded this project to completion. His discerning eye and generous advice have significantly improved the manuscript. In addition, I would like to thank the anonymous reader, whose report was transformative for the framing of my argument, and Aimee Wright, who has had an answer ready for each of my many questions. It would be impossible to express my gratitude to Marina MacKay, whose contagious enthusiasm for mid-century literature led me to this project. She has been a tireless booster and mentor, as well as a model of intellectual curiosity and clear thinking. It is also my pleasure—and privilege—to thank Kathy McQueen for kindling my passion for literary study and to thank Ken Egan, Charles Ess, Randall Fuller, Erin Kenny, Michael Hill, Peter Meidlinger, and Jo Van Arkel for challenging me to ask big questions and think across disciplinary boundaries. I count myself lucky to have been born into a family of readers. I owe many thought-provoking conversations about literature and history to my brother, Shawn Maher. My parents, Tom and Cheryl Maher, made the public library a second home and were the earliest audience for my writing. Finally, it is with great fondness that I would like to thank David Ruvolo. Amid change—and moving countless boxes of books across land and sea— he has been an unflagging source of laughter and support.

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Contents List of Illustrations

Introduction: Brave New Worlds, Brave New Words, and Brave New Rooms Early Modernist Utopianism: Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, and D.H. Lawrence Reassessing Modernist Interdisciplinarity Trajectories 1. Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future of Modernism Initial Appreciations The Threatened National Future Decline and Fall Growing Reservations: Frederick Etchells and Wyndham Lewis

ix

1 8 27 34

40 46 56 61

71

2. Aldous Huxley and the “Brave New World” of Architectural Modernism81 Architecture and Governance 84 Brave New World, Eyeless in Gaza, and the Future of British Literature 104 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: World War II 123 Draws the Dystopian Future Nearer 3. “Swastika arms of passage leading to nothing”: Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “New” Britain The New Architecture and “The New Britain” The New Britain and the Old Literary Modernisms “The mischief was in her own and other rooms”: The Politicization of Architectural Style “This did not look like home; but it looked like something— possibly a story”: Language and Architecture Intersect “The thin air which had taken the house’s place”: Rethinking Modernism 4. Planning for War and Peace: Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and the Dystopian Documentary Towards a New Britain: Modern Architecture at War

129 132 137 143 157 167

174 176

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viii Contents Documenting the Future: The British Documentary Movement and Things to Come Betjeman’s Anti-Planning Documentaries and Literature Orwell’s Leftist Anti-Planning

180 189 197

Evelyn Waugh’s Near Future

209

Epilogue: Modernist Afterlives: J. G. Ballard’s “Handful of Dust”

223

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Love Among the Ruins

205 216

Bibliography241 Index255

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List of Illustrations 0.1 Wyndham Lewis’s “Vorticist Composition” of 1915

15

Image credit: “Vorticist Composition,” 1915, Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). Presented by Miss Ethel M. Saunders in memory of her sister 1963. Photo credit: ©Tate, London 2018.

2.1 The Penguin Pool in The New Architecture and the London Zoo88 László Moholy-Nagy, director, The New Architecture and the London Zoo. 1936. Distribution Moholy-Nagy Foundation, 2007.

3.1 Viewing the Model of the New Coventry in A City Reborn136 Dylan Thomas, writer, A City Reborn 1945. Production Gryphon Films, Distribution bfi.org.uk.

3.2 Rural Cottages in a World War I Propaganda Poster

169

“Your Country’s Call.” 1915. ©Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM PST 0320)

3.3 World War II Propaganda Poster Featuring Modernist Housing

170

Abram Games. “Your Britain—Fight for It Now (Housing).” 1942. ©Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM PST 2909)

4.1 Aerial Perspective and Plastic Furniture in the New Everytown

188

H.G. Wells, writer, Things to Come. 1936. Production London Films, Distribution Criterion Collection, 2013.

4.2 Tower Blocks in “An Englishman’s Home” John Betjeman, writer, “An Englishman’s Home.” Bird’s Eye View. 1969. Production BBC, Distribution bbc.co.uk.

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Introduction Brave New Worlds, Brave New Words, and Brave New Rooms

At a time when most in his literary generation had died, poet Stephen Spender stepped forward to document not simply his generation’s past but its future, one readers could not know because it had never materialized. In “Brave New Rooms,” published in a 1993 issue of Design Quarterly, Spender contemplates the future he and other literary innovators had hoped to usher in through backing leftist politics and remaking the material world through good design. Examining what drove 1930s writers, Spender reflects with some nostalgia on a moment when brave new worlds were a utopian rather than a dystopian prospect. Spender likewise recalls the writers’ faith in brave new words, the potential for literature to provide such a new way of seeing the world that seeing new worlds might become possible. And writing from a period when the angular concrete, steel, and glass forms of architectural modernism dotted the landscape as ruins, symbols of the British welfare state’s perceived failure to achieve that better world, Spender fondly testifies to his generation’s faith in brave new rooms, well-designed buildings and everyday objects that could engender a more egalitarian nation. By recording his contemporaries’ belief in aesthetic newness as a means of achieving political newness, Spender tells an important (and largely forgotten) story about British literary modernism and its aftermath. That story begins with early modernists like Wyndham Lewis, who prefigured 1930s authors’ faith in the ability of modernist design to restructure their world. Even as Spender expresses nostalgia for the heady romance between literature and architecture, his “Brave New Rooms” coyly plays off Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, suggesting a dark side to the utopias that modernist architects promised. By referring to Huxley, Spender acknowledges the divide that later arose between modern architecture and modern literature, as authors such as Huxley moved from enthusiastically supporting

Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State. Ashley Maher, Oxford University Press (2020). © Ashley Maher. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198816485.001.0001

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2  Reconstructing Modernism modernist architecture and design to fearing that those new forms and materials could become a vehicle for totalitarianism. Spender’s account underlines that the history of twentieth-century British literature is a story of writers’ tumultuous affairs with modern design and with the critical language that marked modernist buildings as political as well as formal experiments. His era represents an especially important moment in this larger history, for modernist architects’ primary medium during the early and mid-twentieth century was language: periodical publications, exhibitions, and published plans. Spender’s collaborator Cyril Connolly referred to this revolutionary architecture as a “new three-dimensional poetry,” and authors and architects seized onto the idea of architectural form as a complex poem.1 Even more, mid-century literary engagement with architecture fell during a critical point in the theorization of literary modernism. Through the criticism they left behind, we witness authors adopting the term “modernism” to describe this architecture, long before the term became common in literary criticism. As they approached literary innovation through architectural experiment, they saw the future of literature as intertwined with the future of architecture, for better or for worse. Reconstructing Modernism thus reveals how a utopian architectural modernism instigated a literature of skepticism and dissent, one that repackaged literary modernist notions of autonomy and authorial detachment as political as well as aesthetic objectives. In their encounter with this “new three-dimensional poetry,” authors weighed modernism as a collection of ideas as well as a commitment to renovating form. By taking modernism to the masses, architecture allowed these writers—from John Betjeman to J.  G.  Ballard—to contemplate and reformulate the tenets and practices of literary modernism. Because of this architectural manifestation, “modernism” represented not just a style fostered by a select group but a set of political and aesthetic debating points that coalesced in architectural form. More than a formal tendency, modernism was also a rhetoric, a language shared, modified, and sometimes decried by British authors across the century and across literary groups. In an era when Brutalist buildings are derided as fascist architecture or used as social capital amid a resurgence of “mid-century modern” design, Spender’s piece allows us to witness a time when modernist architecture seemed a boon to both literature and progressive politics, even as authors became some of its earliest and fiercest opponents. Chronicling his generation’s formative

1  Cyril Connolly, “Comment,” Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art 15 (April 1947): 153.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  3 atmosphere, Spender reveals a shared imagination of a world where modernist style served as a structuring social and aesthetic principle: “It was possible, during the 1930s, to think of transforming society through designed utensils in a designed kitchen in a designed house in a designed city.”2 Modernist style—an artistic and architectural style with potential applications to literary style—is not esoteric but the very substance of that material world. In place of distinct aesthetic forms, the designed society joined one form to another, one discipline to another. What Spender outlines is nothing less than a public modernism, made possible by the enthusiastic exchange of ideas between British modernists of every medium. Spender documents meetings in artist-friendly Hampstead between himself; artists Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, and Barbara Hepsworth; writer and art critic Herbert Read; and New Verse editor Geoffrey Grigson, where they discussed the possibility for modernist forms to be mass produced while retaining their aesthetic value. Spender characterizes good design as a shared culture of faith, “an obsession people in that decade had with the belief that the design of objects—ranging from the buildings in a city quarter to the utensils in their kitchens—could influence the pattern of their lives.”3 From the opening paragraph, Spender emphasizes that this obsession was particularly strong in 1930s writers: “It was an idea that W.  H.  Auden expressed forcefully in a poem ending with the line, ‘New styles of architecture, a change of heart.’ ”4 This material world was continuous with the world of belief and allegiance. To his late-twentieth-century readers, Spender is quick to explain that his generation’s commitment to modernist design was a means of contemplating new forms of citizenship. A mass-produced modernism meant a modernism available to the masses, one that “would transcend all boundaries of social class in a world where art was available to the people.”5 Modernist design, in Spender’s opinion, was uniquely capable of channeling the “change of heart” that Auden described, an aesthetic revolution that was 2  Stephen Spender, “Brave New Rooms,” Design Quarterly, 158 (1993): 6. 3  Ibid., 2. 4  Ibid. Modern architecture’s status in Auden’s poem has been debated. In his biography of Auden, Humphrey Carpenter notes that in 1965, Auden requested that this poem be dropped from Random House’s edition of his collected poems. Auden’s “objection” to that poem, Carpenter argues, “was that its last line, which commends ‘New styles of architecture, a change of heart’, was a lie”: “ ‘I have never liked modern architecture,’ he said, ‘I prefer old styles, and one must be honest even about one’s prejudices.’ ” Carpenter calls Auden’s explanation “a wilful misunderstanding of the poem, which is not concerned with actual architecture but with spiritual change.” Carpenter, W.  H.  Auden: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 415–16. 5  Spender, “Brave,” 6.

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4  Reconstructing Modernism also a political revolution. This effort toward “renewal” in art and architecture “tended to be associated with the political left and with causes like town planning,” such that design expanded its reach to the widest possible canvases and resulted in better living conditions for workers across Europe.6 Yet, Spender acknowledges, “the modern design environment could not be equated exclusively with leftism. Even an antisocialist writer like Wyndham Lewis was excited by the idea that architecture, the design of rooms, and of the things within those rooms, could alter people’s lives.”7 This revolutionary modernism bridged longstanding political and formal divisions; architecture came to represent not only a set of politics but also the very site of the political, a means of acting on people from the outside. At this point, the public nature of architecture promised a reciprocal energy to the private nature of literary experience, though later authors came to describe these approaches as oppositional, as we will see in later chapters. The effort to create political renewal through aesthetic renewal, as Spender describes, was a response to World War I horrors: modernist design signified a potentially utopian practice that could change societies so radically that such a war could never occur again. Spender locates the origins of modernist architecture in Weimar Germany, a formative place for his own literary generation. Young Germans turned to modernism to raze the ornamentation of the prior generation. In doing so, they figuratively replaced their parents’ values with the qualities of a “new world—pacifist, socialist, and free-living.”8 Spender describes his own conversion to modernism in 1929, within “a block of modernistic flats” occupied by pho­tog­raph­er Herbert List. He notes that List curated design objects to match the space: “low glass-topped tables, chairs of chrome-steel tubing and plywood.”9 Through clearing away older objects and replacing them with readily manufactured newer items, these figures hoped to change the ma­ter­ial conditions of life across social classes, thus bringing the “change of heart” that Auden anticipated. For Spender, Germans’ self-modernization through design served as a model for remaking Britain as a modern nation. “The young English postwar generation lagged behind the Germans and Scandinavians in their feeling for design,” Spender lamented, since the most design-conscious of his fellow 6  Ibid., 2. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9  Ibid., 4. By tracing the influence of Herbert List upon the Spender–Auden–Isherwood set, we can understand why Isherwood’s Weimar novel Goodbye to Berlin, with its famous line “I am a camera,” investigates photographic style alongside modernist architecture and design, as I will explore in Chapter 3.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  5 Oxford students had looked to the 1890s for inspiration.10 Economic collapse in 1929, however, provided the same stimulus for British modernism that wartime defeat and the following economic privation provided Weimar Germany. Bauhaus ideas consequently permeated Britain—and they gained strength in the 1930s, when the Nazis’ rise led Bauhaus designers to relocate to Britain. Under this design ideology, those “who could not even dream of building a house could easily become owners of a modern lamp or ashtray,” so that modern art no longer represented a lux­ury.11 Spender notes that this enveloping spirit of good design even prompted “a wastepaper basket designed by . . . Nikolaus Pevsner,” the author of a series of influential travelers’ guides to British architectural history.12 The changed economic conditions of Depression Britain thus had the unintended benefit of making the best modern art available to “a great many people, from schoolteachers to taxi drivers.”13 The nation could unite in an appreciation of modernist art. But Spender further emphasizes that this modernism of mass design assumed a particular quality in Britain, unlike that of places like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal America. In Bloomsbury, mural painting allowed artists like Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant to remake domestic space amid new material circumstances, but it lacked the “politicized” quality of America’s government-commissioned public murals. In many ways, Spender implies, one must look not at the content of British modern art and architecture but at the changed form to find a place for the potentially revolutionary to exist even alongside the nostalgic. In this spirit of wrestling with the artistic self in the new modern (and mass) environment, Spender asserts that modernism offered the op­por­tun­ity not just to modernize British spaces but to make truly modern the author who promoted the design-led “change of heart.” Spender describes his self-renovation: When, in the mid-1930s, I moved into the attic flat of an ugly Victorian building in the Hammersmith section of London, I bought two Finnmar chairs, which I imagined were made out of single wide strips of plywood, curled under steam pressure into what was approximately the shape of an  S, and varnished. I also bought a table with a glass top and tubular metal legs, and lamps of frosted glass, like those in Herbert List’s studio . . . . The curtains of the high windows in my flat were simple, the texture of

10  Ibid., 2, 4.

11  Ibid., 4.

12 Ibid.

13  Ibid., 6.

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6  Reconstructing Modernism sacking. In choosing these, I had in mind the curtains in the beautiful Thames-side country house of my friend the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, whose entrance hall had sackcloth curtains onto which the artist John Banting had sewn tape-measure tape in surrealistic designs.14

For Spender, creating a new space for his writing served as a necessary step toward molding himself into a modern writer, and this flat became the headquarters for Horizon, the little magazine that sought to preserve ex­peri­ men­tal modern literature and art during World War II and its aftermath. Much like the writer, the literary work was an outgrowth of this environment. Spender recalls that after his self-transformation, some spiteful reviewer, sneering at one of my early books, wrote that from it you could well imagine the kind of room in which the author lived. The critic improvised a rather devastating description of the objects in my room, dominated by the EMG gramophone, which made me out to be a despicable highbrow.15

In spite of the critical effort to represent this taste—like Spender’s work—as an unimportant fad, Spender maintained that this modernism was a highbrow aesthetic and a potentially cross-class taste. He describes the modern objects he “would have liked but could not afford,” such as a coveted rug “designed by Marion Dorn, the wife of the immensely prolific graphic design genius E.  McKnight Kauffer, any of whose posters or book jackets leaped beyond their commercial and advertising purpose into the category of the best modern art.”16 While noting the still-unaffordable, Spender also suggested that “the best modern art” might be replicable instead of rarefied.

14  Ibid., 5. 15 Ibid. 16  Ibid. In 1954, the Architectural Review’s editors linked E. McKnight Kauffer to Spender’s collaborator Cyril Connolly, who wrote an article for the Review on Shell’s use of modernism in advertising. “E.  McKnight Kauffer.” Architectural Review 116 (December 1954): 351. Of Connolly’s contribution to the “annus mirabilis of 1934,” they write, “For when Cyril Connolly hailed Jack Beddington as the new Lorenzo de Medici, and illustrated three of Kauffer’s best posters to prove the quality of that patronage, he did so in an issue of the Architectural Review which also contained the first publication of Tecton’s Penguin Pool, and the first notices of F.R.S.  Yorke’s The Modern House.” Ibid. Influential mid-century architectural critic Reyner Banham similarly pronounced Connolly’s “The New Medici” “epoch-marking,” and he characterized Connolly’s decision to feature the Isokon Flats in Horizon’s 1946 Ugly Buildings Competition as a milestone in the “disintegration of that alliance between the various elements of the English avant-garde which had made [landmark modernist structures] Isokon and Impington possible.” Banham, “History,” Architectural Review 118 (July 1955): 54.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  7 Spender testifies to a paradox especially pronounced in British literary modernism, namely a drive to mass produce the esoteric. Whereas Adorno theorized modernism as a movement that through its difficulty resisted commodification, Spender represents modernist commodification as a tool for progressive politics. Modernism might be an aesthetic sensibility that is simultaneously highbrow and capacious, insofar as it unites the nation as a community of shared taste. In hindsight, Spender identifies the problems of this technology-driven movement. Much as his title gestures toward potentially totalitarian applications of architectural modernism, his reference to modernists’ enthusiasm for aircraft gestures toward civilian death in the Blitz. “In Moore’s studio,” Spender recalls, “someone once said that any object designed to fulfill the function for which it was used would inevitably be beautiful . . . whoever said it was probably thinking of the airplane as the most exemplary pattern for all designed objects.”17 Indeed, Le Corbusier had composed a booklength paean to aircraft, which John Betjeman in­corp­­orated into his own 1930s praise of modern architecture and design. As George Orwell and Ballard later underlined, a form’s function is not always benevolent; steel and concrete structures, built of the materials vital to modern warfare, might in their very form promote violence and state oppression. Writers of all pol­it­ ical stripes—Orwell, Ballard, Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth Bowen, Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh—increasingly proclaimed the dangers of figuring Britishness through modernist taste, because that design potentially led not to utopia but to the mass internal violence of totalitarianism. This long, often troubled relationship between literature and modern architecture should cause us to reexamine the roots of literary modernism, as well as the ways in which later generations came to understand that movement. When we think about the city and literary modernism, we tend to think about a heady cosmopolitanism, evident in Raymond Williams’s now canonical “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism.” Williams attributes the “major expansion of metropolitan forms of perception” to “increasing mobility,” which led the city to become a place of diversity— social and linguistic.18 Williams’s city acts as a setting for modernism and even an inspiration, but it is more an abstract experience, an already formed place, than a material site that authors worked to transform. In this vein, 17  Spender, “Brave,” 6. 18 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, ed. Tony Pinkney (New York: Verso, 1989), 46.

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8  Reconstructing Modernism scholars often cast modernists as city preservationists, with canonical texts like Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses used as records and even maps of Woolf ’s London and Joyce’s Dublin. Yet many authors wanted to destroy the city as they knew it. By considering the city as an architectural site or even as a set of circulated (and often unrealized) plans, not simply a cosmopolitan ex­peri­ence, we can acknowledge authors’ engagements with very particular, shifting, and fragile environments. “Modernism” suggested more than just an intensified experience of the present for these authors: British modern architecture, with its aspirational city schemes and daring models, promised to shape the future. By reading authors’ architectural criticism alongside their poems, short stories, and novels, Reconstructing Modernism recovers a largely forgotten literary history, rooted in authors’ efforts to reform the city itself. For these authors, transforming literary form necessarily meant transforming the environment in which literature was created and received. Yet the stakes of building a new world were high. If architecture promised better literary and political futures, it also came to suggest a future where culture meant standardization rather than distinction and tradition, where both literature and the nation ceased to exist.

Early Modernist Utopianism: Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, and D.H. Lawrence To understand authors’ sharp reaction against a politicized modern architecture, we must first recognize that architecture established the fault lines of British literary modernism by spawning rival groups, with conflicting utopian visions, in the early twentieth century. Even though buildings of a modernist style were slow to emerge in England, knowledge of Continental trends was widespread, and it was the rhetorical power of modern design that captivated British writers. By recovering these modernist lines of influence, we see that the split between Wyndham Lewis and Roger Fry—an event that produced the Blast versus Bloomsbury tension that defined British literary high modernism—emerged from conflicting understandings of the potential of modern design to mobilize citizens and alter social structure. Modernists’ early investment in utopianism thus upsets the distinction that critics like Peter Bürger make between a politically active avant-garde and a formalist modernism. Even more, high modernists’ belief in aesthetic experimentation as a means of social experimentation should modify our understanding of modernist trajectories, which have often been

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  9 schematized as an inventive, relatively apolitical high modernism yielding to the politicized writing of the 1930s and beyond.19 In fact, mid-century writers largely created what we know as high modernism in retrospect, as they responded to a state-sponsored architectural modernism. As Michael Levenson contends, “Part of the difficulty with modernism is that it has suppressed its origins.”20 These origins, moreover, must be viewed in concert with those of modern architecture. Much as Levenson claims that modernist “critical work became entangled with the creative work, and thus the model of text and context will not serve,” architectural criticism allowed these writers to formulate a politics and theory of literary form.21 Because “modernism” was used frequently in British architectural criticism, with a recognizable meaning and acknowledged set of “modernist” figures, authors could contemplate the existence of—and even forge—a literary counterpart. Their architectural criticism reveals the historical and formal pressures that engendered literary modernism and its mid-century reverberations. By reexamining literary modernism through the lens of this criticism, we have new access to the moment of modernism, a fresh means of evaluating its foundational concerns. As I examine this overwhelming (and largely unacknowledged) body of architectural criticism composed by British authors and members of their professional circles, I consider this work, from manifestos to exhibitions to essays in architectural publications, not simply as subordinate or ancillary to these authors’ literary work, but as the grounds on which they defined what literature was and what that discipline could do. Through incorporating into their writing the rhetorical effects of architectural modernism—its ability to make bold statements through its radical forms as well as its supporting media—they solidified nonfiction as an integral component of early twentieth-century literary practice. The proliferation of little magazines promoted British authors’ essays alongside their fiction and poetry, and journals like F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny even featured their architectural criticism.22 Writers also became frequent—and controversial—contributors to the publications that propelled British architectural modernism, for the early movement was primarily a print phenomenon, led by the Architectural

19  See Benjamin Kohlmann, Committed Styles (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014) for a robust challenge to that literary historical narrative. 20  Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), xi. 21  Ibid., viii. 22  See Herbert Read, “Gropius,” Scrutiny 4.3 (1935): 313–15.

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10  Reconstructing Modernism Review.23 Poet and Review assistant editor Betjeman proclaimed of this journalistic foundation, “If anyone asks me who invented modern architecture, I answer, [Review editor] ‘Obscurity Hastings,’ ” and architect John Summerson called the Review “the Diaghelev of the English architectural stage.”24 The Architectural Association’s John Brandon-Jones echoed Betjeman’s assessment that writers and editors produced the International Style: “[T]he style was taken up and sold by people who were not architects but critics . . . . For years they published it and nothing else, and they managed to sell it to intellectuals . . . . Architects took it up when it became clear that you could not get a building into the Review unless it was in the style.”25 Brandon-Jones testifies to the primacy of architectural criticism, as the Review marketed itself to “intellectuals” across disciplines. The criticism to which Betjeman and other authors contributed, according to Brandon-Jones, did not record architectural modernism’s rise but instead caused it. Indeed, these writers attended less to portraying accurately the work of individual architects or schools than to conveying in striking terms the perceived ramifications of the larger movement; they approached modern architecture in terms of latent developments, both formal and political. Even more, modernist and late modernist writers saw form and content as intricately linked, such that they did not strongly differentiate between a content-driven architectural criticism and a formally inventive body of fiction and poetry. As such, these imaginative essays merit the same process of close reading that modernist literature prompted, while modernist literature itself served as an argument about literary form. Thus, I treat this architectural criticism as a self-consciously created body of modernist nonfiction, another place to use language to present the world anew. It is no accident that Lewis left Fry’s Omega Workshops over a quarrel about the Ideal Home Exhibition; defining the ideal home was not just a 23  Elizabeth Darling exposes twentieth-century periodical scholars’ neglect of architectural little magazines and argues for the importance of the written word for architectural modernism more generally. See “Focus: A Little Magazine and Architectural Modernism in 1930s Britain,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 3.1 (2012): 39–63. By contrast, Miles Glendinning downplays this linguistic and imaginative element: “although ‘paper projects’ could often exert considerable influence, those that were built were infinitely more important . . . many of the ideological tensions and excitements within modern architecture were actually concerned with interpretations or theories of the ‘the practical.’ ” Glendinning, “Architectures and Public Spaces of Modernism,” in The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017), 200. 24  See A.N.  Wilson, Betjeman (London: Hutchinson, 2006), 85; see Bevis Hillier, Young Betjeman (London: John Murray, 1988), 269. The Review editor was so retiring that Betjeman nicknamed him “Obscurity,” and Betjeman became the Review’s public face. 25  See ibid., 270.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  11 bourgeois, middle-class pursuit but an outlet for artists to direct the national future by molding a wide audience for modernism. Lewis had already envisioned an ideal, generative modernist environment by providing design work in 1913 for the Cave of the Golden Calf, a club run by August Strindberg’s former wife for modernists across media, including Katherine Mansfield and Ford Madox Ford. He established a working relationship with Fry through the second Post-Impressionist exhibition in late 1912, and Fry welcomed Lewis to his artists’ collective shortly after the Cave commission. By October 1913, however, Lewis split from Fry following his discovery that an invitation to design an Ideal Home Exhibition room had been kept from him and artist Spencer Gore, and instead Fry took the commission for the Omega Workshops. In response, Lewis circulated throughout the art world a “Round Robin” letter proclaiming Fry’s actions “a shabby trick” and criticizing Fry for harboring conservative tastes and running his supposedly utopian artists’ collective in a dictatorial fashion.26 Lewis subsequently developed an antagonistic relationship with Bloomsbury. This tension over the nature of aesthetic reform shaped Bloomsbury’s self-understanding and the perceived stakes of the modernist movement. Though Virginia Woolf characterized Lewis’s departure and the ensuing publicity as a “storm in a tea-cup,” she noted in 1921 that “ ‘Roger and Nessa [her sister Vanessa Bell, an Omega Workshops member] read him in shops, and won’t buy him—which . . . proves that they fear him.’ ”27 What the Ideal Home Exhibition reveals at stake is the proper environment for modernism: How might space act as a material support for artistic and social movements, and how might modernism transcend established artistic circles via mass exhibitions? The modernist movement offered not just objects but also models for living, and its practitioners vowed to redefine the nation and reform citizens by changing the physical structures that undergirded British social structures. Woolf ’s famous statement that “on or about December 1910, human character changed” is often read as a testament to modern painting’s eye-opening potential—that date coincides with Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition—but I would argue that the design of buildings and everyday objects was an equally important catalyst, one that allowed literary modernists to ponder the political applications of formal

26 Wyndham Lewis, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed.W.  K.  Rose (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1963), 47, 48. 27 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940), 194; quoted in Paul O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 231.

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12  Reconstructing Modernism experimentation. On both sides of the Blast–Bloomsbury rivalry, architecture and design promised an environment fit for nurturing these conjoined aesthetic and social aspirations. Rather than identifying architecture as a lagging form, the last to join movements because of architects’ unique financing challenges, diverse British modernists saw remaking the exterior world as the first step for fostering modernism. They believed that fundamentally changing citizens’ perception by changing that which they regularly perceived would ready them for new art as well as new ways of being. Modern architecture and design thus became a foundation for all other forms of modernism. For Roger Fry, remaking the world began with common objects seen differently. As a young boy, he toured factories with “the author of a Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts,” visits that “ ‘raised questions of . . . what made good art and bad art, what ornament was justified, and whether diamonds were not better used for machinery than for necklaces.’ ”28 Fry drew from the tradition of William Morris and came to see redesigned objects as a way of freshening the mind. Describing Fry’s organization of the famous Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, Woolf recalls that he used design objects to justify the modernist movement. In tracing the “transition from Watts to Picasso,” he moved from pictures to domestic items: “Under his influence, his pressure, his excitement, pictures, hats, cotton goods, all were connected. . . . Anyone’s sensation—his cook’s, his housemaid’s—was worth having.”29 Fry cast modernism as an heir to a lost tradition, one in which taste could be shared among an entire culture. These objects might generate an entirely new style of art, and Fry felt that modernist works could create more than just a single sensation; they could completely transform a person’s modes of perception. At its most extreme, a cross-class modern movement could be the style of a society without an aristocracy, a taste-making body in which Fry had lost faith. From his interest in training Britons to associate beauty with everyday objects, Fry looked to architecture to engage the entire population in aesthetic reform; the built environment represented the ultimate series of every­day objects writ large. In a 1912 letter to The Times, Fry made architecture the  ground zero for taking art from an elite object, which signals its remove from the practical through over-ornamentation, to an object integrated into daily life. “[T]his dreary aesthetic ‘snobbism,’ ” Fry asserted, is “[n]owhere . . . more devastating than in architecture.”30 Fry applauded

28 Woolf, Roger Fry, 19.

29  Ibid., 152, 152–3.

30  Ibid., 185.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  13 French dedication to city planning in Paris, which produced “ ‘an organised vertebrate city, not an amoeba or fungus like London.’ ”31 He shaped his own environment by drafting the plans for his house in Guildford, and he identified architecture as the epicenter of everything wrong with British design: “We make buildings for our need, and then . . . cover them with a mass of purely nonsensical forms which we hope may turn them into fine architecture.”32 In contrast to that “ ‘archaeological humbug,’ ” Fry proposed a streamlined modern style as the antidote.33 He used the Kodak building in London—which Historic England deemed “a pioneering work of modern design” in 1971—to demonstrate “ ‘what may be done by honest methods.’ ”34 The modern style of architecture thus exemplified the ethical dimension of aesthetic reform.35 Changing the lines of a building—revealing its under­ lying construction rather than covering it with ornament—promised to rescue art from being a prop of the aristocracy. Function, rather than artifice, would prevail, and art would produce a more democratic society, where citizens need not look to a particular class but to their own needs for aesthetic dicta. Lewis, who began his career as a painter, also looked to architecture to spread the reach of modernism by making it a public form. Creating a suitable cityscape was for Lewis the work of all modernists, not simply architects. In The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex? (1919), originally published by the Egoist Press (an extension of the little magazine), he envisaged how modernist revolution could spread to the public through complementary modernist arts. He offers the “parable” of a Vorticist caliph who creates abstract drawings and demands that these become the plan of “a new city.”36 Through this parable, Lewis calls for “the entire city [to be] rebuilt on a more conscious pattern,” and ultimately for an avant-garde to produce “an architecture for our time and climate that was also a creative and fertilising art-form.”37 From the “first great modern building,” Lewis prophesies, “a new form-content for our everyday vision” would emerge.38 This innovative 31  Ibid., 78. 32  For Guildford, see ibid., 163–4; ibid., 185. 33 Ibid. 34  “Kodak House,” Historic England, accessed July 18, 2018, https://historicengland.org.uk/ listing/the-list/list-entry/1379260; Woolf, Roger Fry, 185. 35  Similarly, in Antiquarian Prejudice Betjeman praised the “honest, plain structure of steel, glass, and/or reinforced concrete.” Betjeman, Antiquarian Prejudice (London: Hogarth Press, 1939), 17. 36  Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex? (Berkeley: Gingko Press, 1986), 19. 37  Ibid., 33, 34. 38 Ibid.

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14  Reconstructing Modernism form would change citizens’ most basic experience of the world: because large-scale formal experimentation would destroy the ­physic­al structures that naturalized former ways of life, citizens would not only see in a new way; they would also think new ideas. Modernist experimentation here was more than just a form. It was also a content. Beyond denaturalizing the everyday—society-as-is—this intervention would reenergize modern art. The city, Lewis asserts, is the “biggest visual fact.”39 Lewis found Cubists best suited to undertake this social shakeup: “The energy at present pent up (and rather too congested) in the canvas painted in the studio and sold at the dealer’s . . . must be released and used in the general life of the community,” and this “life outside,” Lewis promised, would “come back and enrich and invigorate the Studio.”40 Aesthetic experimentation is best combined with social experimentation, because without moving art “into life,” “this new vitality” of modern design would be “desiccated in a Pocket of inorganic experimentation.”41 Early modernists had breathed life into tired art forms, but for the movement to continue, modernists must expand their reach to the public sphere, reinventing old social forms as they institute new aesthetic forms on the widest of scales. In his follow-up piece, “Plain Home Builder: Where is Your Vorticist?” (1934), Lewis reflected on the degree to which he and other modernists had taken that architectural intervention to heart: “Vorticism (the characteristic movement with which all these modes of extreme modernism began in England) was, in a sense, a substitution of architecture for painting.”42 Beyond being “peculiarly preoccupied with the pictorial architectonics at the bottom of picture-making,” the movement “was aimed essentially at an architectural reform” (Figure 0.1).43 As Vorticists heeded Lewis’s call to create an environment fit for modernism, their paintings became “exercises in architectural theory,” journeys “into the field of pure architecture.”44 Abandoning the bounds of their medium in favor of “this necessity to reform de fond en comble the world in which a picture must exist,” they privileged the “frame,” the outer world, over the picture; their own productions became continuous with the architectural environment.45 Through Vorticism, the movement that spawned Blast and united the visual and literary arts, Lewis encouraged artists and writers not just to import the formal considerations of 39  Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), 169. 40 Lewis, Caliph’s Design, 11–12, 12, 12. 41  Ibid., 12. 42  Wyndham Lewis, “Plain Home-Builder: Where Is Your Vorticist?” in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change: Essays on Art, Literature and Society 1914–1956, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 248. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  15

Figure 0.1  Wyndham Lewis’s “Vorticist Composition” of 1915 Image credit: “Vorticist Composition,” 1915, Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). Presented by Miss Ethel M. Saunders in memory of her sister 1963. Photo credit: ©Tate, London 2018.

architecture into their work, but to let their media be completely changed by that encounter, and to transform citizens’ exterior and interior lives in so doing. Lewis’s ambitions went beyond Fry’s: instead of changing citizens’ modes of perception, he hoped to alter their world beyond recognition. Not simply a voice of alternatives, his modernist is the arbiter of the future world, the ultimate planner.

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16  Reconstructing Modernism Modernist architecture from the Continent provided an illustration of how this reformed world might appear. Lewis published “Plain Home Builder” in the Review, the journal that featured buildings in the International Style. In Rude Assignment (1950), Lewis writes that the city he envisioned in 1919 “would have been white, and it would have looked like sets for a movie about Babylon (designed, perhaps, by Le Corbusier).”46 Because Le Corbusier had yet to develop his signature style in 1919—and had hardly even begun his career—Lewis casts himself as a co-visionary of the modern movement. More than just applying modernist principles, he anticipated them, and he too celebrated the revolutionary qualities of newly available materials. “ ‘Modern armoured concrete,’ ” Lewis then hoped, might trigger an architectural renaissance so that “ ‘[e]xperiment’ ” could be “ ‘brought back once more as the centre of architecture.’ ”47 Fry’s and Lewis’s investment in architecture should stretch and enrich the way we think about high modernism more generally. Though neither is likely to be labeled a “populist,” both envisioned a public, cross-class modern movement—a reform of the everyday rather than a mere record of it. And much as they assembled a body of manifestos, critical essays, and other works of visionary nonfiction, Fry and Lewis believed that architectural and design reform would have enormous consequences for fiction, poetry, and drama. As Woolf records, Fry believed that modern design could bring English literature to full maturity, and along with it the English people who prized literature so heavily: “Of course the English were incurably literary. They liked the associations of things, not things in themselves.”48 Fry accordingly asked, “Why . . . was there no English novelist who took his art seriously? Why were they all engrossed in childish problems of photographic representation?”49 Instead of merely representing things, authors must recognize the power that things—particularly new design forms—might wield. Fry, seeking to reform literature using design principles, even read the classics with irreverence. “The Post-Impressionist movement . . . was by no means confined to painting,” Woolf asserts, “[Fry] read books by the light of

46 Lewis, Rude Assignment, 169. By contrast, Kate Armond reads The Caliph’s Design through the utopianism of German Expressionist architecture, particularly the work of Bruno Taut. “Wyndham Lewis and the Parables of Expressionist Architecture,” Modernist Cultures 9.2 (2014): 282–303. 47 Lewis, Caliph’s Design, 45. Lewis quotes W. K. Lethaby’s Architecture: An Introduction to the History and Theory of the Art of Building (1912), which he deems one of the few worthwhile contemporary studies. 48 Woolf, Roger Fry, 164. 49 Ibid.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  17 it too. It put him on the track of new ideas everywhere.”50 In this exercise of literary criticism, Fry “found glaring examples in Shakespeare, in Shelley, of the writer’s vice of distorting reality.”51 While literary form had languished in “a plethora of old clothes,” “Cézanne and Picasso had shown the way,” and consequently “writers should fling representation to the winds and follow suit.”52 Fry acted as an ambassador to individual writers by inviting friends Arnold Bennett and Henry James to view the second PostImpressionist exhibition. Woolf documents James’s reckoning with visual modernism: Seated on a little hard chair, Henry James would express “in convoluted sentences the disturbed hesitations which Matisse and Picasso aroused in him, and Roger Fry, exquisitely, with something of the old-world courtesy which James carried about him”, would do his best to convey to the great novelist what he meant by saying that Cézanne and Flaubert were, in a manner of speaking, after the same thing.53

Woolf shows James’s literary style, his “convoluted sentences,” colliding with the brashness of modern art, with Fry serving as interlocutor. Fry assured James that Flaubert, whose experiments guided turn-of-the-century literary innovation, did the same work as Cézanne, who guided Matisse and Picasso. Authors had been working in parallel to artists but now might join them. Fry even sought to become a patron and spokesperson for literature in order to oversee its modernization. As Woolf noted, he invited French poets to read in the galleries, signaling that the “new movement was not to be restricted to the art of painting only.”54 Fry accordingly “lectured both upon poetry and upon painting.”55 Of the importance of language to visual reform, he reported, “ ‘I’m continuing my aesthetic theories and I have been attacking poetry to understand painting.’ ”56 He cites the formalism of poetry as its defining quality, such that content is “ ‘entirely remade by the form and has no separate value at all.’ ”57 In Fry’s estimation, poetry communicates the power of form; it remakes content much as radically new objects remake the social substance of their environment. This formulation anticipates Connolly’s “three-dimensional poetry,” though Fry left it to ­others to unite literature with experimental design: Woolf records 50  Ibid., 172. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53  Ibid., 180. Woolf quotes Fry’s former secretary. 56  Ibid., 183. Woolf quotes from a 1913 letter.

54 Ibid. 57 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

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18  Reconstructing Modernism that  “he never found time to work out his theory of the influence of Post-Impressionism upon literature, and his attempts to found a broadsheet, profusely illustrated, to be sold for one penny at the bookstalls, in which the two arts should work out the new theories side by side, failed.”58 Instead, by writing Fry’s biography, Woolf represents herself—and British literature more broadly—as an active participant in his larger vision. In Woolf ’s estimation, authors could interpret and direct the change in character this new art prompted. Unlike Fry, Lewis applied himself directly to producing literature to explore the possibilities of that medium. Documenting this turn in Rude Assignment, he testifies that World War I gave him “subject-matter so consonant with the austerity of that ‘abstract’ vision I had developed, that it was an easy transition” from the abstract to the representational.59 The war-ravaged landscape thus resembled a three-dimensional Vorticist painting, such that the “geometrics which had interested [him] so exclusively before” appeared in this “altered world” “bleak and empty,” in need of “filling.”60 By turning to the “flesh and blood, that is life,” Lewis turned to writing. Language allowed him to create a different sort of altered world— the utopian—and this stage prompted essays such as The Caliph’s Design.61 Like Fry, he feared that his “literary contemporaries” were “too bookish and not keeping pace with the visual revolution,” so he produced his play Enemy of the Stars to adapt that revolution to literature.62 Yet he ac­know­ ledged that the literary medium offered something complementary to the visual arts: “It became evident to me at once . . . when I started to write a novel, that words and syntax were not susceptible to transformation into abstract terms, to which process the visual arts lent themselves quite ­readily . . . . Writing—literature—dragged me out of the abstractist cul-de-sac.”63 Aiming for a public modernist revolution, Lewis saw the need for literature’s concreteness, its ability to surpass the isolation of the canvas. He assigned literature a role much like built environments’: granting social content to aesthetic reform. Like architecture, which Lewis admired for its ability to shape an entire city—that “biggest visual fact”—Lewis appreciated authors’ range in the medium of language.64 Lewis, endorsing modernist nonfiction, declared to artist Augustus John that it is a “great thing to have ready to one’s hand a good many forms,—novel, jaunty or vernacular essay, story like Verlaine’s 58  Ibid., 172. 59 Lewis, Rude Assignment, 138. 60  Ibid., 139. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64  Ibid., 169.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  19 etc.”65 No longer must writers and artists confine themselves to the “rarest metal,” because the “coarse rich mass will never be absent when the vein is rich.”66 Lewis implicitly likens literary “mass” to the materiality of buildings and sculpture, and he finds that the esoteric should overflow into the vernacular, much as he envisioned with revolutionary architecture and design. In a 1929 letter, Lewis’s collaborator, Ezra Pound—who championed modern architecture as a catalyst for American modernist revolution in Patria Mia—expresses hope that authors might temporarily do the work of architects. After discussing typescript suitable for modern literature, Pound tells Lewis, “As one can’t get architecture or even mural stuff DONE one retreats to printed page . . . . (or not as case may be.) At any rate a chance to see something done right in a chaotic environment.”67 The page prepares ­readers for visual modernity. As Lewis heralds this future world—insistently concrete and social as well as abstract—he appoints literature to provide an ideological component to the visual revolution. Fry and Lewis thus participated in a now largely forgotten attempt to educate the public in high modernism as a civic measure, while also breathing new life into literary form. However, the two proposed conflicting ­models for guiding the public toward this better world through design. While they both started from the assumption that modernism is best for the people and felt architecture and design were key to bringing modernism to the public realm, they differed strongly on how to establish a community physically and ideologically structured by modernism, as well as on the timeline for creating those communities. For Fry, the artist’s role was to guide the public through gradual change; innovative art could be temporarily fostered by giving artists a private source of support. Through public exhibitions and redesigned everyday objects, the Omega Workshops could recalibrate the public’s taste. By contrast, Lewis believed that the artist would best serve the public by instituting a radical break in exterior forms. This break would in turn encourage citizens to form a society fit for this new environment. Lewis’s modernist thus creates social change, rather than waiting for Britain to become ready for modernism. While Fry saw the Omega Workshops and 65 Lewis, Letters, 65. 66 Ibid. In 1933 Augustus John commissioned a studio by the modernist architect Christopher Nicholson, which the Architectural Review profiled in 1935. J.  M.  Richards, “Augustus John’s Studio,” Architectural Review 77 (February 1935): 65–8. Christopher Nicholson was the brother of the artist Ben Nicholson, with whom Spender collaborated, as he describes in “Brave New Rooms.” 67  Quoted in Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985), 168–9.

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20  Reconstructing Modernism Bloomsbury as ideal modernist communities engaging with a larger world, Lewis sought to make the entire world a modernist community. In keeping with his argument that Omega’s isolation endangered modernism as a whole, Lewis criticized the Bauhaus for creating art at a remove, despite members’ rhetoric of social function. Lewis characterized the belief that artists should work in isolation as unadmitted “shyness of the ‘common man.’ ”68 Writing from the mid-century, Lewis voiced intellectuals’ justification of a “Two Publics arrangement,” that “it enabled the cultivation of such esoteric beauties, in the half-lit antechambers of the Unconscious, as those produced by Joyce in the last phases of his life, or those for which the precious and exquisite petit-maître of the Bauhaus was responsible.”69 Literary formalism and architectural formalism demonstrate practitioners’ failed relationship with the wider citizenry. Although Lewis acknowledged that groups like the Bauhaus produced “an integral part of our cultural expression,” he described this work as “a prison-art,” which did little to enrich life outside the isolated artistic community.70 By breaking this isolation, Lewis hoped to make not only new art but also new people; he and allied painters offered “[a] rough design for a way of seeing for men who as yet were not there . . . . It was more than just picturemaking: one was manufacturing fresh eyes for people, and fresh souls to go with the eyes.”71 Early modernists created art for an audience that did not yet exist, because the audience would have to be created as well. World War I, however, brought added urgency, for “[i]t was necessary to ask whether human life does not have to change radically, or altogether to disappear.”72 In a 1919 letter, Lewis described his own postwar attempt to imagine a perfect civilization, The Caliph’s Design, as “a consideration of how an abstract design of direction and masses can be applied to a street or a city.”73 In that spirit of using formal innovation to alter the very “form-content” of 68 Lewis, Rude Assignment, 29. 69 Ibid. 70  Ibid. Lewis criticizes T.  S.  Eliot’s model of the artist as a removed commentator in a September 1927 letter to Eliot: “It seems to me that your ‘back to the mirror’ move is wrong, as you can imagine.” Lewis, Letters, 170. Lewis sought artists and authors who would directly intervene in their times, to remake the society and not just comment upon it. 71 Lewis, Rude Assignment, 135. 72  Ibid., 185. This urgency led Lewis to ask John Rodker in 1919, “Have you dreamt of a perfect civilization, that would really suit you: so adjusting matter & society as to eliminate every emetic sight and makeshift person?” Lewis, Letters, 105. Lewis later published Rodker’s futuristic piece in the first issue of The Tyro. When the changes Lewis sought did not materialize, he referred to the interwar years as “Utopia-gone-wrong.” Lewis, Rude Assignment, 183. 73 Lewis, Letters, 110.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  21 everyday experience, Lewis describes a volume of Blast he planned to publish later that year.74 It would communicate the same visions of a new world achieved via modernism, and artists like Frederick Etchells would “illustrate” Lewis’s “theories,” alongside a poem by Eliot and a story by Lewis.75 In this journal, literary modernist efforts to remake language would work in tandem with the modern visual forms that renewed citizens’ experience of the physical world. Though another volume of Blast never materialized, Lewis continued to envision the city as a place for modernists to “make it new” on the grandest of scales. If he had “possessed the power,” Lewis testified, he “should certainly have torn down the whole of London . . . . Upon its ruins would have risen a bright, a new, and an enchanting capital.”76 Lewis’s plans thus in­corp­ or­ated the apocalyptic, blurring the distinction between utopianism and dystopianism. In a letter to Augustus John, thought to have been sent in 1914, Lewis wrote, “What you tell me of your designs on the Town of London is very welcome: smite it hip and thigh! I should not be sorry if you made an end of it once and for all, artistically. Let it be an authentic earthquake!!!—a really prodigious and elemental disturbance.”77 Because Lewis believed that communities are formed through a shared visual ex­peri­ ence, apocalyptic clearance is necessary: social coherence requires aesthetic coherence. Lewis warned, “We are the first men to accept the formless and accidental—a visual chaos. Our scene is composed of a disorderly wilderness of brick and concrete.”78 Lewis’s characterization of himself and other modernists in Blasting and Bombardiering as the “first men of a Future that has not materialized” provides an instructive contrast with these materialized “first men,” who have forgotten about the future; to forget about architecture and design is to forget the social future.79 Bad taste thus threatens a culture’s survival. The willingness to accept ugly objects, Lewis argued, is the aesthetic parallel to the dangerous pol­ it­ical position of accepting “mankind as it is (with its wars, slumps, and the  rest of it).”80 To underline the connection between good taste and 74 Ibid. 75  Ibid., 111. 76 Lewis, Rude Assignment, 169. 77  Lewis continued, “But I am always regretting that I was not born in a volcanic land; in the matter of art anyhow: the sort of place where the aesthetic structures have a slight shake-up every day and are periodically swallowed up altogether.” Lewis, Letters, 64. 78  Lewis added, “all the objects that we use ceased to have any relevant form.” Lewis, Rude Assignment, 171. 79  Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), 256. 80 Lewis, Rude Assignment, 170.

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22  Reconstructing Modernism good governance, he describes replacing government buildings as an act of political revolution: I had blueprints for hanging gardens between Blackfriars Bridge and Westminster. Bank clerks and shopgirls in glittering crowds would have danced the shimmie-shake in snow-white palaces, to the thunder of black bands, upon the present site of Scotland Yard. The Houses of Parliament would, needless to say, have been razed to the ground. A very elegant white-and-blue balconied structure—with the balcony-terraces five hundred yards in length standing over our muddy little river—would take the place of what is unfortunately there. The parliaments would sit in vast circular theatres underground. All above ground would be given over to the festive side of law-making. Old Ben might have his being, out of sentiment, in a wireless tower of aluminum girders rising at the extremity of the building.81

In Lewis’s ideal Britain, art supersedes politics as a means of governing the public. Reordered buildings and objects, which transform the public’s shared identity, establish a new sort of discipline, and the old institutions for law-making and law-enforcing are set ablaze. Yet Lewis also envisioned a reformed government that could partner in this revolution by sponsoring modernism and arraying itself in modernist forms.82 Lewis even advocated extending state patronage to literary modernism: he proposed a “tax of say ten per cent . . . to be levied upon all best-selling and potboiling work and the proceeds devoted to the promotion of good literature,” which might produce a “ ‘Literary Renaissance in England.’ ”83 One populism could yield a new populism, enveloping the entire nation. However, as Lewis himself invested in “a Rhetoric of buildings” to ensure that “the imagination of the multitude could be captured and fixed,” the methods of “captur[ing] and fix[ing]” the “multitude” through architecture proved all too vulnerable to political systems like fascism and communism.84 81  Ibid., 169. 82  Ibid., 143. Lewis acknowledged that political revolution and aesthetic revolution do not necessarily go hand in hand: “A new society when it comes may want a new type of house to match, but that is not what Corbusier found in Russia: according to him, the newer the society, the more archaic the taste. I merely repeat this generalisation as a pointer, not perhaps to be taken too seriously.” Ibid., 145. 83  Ibid., 146–7, 147. 84 Lewis, Caliph’s Design, 28, 28–30. By Rude Assignment, Lewis felt that “human nature” must be considered as a material, along with steel and concrete: “Human nature is a very

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  23 Though Fry and Lewis’s disagreement about the best way to achieve a modernist Britain established major literary divisions in the following years, Lewis was eventually joined by other authors in his quest for a complete clearance and reconstruction of the city. A decade after The Caliph’s Design, D.H. Lawrence, though no ally of Lewis’s, threw his reputation behind social reform to be achieved through modernist rebuilding. His late-in-life endorsement reveals the full extent of architects’, designers’, and critics’ prolonged influence over literary modernists of different stripes. By exploring Lawrence’s investment in modern architecture, we can reassess another truism about literary modernism, that many practitioners longed to return to a lost totality, in the wake of a war that exposed the horrors of the Industrial Age. Lawrence is typically canonized as an opponent of modern civilization and its corruption of nature and human feeling, yet one of his last pieces, an unfinished article for the Architectural Review, presents a much different attitude toward urban life and the Industrial Age. Lawrence’s architectural deliberations consequently challenge us to reexamine high modernism’s alienated individuals. In Lawrence’s “Then Disaster Looms Ahead” (August 1930), what starts as a simple history of the mining town of his birth quickly and unexpectedly expands into a call for complete architectural reform. Through supporting this movement, Lawrence hoped to remake national character and enable civic participation. Writing in the wake of the 1926 General Strike, much as Lewis wrote in the wake of World War I, Lawrence argued that British coal miners had been failed neither in their wages, nor in the conditions of the pit itself, nor even by industrialism; Lawrence insisted that “the pit did not mechanize men” but instead functioned as “a sort of intimate community,” bringing not just happiness but fulfillment.85 Instead, Lawrence joins Lewis in demanding an aesthetic awareness that could structure an entire community: the true blows to the miner were failing to provide outlets for community engagement aboveground and denying him an architectural landscape that would satisfy the “instinct of beauty” that marked him as an “incipient artist.”86 Initially, Lawrence’s commitment to the pastoral appears to take precedence over architecture: “The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the unmanageable and unsatisfactory material: but it is essential to start from that and have it always in mind, with all its shortcomings, in drawing up plans for the kind of society at which men now should aim.” Lewis, Rude Assignment, 181. 85  D.H. Lawrence, “Then Disaster Looms Ahead,” Architectural Review 68 (1930): 48. 86  Ibid., 49.

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24  Reconstructing Modernism tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.”87 Yet his focus turns to “formless” Victorian design, an instructive contrast to the planned communities proposed by Lawrence’s contemporaries: Now, though perhaps nobody knew it, it was ugliness which really betrayed the spirit of man, in the 19th century. The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.88

As with Fry and Lewis, the aesthetic acts not as an enriching accessory to life but as a way of life, joining abstract entities such as ideals and religion. Lawrence, as the son of a miner, announces modernism as the will of Britain’s lower classes, a complement to Fry’s and Lewis’s work of making modernism a cross-class form, the will of the British public. Lawrence’s dismissal of treacherous mine conditions and his diagnosis of industrialists’ true mistake—“If they had given prizes for the handsomest chair or table, the loveliest scarf, the most charming room that the men or women could make! If only they had done this, there would never have been an industrial problem”—sound naïve at best.89 Yet in anticipating a utopian future for England, Lawrence displays the architectural modernist vocabulary of social rebirth through complete clearance and reconstruction, an iconoclasm that Lewis mobilized during the modern movement’s infancy. Lawrence’s own fusion of environmental renewal and aesthetic renewal emerged from his Architectural Review article “Pictures on the Walls” (February 1930), where he highlighted the need for modern art to meet the exigencies of modern life: “Dead and dull permanency in the home, dreary sameness, is a form of inertia, and very harmful to the modern nature, which is . . . sensitive to its surroundings far more than we really know.”90 Because Lawrence recognized a universal need for contemporary art, he advocated renewal through a clean sweep of the old. “Let us refuse to have our vision filled with dust and nullity of dead pictures in the home,” he counseled, “Let there be a grand conflagration of dead ‘art,’ immolation of 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90  Lawrence, D.H. “Pictures on the Walls,” Architectural Review 67 (February 1930): 55.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  25 canvas and paper, oil-colours, water-colours, photographs and all—a grand clearance.”91 Lawrence too invoked the apocalyptic. While Lawrence’s primary concern in “Pictures on the Walls” was updating art to fit modern life, architecture in “Then Disaster Looms Ahead” is a great social shifter, an aesthetic that remakes life itself, much as Lewis had earlier envisioned. Lawrence harbored no illusions about returning to a preindustrial architectural landscape. Instead, he explodes the myth of the cottage as the seat of English identity: That silly little individualism of “the Englishman’s home is his castle” and “my own little home” is out of date . . . . it is puerile. Even the farm labourer today is psychologically a town-bird. The English are town-birds through and through, today, as the inevitable result of their complete industrialisation. Yet they don’t know how to build a city, how to think of one, or how to live in one. They are all suburban, pseudo-cottagey, and not one of them knows how to be truly urban.92

Lawrence sees industrialization not as a fate to which one must resign oneself but as a boon to expanding and deepening the sort of community he identified among miners, when coupled with an aesthetic program. The new urban landscape thus becomes a mold for instilling social virtue: “The English character has failed to develop the real urban side of a man, the civic side” that comes from inhabiting “a real city, with citizens intimately connected with the city,” partially due to “his ‘little home’ stunt, and partly to his acceptance of hopeless paltriness in his surrounding.”93 A failed architecture is a failed life. In opposition to the cottage, the “great city means beauty, dignity,” but the English know neither how to build great cities nor how to inhabit them.94 As Lawrence makes this reform a particularly British political program, to a much greater degree than either Fry or Lewis, he calls for a grand clearance of England similar to that ordered by modern architects: Do away with it all, then. At no matter what cost, start in to alter it . . . . Pull down my native village to the last brick. Plan a nucleus. Fix the focus. Make a handsome gesture of radiation from the focus. And then put up big buildings, handsome, that sweep to a civic centre. And furnish them

91  Ibid., 56.

92  Lawrence, “Disaster,” 50.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid.

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26  Reconstructing Modernism with beauty. And make an absolute clean start. Do it place by place. Make a new England. Away with little homes!95

Lawrence puts faith in aesthetic revitalization to remake the imaginative substance of the nation as it remakes its physical space. The modernist architectural planner is a political visionary, the source of a fresh start for modernists of other media and for the nation as a whole. Lawrence, even more than Fry and Lewis, envisions modernism as a cure for Britain’s very particular social and political ills; he effectively writes modernism into British history while projecting a future for the movement. It is no accident that Lawrence so prominently displays the vocabulary of modern architecture. This culminating addition to his body of work arose from correspondence with the editor of the Architectural Review, who, as I have noted, was responsible for publicizing that movement.96 Lawrence’s direct engagement with architectural modernism in the late stage of his career should cause us to reconsider not only his work but also the reevaluations of literary modernism that occurred as the mid-century approached, reevaluations that often evolved in response to the ambitions of architects and planners in Britain. As authors from John Betjeman to Aldous Huxley lost faith in that model of aesthetic and political reform, they distanced themselves from the movement. Their repudiation has had the unfortunate effect of erasing literary modernists’ early enthusiasm from our understanding of British literary history. Yet modern architecture’s hold on the im­agin­ ation of early modernists like Fry, Lewis, and Lawrence offers an important context for the trajectory of twentieth-century British literature. Authors’ deep engagement with the field of architecture should prompt us to rethink the temporal and formal scope of literary modernist studies, because architectural modernism brought authors not typically deemed modernists into intense consideration of form and its political dimensions. The gap between writers like Lewis and Betjeman, for example, narrows when we consider 95 Ibid. 96 The Review declares the article the “last [Lawrence] wrote,” informs readers that it emerged from “correspondence between D. H. Lawrence and the Editor,” and characterizes it as a “protest against the shapeless kind of industrialization.” Ibid., 47. Industrialism becomes a problem of form, not a problem in itself. Lawrence clearly intended this article for literary audiences too, as it ran in famed publisher John Middleton Murry’s New Adelphi shortly before its Review appearance. For the Review editors, Lawrence modeled good practice. In the February 1930 “Marginalia” section, the editors pronounce Lawrence a “first-rate English stylist” and an inspiration for architects as well as writers. See “Marginalia,” Architectural Review 67 (February 1930): 108. Following Lawrence’s death, the editors twice featured his literary style through excerpting Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  27 how their engagement with the earnestness of architectural manifestos prompted both to adopt strategies like parody and satire. Through recovering architectural modernist ties to writers as different as these two, we find common ground where we would not expect it.

Reassessing Modernist Interdisciplinarity While interdisciplinarity has been central to modernist studies in recent decades, the complex, often tense co-development of British literary and architectural modernisms has been largely overlooked. One theory-guided approach has come from David Spurr’s Architecture and Modern Literature (2012). For Spurr, these forms are the primary record of modernity’s larger crisis of dwelling—“not being at home in the world, including the world of language”—and the two media are formally complementary in their powers of making sense of human experience and proposing new ways of being.97 Spurr provides an important backstory for the two modernisms by locating a shared catalyst in nineteenth-century interest in Gothic architecture, and he identifies shared formal strategies: a similar structural sensibility, a disregard for boundaries between interior and exterior, extreme attention to their own construction, and a shared sense of historical rupture.98 Spurr links Adolf Loos’s anti-ornamentation and Le Corbusier’s emphasis on formal purity to Ezra Pound’s insistence on the clarity of the poetic image; Le Corbusier’s and Mies van der Rohe’s use of the open floor plan (plan libre) find their counterpart in T.  S.  Eliot’s approach to free verse (vers libre).99 Comparing the “architecture of nihilism” to “the austere, lucid works of the second generation of modernists like Jean Rhys and Samuel Beckett,” Spurr even identifies formal similarities between architectural and literary late modernism.100 He depicts a stable congruence between the two modernist disciplines, one where formal crossovers indicate shared aims, and his chief texts are the literary and architectural works themselves, rather than their accompanying body of criticism. Spurr argues, “If we look at modernist literature in the light of these ideas [about modernist architecture], it is true that we do not see much interest in the kinds of houses being built by

97  David Spurr, Architecture and Modern Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), x. 98  Ibid., 48–9. 99  Ibid., 52. 100  Ibid., 69.

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28  Reconstructing Modernism Wright and Le Corbusier.”101 As such, he emphasizes parallel development rather than direct engagement. Victoria Rosner’s Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (2005) demonstrates just what historical particularity is to be gained by looking at modern design and literary modernism in the British context, as she chronicles authors’ participation in design reform movements, from Thomas Hardy to Ford Madox Ford to Mina Loy. Literary modernism crucially fell during a period, she underlines, when Britons scrutinized the Victorian household in its physical and ideological dimensions.102 The joint aesthetic and social experiment of “dismantling . . . the traditional home” is thus “a  modernist gesture that ineluctably and materially links feminism to modernism.”103 The design movements that Rosner analyzes are specifically British, with a matching British genealogy. She links movements such as Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops to the work of nineteenth-century thinkers like Ruskin and William Morris. By emphasizing the local origins of this zeal for design reform, Rosner casts Continental reform movements as parallel and even as instructive contrasts, not as instigators of a British revolution: “looking around America and Europe, where designers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier and groups like the Bauhaus and the Wiener Werkstatte were dedicated to a total restatement of the house, England offers very little by way of comparison.”104 In Britain, “[i]t was interior design—and not architecture—that articulated a visual and spatial vocabulary for describing the changing nature of private life.”105 In keeping with her focus on interiority and privacy, she primarily examines middle-class, single-family homes, at a time when many of the most influential modernist projects were civic buildings and working-class flats. Focusing on interiors likewise colors the argument that Rosner makes about designers’ impact on literary form. The Bloomsbury Group, she contends, refigured “interiority in British modernism.”106 In opposition to “the fantasy of the severed autotelic self,” their “psychic interiority” took its cue from “interior design.”107 Modernism’s “putatively autonomous aesthetics” thus have a “material basis.”108 Even as novelists deployed this aesthetic of interiority and of privacy, their literary works did not retreat from political life but rather “offered a space for the reinvention of private life.”109 Novelistic 101  Ibid., 60. 102  See Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (New York: Columbia UP, 2005), 3. 103  Ibid., 14. 104  Ibid., 7. 105  Ibid., 8. 106  Ibid., 128. 107  Ibid., 128, 2, 2. 108  Ibid., 16. 109  Ibid., 7–8.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  29 space consequently staged a reform corresponding to that happening in the home.110 The contested nature of the home and the confusion of public and private space in this era reveal an equally complex relationship between modernist architecture and gender, particularly with regards to women’s input in designing these spaces. By decimating a generation of young men, World War I instigated a reevaluation of public life, which led architects across Europe to develop new designs for homes and institutions that would encourage citizens to resist their destructive impulses. Yet the modernist emphasis on formal education over apprenticeships, combined with the fact that the leading British architectural school barred women from enrolling until 1917, meant that women’s participation in early modernist efforts was impeded.111 Unlike the influence and recognition women gained in interior decoration and furniture design, active exclusion of female architects was common.112 Certain British authors, including Lawrence and Lewis, even believed that space itself was a masculine concern. In much the same way, architectural presses and journals promoted a brand of modernism typ­ic­al­ly associated with male architects. Leading architectural critic Charles Jencks documents women’s overwhelming exclusion from accounts of twentiethcentury revolution and genius—there were “very few women among the 400 protean creators I have gathered from other writers”—and concludes that critics’ emphasis on functionalism and rationalism had harmed 110  In much the same way, Matthew Taunton’s Fictions of the City (2009) insists on the home as the key space for understanding authors’ efforts to “make sense of the complexity of modern urban life.” Taunton, Fictions of the City (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1. In that account of architecture and planning in French and British literature and film, Taunton demonstrates that domestic architecture and its “geography of class” provide an alternative to modernist scholars’ overemphasis on the flâneur and cosmopolitan “rootlessness.” Ibid., 2. 111  Gavin Stamp, “Introduction,” Architectural Design (AD Profile 24: Britain in the Thirties) 49.10–11 (1979): 20; for women’s enrollment in the Architectural Association School, see Elizabeth Darling and Lynne Walker, “Paving the Way: Celebrating a Centenary of Women at London’s Architectural Association,” November 14, 2017, https://www.archdaily.com/883572/ paving-the-way-celebrating-a-centenary-of-women-at-londons-architectural-association. As Darling and Walker note, the Architectural Association only then allowed women because of funding problems and male students’ wartime absence. 112  Pioneering modernist architect Jane Drew recalled that “ ‘No one took women seriously in [the 1930s],” and Shusha Guppy records that “many firms turned down [Drew’s] application, stating bluntly that they did not employ women,” leading Drew to establish an all-female architectural firm. Shusha Guppy, “Obituary: Dame Jane Drew,” Independent, August 1, 1996, http:// www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituarydame-jane-drew-1307641.html. Similarly, as Frances Anderton demonstrates, Eileen Gray “was excluded from the CIAM Marseilles boat trip for the signing of the Athens Charter,” “[d]espite being an exponent of Modern Movement values.” “Gray Eminence,” review of Eileen Gray—Architect/Designer, by Peter Adam, Architectural Review 183 (April 1988): 10.

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30  Reconstructing Modernism architectural practice: “[a]n urbanism both more feminine and more coherent would have been far superior to the over-rationalized and badly related boxes that have formed our cities.”113 Jencks’s division of architectural styles along gender lines is reductive, but it is certainly true that British authors responded most forcefully to the brash manifestos and sweeping theories of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, which had been promoted by British editors, translators, and exhibition designers. Because their engagement with modern architecture was rooted in language, authors’ understanding of the movement was shaped by these more dogmatic iterations of architectural modernism. Yet, as I explore in Chapter 2, women such as Dorothy Todd and Justin Blanco White often directed architectural conversations through editing periodicals, and Alice T. Friedman has shown that female clients sponsored the developing movement through commissioning innovative houses from major modernist architects.114 When the Architectural Review launched an anthology section featuring the work of modern authors, they first featured an excerpt from Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which described Stephen’s efforts to commission a house from “a young architect who seemed anxious to carry out all her instructions.”115 Pairing Hall’s excerpt with a review of a home exhibition that featured modernist architect Serge Chermayeff ’s designs, the Review editors use the lesbian protagonist’s desire to redesign the home to signal a wider revolution. Indeed, in addition to the interest in modern architecture exhibited by Woolf, Bowen, and Rebecca West, and alongside the Labour Party’s attempts to market modern flats directly to female voters (as I will cover in Chapter 4), the poet H. D. and the novelist Bryher were integrated into the world of modern architecture: these authors and patrons of modernism established an unconventional domestic arrangement in Bryher’s modernist home and studio, where they socialized in the 1930s with Madame Jeanneret, the mother of Le Corbusier, who lived in a nearby house designed by her son.116 Modernist architectural history is thus inseparable from the rapid transformation of gender roles and family structures in the early and mid-twentieth century, and these reimaginations of domestic space had an equally large 113  Charles Jencks, “Jencks’s Theory of Evolution,” Architectural Review 208 (July 2000): 76. 114 For Todd and White, see Darling, “Focus”; see Alice  T.  Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006). 115  Radclyffe Hall, “Anthology,” Architectural Review 65 (January 1929): 51. 116  For Jeanneret and Le Corbusier’s visits, see Bryher, Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle (New York: New Directions, 2002), 17.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  31 impact on the novel as a form. Nancy Armstrong argues that the genre “was born as authors gave narrative form to [the] wish for a social order sufficiently elastic to accommodate individualism,” but, beginning in the nineteenth century, novelists substituted a “class-specific model of the household” for “civil society” as the embodiment of social order.117 In short, these authors turned from the public world to the private, familial world as the place of individual fulfillment. As a result, their novelistic subjects must “individuate [themselves] through repeated acts of compliance to or deviance from familial norms.”118 This not only naturalized restrictive middle-class household structures but also limited the novel as a tool for political thought. The novel thereby “canceled its own democratic mission.”119 Armstrong identifies a corresponding move in 1990s feminist criticism (including her own), which, she contends, largely replaced one vision of the household for another, without seeking to question larger social and pol­it­ical inequalities or the wisdom of treating the family as the primary unit of social belonging.120 Armstrong primarily understands the household sociopolitically, but considering the household in its architectural dimensions reveals the full implications of this novelistic and political “inward turn.”121 This is particularly true for early and mid-twentieth-century Britain, where social change was formulated in terms of the flexibility of architectural structures. In keeping with Armstrong’s observations about the middle-class household in nineteenth-century literature, Peter Kalliney demonstrates the im­port­ ance of domestic architecture for the twentieth-century British novel: it is a structuring device and a sophisticated tool for measuring change and con­ tinu­ity in the British class system. Kalliney argues that family homes— whether bungalows or the two-up, two-down—served as “a metaphor for national culture.”122 Planning likewise represented a way to “redraw the boundaries of Englishness within a more limited geographic field” as part of efforts “to imagine England as a postimperial nation.”123 Through its own “inward turn,” Britain functioned in the imagination as a domestic space. By examining the Angry Young Men and “heterosexual masculinity,” Kalliney demonstrates that these architectural changes concretized renov­ations of family structures and gender roles, changes that many authors across the 117  Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia UP, 2005), 139, 143, 143. 118  Ibid., 143. 119  Ibid., 144. 120  See ibid., 144–5. 121  Ibid., 143. 122  Peter Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2006), 116. 123  Ibid., 48, 46.

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32  Reconstructing Modernism political spectrum found threatening.124 As I will discuss in later chapters, this conflation of nation and household through welfare state reforms was accelerated by modernist architects, who promoted centrally planned public housing that bound the citizen to the state. Architectural modernism consequently represented a powerful tool for renovating British identity in post-imperial and postwar Britain. Mid-century fiction dramatizes these troubled boundaries between public and private life, and the household as a structuring device buckles under the weight of new architectural understandings of the home. Decline and Fall, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and other novels reveal a strain on the nuclear family and the households that undergird those af­fect­ive ties. Even as Lawrence attempted to think beyond the English cottage, and even as Orwell studied shared housing options for working-class men, novels and their attendant model of private, family life were often used to counter the perceived overreach of state power. In place of Armstrong’s early novelistic subjects, who attempt to improve their own status in the public sphere, many twentieth-century protagonists simply try to maintain prior standing and escape the reach of technocracy. Faced with the threat of over-rationalization through modernist architecture and planning, these writers upheld the affective life as the unique domain of literature. As a consequence, W.H. Auden, along with other authors, cautioned against ceding to architects too much responsibility for directing private life. Despite his call for “New styles of architecture, a change of heart,” Auden argued in the Architectural Review that architects should concentrate only on needs architecture can provide. Citizens, he underlined, must enforce those boundaries by learning to “bring to the study of the passions of our neighbours and ourselves the same kind of interest we take in the physical world, and to distinguish between those which are fulfilled in building and those which can only be satisfied in other spheres . . . and by our own efforts.”125 Against architecture’s inability to address individuals’ “passions,” Auden implicitly carves out space for literature as a form addressing the personal, the emotional, and the nonmaterial. This body of architectural criticism provided a justification for literature’s “inward turn”—and, by extension, for literary modernist interiority. Even more, this criticism launched a mid-century reexamination of poetic and novelistic subjectivity in light of the rival understanding of the 124  Ibid., 120; see ibid., 121. 125 W.H.  Auden, “What is Wrong with Architecture?” Architectural Review 74 (August 1933): 66.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  33 individual advanced by modernist architects, state planners, and documentary filmmakers. Unlike Armstrong’s model of the novelistic subject as exceptional individual, architectural theorists and documentarians relied on a model of the average individual. Governmental films depicted representative citizens whose housing problems are solved through collective effort, and modernist public housing and town planning models were created with a shared set of basic needs in mind. The aversion to “repetition” and “the mass body” that Armstrong identifies in late nineteenth-century novels like Dracula and She was only heightened in response to modernist architectural templates for structuring social life.126 Even as Huxley and Orwell championed the novel as a tool for individualism, fiction registered formally the threats to originality and individuality these repeated plans introduced. In Decline and Fall, for example, Waugh precedes a conversation about the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier with the caveat, “the whole of this book is really an account of the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather, so that readers must not complain if the shadow which took his name does not amply fill the important part of hero for which he was originally cast.”127 In contrast to an earlier novelistic model in which individuals change their environment through their own actions, and in contrast to the compensating richness of the imagination in literary modernism, Pennyfeather marks a new novelistic protagonist: ineffective, static, depthless, and shaped by his environment. What emerges is an unfulfilling sociality: talk rather than action. These developments fostered a mid-century body of dystopian fiction, which imagines a future without the novel—and, by extension, without individuality. Whereas Armstrong identifies the novel’s responsibility for devising the concept of individualism, authors like Orwell and Huxley think beyond the modern subject and beyond the shape of the modern novel. Surveying the institutions of public life, they escape the limits of the household as a structuring device by representing a future in which the household is no longer the primary unit of social belonging. Nonetheless, they do so through representative protagonists who find themselves unable to alter these institutions, particularly governmental structures. As fictional and nonfictional modes merge in these works, they show the strain placed on the novel as a tool for political thought in the mid-century. Because of the threat that mid-century novelists perceived in architectural modernism, it is important to recognize the antagonism as well as the cross-disciplinary collaboration between authors and architects. If Rosner 126 Armstrong, How, 114. 127  Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1999), 163.

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34  Reconstructing Modernism celebrates the modernist writer for whom “the home . . .become[s] a kind of workshop for interior design and social change,” artists like Etchells, modernist writers like Lewis, and mid-century authors like Huxley and Waugh—all of whom retreated from an earlier admiration for modernist architecture—do not neatly fit into a critical narrative that sees design reform as by and large progressive.128 Yet the fact remains that many British authors disengaged from both modernist architecture and modernist in­ter­ ior design, and many did so because they believed that these movements had allied themselves with political systems that limited individual freedom and expression. Indeed, conservative writers like Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen, and even leftist writers like Orwell, treated older styles of architecture and design as means of resisting the perceived authoritarianism of modernist structures and domestic objects. While Rosner and Benjamin Kohlmann present convincing accounts of modernist writers’ utopian as­pir­ations— particularly their faith that changing the design of their world could change the very tenor of that world—Reconstructing Modernism attends to the messiness that resulted when authors, fearing that modernist design had been corrupted and coopted, promoted literature as a rival medium of social reform.129 In fact, I argue that modernism as a literary concept emerged from this charged exchange, as authors used the modern movement in architecture to clarify and even reinterpret literary in­nov­ations. The responsibility for defining literary modernism for the mid-century public was thus shared by an incredible variety of authors—Edwardians, modernists, satirists, and even anti-modernists.

Trajectories By tracing British authors’ evolving relationship with modern architecture, Reconstructing Modernism documents the emergence of a politics of medium, through which right-leaning and left-leaning authors reformulated novelistic 128 Rosner, Modernism, 13. 129  In Kohlmann’s introduction to Utopian Spaces of Modernism, he argues that a post–Cold War tendency to associate utopian projects with totalitarianism, in the wake of Stalinist atrocities, has been projected back onto the modernist period, with the effect of erasing from critical view modernism’s non-totalitarian utopianism. “Introduction,” in Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945, ed. Rosalyn Gregory and Benjamin Kohlmann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–2. My chronology differs slightly from his, as I locate the fear of modernist totalitarianism as early as the 1930s.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  35 individualism against architectural collectivity. The book’s structure follows this historical progression. My first two chapters primarily address the late 1920s and the 1930s. Authors like Betjeman, Lewis, and Huxley moved from seeing modern architecture—epitomized by the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, and the MARS Group—as a tool for rejuvenating Britain to seeing it as an ex­ist­ en­tial threat to the nation and to literature. During this period, architectural modernism in Britain existed mainly in exhibited models, published plans, translated books, and widely read periodicals. Through these publications, authors scrutinized and responded to architectural innovations arising on the Continent and later in Britain, through the work of German and Soviet immigrant architects. The next two chapters primarily address the late 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s, as the implementation of the welfare state brought the language of architectural modernism into British political vocabulary and modern buildings became a reality through state sponsorship. While Continental modernism before appeared an interloper, authors like Christopher Isherwood and Bowen drew from wartime fears of double agents to consider modernist architecture as something threatening the nation and even British literary culture from within. My epilogue provides a look back on the World War II era from the latter part of the century, when Ballard contemplated a state-sponsored modern architecture and a literary modernism seemingly in ruins. I argue that our critical understanding of literary modernist history and t­enets has been filtered through these three important moments. Authors at each point reexamined and reformulated literary modernism in the face of architectural revolutions on the Continent that made modernist vocabulary a political vocabulary, the adoption by the wartime British government of modernists’ language of regenerating destruction, and perceived national decline that made early modernist utopianism seem not simply misguided but also potentially complicit in state violence and authoritarianism. In each period, one chapter pays special attention to dystopian novelists’ roles in positing alternative futures to those promoted by modernist architects, planners, and politicians. Writing from June 1940, Orwell characterized literature as a better arbiter of the future than the state. Stephen Spender’s question, “ ‘Don’t you feel that any time during the past ten years you have been able to foretell events better than, say, the Cabinet?’ ” prompts Orwell to conclude that, indeed, he had foreseen the approach of World War II and the Soviet purges: “I had always felt that—not exactly that, but something like that—was implicit in Bolshevik rule. I could feel it in their

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36  Reconstructing Modernism literature.”130 In this formulation, literature records not only the past and present but also the future. Because Huxley, Orwell, and Waugh considered literature to be the medium of the autonomous individual, they wrote a future for that medium by imagining the new, almost unrecognizable literature that writers would develop to answer a totalitarian state. In this way, authors might not simply predict the future but redirect it. Chapter 1 contrasts the critical foundation that anarchist poet Herbert Read laid for Unit One—a MARS Group contemporary that promoted the “architectonic” in modern art—with the move that Waugh, Lewis, and Betjeman made from championing modern architecture in the 1920s to denouncing it after its adoption by socialist causes in the 1930s. For Waugh and Betjeman, foreign practitioners from Germany and the Soviet Union summoned fears that at its core modernism might be “un-British,” even a national threat. The chapter pairs Waugh’s reviews of Le Corbusier’s books (translated by Lewis’s associate Etchells) with his novel Decline and Fall, which chronicles moral and aesthetic anomie after a fictional German architect destroys a Tudor house to create a modernist replacement. A largely leftist campaign to spread modernist taste also influenced Lewis, who wrote against the machine-like populace that he believed architecture was creating. Against the perceived debasement of modernism, he retrospectively emphasized the values of “extreme modernism”—self-reflexivity, autonomy, authorial detachment, formal difficulty, apoliticism—to separate aesthetic from political novelty. Considering architectural form as a pol­it­ ical vocabulary in itself thus led the three to tout the national importance of literature: while Waugh and Betjeman relied upon a model of literature as a glue and a compass for English culture—and, for Waugh, civilization more generally—Lewis redefined literary modernism as a form of national defense against the “propagandist aesthetics of Magnetogorsk.”131 Chapter 2 argues that, against architects’ use of steel, glass, and concrete structures to symbolize the national future, British authors turned to a genre designed to invert utopian futurity: the dystopian novel. Whereas Gregory Claeys and other critics attribute the rise of dystopian fiction to totalitarianism and to decimating war technologies that undermined belief in scientific and social progress, this chapter suggests that many dystopian 130  George Orwell, “War-time Diary,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 2, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 345, 346. 131 Wyndham Lewis, “One Picture is More Than Enough,” in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 234.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  37 classics responded to an even more specific threat, the utopian promises that architects offered to a troubled nation. After Aldous Huxley rejected the modernist architecture and national planning that he had once cham­ pioned, he set himself against the new momentum that his brother, zoologist Julian Huxley, had given that movement. Integrated into Bauhaus and Soviet modernist circles, Julian sponsored animal housing at the London Zoo, an instructive experiment for human housing in the centrally planned Britain that he envisioned in If I Were Dictator. Aldous believed that modernist design could be a front for subliminal collectivist and communist politics. In contrast to Julian’s vision of social unity through architectural unity, Aldous elevated literature as the form that celebrated the individual; in this regard, literature offered a place of symbolic resistance to the col­lect­ iv­ist state. Brave New World consequently uses the “Savage” John’s love of literature to indict the empty progress of a new society housed in sparkling concrete and glass. Chapter 3 develops the idea of a feared mass modernism by reading British wartime collectivism alongside the state’s adoption of MARS Group rhetoric. Graham Greene and Dylan Thomas crafted scripts for Ministry of Information films that promoted modern architecture and planning as symbols of a utopian postwar Britain. By contrast, for conservative Elizabeth Bowen and left-leaning Christopher Isherwood and Orwell, modern architecture symbolized state power run amok, seen in the eerie spectacle of the British state speaking in a modernist voice. The tension between modern architecture and literature encoded a struggle within the British Left, between Socialist publicities and Liberal privacies. Bowen’s fascistically laby­rin­thine interiors in The Heat of the Day, Orwell’s streamlined steel milk bar in Coming Up for Air, and Isherwood’s submarine-like modernist house in Goodbye to Berlin become sites for these writers to weigh their own literary styles against architectural styles and their political associations. Once artistic allegiance was seen to shape political allegiance, mid-century authors dissociated themselves from modern architecture, more especially from a modernist aesthetic that seemed to be corrupted by politicization. Chapter 4 argues that dystopian literature changed dramatically in the postwar period, when British modern architecture transformed from a primarily verbal phenomenon into the representative architecture of council housing and public health centers. As a result, the novelty of Huxley’s planned world gave way to the bureaucratic totalitarian state, the perceived “technocratic evil” that Marina MacKay argues inspired a range of British

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38  Reconstructing Modernism anti-state novels.132 “Speculative planning,” MacKay has shown, gave rise to speculative fiction, though this chapter argues that modernist architectural planning complements and even predates the threat of Soviet-style state power that she foregrounds.133 The exercise of power through architecture led the poet John Betjeman to parody the modernist vocabulary adopted by the state in his popular anti-planning documentaries and in poems such as “The Planster’s Vision.” Amid that national self-reinvention through modernist construction, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins locate the dystopian future in the near future. Just as Orwell feared totalitarianism would destroy literature, the postwar state in his novel perverts linguistic innovation, epitomized in Newspeak, within modernist buildings that ape Charles Holden’s Senate House turned Ministry of Information. Waugh also lamented that bastions for preserving literature, including Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, had become mouthpieces for modern architecture, planning, and socialism. British authors thus helped forge a future in which literature had no place, dramatized by Waugh in Love Among the Ruins. Older architectural and social structures are razed in Waugh’s banally dystopian Britain—a sort of dystopian parody, as MacKay has argued for Put Out More Flags—and Waugh matches narrative-based destruction with visual reconstruction: he illustrates his work by cutting up and embellishing illustrations of Antonio Canova’s neoclassical sculptures, thus acting out the modern perversion of neoclassical social and aesthetic order.134 As a final stab at authors who lent verbal support to modernist planning and socialist pol­it­ ics, Waugh pivots from architectural destruction to literary self-destruction: characters spoofing Auden and Isherwood commit suicide in a state-run modernist euthanasia center, and Waugh’s illustration shows a wizened Auden carrying with him a text entitled Newest Writing. Finally, in the epilogue, I explore the link between a failed modernism and a failed state through J.  G.  Ballard’s fiction. Whereas scholars most commonly tie Ballard’s treatment of space to postmodernism—and with it the avant-garde Situationists’ emphasis on psychogeography and unitary urbanism—Ballard displays an intense interest in modernist architecture using many of the same terms with which prior British authors engaged with the movement; the epilogue thus argues that Ballard should be read as part of a much longer critique of functionalist architecture within British 132  Marina MacKay, “Anti-State Fantasy and the Fiction of the 1940s,” Literature & History 24.2 (2015): 30. 133  Ibid., 38. 134  Ibid., 37.

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BRAVE NEW WORDS, BRAVE NEW ROOMS  39 literature. Ballard’s writing accordingly reaches back to the early days of architectural and literary modernism. He typically portrays modern buildings as ruins, the specters of state propaganda that had obscured the cold calculations of war. In “A Handful of Dust”—a piece of criticism the Guardian described as “JG Ballard on Modernists and Death”—Ballard argued that violence embedded in modern architecture, tied formally to concrete and steel World War II battlements, continues to haunt British culture: postwar tower blocks in Britain echo Nazi blockhouses.135 Architecture triggers this residual violence in High-Rise, where Ballard’s initial draft finds the protagonist Laing reading Le Corbusier just as his luxury apartment block begins its slide into ruin and anarchy; against late twentieth-century debates about the dangers of tower-block council housing, Ballard contends that the seed for destruction is in the architectural form itself. Modernism in this instance proves dangerous. It regenerates neither literature nor the nation. Instead, it expresses and even causes their demise.

135  J. G. Ballard, “A Handful of Dust,” Guardian, March 19, 2006, G2, 16, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/mar/20/architecture.communities.

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1

Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future of Modernism Following the dissolution of Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops and Wyndham Lewis’s Rebel Art Centre, critic, poet, and anarchist Herbert Read crafted a language for the group he believed could finally create a true cross-medium modernism, Unit One. Much like Lewis’s Vorticists, Unit One members made architecture a structuring principle for their respective media: in a 1933 public debate in The Times, artist Paul Nash declared that modern art, rather than copying nature, should be “architectonic.”1 In a subsequent letter to the editor, Nash announced that Unit One, in pursuit of the architectonic, “may be said to stand for the expression of a truly contemporary spirit.”2 Celebrating the modernist’s ability to reshape the environment, he concludes on behalf of the group, “Nature, we need not deny, but art, we are inclined to feel, should control.” Read took to heart Unit One’s charge for art to act by transcending the traditional role of critic to serve as the group’s unofficial spokesperson. As Read assumed responsibility for editing Unit One: The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture (1934), he helped members—including founding MARS Group architect Wells Coates— translate art and architectural principles into language, his own medium. “[T]he original artist” or author, he stated, must construct an audience for groundbreaking work and thus “must be, not merely a poet or a painter, but also a propagandist of his poetry and painting.”3 Propagandizing modernism meant developing new institutions for criticism, for “the very potent wine of modernism will never be poured into the old bottles of the academic tradition. A new tradition is involved, a tradition of which the forms and lineaments can be traced in literature and music as well as in painting, 1  Paul Nash, “Nature and Art,” The Times, May 19, 1933, 10. 2  Paul Nash, “Unit One: A New Group of Artists,” The Times, June 12, 1933, 10. 3  Herbert Read, “Introduction,” in Unit One: The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture, ed. Herbert Read (London: Cassell, 1934), 12. Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State. Ashley Maher, Oxford University Press (2020). © Ashley Maher. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198816485.001.0001

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  41 sculpture and architecture.”4 Read adopts the term “modernism” to describe this cross-medium collaboration. As a nonmember, an “independent critic,” he announces an opportunity for critics—many of whom were drawn from literature—to create a body of nonfiction fit to address revolutionary architecture and design.5 To put language in service to the movement, Read created a questionnaire to guide the expression of its aims, “since the artist is notoriously inarticulate in the medium of words.”6 He, as critic, must devise a form that was “in a real sense emetic,” one that would induce a verbal vomit.7 Much as the new art promised to stimulate literature, authors could spur modern architects and designers to become producers of language. Through his questionnaire, Read asked Unit One members to describe not only their technique, theory, and education but also their “policy”: “Have you any political convictions of a party kind [conservative, fascist, communist]?”8 Read concludes of their responses, “Nothing could so directly and intimately reveal the ideals and intentions of the modern movement in art.”9 More than just a critic of modern design, Read casts himself as the facilitator of the language of modernism. Beyond granting modernist design a linguistic foundation, Read promoted the movement in literary circles. In 1935, Read reviewed Walter Gropius’s The New Architecture and the Bauhaus for F.  R.  Leavis’s Scrutiny, which counted prominent authors like T.  S.  Eliot as subscribers. Gropius’s “aesthetic significance,” Read emphasizes, is best understood through the “sociological aspects which determine the aesthetic development of [his] work”: Gropius’s steel, glass, and concrete “environment” instills “human virtues.”10 Yet Read underlines that new architecture requires new institutions, namely a “change of [economic] system” and nationwide aesthetic education.11 Read the anarchist warns against separating architectural and political reform through the example of post-revolution Russia, where “architectural development has been deliberately slowed down, and even reversed, to enable an aesthetically starved people to babble in the dead language of bourgeois styles.”12 While these older styles are a “dead language” unfit for a revolutionized society, Read offers architectural modernism as a “living language bearing some relation to” working-class realities.13 After granting modernist design a language in Unit One, he urges literary figures 4 Ibid., 13.   5 Ibid.   6 Ibid., 14.   7 Ibid.   8  Ibid., 14–15. 9  Ibid., 15. 10  Read, “Gropius,” 313, 313, 315, 315.   11  Ibid., 315. 12  Ibid. 13  Ibid.

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42  Reconstructing Modernism to recognize modernist architecture as a “living language,” fit to animate their own practice. Read concludes that Gropius’s designs are part of a “new aesthetic [that] involves more than architecture”: “it is fundamental to the modern movement in all the arts.”14 Summoning the utopian language of Fry and Lewis, he notes that “appreciation” of this new aesthetic is “the prerequisite of any rebuilding of our disordered world.”15 Read’s faith in the political efficacy of the modernist aesthetic prompted him to support the “good design” movement of 1930s Britain, which, as Stephen Hayward documents, united the criticism and curation of design with the efforts of “[g]overnment agencies, exhibitions, journals and radio broadcasts” in order to educate an entire populace in citizenship for an improved Britain.16 Read’s foundational text Art and Industry (1934) thus advocated a national taste, shared across classes much as Lewis envisioned. By applying movement principles to objects available to all, modernists might take up their social mission. As one designer asked in 1935, “ ‘Is it too much to hope that in learning to design our cups and gas fires, our chairs and lamp posts we may in the end learn to design our lives?’ ”17 That query matches Stephen Spender’s assessment in “Brave New Rooms”: “It was possible, during the 1930s, to think of transforming society through designed utensils in a designed kitchen in a designed house in a designed city.”18 In that decade, modernist design provided a lesson in good governance. By characterizing modernism as an ideal accessible to all citizens, Read urges us to consider to what extent modernism can be declared the aesthetic par excellence of modernity. The fact that “modern” and “modernist” were used synonymously in this period signals a volatility in the perceived relationship between aesthetic form and history. Modern architects publicized an aesthetic that was also a model of living, one that, instead of merely responding to the times, could produce a new social era. As such, the pressure of architectural modernism upon literary modernism reframes the movement’s integration into modernity. In these early accounts of the new architecture, modernism represents a socially oppositional force, standing outside entrenched cultural and political institutions, while also reaching a mass audience. However, as I will show through the examples of Evelyn 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16  Stephen Hayward, “ ‘Good Design Is Largely a Matter of Common Sense’: Questioning the Meaning and Ownership of a Twentieth-Century Orthodoxy,” Journal of Design History 11 (1998): 223. 17  Quoted in Hayward, “Good,” 223. 18  Spender, “Brave,” 6.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  43 Waugh, John Betjeman, and Wyndham Lewis, authors and literary critics at  the height of the good design movement developed an increasingly discordant relationship with architectural modernism. As authors defined literature against modern architecture—thereby shattering the cooperation Read saw as vital to the movement—British authors questioned whether modernism might instead be the expression of an alternative modernity, one evident in artistic productions but unreachable in political practice. At stake was whether the nation was on a path set by modernists, a complete union of modernism and modernity, or whether modernist design was instead a political pawn, against which authors might develop a modernism of aesthetic autonomy. World War I was integral to this debate over modernists’ political calling. That war created a public for the utopian aspirations that Fry and Lewis had fostered, but it also introduced a new understanding of the movement’s place in European history. If architecture allowed authors like Lewis to contemplate modernism in terms of futurity—the still-to-materialize now— then the war rewrote that future. Surveying the postwar period in Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), Lewis includes himself among “the first men of a  Future that has not materialized.”19 This language of “materialization” suggests that Lewis’s lost future was closely linked to architects’ failure to produce the social world necessary for other modernist forms to thrive. Even as the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier promised a better postwar Europe, many British authors used that architecture to symbolize the progress that Europe’s decision to pursue war precluded; it was the future arrested by the state, the future that had no future. The marked split between the ideal world (once envisioned as the future) and the actual future confounded modernist temporality. For prewar authors like Lewis and postwar authors like Betjeman and Waugh, architecture introduced a potent model and measure of time. Plans and models, along with buildings’ concrete record of atrophy and cultural history, provided a means of reading the complex intersection of past, pre­sent, and future. Architectural time thus offered an alternative to Henri Bergson’s durée (time experienced by the individual) and standardized time (time as a form of regulation by governmental and social institutions, as expressed through the invasive striking of the clock in novels like Mrs Dalloway).20 19 Lewis, Blasting, 256. 20  See, for instance, Vincent Sherry’s discussion of Woolf ’s text in The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 292.

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44  Reconstructing Modernism Pondering divergent modernist futures—material and imagined—necessarily led these authors to wrestle with the modern movement’s relationship to the 1920s and 1930s British nation. What place did modernism have in the modern world if the modernity it aimed to institute differed so substantially from the course Europe took instead? In other words, given that gulf between the envisioned world that preoccupied British modernists and the actual world, in what way was this movement modern-ist? These questions of aesthetic temporality developed strong political overtones heading into the 1930s and prefigured mid-century formulations of autonomy, for modernist design and literature in retrospect appeared divorced from the conditions of everyday life. As the British public increasingly associated architectural modernism with leftist projects, the battle over the time and place of modernism became a battle over what should count as modern, a battle that held enormous importance for conservative writers like Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman. In periodicals from the 1910s through the 1930s, debates about modern architecture’s capacity to regenerate a Europe in ruins were simultaneously debates about the nature and future of modernism. Yet modern architecture has been largely (and detrimentally) absent from critical consideration of how and why World War I redirected the development and reception of literary modernism. Prominent early accounts of the movement, particularly Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, treat World War I as a defining event for literary modernism, a moment where avant-garde optimism and cross-medium collaboration turned to pessimism and fragmentation. To illustrate the prewar era’s dissolution, Kenner describes a copy of Blast left outside in the rain, where “[n]o one rescued it.”21 In A Genealogy of Modernism, Michael Levenson similarly uses 1914 as “the year that divides the study,” part of his effort to reveal the rapid changes to “theory and practice” that occurred within literary modernism: “modernism was individualist before it was anti-individualist, antitraditional before it was traditional, inclined to anarchism before it was inclined to authoritarianism.”22 But the fact that modernist architectural utopianism was a product, rather than victim, of World War I necessarily 21  Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1972), 246. 22 Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism, vii, x, 79. In addition to the outbreak of World War I, the “boundary stones” (viii) Levenson identifies from 1914 are the introduction of Eliot and Pound and the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in installments (vii), yet he characterizes the war as the chief cause of the dramatic shift between early modernism and later versions.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  45 complicates the case for using that event as a divider of modernist history, as does the interwar assertion of literary individualism against the perceived anti-individualism of architectural modernism.23 While Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane make individuality the focus of their influential account of literary modernism—“Modernism is less a style than a search for style in a highly individualistic sense”—their model largely precludes architectural modernism.24 “[O]ne can argue, to a point, that in graphics, architecture, design, and especially in the conventions of media like film and television, Modernism has become an invisibly communal style,” they acknowledge, “Yet in some ways this is to defeat Modernism’s presumptions; the shock, the violation of expected continuities, the element of de-creation and crisis, is a crucial element of the style.”25 By separating the “communal style” of modern architecture so decisively, Bradbury and McFarlane adopt a stance similar to that of many of the authors of my study. However, this backlash to architectural modernism arose largely after 1930, the end date for their account. By contrast, early literary modernists like Lewis failed to differentiate between the two strains of modernism, instead arguing that architectural revolution was a necessary precondition for literary modernism. Through resisting this stark disciplinary divide, I argue that we must take a much longer view of the war’s aftermath: much as Evelyn Waugh argued that the gravest effects of World War I developed in the postwar generation, the abandonment of modernist architectural futurity and utopianism emerged not immediately following the war but in the late 1920s and 1930s. In what follows I propose that the war belatedly appeared to have ruptured literary and architectural temporality, the time of the individual and the time of the community, despite many writers’ cooperation in utopian architectural visions immediately after the war. As J. G. Ballard summarized Bertolt Brecht, the “mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom.”26 British writers initially welcomed, then increasingly challenged, modern architects’ efforts to clear away the past—physically and

23  For his part, Levenson notes that his study does not attempt to be a “comprehensive history” but rather an “account of a recognizable lineage in a specific geographic centre during a confined period” (x). 24  Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” in Modernism: 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 29. 25  Ibid., 24. 26  Ballard, “Handful.”

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46  Reconstructing Modernism symbolically—through publicized plans for a new Europe. The war gained importance not only as a historical milestone but also as a divider of media in retrospect. By the late 1920s, literary and architectural fortunes no longer seemed aligned. The “shock” and “violation of expected continuities” so central to Bradbury and McFarlane’s literary modernism—and to Kenner’s and Levenson’s prewar modernism—assumed new connotations as organizations like the MARS Group proposed to abolish the material residue of history, particularly historic town centers. At its extreme, architectural violence resembled martial violence, and many writers mourned what they perceived as lost social totality. With practitioners’ pledge to renovate rather than restore, modern architecture unsettled and granted new significance to authorial orientations toward prewar and postwar social formations, social and aesthetic wholeness and fragmentation, tradition and innovation, and individualism and collectivism. By documenting how revolutionary materials and techniques came to represent a repository and even an advance guard for socialist politics, I account for Waugh and Betjeman’s sharp retractions of their early criticism as they instead laud the sustaining powers of an (often manufactured) British architectural tradition. I then show that Lewis too reacted against the conflation of modernism and socialism, though I argue that he instead turned to a largely manufactured modernist tradition as he proclaimed his allegiance to “extreme modernism.”

Initial Appreciations From a twenty-first-century viewpoint, Betjeman seems an improbable modernist sympathizer, given his famous efforts to preserve Victorian architecture. Yet Betjeman was an early member of the MARS Group, which formed in 1933 as the British offshoot of the influential Continental group CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), whose members included Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.27 Though not trained as an architect, Betjeman’s interest in the field propelled him to a job as assistant editor at the Architectural Review from 1930 to 1935. While working under the same editor who encouraged Lawrence to demand a “new England,” Betjeman developed deep relationships with P.  Morton Shand, who 27  Gropius joined MARS when he emigrated from Germany to Britain.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  47 co-founded the MARS Group and translated Gropius for English-speaking audiences, and Lewis’s collaborator Frederick Etchells, who translated essays  that Le Corbusier had published in L’Esprit Nouveau. Betjeman also befriended Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, a relationship that led Moholy-Nagy to provide photographs for An Oxford University Chest.28 Betjeman’s enthusiasm for the modern movement reflected his conviction that architecture was a site of inspiration and meaning, a tool for connecting the individual to the larger world. As Donat Gallagher observes, for the generation including Betjeman and Waugh, “Architecture, broadly speaking, filled the place . . . that nature had occupied in all generations since the Romantic Movement.”29 Accordingly, authors like Waugh, W.H.  Auden, Herbert Read, and Cyril Connolly joined Betjeman in contributing to the Review’s vibrant debates in the 1930s, when architectural modernism was primarily a linguistic phenomenon. Expanding his outreach even further in an appeal published by the London Mercury, Betjeman urged readers to apply robust mid-century literary critical practices to the nascent field of modern architecture. He suggested that architectural criticism was an even higher calling than literary criticism, for it brought those practices to bear on the material world: “an architectural magazine is, by reason of its subject, of as much and greater importance as any literary, political, humorous or religious periodical.”30 Betjeman’s Architectural Review contributions document his own shift in  attention to the built environment. In “The Passing of the Village” (1932), Betjeman expresses no regret at the diminishment of rural space, instead charging that “[o]nly an escapist who has not the courage to face the creations of the machine age . . . will fly to the country to find rural peace,” a peace no longer available.31 He faults citizens for disregarding “the architecture of today” and laments the tendency to build a “main road to look like a Stratford-on-Avon street with half-timbered hideosities.”32 28  See Hillier, Young Betjeman, 268. Though many loyalists attribute Betjeman’s support for modernist architecture to toeing the company line, his commitment extended beyond the Review. Betjeman was a founding member of the MARS Group, and author Patrick Leigh Fermor recalled the lecture Betjeman delivered to his school about Bauhaus and Corbusian designs: he “ ‘extolled’ ” “ ‘the merits of ferro-concrete and the simplicity of tubular steel furniture.’ ” Wilson, Betjeman, 85. 29 Gallagher, Donat, ed., The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (London: Methuen, 1983), 6. 30  John Betjeman, “Architecture,” London Mercury 29 (November 1933): 67. 31  John Betjeman, “The Passing of the Village,” Architectural Review 72 (September 1932): 92. 32  Ibid., 91, 92.

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48  Reconstructing Modernism Characterizing preservation efforts as “misdirected energy,” he awaits the “glorious day”—“and it may take a revolution to bring it”—when “the house will show its grace of construction in steel and concrete.”33 Betjeman urges his countrymen to see that “[t]he Machine has won,” but instead of mourning this, he celebrates a new, functionalist beauty: “Those little spaces between the main roads, war memorials to defunct agricultural labourers, should, where possible, be preserved, but the stateliness of pylons and the clear-cut lines of a new ostentatious factory will not detract from their beauty.”34 In this testament to the beauty of factories and pylons, Betjeman envisions the built environment overtaking the rural landscape in providing British citizens with a sustaining, everyday beauty. Through “The Death of Modernism” (1931), Betjeman lays an architectural historical foundation for appreciating this new beauty. He conceptually transforms modern architecture—associated with novelty and foreignness— into the inheritor of national tradition. Betjeman faults architects who “have followed only mannerisms” by confusing tradition with “the reproduction of the mere façade of the past.”35 With Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Kenneth Clark’s The Gothic Revival hovering in the background, he takes a cue from Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by arguing that modern architecture reworks tradition in light of modernity: it draws upon the spirit of functionalism evident in Gothic architecture. Rather than treating modernism as an invasive Continental movement, Betjeman emphasizes its  English roots. This is, of course, a false history. Gothic architecture’s own roots were in the Continent; Britain’s claim came through the Gothic Revival it originated, a national reinvention of the Gothic that led parliament to be rebuilt in the style deemed “particularly British.”36 Yet Betjeman’s drive to place modern architecture in a robust British tradition goes further still. More than just a legitimate heir, modern architecture is a potential redeemer of the modern age: “we are waiting for some monumental architecture to appear that will be fit to house our numberless offices and flats . . . . There are new materials, a new social order, new proportions to be commanded, and the possibility of creating a new beauty which this generation must not be too stultified to see.”37 Under this formulation, the national

33  Ibid., 93. 34 Ibid. 35  John Betjeman, “The Death of Modernism,” Architectural Review 70 (December 1931): 161. 36  “Style Guide: Gothic Revival,” Victoria and Albert Museum, http://www.vam.ac.uk/ content/articles/s/style-guide-gothic-revival/. 37  Betjeman, “Death.”

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  49 future—the “new social order”—will materialize not through preservation but through innovation. Betjeman situates his criticism in the larger cultural battle to define the “modern.” The term “modern,” he argues, has paradoxically become “oldfashioned”: some critics use it to describe contemporary work by stodgy architects, and others to describe the creations of architects like Le Corbusier. The term does not allow one to differentiate “traditional form from what poses as such”; at this stage in his career, modernist form is the meaningful category one must defend against the emptiness of the pseudo-traditional.38 By interrogating the architecture billed as “modern,” Betjeman attempts to make the modernist movement mean something, to allow it to coalesce by weeding out impostors. Yet Betjeman also feared that modernism, by instituting aimless formal changes, might parallel the empty replication of past facades. He consequently sought to authenticate modernism. To his concept of the pseudo-traditional, he adds in “1837–1937, A  Spiritual Change is the One Hope for Art” the term “pseudo-modern,” introducing the idea that the “modern” could be counterfeited. Again, Betjeman shows the stakes of defining what should—and should not— count as aesthetically and socially modern. Taking aim particularly at Art Deco, Betjeman uses terms like “jazz Egyptian,” “pseudo-Swedish,” and “jazz modern” to describe illegitimate heirs to modernity, “half-digested theories of art” defined by “meaningless” applications of modern aesthetics.39 He attributes the futile search for new forms to “the bewilderment of man’s mind”: “Today, the machine has given us everything we want—steel, glass and concrete for houses, hundreds of stuffs for textiles, varieties of pigmentation, processing of wood, processing of stone. But no one knows what to believe.”40 Abandoning the functionalism that tied modernism to a living Gothic tradition, streamlined design becomes façade, the stuff of advertising and fad. Though Betjeman recognized the possibility for design to shape national character, he questions its ability to effect national reform on its own: “There is one hope only for the improvement in design and that is, odd as it may seem, a spiritual change in the people.”41 There must be an immaterial counterpart to formal change. Modernism requires a revival of citizens’ hearts as well as their eyes. 38 Ibid. 39  See John Betjeman, “1837–1937, A Spiritual Change is the One Hope for Art,” London Studio 13 (1937): 71, 71, 71, 72, 71. 40  Ibid., 72. 41 Ibid.

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50  Reconstructing Modernism Despite his reservations about the “pseudo-modern,” Betjeman still believed that the thoughtfully applied modernist aesthetic could engender an ideal way of being in the modern world. He ventures that greater public outcry over slums, “a few blocks of flats in highbrow suburbs, the poetry of Yeats and Eliot, [and] the improvement in poster design” together point the way toward achieving the reform of national spirit he desired.42 To match the literary modernist offerings by poets like Eliot (his teacher at Highgate School), Betjeman offers the image of a block of flats by Tecton, the firm led by MARS member Berthold Lubetkin, with the caption “Buildings such as this give us an idea of what can be done.”43 For Betjeman, modernist architectural and literary forms jointly grant critics new theoretical access to social form; aesthetic reform enables political reform. By the time he published Antiquarian Prejudice (1939) with Hogarth Press, however, Betjeman hinted that architectural modernism may instead be a threat to the nation. The pamphlet’s ostensible purpose was to expose once again slavish traditionalism, which produced such monstrosities as a “block of flats built to look like Hampton Court.”44 This “antiquarian prejudice” encouraged equally harmful pseudo-modern responses like “the dashing milk-bars which have dispensed with the need for capital letters” and “ ‘modernistic suites’ to be seen in hire-purchase catalogues.’ ”45 Where Betjeman diverges from earlier stances is the role he ascribes to a thoughtful modernism, as it combats pseudo-traditionalism on one side and debased modern style— diluted and made precious through mannerism—on the other. He pointedly avoids positing modernism as a successor to a line of defining British styles. Instead, he suggests another calling, solving “the housing problem” by means of “decent and convenient mass-produced houses”: “These houses should be pre-fabricated, as was the Crystal Palace . . . . Pre-fabrication would make it possible to remove these houses from one place to another when they were wanted, and the land they had occupied could go back in agriculture.”46 Betjeman’s charge to modern architects is to produce ephemeral creations, with little impact on the landscape. Though he reserves a positive purpose for their work, he ascribes limited lifespans and applications to it. Gone is its connotation of futurity, its responsibility for carrying society from one era to the next. Betjeman draws modernist architecture back from the idealized future into the quotidian present. He thus negates aspirations to achieve a stable, quasi-utopian space following World War I. 42  Ibid. 43 Ibid. 46  Ibid., 20, 20, 20–1.

44 Betjeman, Antiquarian, 6.

45  Ibid., 22.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  51 As he reconsiders modernists’ role in national evolution, Betjeman reacts against the growing political connotations of the style by half-heartedly differentiating a production for the masses from a politics of the masses. Socialism and architectural modernism had become increasingly associated in the public mind in the 1930s, as British politicians, architectural schools, and the press linked aesthetic novelty to political novelty. The election of a  Labour government in 1929 had created an opportunity for modernist architects, for the new government “introduced the first post-war housing legislation to tackle directly slum clearance” and moved “towards a more thoroughgoing centralized control of the built environment.”47 As Elizabeth Darling records, the governmental emphasis on planning and on building flats “established a common ground between modernists and the state which could be exploited.”48 Anthony Jackson likewise indicates that economic depression and the General Strike hastened planning efforts.49 The state’s growing attention to working-class conditions matched the modernist emphasis on designing housing for the working class.50 Darling accordingly contends that these architects aimed to “render modernist principles synonymous with social housing,” and Jackson documents a controversial article, “A Hundred Years Ahead” (1935), by architect Serge Chermayeff and critic J. M. Richards, which envisioned a complete integration of architectural modernism and political reform.51 Those figures anticipated a “Socialist reconstruction period” from 1936 through 1965, which would cede “control of the building industry” to the state.52 For Chermayeff, a socialist government would enable change on the widest scale, allowing architects to “ ‘participate in the reconstruction of society.’ ”53 As Jackson observes, modernists’ “semantic misappropriation of the term to plan” prompted them to consider spatial interventions and social interventions as one and the same.54 Through contemporary changes in architectural education, many ­practitioners developed a deep commitment to leftist politics. Young architects became increasingly concerned about National Socialism and its exploitation of Neoclassical architecture for fascist ends, and within the prestigious Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture

47 Elizabeth Darling, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (London: Routledge, 2007), 109. 48  Ibid., 110. 49  Anthony Jackson, The Politics of Architecture: A History of Modern Architecture in Britain (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1970), 62. 50  See ibid., 63. 51 Darling, Re-forming, 108. 52 Jackson, Politics, 66–7, 67. 53  Ibid., 68. 54  Ibid., 62.

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52  Reconstructing Modernism there arose “a communist cell . . . which was furthering the cause of a new society through the overthrow of the staid Beaux-Arts system.”55 One leader reported, “our policy [was that] it was no good just going round preaching revolution, because no-one would listen to us, what we had to do was be very good at our job. We said we’ll work in architecture, in the school. It was all, in a peculiar way, muddled up with the potential of modern architecture as a, not a style . . . but as a social instrument.”56

Architecture represented the most direct way to implement socialist principles. Indeed, one contemporary report indicated that not just the AA but also “ ‘most of the architectural schools throughout the country’ ” had “ ‘reacted vigorously to political-social-architectural doctrines which are generally spoken of as “left-wing.” ’ ”57 For Tyrus Miller, this conflation of architectural modernism and collectivism occurred within a broader drive toward rationalization. He argues that “Bauhaus director László Moholy-Nagy—the modernist in machinist’s overalls, the artist as engineer”—and, as I have noted, a friend of Betjeman— “embodied this heroic affirmation of system over self, this shift from artworks by individual artists into the collective production and consumption of designed objects.”58 Miller’s account foregrounds the “erosion of individual subjectivity” and the diminishment of literature “in the economy of media and artistic practices” that occurred during this period.59 Yet the fact that Betjeman and Moholy-Nagy were collaborators signals a much more complex relationship between literature and modernist architecture than a matter of inverse fortunes. That Betjeman attempted to separate architectural modernism from socialist principles and compared Tecton’s flats to poems by Eliot and Yeats reveals a perceived commonality between literary and architectural practice, a partnership he was reluctant to abandon despite the movement’s growing politicization. As architectural training shifted to institutions like the AA School and became increasingly standardized and collectivist, Betjeman mourned the loss of apprenticeships, which produced “individualists.”60 His aversion to stylistic conformity led him to examine the relationship between style, 55 Darling, Re-forming, 185. 56  Ibid., 186. 57 Jackson, Politics, 59. 58  Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999), 35. 59  Ibid., 40, 37. 60 Betjeman, Antiquarian, 29.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  53 material, and politics. Of monumental architects whose work merely copies the past, Betjeman writes, [T]o go to the opposite extreme and let the new frightening materials that they never knew when they were young men, do the job for them as Paxton let cast iron or glass do his job at the Crystal Palace—this savours of Bolshevism. For an antiquarian reason, to which the present state of architecture in U.S.S.R.  gives the direct lie, an honest, plain structure of steel, glass, and/or reinforced concrete is considered Bolshevistic or international. And, of course, since the new materials have burst on the world, more or less simultaneously, and since everyone who experiments with them is bound to produce work similar to someone in a country hundreds of miles away, the style is bound to seem international. But no more and  no less international than the graves of the Bronze Age men or the fortresses of the Middle Ages.61

Betjeman protests that modernist materials do not necessarily coincide with the materialist values of “Bolshevism” because contemporary Soviet architecture largely eschewed modernist style. That the distinction was necessary underlines how politically charged the mere materials of steel and glass had become by 1939, especially as prominent Continental architects emigrated to Britain, with many committed to collectivist political causes. That very year, the Jewish German architect Arthur Korn, a MARS member whose communist sympathies were well-known, was arrested when police observed “a detailed map of London” on his wall, and he was interned on the Isle of Man, a common fate for German and Austrian refugee architects.62 The fear of dual loyalties engendered a skepticism toward the style itself. Betjeman’s defense of the “honest, plain structure” betrays the fear that modernists allied themselves not only with foreign styles but also with foreign political systems, that modernism could never be suitably domesticated. By emphasizing the accidental internationalism of the modern style, he introduces the possibility of a more sinister version. Betjeman’s anxiety reemerges in his observation that the “jolly tricks of a rebellious modern, futuristic, Swedish, 61  Ibid., 17–18. 62  For Korn’s arrest, see Jack Pritchard, Planning and Architecture: Essays Presented to Arthur Korn by The Architectural Association, ed. Dennis Sharp (Madison: Barrie & Rockliff, 1968), 122; for his internment, see Dennis Sharp and Sally Rendel, Connell Ward and Lucas: Modernist Architecture in England (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008), 200; for the wider treatment of refugee architects, see John R. Gold, The Experience of Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City, 1928–53 (London: Routledge, 2013), 167.

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54  Reconstructing Modernism [and] cubistic” style may be simply a “veneer of . . . modern-ity,” a shallowness that gestures toward a hidden core.63 Betjeman concludes that the “reaction from antiquarianism has been almost as harmful as antiquarianism itself.”64 He puts faith neither in governmental intervention in the arts nor in “a change of government” but in a “change of heart.”65 Even as he echoes Auden’s call for “New styles of architecture, a change of heart,” Betjeman disavows modernists’ promised postwar union of style and social structure. Instead, he advocates an individual morality, one that would ostensibly check the modern age’s social and aesthetic conformity. These concerns about modernist ties to national character and the state were shared by fellow conservative Waugh, whose intimate relationship with Betjeman ranged from expressions of dry humor to heated exchanges regarding each other’s systems of belief. Waugh told Betjeman that Helena (1950) was planned as a novelization of his wife Penelope’s life (reportedly complete with her girlhood sexual fantasies), but they also engaged in theological debates, with Waugh trying to convert Betjeman to Catholicism.66 Despite these parries, they shared a core belief that the record and seat of British civilization is its architecture. For this reason, while reviewing a collection of Betjeman’s architectural essays in 1952, Waugh called Betjeman out for his perceived role in weakening the nation. In response to Betjeman’s mid-century turn from modernism to preservationism, Waugh asserts, “If there was an épuration of those who had collaborated with the destroying forces, Mr Betjeman’s friends, the present writer among them, would compete for the privilege of rescuing and hiding him. But his name would be on the list of guilty men.”67 Waugh’s language of “guilty men” is almost certainly a reference to Guilty Men (1940), the pseudonymous book that stirred Britain through naming politicians who supported appeasement in the buildup to World War II. By criticizing Betjeman for appeasing the modernists he now found despicable, Waugh equates these architects with Hitler. Waugh is only too happy to publish the list of “guilty men” under his own name: In January 1938 there was an architectural exhibition in London of all that Mr Betjeman now deplores. The exhibitors called themselves the MARS group. Their catalogue had a preface by Bernard Shaw exulting over the

63 Betjeman, Antiquarian, 29. 64  Ibid., 23. 65  Ibid., 30. 66 See The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1980), 207; see ibid., 243. 67  Evelyn Waugh, “Mr. Betjeman Despairs,” in Essays, 430.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  55 destruction of Adelphi Terrace. The introduction hailed Le Corbusier as  the liberator of architecture. And in the group beside Arup, Gropius, Chermayeff, Lubetkin and Zweigenthal stands the name of Mr Betjeman.68

Waugh’s naming of the guilty places Betjeman among an earlier generation of writers—epitomized here by Shaw—who should be held responsible for the new order. Moreover, Waugh excludes MARS members with English surnames to emphasize the foreignness of the modernist aesthetic. By accentuating Betjeman’s Dutch name, Waugh reveals his place among the “destroying forces.” Despite this strident anti-modernism, Waugh’s first published essay, written at the age of fourteen, was entitled “In Defense of Cubism” (1917). That Drawing and Design contribution praises Roger Fry and the Omega Workshops’ appropriation of Cubism for “house-decoration” and ascribes to Cubism “a glorious future.”69 Like Betjeman, Waugh was drawn toward design and architecture as tools for understanding the relationship between social structures and the arts. Though not trained as an architect, Waugh took lessons in wood engraving, had a brief art school stint following his third at Oxford, and entertained careers in printmaking and cabinetry.70 Through essays, letters, and fiction, Waugh documented his changing stance toward the modernist aesthetic. Most famously, Waugh dramatized this reversal through Charles Ryder, the protagonist of Brideshead Revisited: Ryder sets aside his Omega Workshops screen and his admiration for Roger Fry and announces modern art to be “great bosh.”71 We witness a milestone in Waugh’s modernist reevaluation through “Cities of the Future” (1929), his review of Le Corbusier’s The City of Tomorrow, which had just been translated to English by Etchells.72 At this early stage, four years before the MARS Group’s founding, Waugh did not yet exhibit the antipathy toward modernist architecture that pervaded his later writing. Rather, Waugh directs his criticism toward the rhetorical uses to which the British had put the movement. He deems Le Corbusier’s plan “sane and courageous” but also inadvisable under current conditions, largely because 68 Ibid. 69  Evelyn Waugh, “In Defense of Cubism,” in Essays, 7. Waugh describes the motivation for his essay in A Little Learning (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1964), 121–3. 70  For his engraving, see Waugh, Little, 190; for art school, Waugh, Letters, 17. 71  Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1973), 152. 72  In the postwar period, Etchells took up architecture, producing structures in the modernist style. He was also the translator of Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (1923), rendered as Towards a New Architecture.

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56  Reconstructing Modernism “M. le Corbusier’s city is indefensible in war”: “Perhaps the chief value of Urbanisme is as a social document which shows what the great cities of the world might have made of this decade if they had not chosen to have a war instead.”73 This future city is, paradoxically, obsolete, a product of the prewar past; it belongs to Lewis’s later formulation of the “Future that has not materialized.” Waugh presents modernism as an alternative but inaccessible model of living in modernity, an aesthetic that lost its authority when World War I severed its temporality from Europe’s. Modernism belonged to the future that did not and could not happen. As such, Waugh objects to the movement primarily because its supporters ascribe a utopian futurity to it, even after the state effectively precluded its power. He faults the publisher’s decision to render Urbanisme as The City of Tomorrow, for Le Corbusier was not “attempting any Utopian prophecy.”74 The futurity that British modernists embrace is absent from the original: “The ‘City of Tomorrow’, which [Le Corbusier] discusses, exists for the Future only in the sense that it has not yet been built Today. He himself calls it the Contemporary City, and he presents it not as the probable result of present directions of development, but as a logical solution to a problem which already exists in an acute form all over the world.”75 Because Le Corbusier’s city is insecure and cannot accommodate population shifts and changed transport methods, it has missed out on this present as well.76 Modernist architecture is unlivable, since its practitioners are incapable of effecting social change: these forms cannot prevent war. Waugh demands that readers abandon utopian futurity and instead contemplate the long, measurable future of modernist form. “How will M. le Corbusier’s houses look in a hundred years’ time,” he asks, “when the patina of the concrete has weathered and the sharp angles have softened . . . ? One cannot help feeling that iron furniture bent out of shape would be more offensive than worm-eaten wood, and discoloured concrete and rusted metal than mellowed brick and stone.”77 This, Waugh implies, is the true modernist future.

The Threatened National Future The future that Waugh predicts for modernism is offensive primarily on an  aesthetic level, but as modernism gained hold in Britain and became 73  Evelyn Waugh, “Cities of the Future,” in Essays, 64. 76  “Cities,” 64. 77  Ibid., 64–5.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  57 increasingly associated with leftist projects, both Betjeman and Waugh warned against the effects of a modernism that had lived beyond its social usefulness. If architecture both symbolizes and instills national values, then “pseudo-modern” environments would inevitably impact British character. In “From Bad to Worse” (1932), an address to the Incorporated Institute of British Decorators, Betjeman accordingly predicted a Continental “level[ing] down” through a uniform modernist style; by 1954, in a Royal Institute of British Architects lecture, Betjeman abandoned his efforts to domesticate modernism, while also downplaying the reach of its tenets: English spaces—and, consequently, value systems—are not interchangeable with those of the Continent.78 By identifying what is particular to England’s “climate” and architecture, he rebuffs the International Style, as exemplified by CIAM: those who imagine that there is such a thing as an international style created by industrialization—an architecture of space ships and aeroplanes anchored to the earth or standing on their heads on the landscape—are unpractical romantics. Corbusier has long seemed to me a poetic romantic who invents a theory and packs his people into it.79

Betjeman pronounces internationalism an unanchored fantasy, one that hides its actual channels of influence and control. From the cooption of people into a theory, he turns to Continental architects’ cooption of British style. Instead of tracing the modern style directly back to the Gothic, as in “A Spiritual Change,” Betjeman identifies a Continental detour. He locates its origins in the work of Scottish architects  Charles Mackintosh and George Walton, which was appropriated “before 1914” by “the literal and unoriginal Teutons,” who called it “ ‘Mackintoshismus.’ ”80 That style returned to Britain after the war as “rootless commercial flashiness.”81 By constructing this chain of influence, Betjeman suggests that international modernism compromises the native aesthetic. He re-particularizes the nation and its architecture—and thus 78  “Modernism in Art: Work of the Decorator,” The Times, July 22, 1932, 7. 79  John Betjeman, “Honour Your Forbears,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 61 (January 1954): 88. 80 Ibid. 81  Ibid. Betjeman identifies a fairly unified British identity, which went beyond Englishness to encompass the Scottish, as he established a shared aesthetic sensibility. This collective identity, however, stops at Britain’s physical borders; there is no pan-European identity.

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58  Reconstructing Modernism preserves architecture as a seat of national values—by denying the possibility for good style to spread through international networks: “There is no such thing as an international style. Salvation lies in regionalism.”82 To establish architecture as a response to the distinctively local, he describes “[t]ravelling about with dear old Frederick Etchells, himself the translator of Corbusier, and with John Piper the artist,” as they “constantly pointed out . . . the varying domestic and ecclesiastical styles of our island.”83 Betjeman portrays himself and Etchells—a one-time promoter of modernist futurity—as prodigal sons, newly devoted to British particularity. Betjeman’s fear of modernist standardization summons a fear of socialism, a perceived standardization of people under an international political movement. Betjeman advocates a return to architectural individuality by denouncing the “map mentality,” modernists’ penchant for aerial views. These architects “talk of people in terms of ‘income groups’ or ‘fifty-plus’, or whatever it happens to be. They forget that we are not yet insects . . . and that we do not want to be crammed into one of their industrial units and entertained by documentary films in the hygienic community centre.”84 Betjeman implies that these structures promote communality even to the unwilling. He further confronts the collusion of practitioners and the state by urging architects to preserve their “integrity” by resisting the demands of their “employers,” “too often . . . humourless state officials and theorists who will try to beat you down with statistics and ethical arguments in matters which are largely aesthetic.”85 By condemning these misguided “ethical arguments,” Betjeman suggests that British architecture’s political meaning has been forced upon it, in the same way that British citizens have been “crammed into” the offending structures. He thus seeks to disentangle modernism from national identity, as well as from the state. Much as Betjeman embraced stylistic “regionalism,” Waugh pronounced modernist structures to be fundamentally unsuited to England in “A Call to the Orders” (1938), published as a Country Life supplement.86 As Darling notes, the Orders, the defined classical and Neoclassical styles, were “banished from the curriculum” of the AA School in the late 1930s.87 Contrasting

82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84  Ibid., 91. 85 Ibid. 86  Elizabeth Darling describes the journal’s dedication to evaluating modern architecture: “It is only relatively recently that awareness has grown of the not insignificant part played in debates about the modernization of British architecture by the weekly magazine Country Life.” Re-forming, 28. 87 Darling, Re-forming, 183.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  59 the classical approach with modernist novelty, Waugh likens the modern movement to a disease: They are all over England, these models of civilized buildings, and of late years we have been turning to them again in our convalescence from the post-war Corbusier plague that has passed over us, leaving the face of England scarred and pitted, but still recognizable. For ten or fifteen years we all had the pest-mark scrawled across our doors and the watchman cried nightly: ‘Bring out your dead!’ From Tromso to Angora the horrible little architects crept about—curly-headed, horn-spectacled, volubly explaining their ‘machines for living’. Villas like sewage farms, mansions like half-submerged Channel steamers, offices like vast bee-hives and cucumber frames sprang up round their feet, furnished with electric fires that blistered the ankles, windows that blinded the eyes, patent ‘soundproof ’ partitions which resounded with the rattle of a hundred typewriters and the buzzing of a hundred telephones.88

Under this formulation, modernism is a foreign body intent on harming the nation, never integrated into the body politic. As architectural modernism became increasingly politicized in the 1930s, Waugh moved from characterizing modernism as a missed opportunity to viewing it as fundamentally unlivable, an intensification of modern ills. These structures threaten English hierarchies through absurd compromises and conflations: “Villas like sewage farms, mansions like half-submerged Channel steamers.” Tracing architects’ footholds from Scandinavia to the former Ottoman Empire, Waugh emphasizes the essential foreignness of the modernist model. The threat of  aesthetic invasion draws upon the fear of military invasion. However, Waugh invokes the special qualities of English character. Of the response to  this “post-war . . . plague,” he declares, “In England we have an artistic constitution which can still put up a good fight; our own manifold diseases render us impervious to many microbes which work havoc upon the sounder but slighter races. We suffered less from the concrete-and-glass functional architecture than any country in Europe.”89 Waugh depicts the English as a “race,” and he attributes their recovery to a fundamental disjunction between modernism and national character.90 88  Evelyn Waugh, “A Call to the Orders,” in Essays, 216. 89 Ibid. 90  Accordingly, Waugh asserts in “The Philistine Age of English Decoration” (1938) that the “plain man” has no “natural taste for plainness.” Instead, “it has been drummed into him by a

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60  Reconstructing Modernism In addition to citizens’ special aesthetic immunity, Waugh credits the British climate with providing protection against invasive modernist structures: In a few months our climate began to expose the imposture. The white flat walls that had looked as cheerful as a surgical sterilizing plant became mottled with damp; our east winds howled through the steel frames of the windows. The triumphs of the New Architecture began to assume the melancholy air of a deserted exhibition, almost before the tubular furniture within had become bent and tarnished. It has now become par excellence the style of the arterial highroads, the cinema studios, the face-cream ­factories, the tube stations of the farthest suburbs, the radio-ridden villas of the Sussex coast. We have had a fright—a period of high fever and delirium, a long depression, and now we are well on the way to recovery. We are again thinking of stone and brick and timber that will mellow and richen with age, and we have instinctively turned to the school in which our fathers excelled.91

Waugh revisits the long, measurable modernist future he described in “Cities of the Future” by showing that the predicted decay has already occurred—and at a much quicker pace. For Waugh, the physical impossibility of sustaining these buildings indicates a wider obsolescence of modernist aesthetics. Through the image of the “deserted exhibition,” Waugh recalls architects’ efforts to educate the nation through initiatives like MARS’s pivotal 1934 contribution to the “New Homes for Old” display at the Building Trades Exhibition. He implies that those efforts have run their course, like  a  severe but momentary disease. Waugh instead advocates the social discipline that emerges from national tradition; citizens’ instinctive return shows that tradition to be naturally suited to imposing order on British modernity. In opposition to the shallowness of consumer culture—where Waugh relegates modernism—tradition can provide salvation. Yet citizens must learn to value authentic architecture, for “imitation, if extensive enough, really does debauch one’s taste for the genuine”: the use of sham

hundred experts, writing on what are ironically termed ‘home pages’, that ornament is vulgar, and today he endures blank slabs of concrete and Bakelite, prisonlike bars of steel and aluminum.” Essays, 220. 91  Waugh, “Call,” 216.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  61 Tudor dampens critical capabilities.92 To produce social discipline, Waugh insists on ­architectural discipline. Through Waugh’s call to protect England as a nation, not just as a state, we see how Waugh’s language of anti-modernism—modernism as disease, modernism as an unsuitable match for the English climate—slides so easily into the xenophobic and anti-Semitic. His fear of losing the keepers of a traditional, national style, the aristocracy, quickens a fear of those who might install an alternative taste. Waugh uses the inhospitable climate to naturalize his rejection of modernism, and with it, Continental modernists. The nation could distinguish itself not by embracing the aesthetically new but by undermining it. For Waugh, that required the manufacture of a  resilient “Englishness”—a style of architecture as well as a restrictive national identity—to combat the internationalism, the conflation of domestic and foreign, that modernism was made to represent. Yet Waugh underlines the challenge to preserving English identity, as he defines it: in Decline and Fall, the only people with a taste for traditional forms are of the lower classes, from foreign countries, and non-white. Thus, the greatest threat in Waugh’s mind was that the postwar nation and its architectural correlative could be compromised from within, for the ruling class might itself develop foreign tastes.

Decline and Fall Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928), with its reference to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, dramatizes the threat posed by the abandonment of English social and aesthetic structures. Through the biting comedy of his first novel, Waugh emphasizes that social structures are extensions of the physical structures that define Britain, and both have severely atrophied. Over the narrative’s course, Paul Pennyfeather—who, as the novel freely admits, can barely be called a protagonist—drifts between the British institutions whose claims to meaningful tradition have become hollow: Oxford, the public schools, the justice system, and, especially, the aristocratic country house.93 King’s Thursday, the Tudor estate that had been the seat of the “Earls of Pastmaster” since Mary I’s reign, serves as a barometer of British tradition

92  Ibid., 217.

93  For Paul as an unsuitable protagonist, see Waugh, Decline, 163.

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62  Reconstructing Modernism in Waugh’s novel.94 The only changes made to the house had been restorations, undertaken by the “estate carpenter, an office hereditary in the family of the original joiner who had paneled the great staircase.”95 Because successors used the original carpenter’s methods, their work “became indistinguishable from that of [their] grandsires.”96 In addition to the aristocratic family’s “poverty and inertia,” recent political developments made the house unsustainable, even uninhabitable: the family cannot retain the necessary servants because “[m]odern democracy called for lifts and labour-saving devices, for hot-water taps and cold-water taps and (horrible innovation!) drinking water taps, for gas rings and electric ovens.”97 Tradition has ceased to be renewed; instead, it is a sideshow, for the house becomes a “Mecca of week-end parties,” with Lord Pastmaster showing guests “the closet where the third Earl imprisoned his wife for wishing to rebuild a smoking chimney.”98 This touristic engagement with tradition inevitably ends with guests’ return “in their big motor cars to their modernized manors,” with only fading reflections on how “the very-great-grandparents of their host might have talked in the same chairs and before the same fire three hundred years before, when their own ancestors, perhaps, slept on straw or among the aromatic merchandise of some Hanse ghetto.”99 Figuring aristocratic seats as the ghetto-like residences of Britain’s past rulers, Waugh again draws upon xenophobia and anti-Semitism to illustrate perceived threats to British architectural tradition. Though these buildings survive, a changing social structure means that their purpose has been nullified. Yet Waugh focuses less on the slow decline of British tradition, embodied in social and physical structures, than on the precipitous decline following World War I. In “The War and the Younger Generation,” published a year after Decline and Fall, Waugh declares that the war upset the passing of tradition from one generation to the next, a rupture that reenergized and confirmed “the catch-phrases of the Ibsenite movement.”100 Before the war, “[y]outh and aged merged together in a gentle and unbroken gradation,” but afterwards, European society fractured into three distinct generations, “(a) the wistful generation who grew up and formed their opinions before the war and who were too old for military service; (b) the stunted and mutilated generation who fought; and (c) the younger generation.”101 Waugh’s

94 Waugh, Decline, 151. 95  Ibid., 152. 96 Ibid. 97  Ibid., 151, 153. 98  Ibid., 152. 99  Ibid., 153. 100  Evelyn Waugh, “The War and the Younger Generation,” in Essays, 61. 101  Ibid., 61, 61–2.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  63 greatest concern is for the generation that came of age in the postwar world, because that generation saw the war as the norm rather than “a shocking negation of all they had represented, or a reckless, rather thrilling, plunge into abnormality.”102 For Waugh, wartime falsity of information found its  counterpart in the war’s aftereffects: “the real and lasting injury” came from living in a world where “[e]verything was a ‘substitute’ for something else.”103 Of this generation, Waugh estimates that “950 in every thousand are totally lacking in any sense of qualitative value. It is absurd to blame them if, after being nurtured on margarine and ‘honey sugar’, they turn instinctively to the second-rate in art and life.”104 Waugh imagines an alternative postwar Britain, in which the soldier generation reinstated the “rigid discipline . . . of the standards of civilization.”105 But because they no longer believed in “those very standards . . . they had fought to preserve,” they instead displayed a “jolly tolerance of everything modern,” which left  postwar generations without taste or guiding values.106 The war thus enabled iconoclastic art (represented by the revived “catch-phrases of the Ibsenite movement”), and it substantiated the avant-garde rhetoric of generational splits and ruptured aesthetic and social traditions. In Decline and Fall, Margot Beste-Chetwynde, Paul’s love interest and his student Peter’s mother, embodies the postwar acceptance of this second-rate novelty. She assumes control over King’s Thursday from the current Earl of Pastmaster, the brother of her deceased husband (whom she is rumored to have poisoned). Because she does not differentiate genuine from sham Tudor, the untitled Mrs Beste-Chetwynde cannot “ ‘think of anything more bourgeois and awful than timbered Tudor architecture.’ ”107 She consequently demolishes the structure “with the aid of all that was most pulverizing in modern machinery,” leading outraged neighbors to assist nonetheless by scavenging its remains.108 Despite all this, she maintains minimal respect for the trappings of nobility: to ensure Peter’s inheritance of his title, she tries to prevent Lord Pastmaster from marrying in retaliation. Yet Margot fails to recognize that this title will mean little because the aristocracy has lost its purpose—acting as the seat of national culture and taste. Outlining this loss in a 1932 BBC address, Waugh described the detrimental impact of economic shifts that forced upper-class youth to seek employment: “One will [therefore] expect, in that part of society which moulds the ideas, manners and art of its generation, psychological symptoms of futility, inferiority 102  Ibid., 62. 103 Ibid. 107  Waugh, Decline, 155.

104 Ibid. 108  Ibid., 156.

105 Ibid.

106 Ibid.

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64  Reconstructing Modernism and a revolt from culture and it is exactly these things that are, in fact, coming to articulate expression today.”109 In Decline and Fall, the upper class’s declining fortunes and consequent decay emerge from the very beginning of the novel in the “epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; . . . [and] illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands” who descend on Oxford for a meeting of the exclusive Bollinger Club.110 That decline yields a literal “revolt from culture.” Targeting the cultured—and therefore unpopular—Oxonians, the Club’s members submerge a Matisse painting and destroy a submission for the Newdigate Prize Poem. In this upheaval of cultural identity, people and place are formed of incongruent pieces, lacking the wholeness Waugh thought possible before the war. False appendages like wigs and prosthetics signal the disintegration of personhood, and social roles are upended through the ease with which school butler Philbrick masquerades as a rich man. Perhaps no one is more of an assemblage than Margot, whom Waugh first describes as “two lizard-skin feet, silk legs, chinchilla body, a tight little black hat pinned with platinum and diamonds, and the high invariable voice that may be heard in any Ritz Hotel from New York to Buda-Pesth.”111 The “margarine” and “ ‘honey sugar’ ” of the postwar world infiltrate personhood itself, with body parts and values easily traded for others. Against designers’ promise of social reform, Waugh suggests that British citizens will become the objects they consume. Yet the biggest exchange Margot makes—even more abhorrent, the novel suggests, than her prostitution ring—is replacing the demolished King’s Thursday with a quasi-modernist structure. That materialization of the modern style is especially significant because Waugh published Decline and Fall half a decade before the MARS Group’s founding. While the old forms stagnated long before Margot and modernism arrived, Waugh underlines that “the second-rate in art and life” did not assume dominance until the postwar period. World War I, as we saw in “Cities of the Future,” marked the point at which modernist architecture lost its legitimacy. The rebuilt King’s Thursday is an even more outrageous assemblage than the novel’s characters, and its aesthetic and social emptiness accelerates the production of hollow people. In response to Margot’s request for “ ‘[s]omething clean 109 Waugh, Essays, 34. Excerpt from November 28, 1932 BBC address “To an Unknown Old Man.” 110 Waugh, Decline, 1–2. 111  Ibid., 95.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  65 and square,’ ” architect Otto Friedrich Silenus instead produced a bizarre gathering of modern forms and materials: “a floor of bottle-green glass,” a “vulcanite table,” an “aluminum lift,” a “great colonnade of black glass pillars,” a “polished aluminum balustrade,” “aluminum blinds” with a window of “vita-glass,” “pavement of silver and scarlet,” a “sunk bath of malachite,” “pneumatic rubber furniture,” a “porcelain ceiling,” “leather-hung walls,” and a “tank of octopuses.”112 As Paul escorts his old Oxford friend Potts—a League of Nations employee—around the house, its full absurdity emerges: [Potts] admired the luminous ceiling in Mrs Beste-Chetwynde’s study and the indiarubber fungi in the recessed conservatory and the little drawing room, of which the floor was a large kaleidoscope, set in motion by an electric button. They took him up in the lift to the top of the great pyramidical tower, from which he could look down on the roofs and domes of glass and aluminum which glittered like Chanel diamonds in the afternoon sun.113

Potts’s enthusiasm for postwar internationalism matches his enthrallment with the aesthetically new. The urge to achieve the absolutely modern in art—that which has yet to materialize—is precisely what leads Margot to Silenus. We learn that he has never had an “important commission.”114 Instead, he attracts Margot through his “rejected design for a chewing-gum factory which had been reproduced in a progressive Hungarian quarterly.”115 With her instinct for visually displayed cultural capital, Margot sponsors this coalescence of the modernist factory aesthetic, avant-garde magazines, and Continental practitioners. As David Bradshaw argues, Silenus’s absurd creations—namely the industrial elements he applies to domestic design—channel Waugh’s criticism of modernists who conflate architectural forms of vastly different social purposes. While reviewing The City of Tomorrow, Waugh scolded critic Raymond Mortimer and former Vogue publisher Dorothy Todd for venerating “grain-elevators, hangars for airships, factories, [and] liners” in The New Interior Decoration; they “admire [Le Corbusier’s] work as being avant-garde rather than as a logical solution to a practical program.”116 112  Ibid., 156, 166, 166, 168, 168, 168, 170, 170, 170, 180, 185, 185, 185, 190. 113  Ibid., 189. 114  Ibid., 156. 115  Ibid., 159. 116  See David Bradshaw, “Introduction,” Decline and Fall (London: Penguin, 2001), xxvi–xxvii; see Waugh, “Cities,” 64. As Hermione Lee notes, Todd featured work by Le Corbusier in Vogue.

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66  Reconstructing Modernism By contrast, prominent critics treated Waugh’s novel as incisive commentary: in 1938, the Architectural Review published an excerpt that caricatures Silenus’s theories.117 That Review feature affirms the serious message that Waugh’s humor conveys. Despite the absurdity of cephalopod and chewing-gum modernism, Waugh urges readers to see that absurdity does not make a design harmless. Rather, Silenus’s modern environment is so unlivable that it’s dehumanizing, a trait that recalls his foray into cinematic modernism, a “film of great length and complexity of plot—a complexity rendered the more inextricable by the producer’s austere elimination of all human characters.”118 Silenus locates architectural perfection not in an environment that meets human needs but in one that eliminates all human qualities and, indeed, humans themselves: “The problem of architecture as I see it,” he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferro concrete and aluminum, “is the problem of all art—the elimination of the human elem­ent from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man,” he said gloomily; “please tell your readers that. Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.”119

Modern architects, Waugh implies, threaten civilization not only by severing access to tradition but also by undoing the foundations of sociality. In Silenus’s formulation, the highest good that architecture can produce is making inhabitants inhuman. As Bradshaw notes, Waugh’s accompanying drawing of Silenus looks remarkably similar to Le Corbusier, who famously theorized the house as “a machine for living in.”120 Silenus voices his full scorn for humanity when he balks at installing a staircase: “ ‘Do dynamos See Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Random House, 1997), 470. Mortimer wrote for Vogue in that period, as did Aldous Huxley. In line with Waugh’s depiction of a muddled modernism, Betjeman praised Waugh in the Architectural Review for censuring architecture that masquerades as modern: “Decline and Fall put jazz-modern [Art Deco] in its right place.” “Architecture in Fiction,” Architectural Review 76 (November 1934): 174. 117  Evelyn Waugh, “Vile Bodies,” Architectural Review 84 (October 1938): 197. Its heading is a nod to Waugh’s 1930 novel of that name. 118 Waugh, Decline, 159. 119 Ibid. 120  Bradshaw, “Introduction,” xxvii.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  67 require staircases? Do monkeys require houses? What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution!’ ”121 In Decline and Fall, the future modernists offer is not only postwar but also posthuman. For Waugh, this architectural dehumanization has grave implications for authors’ attempts to document and interpret the altered modern world. If the novel is a character- and narrative-driven art, the fact that Waugh calls his book “an account of the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather” and notes Paul’s failure as protagonist reveals a purposeful unraveling of literary form.122 Waugh’s experimentation is not simply playful. Instead, it  adumbrates a wider dehumanization under modern architecture and design, as humans become inseparable from “dynamos.” Old techniques of characterization are inappropriate for this modern world, Waugh suggests. Instead, British mid-century authors must address dehumanization at the level of form as well as content, if they are to engage critically with that world. By voicing Silenus’s interrelated aesthetic and social motives alongside his own evacuation of character, Waugh undercuts the ethical agenda of prominent CIAM architects. We are led to recognize the inhuman face of modernism alongside Paul, who to some degree acts as Waugh’s stand-in. (The two share ignominious finishes at Oxford and consequent teaching jobs in Wales.) Paul’s expectations for the new King’s Thursday shatter upon his first glimpse: “English spring,” thought Paul. “In the dreaming ancestral beauty of the English country.” Surely, he thought, these great chestnuts in the morning sun stood for something enduring and serene in a world that had lost its reason and would so stand when the chaos and confusion were forgotten? And surely it was the spirit of William Morris that whispered to him in Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s motor car about seed time and harvest, the superb succession of the seasons, the harmonious interdependence of rich and poor, of dignity, innocence, and tradition? But at a turn in the drive the cadence of his thoughts was abruptly transected. They had come into sight of the house.123

Again, the house is shown to destroy the possibility for an already weakened tradition to provide stability amid postwar anomie. Yet, in Paul’s turn to William Morris, Waugh contemplates social reform through aesthetics. 121 Waugh, Decline, 160.

122  Ibid., 163.

123  Ibid., 165.

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68  Reconstructing Modernism The  Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood occupied Waugh’s thoughts, for he ­published his Rossetti biography while writing Decline and Fall and had recently visited Morris’s Kelmscott Manor.124 By summoning Morris, Waugh distinguishes modernism from Morris’s project of reimagining aesthetic tradition through the political possibilities of socialism, under which good design could reorganize everyday life. The very form of the house dismisses Paul’s reveries about “the harmonious interdependence of rich and poor, of dignity, innocence, and tradition.” Paul’s conversation with Potts before traveling to King’s Thursday ­presages his inevitable disappointment. Potts’s leftist and internationalist political affiliations match his taste for a stridently international modernism. After seeing Silenus’s productions in Munich, Potts pronounces him “a man worth watching”: “He was in Moscow at one time and in the Bauhaus at Dessau. He can’t be  more than twenty-five now. There were some photographs of King’s Thursday in a paper the other day. It looked extraordinarily interesting. It’s said to be the only really imaginative building since the French Revolution. He’s got right away from Corbusier, anyway.”125

Silenus’s time in the recently formed USSR gains added weight when Potts ties class-based revolt to architectural revolt by using the French Revolution to date the last “really imaginative building.” Political imagination merges with aesthetic imagination, and Silenus’s modernist credentials are reinforced through his Bauhaus stint. Potts’s use of Le Corbusier to represent an original but outmoded modernism prompts Paul to observe, “ ‘If people only realized . . . Corbusier is a pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that’s why they like him.’ ”126 In Paul’s estimation, Le Corbusier is the product of a prewar moment, much as Waugh argued in “Cities of the Future.” Paul likewise describes his work as the outgrowth of a significantly different ethical tradition from that commonly associated with modern architecture. Because of Le Corbusier’s functionalism, Paul ties him to a movement advocating the greatest good for the greatest number. That tendency explains his popularity but undercuts his revolutionary credentials, for his is a nineteenth-century mindset. These alleged intellectual underpinnings are hardly the tradition to which Waugh subscribes; as we have seen,

124  Waugh, Letters, 24–5.

125  Ibid., 163.

126 Ibid.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  69 Waugh advocated preserving the upper classes in order to preserve art and  culture. By differentiating Le Corbusier from Silenus, Paul separates a  reform-oriented model of architectural modernism from the postwar movement—an aesthetic without substance, open to appropriation by destructive ideological forces. In this formulation, modernism is not a vision for reforming modernity but an intensification of its ills. That Paul expresses a definitive opinion is significant, since he too is appropriated by external forces for most of the novel. “For an evening,” Waugh writes, “Paul became a real person again.”127 Critically evaluating architectural modernism allows him to regain his humanity—if only until he resides in Silenus’s creation. Through King’s Thursday, Waugh refigures Le Corbusier’s “machine for living”: the structure is habitable only if you’re a machine. Modernist futurity is similarly reworked in the newspaper headline that Silenus’s work generates, “ ‘Peer’s Sister-in-Law’s Mansion Builder on Future of Architecture . . . Will machines live in houses? Amazing forecast of Professor-Architect.’ ”128 This forecast may not be so far-fetched. Silenus’s “inexpressive” eyes, the mechanical motion of his “empty jaws,” and his sleeplessness all signal his evolution toward the machines he idolizes.129 Waugh suggests that mechanization is more than a set of habits this architecture induces: because architecture becomes the medium through which inhabitants think, structuring their experience of the world, it could shape their ideology. At risk in architectural modernism is a loss of subjectivity in favor of standardization. Contemplating Silenus’s mechanization, Paul recognizes that he too is fodder: “he felt the sleepless, involved genius of the house heavy about his head. He and Margot and Peter and Sir Humphrey Maltravers were just insignificant incidents in the life of the house: this new-born monster to whose birth ageless and forgotten cultures had been in travail.”130 The greatest threat of this “new-born monster,” however, is its own fleetingness. Margot soon replaces it, an occurrence that goes largely without remark, since even its creator had no affection for it. Through contrasting this ephemerality with the longevity of traditional structures, Waugh again refigures modernist futurity by locating that future in ruin. The “forgotten cultures” to which Paul attributes the house’s existence lend an air of foreignness while also implying that Continental social and aesthetic values will bring British culture itself to ruin. Silenus’s name associates him with

127  Ibid., 164.

128  Ibid., 160.

129  Ibid., 161.

130  Ibid., 183.

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70  Reconstructing Modernism the Dionysian, a sign of the threat to social discipline he and his structures pose. As in “A Call to the Orders,” modernism appears fundamentally unsuited to Britain. Architectural anomie yields cultural instability: the son  of Margot’s gardener wears Silenus’s tie after he leaves, and Philbrick challenges the appropriateness of class assignments, proclaiming that he “ ‘wasn’t made to be any one’s servant.’ ”131 Nonetheless, the upper-class characters are primarily responsible for abandoning tradition in favor of chasing a faddish modernism, as Margot’s two marriage proposals to Silenus reveal. In fact, the only characters who embrace British tradition and art are not of British background. The paneling from the original King’s Thursday “went to South Kensington, where it has come in for a great deal of admiration from the Indian students,” and the most emphatic appreciation of traditional architecture comes from Margot’s African-American boyfriend, Sebastien “Chokey” Cholmondley, who tours cathedrals and country houses and claims he’d “ ‘give all the jazz in the world for just one little stone from one of your cathedrals.’ ”132 The response of Margot’s son to the new house reveals the degree to which the upper orders have, by contrast, abandoned taste for modishness: “ ‘I think it’s so good. It was rather Chokey’s taste before.’ ”133 Despite architects’ calls for large-scale, prescient planning, Silenus’s fiasco suggests that modernism cannot support a civilization. Waugh underlines the danger of novelty for its own sake, in aesthetics and politics: abandonment of tradition made postwar youths “Bolshevik at 18 and bored at 20.”134 Indeed, Waugh indicts modernism across the arts. Silenus resides in Bloomsbury, and Paul, accumulating objects in Margot’s manner (and through her money), purchases “a set of Proust.”135 Margot likewise invests in literary modernism as modish object: while Paul is imprisoned through her doing, she sends Woolf ’s latest novel via the chaplain, who assures Paul, “ ‘It’s only been out two days.’ ”136 The chaplain—and Margot— admire modernist fiction simply for its newness. In a story short on resolution, with Paul returning to Oxford under a new name, Waugh does stage the failure of a compromised and compromising modernism. A destitute Silenus reemerges and, upon discovering Margot has already married, simply exploits her through residing in her Mediterranean villa; the modern movement, in the form of Silenus, no longer has access to  British institutions. Margot’s wedding, in fact, is the result of her own 131  Ibid., 63. 132  Ibid., 156, 103. 133  Ibid., 167. 135 Waugh, Decline, 200. 136  Ibid., 256.

134  Waugh, “War,” 62.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  71 perceived obsolescence. Crediting her social relevance with a lifespan as  limited as the aesthetic she abandoned, Margot weds Sir Humphrey Maltravers. When Maltravers assumes the title of Viscount, he chooses to be called Viscount Metroland. In doing so, he valorizes and claims affinity with Metroland, the site of new suburbs populated with sham Tudors. The tacky new, not tradition, fills the void left by Silenus’s modernism. Margot is  consequently Viscountess Metroland, a representative of the bourgeois, pseudo-traditional style that caused her to destroy King’s Thursday. In Waugh’s novel, modern architects erase Britons’ taste for the genuine and actual in favor of impractical plans printed in avant-garde journals. Now that the generation that embraced modernism has a taste for the secondrate, they are fodder for manipulation by any new agenda. Silenus’s creation thus embodies the political and aesthetic misdirection of the nation, a failed modernity as well as a failed modernism.

Growing Reservations: Frederick Etchells and Wyndham Lewis It was not only conservative writers like Waugh and Betjeman who distrusted the modern movement’s increasingly public platform; both Etchells and Lewis criticized the shape architecture-led social reform took when implemented under less sweeping programs, and they distanced themselves from the movement. In fact, Etchells—despite leaving Fry’s Omega Workshops to  support Lewis’s more extreme vision at the Rebel Art Centre—joined Betjeman in his preservationism and taste for ecclesiastical architecture. In Etchells’s Architectural Review obituary, Betjeman praises his dissociation from the modern movement: Etchells had “such powers of concentration that he could cut himself off entirely from whole circles of friends including those I have mentioned of the ’30s.”137 Betjeman recalls unearthing his copy of Blast with Etchells’s drawings, which led Etchells to reply, “ ‘I hope you don’t draw attention to that John, it would upset my little vicars.’ ”138 Etchells’s full abandonment of modernist aspirations and avant-garde temporality manifested itself in his ability to compose “funny letters in the  manner of a pompous would-be modern architect” and to “make his

137  John Betjeman, “Frederick Etchells,” Architectural Review 154 (1973): 271. 138 Ibid.

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72  Reconstructing Modernism buildings look as if they had always been there.”139 By erasing all traces of novelty, Etchells inverts the modernist futurity Waugh denigrates—the desire to launch aesthetic and social structures unlike anything seen before. Like Waugh and Betjeman, Lewis regretted the modern movement’s socialist associations, for he saw socialism as a threat to the individuality needed to produce great art. Following St. John Ervine’s denigration of the “angry young poets,” Lewis wrote a 1936 letter to The Observer challenging Ervine’s implication that “everybody who has rather unconventional tastes in art is a ‘bolshie.’ ”140 Lewis distinguishes the socially oppositional modernist voice from an affiliation with a particular ideology. This stance departs from The Caliph’s Design, where Lewis urged politicians to adopt modernism as a platform. In response to accusations of being “ ‘counter-revolutionary,’ ” he differentiates aesthetic and political revolution.141 Significantly, he invokes literary difficulty to refute Ervine’s assumption about the politics of modernism: “A difficult author—Mallarmé, Henry James or Hopkins—would be no hero in Russia today. Indeed it should be self-evident that ‘difficulty’ (that is, highly individualised expression) must be regarded not only as anti-popular, but, since useless for purposes of propaganda, a sort of affront like an idle man.”142 Lewis thus reworks his previous vision of modernism as a mass aesthetic, one an entire community must adopt for full effect. The modernism Lewis now values is individualist and “anti-popular.”143 In his 1935 review of the Art in Industry exhibition at Burlington House, Lewis similarly reevaluates the potential for a mass modernism by acknowledging that visionary forms might not actually change the people who encounter them. He anticipates Betjeman’s argument that self-reflection is necessary for a change in environment to matter, but he maintains that the issue is not that modernist environments lack intrinsic meaning; rather, they have not been fully deployed. Lewis refuses to write “a ‘puff ’ for the 139 Ibid. 140 Lewis, Letters, 235. 141  Ibid., 246. 142  Ibid., 235. 143  In pursuit of this “highly individualised” modernism, Lewis accused even previous allies like Pound of displaying the conformity he blamed for World War I, calling Pound “a crowd, a little crowd” in Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Berkeley: Gingko Press, 1993), 68. In 1942, he attributed his early praise for Hitler to his desire to wrest modernism from the Left in the years before the war: “Our tribe suffered terribly the last time it went to war . . . I turned upon the left-wing you remember, because it seemed to be from that quarter that the war-psychosis came.—It is now very apparent to me that I thought too much of our tribe: too little of the ‘genre humain.’ ” Lewis, Letters, 328. In this account, the 1930s severed modernism from social reform, for a culture conducive to art is not necessarily humane. That divergence forced Lewis to reevaluate his vision for using large-scale architectural projects to create a world friendly to modernism.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  73 modernist decorator,” since high design does not necessarily yield a higher intellectual life: “I am ultimately more concerned with the persons who sit upon or within it, than with the furniture itself.”144 This explicitly “modernist” style is functioning simply as a form, but rather than discrediting the new, Lewis incites purchasers to “cooperate intelligently in what the ‘new’ chairs and tables mean—not to take or trust anything labelled new, else the word ‘new,’ and the thing too, becomes merely silly.”145 Citizens must engage with modernism consciously as well as unconsciously, particularly because the term—and modernist rhetoric more generally—can easily be manipulated. Returning to design as a catalyst for literary development, Lewis uses novelist Ethel M. Dell to demonstrate that progressive environments do not necessarily bolster other arts or instill a critical appreciation of modernism: “Would the acquiring of an expensive, elaborate, modernist home by Miss Ethel M. Dell—acquired on the proceeds of what is admittedly an inferior type of popular fiction—mean very much in terms of life (life being synonymous with art in this connection)?”146 Style itself cannot reform taste. “It is of some importance what sort of people live in the midst of a dazzling ‘progressive’ equipment,” and Lewis illustrates the disjunction using apes in airplanes with bombs: “the power possessed by the ape would be admirable, but the uses to which he would put the power would cancel and contradict the intellectual achievement represented by the great machine.”147 In this formulation, modernism possesses a power that inevitably attracts abuse by those unable to access its deeper meanings and possibilities. For Lewis, manufacturing advances are partly to blame for the ineffectiveness of the modern style. Whereas beautiful “interiors . . . used to signify that the person inhabiting them was spiritually a match for his surroundings,” factory-made and easily attainable items mean that “what a person uses tell[s] us nothing whatever about what he is.”148 Modernist interior design, modern novels, Arp and Chirico paintings, and “Corbusier-school ferro-concrete veranda[s]” can be assumed as status symbols, and “Mr or Miss Modern” can achieve “ready-made the thing with the cachet, in this case the cachet being equivalent to power.”149 In contrast to Waugh’s concern with irrecoverable tradition, this modernism is simply more of the same, one consumer option among many. The ability to mold modernism as a signifier has been transferred to the masses, and unlike Herbert Read, 144  Wyndham Lewis, “Art in Industry,” in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 241. 145 Ibid. 146  Ibid., 245. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid.

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74  Reconstructing Modernism Lewis in the 1930s possessed little faith in the effect of good design on national taste and habits. Lewis’s “One Picture Is More Than Enough” (1934) underlines the danger of instituting mass modernism only partially, without the reform of every aspect of life he demanded in The Caliph’s Design. Elaborating on modernists’ hitherto limited ability to change human nature through challenging forms, Lewis surveys the safer, more palatable modernism that had been deployed. Practitioners must not simply mold “the objective world in which [they] set out to place” citizens.150 Without corresponding intellectual development, citizens will remain the “robots” that “artists and propagandists” have created.151 Instead, “[i]t is to Mr Modern that we have to give some thought now—we ‘modernists’ who have been the architects of the contemporary world.”152 In this piercing evaluation of his fellow “architects,” Lewis identifies “ ‘modernists’ ” as contributors to audience deficiencies. That he quotes the name signals an inchoate critical recognition of this cross-medium modernism, united under a term that gained traction in architectural writing. Lewis’s concern is not simply that the vacuity of “Mr  Modern” has persisted but that modernism can function much like propaganda, as rhetoric that creates automatons. Lewis echoes the fears Waugh voiced in Decline and Fall, but Lewis does not attribute this mechanization to modernists’ extremity. Rather, a mass modernist style leads only to a taste for art that is “quite harmless and just ‘advanced’ enough for Mr Modern to accept it along with the chromium-plated writing desk.”153 In no uncertain terms, Lewis characterizes this “harmless” modernism as the potential bearer of empty and manipulative ideologies: “the present modernist furniture,” on the whole, “seems designed for a sort of bastard half-class of half-proletarianized nobodies.”154 If modernism in its fullness enables individuality, its safer, sterilized variant produces pseudo-people, robots to match a machine aesthetic. Highlighting the danger of a compromised modernism, Lewis directly addresses alliances between modernists and socialists. He questions whether “ ‘modern interiors” are a materialistic phenomenon, “a crude, ideologic, reflection on its machines,” or “an intelligent phenomenon.”155 “[A]ll that is ‘new’ in art is associated vaguely in people’s minds with Marxism,” but the “propagandist aesethetics of Magnetogorsk” are “merely the Ford Plant

150  Lewis, “One,” 232. 151 Ibid. 154  Ibid., 234–5. 155  Ibid., 234.

152 Ibid.

153 Ibid.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  75 Wagnerized, and plastered with power-slogans.”156 This aesthetic novelty is  a veneer for politics based on feeling rather than intellect. Yet Lewis advances an alternative, reclaimed modernism, one in which the new is not “circumscribed by those materialist ideologies.”157 Writing from the 1930s, Lewis emphasizes self-reflexivity as a defining quality for true modernism, theorized now as a formalist phenomenon. Socialists’ perceived usurpation of modernism similarly led Lewis in  “Power-Feeling and Machine-Age Art” (1934) to contemplate a brute materialist modernism capable of turning citizens into a body “intoning the Marxist ABC of machine-mindedness.”158 He differentiates that which is “merely . . . a bare board, or a crude whitewashed wall” from the “compacted significance” of the “much-advertised ‘simplicity’ of the average ‘modernist’ design”; good modernist architecture requires interpretive strategies similar to those demanded by modern poetry.159 The 1930s, for Lewis, present an opportunity to renew the utopianism of early, cross-medium modernism: “The world has been held up for twenty years by War, Post-war, and then by  Slump, and now the forces of brave-new-worldishness are organizing themselves once more.”160 Yet the utopian impulse can itself be appropriated. While Lewis “freely confess[es]” that he is “a brave-new-worldite,” he reiterates his opposition to Italian Futurists’ “interpretation of the ‘new’ ” and their attendant politics.161 He recognizes the modern movement’s vulnerability to fascist and communist “propagandist-dictators,” yet, because of the nation’s early experience of the Industrial Revolution, which immunized it against romanticizing machinery, he reserves hope in British resistance to debased and materialist modernisms.162 In that decade, Britain represented modernism’s front line. This conflict intensified in “Plain Home-Builder: Where Is Your Vorticist?” (1934), published in the Architectural Review, which still included Betjeman as assistant editor. Although Lewis identified Britain as a potential site of resistance, he concedes that “the Anglo-Saxon public (this applies more to England than to America) has remained obdurate, and has refused even to  adopt a tolerant attitude, much less to be converted” to modernism.163 Lewis’s diagnosis is similar to Waugh’s in “The Philistine Age of English Decoration”: he admits that for the “Plain Home-Builder,” much as for the 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid. 158 Wyndham Lewis, “Power-Feeling and Machine-Age Art,” in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 236–7. 159  Ibid., 240. 160  Ibid., 237. 161  Ibid., 236. 162  Ibid., 240; see ibid., 236–7. 163  Lewis, “Plain,” 246.

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76  Reconstructing Modernism “Plain Reader,” modernism “would be ideal only for the very few.”164 Again, Lewis in the 1930s elevated modernist difficulty. He argues that “the architectural plans of Mr. Wells Coates” present similar problems of reception and interpretation as “Mr. Eliot’s crossword puzzles in place of poems (as it seems to the uninitiated).”165 Architects and authors could distinguish their work through an instructive formal difficulty. Rather than teaching the public to like modernism, in Herbert Read’s manner, Lewis maintains that modernist works themselves can and should educate citizens, despite their instinctive aversion. Warning against products designed for easy consumption, Lewis describes modernism as a cure for social ills. Of “this art of the  most ‘modern’ schools,” he admits, “a bitter pill it is—why deny it?”: “In this country architects like Etchells, Holden, Connell and Ward, Tecton, Emberton, Tait, Wells Coates, Chermayeff, McGrath, Fry; painters and sculptors like Henry Moore, Epstein, Kauffer, and the Nashes are in the nature of paregoric or codliver oil to the oversweet Anglo-Saxon palate.”166 Modernism may not suit Britain, but Britain needs it. Unlike Waugh’s description of modernism as disease, Lewis’s modernism is the medicine needed to restore national health. That “bitter pill” prompts Lewis to reflect on the “non-human principle” in art.167 The artist must become “just as cold-blooded as the efficient surgeon or duellist: his eye must be as detached, his hand as firm as theirs.”168 Lewis offers a retrospective argument for modernist detachment. While Waugh condemned dehumanization, Lewis asserts that “the non-human principle . . . promises a finer standard of art, whatever else you may think about it, upon purely human grounds.”169 As he rationalizes why the British public had not immediately welcomed the modern movement, Lewis reformulates early modernist utopianism. Instead of blaming artists’ slowness to  abandon tradition, as in The Caliph’s Design, Lewis wrestles with a public clinging to older behaviors. Lewis recognizes a conflict between democratization and modernism in the field of architecture, the foremost public art: the reform he envisioned might emerge only under an authoritarian regime. The risk is that modernism too would require a loss of individual choice. To consider the implications of that loss, Lewis evaluates modernist consumers. For the masses, having modernist architecture forced upon them 164  Ibid., 246–7. 168  Ibid., 254.

165  Ibid., 247. 169  Ibid., 253.

166  Ibid., 246.

167  Ibid., 253.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  77 and receiving what they can subconsciously are to their benefit.170 Because the average citizen has “no taste at all,” [he] should if possible be restrained from buying those coloured prints of comic Bonzos he naturally favours and putting them up on his walls. For  him a perfectly blank wall is the only decent solution. He is what “bourgeois” civilization has made him. He should put himself humbly in the hands of a competent modernist designer, and cubist-bungalow architect, and allow them to ration him, very strictly indeed, in the matter of everything barring strict necessities.171

Prescribed by a modernist who serves as doctor and lawmaker, architecture corrects the ills of “ ‘bourgeois’ civilization.” The locus of that wisdom is instructive: Lewis’s subtitle urges the “Plain Home-Builder” to consult a “Vorticist” rather than, as in The Caliph’s Design, discover the “Vortex.” Much as he resituates modernist inspiration, Lewis differentiates architecture from arts—especially literature—that require conscious engagement, for modernist architecture molds those with inferior taste. Lewis accordingly reformulates the “ideal home” in terms of modernist discipline rather than bourgeois aspiration: “to say that that ‘ideal home,’ of that spoilt child of the Machine-age, is in fact ideal, or is at all final, would indeed be absurd, and criminally discouraging . . . . he is an embryo, as it were, a foetus, of what should be—let us square our shoulders, and say shall be.”172 Modern architecture is only a first step in the process of reform. By abandoning architectural modernism as the symbol of what “shall be,” Lewis partially cedes it to proponents of socialism, a political system Lewis deems antiindividualist. The “cubist cavern” inhabitants are “proletariat too—the newest of the new poor; the first swallow of the Anglo-Saxon Bolshevy that is to be.”173 Lewis adopts the socialist vocabulary of “the proletariat” and uses it derogatorily, yet he characterizes this dwelling as the “skeleton of a much richer existence.”174 He envisions a long, evolving modernism, in 170  Treating Lewis as an instructive precursor to postmodernism, Andrzej Gasiorek interprets Lewis’s evolving understanding of modernist utopianism (from The Caliph’s Design to “Plain Home-Builder”) as a turn away from the authoritarian aspects of modern architecture, though I would emphasize that Lewis does still prescribe modernism for the average citizen. Gasiorek, “ ‘Architecture or revolution’?: Le Corbusier and Wyndham Lewis,” in Geographies of Modernism, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London: Taylor and Francis, 2005), 136–45. 171  Lewis, “Plain,” 255. 172 Ibid. 173 Ibid. 174 Ibid.

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78  Reconstructing Modernism which the ideal—aesthetic and social—is achieved through cross-medium cooperation. Moving beyond modernist architecture will allow the audience to reach higher levels of consciousness: “it is up to you, after all, to refuse to be made into a sedate athletic doll—into an exhibit, like a show-piece for a  lecturer, or in an interview with ‘the perfect proletarian, in the newest frugal, least domestic, prize-puritan-parlour.’ ”175 The maligned “show-piece for a lecturer” and “perfect proletarian” interviewees reference architects’ and reformers’ reliance on exhibitions and housing documentaries, as I discuss in later chapters. By contrast, Lewis treats his readers as elites. Because of their self-reflexivity and elevated taste, Lewis urges them to furnish their environments with worthy art: “it is no use learning about modern architecture and furniture if you do not learn about modern pictures too; unless you wish to exist as the least imaginative of cave-men or cave-women, as, of  course, the average must do. But I have not been addressing myself to an  average Plain Home-builder.”176 By addressing Review readers, Lewis reconciles architecture to the network of modernist arts. To incentivize cooperation, he promises individual distinction via modernist consumption. As Lewis affirms the value of modernist networks, he develops the crossmedium affinities he identified in The Caliph’s Design. Lewis, as we have seen, retrospectively characterized Vorticism as a tool for imagining architectural possibilities: “Vorticism (the characteristic movement with which all these modes of extreme modernism began in England) was, in a sense, a substitution of architecture for painting.”177 In distinguishing “these modes of  extreme modernism” from materialist counterfeits, Lewis identifies architecture as the form that allowed modernists to understand themselves as modernists. Formal experimentation became coextensive with plans to remake the structures of everyday life. “[T]he pictures produced by myself, and other painters of similar aims, and which have been produced continuously since that time,” Lewis argues, were “pictorial spells, as it were, cast by us, designed to attract the architectural shell that was wanting.”178 In their efforts to theorize architectural modernism before it existed as such, the paintings were “merely a picture X—a positional abstraction.”179 Even as architecture allowed practitioners of other arts to chart the future of modernism and modernity—the “Babylon” where social life and the arts would jointly flourish—Lewis emphasized that stopping at modernist architecture would kill the utopian impulse and compromise modernist 175  Ibid., 255–6. 179 Ibid.

176  Ibid., 256.

177  Ibid., 248.

178 Ibid.

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Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future  79 energies. Reviewing the British enactment of architectural modernism after The Caliph’s Design, he laments its failure to produce a postwar renaissance: the appropriate shells—the buildings—have been, in a small way it is true, forthcoming. But they, too, have forgotten the picture! Or rather, it has turned out that the architect (having got his Vortex at last) has conceived it usually in such a manner as potentially to exclude the picture altogether from his dogmatic vorticist or cubist walls.180

Straying into the “field of pure architecture,” painters had compromised their forms because their paintings were “obviously contingent on, and conditioned by, what the architect produces.”181 Yet architects failed to yield an audience for cross-medium modernism and even impeded the development of other arts.182 Given the wide public that modern architecture enjoyed, Lewis had deemed it the best hope for stimulating postwar modernism, but he hints that architects instead compromised the wider movement. Lewis’s account is even more dire in Men Without Art (1934), which, like many of his reassessments of modern architecture, was published the year after the MARS Group was founded. He leaps from using art to reimagine society to imagining a society without art. For Lewis, art not only reflects a  culture to itself but also stimulates it to change, so to lose art is to lose an important tool for self-criticism.183 Art then has an “ethical” and a “political status,” though it need not conform to political orthodoxy; through its “non-partisan” perspective, it pairs satire with visions of an alternative structure, “the state-beautiful.”184 Anticipating world war, Lewis defends the  social value of the modernist arts in the face of their probable disappearance. Apoliticism becomes a virtue at the moment that political forces threatened to destroy modernism. By casting the movement as apolitical, Lewis diminishes his vision of art’s sociopolitical efficacy: it “may be a way of life, a system of ‘salvation,’ for the professional critic, as we see in the case of Mr. I.  A.  Richards. But it cannot be that for the artist. The artist, unlike the critic, must also be a living person, and he is not likely ever to  understand that sort of ‘salvation.’ ”185 In contrast to the adoption of modernist utopianism by politicians, students, and documentarians in the  1930s, Lewis underscored the disjunction between modernism and 180  Ibid., 248–9. 181  Ibid., 248. 182  See ibid. 183  See Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 13. 184  Ibid., 14, 14, 193, 191. 185  Ibid., 225.

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80  Reconstructing Modernism everyday life. Whereas British lawmakers stood to benefit from modernist revolution in The Caliph’s Design, in this account they prefer a world without art, for politicians have usurped artists’ role as social visionaries.186 In this climate, modernist co-evolution proves impossible: “The architects are handicapped, the painters are depressed, the writers don’t know what to  write about . . . . La patrie est en danger—the ‘patrie’ of the intelligent, industrious, unassuming minority.”187 Modernism is a minority culture threatened with extinction, and modernists who privilege interiority detrimentally substitute an “ ‘unreal city’ ” for the external world on which their existence depends.188 Lewis acknowledges that “[a]rt will die perhaps,” but “[i]t can . . . before doing so, paint us a picture of what life looks like without art. That will be, of course, a satiric picture. Indeed, it is one.”189 Lewis provides an agenda for 1930s authors: through engaging in self-reflection while keeping the external world in view, authors can confront the fate of modernism—and of literature more generally. Practitioners are charged not with theorizing the movement’s future but with portraying a future in which it does not exist, in which it holds no relevance. If World War I (retrospectively) undermined the movement’s sense of itself in time, World War II might (proleptically) decimate the modernist imagination. Lewis raises “a question of great moment—namely, whether the society of the immediate future should be composed, for the first time in civilized history, of Men without art.”190 Like Waugh, Lewis used modernism to imagine the immediate future, but what terrified Lewis was not an end to the nation. What loomed on the horizon was even more devastating: an end to art itself.

186  See ibid., 13; ibid., 87. 190  Ibid., 234.

187  Ibid., 192.

188  Ibid., 138.

189  Ibid., 183.

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2

Aldous Huxley and the “Brave New World” of Architectural Modernism While concerned readers wrote to architectural journals to warn against adopting communism “even when . . . disguised in the most seductive of concrete and glass clothes,” interwar British writers pondered whether embracing the International Style also meant embracing the Communist International, along with the erasure of individual distinction that many associated with socialism.1 As we have seen, that synthesis of style and pol­it­ics was particularly concerning to John Betjeman, who attempted to sep­ar­ate an international style from a socialist internationalism to be established through central planning, before giving up on both modernism and internationalism entirely. Yet in his efforts to show that the fantasy of the modern style—“an architecture of space ships and aeroplanes anchored to the earth or standing on their heads on the landscape”—is a poor substitute for national tradition, Betjeman taps into British modernism’s as­pir­ation­al and utopian elements.2 These architects’ status as visionaries captured the attention not only of governmental planners and of leftist policy groups, but also of dystopian novelists. Such was the case with biologist and planner Julian Huxley and novelist Aldous Huxley, brothers who shared an interest in modern architecture. Despite their similar intellectual background and their early involvement in the planning movement, in the 1930s they became prominent spokespeople for two different—yet conversant—strands of leftist politics: collectivism and liberal individualism. In their respective public roles, they claimed aesthetic experimentation for these divergent political ends: as Julian envisioned modernist forms that could, through their radical newness, mobilize an entire population for revolution, Aldous hailed literature as uniquely capable of using formal experimentation to voice political dissent. At stake in this political and disciplinary split for 1  Quoted in Jackson, Politics, 67.

2  Betjeman, “Honour,” 88.

Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State. Ashley Maher, Oxford University Press (2020). © Ashley Maher. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198816485.001.0001

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82  Reconstructing Modernism Aldous was the national future, namely whether the organizing unit of Britain’s future was the expressive individual or the reproducible pattern.3 Yet it would be a mistake to treat Aldous as an unequivocal proponent of individualism, as so many Cold War classrooms did. Rather, we should read his most famous novel as a piece of 1930s literature and a milestone in his evolving relationship with architectural and political reform, in concert with his large body of criticism. Benjamin Kohlmann convincingly demonstrates the flexibility of 1930s writers’ political thought and exposes their “concerns that literature . . . would be unable to bear the weight of political causes.”4 Cyril Connolly likewise identifies the hesitancy of these writers’ commitments by designating Aldous “the most typical of a generation,” full of “erudition” and “cynicism.”5 Those qualities are apparent in the blurred boundaries between polemical and novelistic modes in Huxley’s body of work. Into his imaginative fiction he incorporates the rhetorical strategies of his architectural criticism—particularly his discomfiting juxtapositions and his hyperbole—to clarify the terms and stakes of these political conflicts. At the same time, he uses novels like Brave New World to foster a model of lit­era­ture as timeless and independent, a form that rises above the particularity of contemporary debates. What emerges is a cross-medium and crossgenre critical process rather than any static statement of belief. That the mid-century produced so many dystopian novels signals a wider transformation in the novel as a tool for political thought. In How Novels Think, Nancy Armstrong argues that many late nineteenth-century novels staged “the conflict between the individual and some form of collectivity that obliterated individualism,” generating the “figure of mass man.”6 Nazism and Soviet communism heightened fears of mass man in the 1930s, and modern architecture—associated as it was with socialism in Britain— changed the terms through which novelists considered possible futures for the individual. Armstrong writes that “[t]o think utopically is to imagine 3  Throughout this chapter, I will be building on the history of Bauhaus émigrés’ col­lab­ora­ tions with British scientists that Peder Anker has recovered in his article “The Bauhaus of Nature,” Modernism/modernity 12.2 (2005): 229–51, as well as his monograph From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). I will reframe Anker’s narrative about environmentalism and sustainability by considering the protests many other British writers launched against the new architecture. Often integrated into the same intellectual circles as these scientists and architects, authors such as Aldous Huxley expressed great skepticism toward modernist architects’ attempt to remake the social environment through remaking the built environment. 4 Kohlmann, Committed, 8. 5  Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 44. 6 Armstrong, How, 23.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   83 how that insatiable being known as the modern individual might acquire the means to perfect and gratify him- or herself,” and she argues that this utopian thinking was inhibited by nineteenth-century novels’ substitution of the “household” for “civil society” as the community through which individuals defined themselves.7 However, utopianism necessarily looked much different after modernist architects and planners proposed mass housing that reintegrated the household into civil society. That materialist utopian imagination countered the “inward turn” that Armstrong identifies in ­lit­era­ture, and architects promised reform that could happen unconsciously, in place of the “self-govern[ment]” Armstrong locates in the early novelistic subject’s quest to change his or her circumstances—and give narrative form to that experience.8 As such, many dystopian novelists found themselves defending the novel as the domain of private life, along with the family structures that the nineteenth-century novel entrenched. These late modernist authors bridge realism and modernism by advocating for the household as a social and novelistic unit and for the autonomy that modernist fiction came to represent in the 1930s, as I have explored with Lewis’s conflation of aesthetic and political values. Faced with this relocation of utopian thinking to the fields of architecture and planning, Huxley imagined the consequences of uniting formal allegiance with political allegiance by looking to Britain’s future, when modernist architecture under a totalitarian government might make literature of any style extinct. In this way, Huxley drives home the stakes of imagining the national future through modernist architecture that I analyzed in my first chapter. While Betjeman and Waugh addressed modernism as an infiltration of foreign architects and foreign styles, even an affront to Britain’s climate because its materials rusted and mildewed, Huxley turned his sights to an enthusiasm catching on among British citizens for collectivism via modern architecture; that enthusiasm led to the founding of the MARS Group the year after Huxley published Brave New World. As Julian joined architects like Berthold Lubetkin, Maxwell Fry, and Jane Drew in thinking about citizenship ecologically, approaching the built environment as a malleable natural habitat, Aldous searched for a new literature that might thwart this environmental conditioning by allowing citizens to express dissent. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that visions of possible futures increasingly emerged along disciplinary rather than purely political lines, even as the involved parties continued to engage each other intellectually through 7  Ibid., 137, 145, 145.

8  Ibid., 143, 6.

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84  Reconstructing Modernism social gatherings, organizational membership, and periodical publication. At its most extreme, this habit of theorizing political structures through aesthetic structures led authors to transform architects’ narratives about social renovation by importing them into literary form, now championed as the medium of the individual. By mapping these narratives of the future onto the form of the dystopian novel, authors like Huxley—along with Orwell and Waugh—drafted alternative modernist futures, futures that loomed larger and larger as modernist architecture became integrated into the British landscape through the MARS Group’s efforts.

Architecture and Governance Aldous and Julian’s ideological divergence manifested itself in the sphere of policymaking when Aldous left the Political and Economic Planning Organisation (PEP) in order to write Brave New World.9 That think tank, formed in response to ecologist and architectural critic Edward Max Nicholson’s “A National Plan for Great Britain” (1931), counted both Julian Huxley and H. G. Wells as prominent members and became a model for the expertly planned community that Aldous imagined as materialized present in his dystopian novel. The concept of national planning allowed disciplines like architecture and the sciences to establish authority by forecasting a comprehensive future gained by the exercise of that joint authority. Planning, then, was not just an envisioned relationship of the present to the future but also a politics of the future. The comprehensiveness of that future community depended upon molding a group identity, a unity of purpose and thought that Aldous came to characterize as limiting the sort of individual expression and dissent that he saw as essential to literature. Julian’s own commitment to the expertly planned national community deepened through contact with smaller-scale modernist planned communities. Julian integrated himself into the social circles of Bauhaus artists and architects after they relocated to London in the early 1930s. It was not a British architect but Huxley himself who played the host for Walter Gropius’s 1937 going-away party, with Wells and Herbert Read also in attendance.10 Julian’s interest in using modernist housing to create an ideal 9  See Anker, From Bauhaus, 27. 10  For Huxley as host, see Anker, “Bauhaus of Nature,” 229; for guests, see David Dean, Architecture of the 1930s: Recalling the English Scene (New York: Rizzoli, 1983), 137.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   85 community developed via what is often deemed the first modernist residence in London, the Lawn Road Flats. As the London home of Bauhaus artists (and later, during the war, Agatha Christie), the flats were an exercise in collective living, and the building’s Isobar Club—a room for which a new line of furniture was designed—hosted group discussions and debates. Julian, while secretary of the London Zoological Society, followed that example by using his own lodgings at the zoo as a gathering place for pol­it­ical discussion. Developed into what Peder Anker calls a “showroom for modernist design,” these physical surroundings became visually representative and even constitutive of a political project as architects, scientists, and town planners engaged in a joint imagination of a future for Britain.11 Huxley’s interest in the architecturally defined communal environment found an outlet during his time at the Zoological Society, when prominent modernist architects redesigned housing for groups of animals at both the Regent’s Park Zoo and Whipsnade Zoo. Common concerns of health and hygiene initially led to partnerships between the Zoological Society and modernist architects in the early 1930s. Gatherings in Hampstead, often at the home of Julian’s friend and collaborator Wells, allowed ideas to flow freely between scientists and architects.12 The two groups found common ground in their commitment to sponsoring cutting-edge disciplinary research: the Zoological Society prided itself on being the world’s first scientific zoo and had its own Institute of Zoology, while the architects presented their work as a science as well as an art by calling their organization the Modern Architectural Research Group. Their formal innovations were en­abled by breakthroughs in engineering and materials science, and Julian recounted his own visits to labs conducting research in steel, concrete, and glass in Scientific Research and Social Needs (1934).13 Because of these close relationships between architects and scientists, Huxley’s immediate predecessor to the post of Zoological Society secretary, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, became acquainted with Soviet émigré Lubetkin, one of Wells’s salon attendees.14 Through Huxley’s advocacy, Chalmers 11 Anker, From Bauhaus, 13. 12 Huxley and Wells, along with Wells’s zoologist son, had co-authored a three-volume introduction to biology for the general public, The Science of Life. 13  See Julian Huxley, Scientific Research and Social Needs (London: Watts & Co., 1934), 61, 137. 14  While in Paris, Lubetkin had also been exposed to American literary modernists. In his unpublished memoir, Lubetkin reports that, while a student at l’École Spéciale d’Architecture, he became acquainted with expat authors Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Notes for Lubetkin’s “Samizdat” (a personal memoir of his life) (LuB/25/4/1–3), The Berthold Lubetkin

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86  Reconstructing Modernism Mitchell initiated a collaboration between the zoo and Lubetkin’s newly created firm, Tecton, that Huxley would continue when he assumed Chalmers Mitchell’s position. Near the end of Huxley’s tenure, Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and Justin Blanco White provided a design for a rodent house at a turning point for their careers.15 Beyond advancing the prestige of individual architects, these zoo projects marked the first big break for modern civic architecture in Britain. Demonstrating architects’ ability to design for the highly particular needs of animal species, they acted as a showpiece for modernist functionalism as well as zoological research. The publicity surrounding the buildings allowed Tecton to snare a number of highly visible public commissions, and the ease with which Lubetkin and his associates transitioned from zoo architecture to council-sponsored housing and public health projects underlines ZSL’s understanding of the zoo as a civic as well as scientific project. Expanding upon nineteenth-century evolutionary science, Huxley and other zoologists took an acute interest in how en­vir­on­ ment can mold behavior, and these new enclosures served as an experiment in governing large populations through good design. The series of modernist (animal) housing projects that emerged out of this alliance between zoologists and architects represented nothing less than a modernist reconception of environment and social order. Rather than imitating the animals’ natural environment—and thus making the architecture recede, effectively casting the social order in the zoo as no different from the social order in the wild—the architects opted for a planned, geometric order, seen in The Times’s review of one of the first modernist zoo buildings, the Gorilla House: “The exterior will be finished in a dull white, and every effort has been made to retain the simplicity of the actual structure without attempt at the provision of ‘decorative features.’ ”16 By highlighting their creation of a new environment in lieu of replicating an old one, these architects nonetheless saw the created environment as a way to actualize the animals’ innate qualities and natural movements; accordingly, one critic who reviewed plans

Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, ii. After arriving in London, his circle expanded through becoming acquainted with “Roger Fry of the Bloomsbury Set” (34) in addition to the Hampstead intellectuals he met through Wells’s salons. 15  While Huxley recalls that Drew and Fry became engaged while sheltering at the zoo during an air raid, their proposed Rodent House was never constructed. See Huxley, Memories (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 253. 16  “New Gorilla House: Novel Building at the Zoo,” The Times, December 31, 1932, 5.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   87 for the zoo’s spiraling concrete penguin pond applauded it for “giv[ing] the penguins the opportunity of showing their odd gait.”17 In the eyes of the designers associated with these projects, it was not modernist environments but reproduced naturalistic environments that were guilty of artificiality, to the zoo animals’ detriment. Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy’s documentary film The New Architecture and the London Zoo (1936) proclaims in its opening screen, “The animals for the first time are no longer housed in artificial reproductions of their natural surroundings. The new buildings provide a hygienic organic setting, the simplicity of which best displays the natural characteristics of the animals.”18 The modernist environment is thus more “organic” than the reproduced natural environment and better supports residents’ “natural characteristics.” Featured by MoMA in its modern English architecture exhibit, Moholy-Nagy’s film testifies that the modernist environment would go beyond reproducing old habits as well as old habitats by staging a changed relationship to the environment, for the animals, and, importantly, for the human visitors as well (Figure 2.1). A new environment opened up a new way of life, yet also fulfilled the inhabitants’ latent needs and potential. In its press release describing Moholy-Nagy’s treatment of Huxley and Tecton’s “new theory of modern housing for wild animals,” MoMA underlines that the zoo is potentially a human space as well, for these new habitats represent “the best practice in modern architecture for human beings.”19 The visual symbolism of the changed architectural environment cor­re­sponds with a defamiliarized experience of space in Moholy-Nagy’s cinematography. Rather than replicating the movement and lines of vision of a removed spectator, the film models a more interactive relationship with the architectural environment, frequently drawing the camera across the lines and curves of the architecture such that sightlines become tied to architectural 17  “Penguins at the Zoo: New Pond, with Beaches of Rubber,” The Times, January 27, 1934, 7. 18  László Moholy-Nagy, dir., The New Architecture and the London Zoo. 1936. Distribution, Moholy-Nagy Foundation. 19 MoMA, Exhibit of Modern English Architecture, MoMA Press Release Archives, February 2, 1937, https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/367/ releases/MOMA_1937_0007_1937-02-02_2237-5.pdf. In spite of this hope that the new zoo architecture would better satisfy animals’ needs and natural movements, the penguins later had to be removed from the exhibit because walking on the concrete caused their joints to ache. Even worse, Lubetkin recalls that, to economize, the zoo council detrimentally modified his plans, and when the first gorillas died shortly after moving into the enclosure, their bodies “were put into the carrion crows’ cage.” Notes, 40. If the zoo was billed as a portent of the human future, then it also foreshadowed many of the postwar debates about the deleterious effects of tower block life and council housing more generally.

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88  Reconstructing Modernism

Figure 2.1  The Penguin Pool in The New Architecture and the London Zoo László Moholy-Nagy, director, The New Architecture and the London Zoo. 1936. Distribution Moholy-Nagy Foundation, 2007.

form. To further establish this interactive relationship with the environment, Moholy-Nagy takes viewers beyond a perpetually upright stance of spectatorship by repeatedly filming at a slant; the viewer’s relationship to the surrounding architecture is made unstable, defamiliarizing both the en­vir­ on­ment and the self ’s ties to that environment. Seeing this architecture from a perspective uncommon for humans becomes compounded by MoholyNagy’s decision to film from vantage points zoo visitors would not ever have. He often filmed from within enclosures and positioned the camera at animals’ height, even moving it along their sightlines. In doing so, he gave the perspective of animal residents. Indeed, the integration of the human into the zoo’s architectural environment follows the framing of the film itself. It begins with a map of London showing the Regent’s Park Zoo and with a hand measuring the distance from London to Whipsnade; MoholyNagy consequently portrays the zoo not as a fantastical space of alterity but as a setting fully integrated into planned, mapped human space. Moholy-Nagy’s strategy of defamiliarizing space while also placing it within the realm of human planning notably overlaps with the public

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   89 reception of the new zoo buildings. A Times review called “Beauty in New Buildings: The Direct Appeal” (1937) echoes Moholy-Nagy’s characterization of these modernist buildings as truly organic by contrasting “natural or geometrical beauty” with “customary beauty.”20 Unlike customary beauty, which is a historically conditioned taste, natural beauty is innate, attuned to proportion and geometric harmony. The critic attributes the “difficulty in accepting the new architecture” to a tendency for viewers to overlook its natural beauty for the customary beauty of past styles.21 The critic, however, sees a special opportunity for the buildings at the zoo to correct that mistake because the “seductions of customary beauty” are much easier to resist and natural beauty much easier to see in unfamiliar settings like zoos, rather than such sentimentally charged spaces as homes.22 The zoo becomes a place of education in architectural taste, and the animals, unencumbered with the weight of architectural history, become the guide to determining natural beauty. With reference to a novel by Anatole France in which penguins turn into people, the critic writes, “France would have appreciated the circumstance that the penguins, at any case, know what’s what in contemporary architecture.”23 In this way, zoo-goers could acquire the taste for modernist architecture almost unconsciously, through the example of the animals; as an inverse to France’s novel, people take on animals’ capabilities for perception. The critic also regards the zoo’s modernist architecture as a potential boon to social health and cohesion because, “as an institution popular with all classes, the Zoo is an admirable field for the development of architecture towards its recovery, more and more evident, as a communal art rather than an art of individual expression.”24 While this new architecture may appear singular against the wider architectural landscape at the time, it contained the ability to provide structure for an entire society; modern architecture presented the possibility of a new “natural.” Critics, biologists, and modernist architects in this way imagined the housing of animals to be an aesthetic experiment with direct ties to developing human housing, one that would provide invaluable insight into how social organization might be guided through the environment. By providing plentiful light and ventilation, modernist architecture became associated with the hygienic, pejorative though that term would become when some, including Aldous Huxley, compared modernist dwellings to sterile medical 20 “Beauty in New Buildings: The Direct Appeal,” The Times, October 5, 1937, 15. The author borrows this distinction from Christopher Wren. 21 Ibid. 22  Ibid., 16. 23 Ibid. 24  Ibid., emphasis added.

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90  Reconstructing Modernism offices. That the zoo architecture was also an exercise in human health comes through clearly in Chalmers Mitchell’s reliance on un­employed miners to do a substantial amount of the construction work with the goal of improving their health, alongside the animals’ health, as both were placed in a new, more suitable environment. The zoo’s status as an experimental site for developing human housing was especially important for Lubetkin, who built within Whipsnade Zoo a country house that was, because it was on zoo property, allowed to defy existing “planning regulations.”25 The potential payoff of this experimentation allowed Julian to counter those who criticized the zoo for providing better housing to animals than London’s lower classes received.26 Julian makes this disparity between carefully planned, modernist housing for animals and poor living conditions for people a call to arms when he juxtaposes in Scientific Research and Social Needs an image of the slums with an image of the new Gorilla House, with captions “A contrast in housing. Compare these human habitations—in the slums—” “with this home for apes—at the London Zoo.”27 And, for Huxley, these architectural experiments had implications even beyond housing. While analyzing the potential benefits provided by zoos, he submits that “[i]n housing their animals, they can experiment with new and striking architectural designs, too advanced for general acceptance outside,” ul­tim­ ate­ly “encourag[ing] plans for public buildings.”28 Huxley’s feeling that this modern style could shape an entire public matches that of the Times reviewer who wrote “Winter Work at the Zoo: A Slum Clearance Scheme: An Orderly Layout” (1936).29 To describe the new construction work at the zoo as a “slum clearance scheme” makes an implicit jump from animal housing to human housing, and the reviewer describes the zoo’s “new architectural policy” as nothing short of a “zoological civic scheme,” accomplished by means of a “coordinated plan.” In this way, Tecton’s modernist buildings at the zoo enabled modern architecture to become the symbol and medium for molding new civic formations. These modernist aesthetics, when tied to civic planning, served as a visual representation of self-consciously socialist politics for the architects and their zoo sponsors. Lubetkin designed a bust of Lenin to go into a memorial 25 Royal Institute of British Architects, “Hillfield (House A), Whipsnade Zoo Estate, Whipsnade: roof plan, site plan and section,” RIBApix, architecture.com, RIBA17942. 26  See Anker, From Bauhaus, 29. 27 Huxley, Scientific, no page. 28 Huxley, Memories, 233. 29  “Winter Work at the Zoo: A Slum Clearance Scheme: An Orderly Layout,” The Times, January 29, 1936, 7.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   91 in Holford Square in Finsbury, where Lenin had briefly lived; Chalmers Mitchell used his retirement to take up arms with the socialists in the Spanish Civil War.30 Huxley himself used animals to consider the possibility of establishing socialism. In “Ants and Socialism,” a Times account of a 1928 lecture by Huxley, the writer summarizes Huxley’s differentiation of ant and human social formations, that humans did not come into life “ready-made,” a point to which Huxley returned in 1933: “the ants seemed to have finished their evolution, whereas man was just about beginning his,” for humans are the “conscious trustee[s] of the evolutionary process.”31 In other words, people had the power to change their core behavior and consequently push themselves into a new state of existence. Huxley further developed the relationship between human social or­gan­ iza­tion and the built environment in his opening address for a 1937 ex­hib­ ition at the Royal Institute of British Architects. Huxley, who had been invited as a zoo emissary, pronounces on architecture and British social life: The social function of architecture waxes and wanes. There is in this country a great need of its waxing at the moment. As regards style we have been largely living in the past . . . and as regards planning we have been so  complaisant to the idea of individual private enterprise that we have permitted chaos.32

A collective, national architecture and a modern style, for Huxley, promised to right British social ills. He moves explicitly into the language of power and governance as he celebrates the “new command of nature” made pos­ sible by architecture in the “past fifteen years”—a period in which Aldous acted as architectural critic—and urges the public, “ ‘We are now ready if the public response is adequate to reap the benefits of the trial of modern ­methods in other countries.’ ”33 The symbolically modern (and internationalist) materials of “ ‘[s]teel, glass, concrete, [and] synthetic materials’ ” had 30  For Lubetkin, see “Lenin Memorial in Finsbury: Unveiling by M.  Maisky,” The Times, April 23, 1942, 2; for Chalmers Mitchell, see Anker, From Bauhaus, 23. Early in his career, Lubetkin tried to recruit British architects for the Palace of Soviets design competition. For this the editor of the Architectural Review wrote to Godfrey Samuel, “ ‘Dear Godfrey, it’s very shittish/of Lube to carry out espionage/against the British.’ ” Notes, 25. 31  See “Ants and Socialism,” The Times, March 10, 1928, 7; “The Way of an Ant: Contrasts with Human Society,” The Times, September 11, 1933, 15. 32  Julian Huxley, “The Liverpool School Exhibition,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 44 (1937): 688. 33 Ibid.

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92  Reconstructing Modernism thus “ ‘opened a new world for the architect to conquer. The so-called modern style is not a style: it is the attempt to realise a revolution.’ ”34 And for Julian, the striving of modern architecture was a striving for political as well as aesthetic revolution. Aldous Huxley’s renunciation of the policies advocated by Julian and PEP forms just one milestone in his evolving relationship with modernist architecture and national planning, a trajectory that led from embracing architectural (and to some degree social) uniformity to denouncing it. Huxley had for some time taken a personal interest in art and architectural criticism, developing himself as an author and thinker through this body of nonfiction. In 1918, after Aldous spent a weekend at Roger Fry’s self-designed country house, Fry saw fit to offer his position as editor of Burlington Magazine to Huxley.35 Although he turned down the offer, Huxley maintained a reputation as an architectural critic. He joined architects and writers in the Architecture Club—a body founded in 1922 that counted Thomas Hardy as its honorary president—and participated in a science-oriented dining club alongside architects and zoologists who formed the core of the zoo housing project.36 By the time he wrote Brave New World, Aldous was an architectural authority in his own right. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, he found a professional outlet for his interests through contributing criticism to House & Garden, Vogue, and various art and architectural publications, which provide a record of Huxley’s evolving stance toward the social role of modern architecture. In this body of criticism, Huxley does not generally position himself as an objective evaluator of individual architects or schools; instead, he writes as an impassioned interpreter of the rhetorical and psychological significance of the wider movement: its architects’ and critics’ ability to launch a radical reform of everyday life that bridged aesthetics and politics, the social life and the inner life. Thus, as I analyze Huxley’s architectural criticism, I do not wish to assess the accuracy of his pronouncements on modern architecture, which are prone to hyperbole and to treating architects as politically and stylistically interchangeable. Instead, I am interested in his language itself, how wrestling with (and sometimes even manipulating) the critical language of modern architecture shaped his literary practice and his role in heated policy debates. Through close reading 34 Ibid. 35  See James Sexton, “Aldous Huxley AKA Condé Nast’s ‘Staff of Experts,’ ” Aldous Huxley Annual 5 (2005): 7–8. 36  For the Architecture Club, see “Architecture Old and New,” The Times, March 2, 1923, 7; for the dining club, Andrew Brown, J. D. Bernal: The Sage of Science (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 108–9.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   93 this criticism, I reveal how “individualism” and “uniformity” emerge as Huxley’s guiding terms for literary, architectural, and political analysis. In one of Huxley’s early pieces in House & Garden, “Beauty in Common Life” (1921), Huxley joins Wyndham Lewis and Roger Fry in considering the effect of well-designed everyday objects on those who use them. Working against the notion that “such common objects as sand-bins, letter-boxes, and lamp-posts are intrinsically ugly and need ‘beautifying,’ ” Huxley echoes Fry in criticizing British artistic institutions’ thwarting of modern design reform: “Every plain and decent lamp-post will be pulled down to make room for something ‘artistic’ in the way of convoluted dolphins, designed by pupils in the Royal Academy schools.”37 The problem with the “beautiful London of the future” being proposed in a series of Times articles, Huxley asserts, is that any “Committee of Taste” comprising members of such backward-looking institutions would force modern objects to betray their own time by disguising them as objects from times past.38 Huxley argues that a businessman would much better regulate taste, since “[w]hat he asks for, unless he is an intellectual snob, is precisely that perfect harmony between form and function . . . . Possessing no knowledge of ancient architecture . . . he would merely have insisted that the buildings to be erected should be convenient, economical, and hygienic.”39 By joining form and function, beauty arises of its own accord. Huxley in this way prefigures the differentiation made by the critic behind “Beauty in New Buildings,” between natural beauty (the innate beauty that modern architecture em­bodies) and “customary beauty.” In doing so, he takes up the language of economy and hygiene that would characterize zoologists’ and housing reformers’ engagement with the new architecture. Contemplating the question of beauty applied on a wide scale, Aldous likewise sees the benefits of a planned community. Despite the ills of committee-sponsored design, these bodies would impose order onto a disorderly built environment: “A Committee of Taste would serve some useful purpose if it insisted on a certain degree of uniformity, both of style and quality.”40 Two years after The Caliph’s Design, Huxley, like Lewis, wrestles with the possibility of centralizing taste, at this point in his career embracing the idea of uniformity in the social environment. Architecture’s provision of social structure becomes more clearly tied to the exigencies of post–World War I Britain in Huxley’s “Architecture and 37  Aldous Huxley, “Beauty in Common Life,” House & Garden 2.1 (May 1921): 24. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 20. 38 Ibid. 39  Ibid., 21. 40  Ibid., 22.

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94  Reconstructing Modernism the Modern Environment” (1922), where he toys with the idea of the state guiding the creation of a new environment. Like Betjeman and Waugh, Huxley sees architectural forms not simply as a reflection but rather as the very root of British culture and politics. The decline of aristocratic country houses following World War I reveals a world that is “poorer, more democratic, and less secure.”41 In the wake of that decline, Huxley distinguishes a new manifestation of the “grandiose” in the public world of the cities, particularly in their “great blocks of flats.”42 This shift to urban architecture is not merely compensatory, for it facilitates progress in town planning and large-scale remodeling of the city, which in turn necessitate the elevation of social needs over individual interests: Individualism, vested interest, and jealousy of State interference have prevented [town planning] in the past from ever being much practised in England . . . . Today we are grown accustomed to State interference; and besides, we are so mortally uncomfortable in this crowded London of ours that we should all be glad to see a fine comprehensive scheme of town planning carried out.43

Ten years before the publication of Brave New World, Huxley summons the discourse of planning to extend his ideas about the benefits of architectural uniformity. “State interference” for the greater good generally trumps “individualism.” Oversight of individual buildings within a larger scheme becomes a means to imagine the individual’s relation to the state within a planned national future. In line with many early supporters of modern architecture, Aldous identifies its material innovations as harbingers of a new social order. “The introduction of steel and concrete” produced “constructional audacities of which our ancestors scarcely dreamed.”44 Impeding these revolutionary materials are the “retrospective habits of thought” among architects who, as he quotes Roger Fry, “ ‘substitut[e] for the art of architecture the art of dressing buildings according to the fashion.’ ”45 Customary beauty in this case thwarts the natural beauty of the materials. Huxley holds out hope that the new materials will eventually create an architectural style of their own in Britain: “A new style suitable to the new material is being evolved . . . . The 41 Aldous Huxley, “Architecture and the Modern Environment,” House & Garden 3.3 (January 1922): 28. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 26. 42  Ibid., 27. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45  Ibid., 28.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   95 time is ripe for the architectural genius who shall create a new and definitely twentieth-century architecture out of these twentieth-century materials.”46 A new steel and concrete architecture, when coupled with state-implemented planning, would not just reflect the time of creation but also fulfill the promises of the remainder of the century. Modern architectural ma­ter­ials serve as placeholders for the expectation of a new social organization in line with an aesthetic reorganization. Less than one year later, Huxley uses the word “modernist” to describe an extreme artistic expression of the modern, a set of furniture displayed in a state-supported exhibition of dec­ora­tive arts.47 Evaluating the potential for a definitive, authoritative modern style becomes a way to evaluate the political possibilities for Britain, because the large-scale reform that Huxley imagines can be achieved only through a modern style that is both formally adventurous and embraced by those with the power to initiate reform. As late as 1924, Huxley touted state-enforced uniformity of architectural taste, even if the state produced flawed architecture. In “The Problem of Uniformity,” published in Architecture, Huxley argues that “bad taste that is uniform and systematic” is more desirable than “bad taste that is mixed, patchy, uncertain and indecisive.”48 That differentiation proves important for exploring the national future of the modern style. “Our English bad taste is of the patchy kind,” he attests, “Every man loves the lowest when he sees it and every lowest is different from every other lowest. We are individualists here.”49 Huxley faults individualism for impeding public consensus and for stymieing a national aesthetic program; England lacks “spiritual uniformity” and architectural uniformity and thus “uniformity from within is im­pos­ sible . . . . Uniformity, if we are to have it, must come from without.”50 Huxley ventures one avenue for instituting that uniformity: the state, put in the role of a benevolent dictatorship. He predicts how state officials might assert their power: “To begin with, of course, the public authorities would have to lacerate our individualistic feelings by insisting on a right to dictate what sort of houses private citizens shall build.”51 In that same spirit of ne­ces­sary authoritarianism, the governmental bodies, already in charge of building regulations, “must now extend their tyranny and say what [the house] shall 46 Ibid. 47  See Aldous Huxley, “Art and Industry,” House & Garden 3.5 (March 1922): 28. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 38–40. 48  Aldous Huxley, “The Problem of Uniformity,” Architecture 2 (February 1924): 166–8. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 9. 49 Ibid. 50  Ibid., 10. 51 Ibid.

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96  Reconstructing Modernism look like.”52 Architectural uniformity stems not from democratic unity but from state-imposed unity. Yet this environment might also produce aesthetic originality and even allow individual artistic genius to flourish on a grand scale. Lewis’s caliph echoes in Huxley’s prediction that “perhaps some prodigious genius will impose a new convention on all the lesser men.”53 The architect is a legislator of the new world; in spite of—and even because of—anti-individualist town planning, individual artistic genius can emerge. Creativity, in this formulation, does not require individualism. After moving to Vogue, Huxley made a dramatic shift away from his willingness to sacrifice individualism to a state-sponsored aesthetic uniformity. When Huxley came to the magazine, British Vogue was led by the visionary editor Dorothy Todd, who commissioned work from Gertrude Stein, Vanessa Bell, and Virginia Woolf, before she was forced out for her “dramatic changes.”54 In “The Work of Some Modern Decorative Artists,” Huxley takes as a starting point the automobile, which represents of uniformity in modern style: “Our motors are standardized, but need our rooms be?”55 Calling a house a “background for a human being,” Aldous makes the case that living in uniform modern space indicates shared (and implicitly deficient) thought; aesthetic conformity enables an almost mindless col­lect­ iv­ity.56 The link between communal taste and a loss of individuality to group identity becomes even more marked in Huxley’s arch observation, “We have not yet achieved that perfection of society in which every person has the same face. If conventionality is the ultimate virtue, bees and ants can beat us every time.”57 The ants that Julian used to ponder socialist political for­ma­ tions and human perfectibility represent for Aldous the threat of a modern uniform style: rather than perfecting the innate characteristics of humans, that uniform style is inhuman, even dehumanizing. In this concern with dehumanization, Huxley drifts surprisingly toward Evelyn Waugh’s portrayal of a self-consciously modern style in Decline and Fall, published two years later. As Huxley lauds individual distinction in design, he elevates the 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Orla Pentelow, “Vogue Editors through the Years,” April 10, 2017, http://www.vogue. co.uk/gallery/past-british-vogue-editors-history. In a later piece for the Architectural Review, Todd lauded the “democratic” nature and inherent “internationalism” of the new architecture, yet she also recognized the potential for the forms and rhetoric of this movement to be coopted. Dorothy Todd, “Some Reflections on Recent Tendencies in American Architecture,” Architectural Review 69 (June 1931): 208, 210. 55  Aldous Huxley, “The Work of Some Modern Decorative Artists,” Vogue 64.16 (August 1926): 28–31, 68. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 49. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   97 Omega Workshops’ products as antidotes to aesthetic uniformity, and he turns to work by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, through whom each house has a “character of its own.”58 Because these designs are never reproduced even by the same artist, space is infinitely differentiated, and the form of modernism Huxley holds up is modernism as irreproducible distinction. Rather than assigning the state the authority to develop a modern style, he makes modernism an expression of individuals in the private realm: “The heroic period of the contemporary movement, the Terror, so to speak” has passed, and the “time has come to domesticate modern art.”59 Aldous’s reservations about a state-sponsored modern style grew more urgent in the period immediately before he composed Brave New World. In “Puritanism in Art” (1930), published in Creative Art, Huxley prefigures Lewis’s use of “puritanism” in “Plain Home Builder: Where Is Your Vorticist?” (1934) to describe the appropriation of modernist architecture as a tool of social and aesthetic conformity. Huxley contrasts the prior generation’s “moral Puritanism” with the “aesthetic Puritanism” of his day: “Mortification of the flesh is out of date; but mortification of paint is now an aesthetic duty.”60 In “purg[ing] the arts of certain aesthetic vices introduced during the nineteenth century (that age of moral puritanism and aesthetic licentiousness),” “our puritans” leave little room to diverge from their aesthetic program.61 As he establishes the extent of this phenomenon, Huxley scru­ tin­izes aesthetic Puritanism in literature and architecture in particular: “No less categorical are the imperatives that decree the mortification of musical sound, of language (though the number of strict modernists among the men of letters is small), of carved stone, of bricks and mortar, or rather (since bricks and mortar are now anachronisms) of steel and glass and concrete.”62 This impulse, when applied to literature, produces “strict modernists,” but, as will become important in Brave New World, Huxley credits literature with innately resisting a modernism of uniformity, made visible in a steel, glass, and concrete landscape. After contrasting literary and architectural applications of modern style, Huxley parses instances of modern style in architecture to identify the style he does endorse. Huxley turns to German architect Erich Mendelsohn as an exception to the regime of aesthetic Puritanism. Mendelsohn’s designs are “refreshingly humane”; they prove that he “is not haunted by the fear of the 58  Ibid., 50. 59  Ibid., 52. 60  Aldous Huxley, “Puritanism in Art,” Creative Art 6 (March 1930): 200. 62 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

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98  Reconstructing Modernism aesthetic taboos.”63 Though Mendelsohn had ties to Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Serge Chermayeff, Huxley asserts that he is “less rigidly puritanical than his French colleague [Le Corbusier] . . . . he admits that man is imperfect—not a beautiful neat machine.”64 In dismissing human perfectibility, Huxley uses the image of man as automaton to probe Le Corbusier’s language of mechanization: “pandering to human frailty, the German architect provides his clients, not with austere ‘machines for living in,’ but with charming houses.”65 Le Corbusier and others stray by fashioning a uniform population to match the uniform aesthetic; they eliminate individuality for the sake of rigidly administered perfectibility. Huxley elaborates on the degree to which leading modernists had seen human beings as a mass to be molded via aesthetics: “The Cubists and other Pharisees of modern architecture refuse to admit the existence of such ­trifles as . . . the congenital peculiarities of human nature. For them, man is made for modern technique, not modern technique for man.”66 Rigid modernists—those who are “Pharisees” in their love for enforcing aesthetic dicta—miss individual distinction and leave little room for dissent or for opting out of this program of governance through aesthetics: Thus, in the name of modern technique, Le Corbusier would compel us all to inhabit a mixture of green-house and hospital ward . . . . For the heretics who, like myself, desire their houses to be castles, and are only happy if they can live well barricaded away from the world, he has no mercy . . . . No mercy for those who disapprove of too much asepsis . . . . No mercy for those who pine for the stimulating life-flow that proceeds from even a humble piece of individual craftsmanship (for modern technique condemns craftsmanship, and the only permissible luxury in a contemporary house is a luxury of engineering—concrete terraces, bridges, aerially floating galleries . . .67

Huxley accuses modern architects of forcing the population as a whole to live in a modernity of their making. In decrying Le Corbusier’s “mixture of green-house and hospital ward,” Huxley disowns the merger of ecological design and the hygienic that characterized Julian’s engagement with modernist architecture. Aldous similarly uses constructional uniformity, the expertly planned space Julian championed, to consider this new world’s betrayal of 63  Ibid., 201, 200. 66  Ibid., 201.

64  Ibid., 202. 67  Ibid., 201–2.

65 Ibid.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   99 privacy, the ability to withdraw from the collective. Because citizens cannot opt out of this aesthetic program (since this architecture becomes embedded in one’s physical and mental life) and because this design compels sociality, the possibility of individual privacy is lost. Just as the ability to withdraw from a group expresses individual distinction for Aldous, so too does the ability to choose luxury products; this modern style makes available only the “luxury of engineering,” creating audacious, even unnatural forms. Distinction cannot be attained through individual aesthetic choices, because modern architecture limits the ability of the individual to shape the self or the environment. Huxley directly addresses the conflation of modern design with egalitarian politics in “Notes on Decoration” (1930). Pondering the necessity of expensive materials for a well-executed modern design leads Huxley, much like Waugh, to examine the necessity of preserving an upper class in order to preserve art. To document the socioeconomic impact of the modern style, Huxley turns to Cubism’s “first violent reaction against the prettinesses,” an aesthetic revolution whose “severe simplicities” were integrated into the wider culture out of “economic necessity”: “If we cling to the simplicities, it is because we can’t help ourselves; and also because, grown used to what we must have, whether we like it or no, we have actually grown to prefer the simplicities.”68 In this regard, Huxley prefigures Viscount Esher’s and George Bernard Shaw’s charges to get used to the simple, widely avail­able modern style as a matter of economic and social expediency, yet he figures this as a much more painful transition than either Viscount Esher or Shaw would. “It is no use pretending that good modern decoration can be done cheaply,” Huxley challenges, “it can’t.”69 By emphasizing the need for expensive ma­ter­ials to make the simplicity of modern style come off, Huxley ef­fect­ ive­ly separates good modern style from modern materials, manufactured in mass and widely available. In doing so, he stands against the loss of distinction that comes from the modern materials; taste remains a province of the elite rather than something that can be claimed by the masses. “True, the rich and powerful to-day do not ‘owe it to their position’ to live

68  Aldous Huxley, “Notes on Decoration,” Creative Art 7 (October 1930): 240. Huxley’s essay drew a rebuttal from Serge Chermayeff: “Mr. Aldous Huxley wrote a short time ago that ‘trad­ ition is the next best substitute for talent.’ Modesty would verge on stupidity if we believed ourselves to be unable to progress. This age cannot be satisfied to copy where conditions demand new things without precedent.” “A New Spirit and Idealism,” Architects’ Journal 1920 (November 1931): 619. 69  Ibid., 241.

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100  Reconstructing Modernism magnificently in Stowes and Blenheims and Castle Howards,” Huxley acknowledges of the changed economic and class climate of the early twentieth century, “But even on the decoration of their much more modest dwellings, they contrive to spend a great deal of money. To have one’s house furnished and decorated by the best contemporary masters costs—well, a great deal more than I, for one, have ever been able to afford.”70 Huxley finds himself in a position surprisingly like that of Waugh; to preserve art, class structure in some way has to be preserved, even if Huxley (like Waugh) is not of that upper class. Yet Huxley acknowledges an increasingly influential modern style, the expert design available to those of “moderate means” being introduced on the Continent through the Werkbund, a predecessor to the Bauhaus. “The German Werkbund,” Huxley remarks, “aims at producing a new type of standardized, utilitarian furniture, mainly in metal, for people of moderate means. This, of course, will be ‘modern’ with a vengeance.”71 R.  A.  ScottJames’s characterization of a novel by Robert Hichens as “ ‘modernism’ with a vengeance” is repackaged as a denouncement against modern architecture and design.72 In writing of this “vengeance,” Huxley portrays the movement’s aesthetic shift as a violent revolt; modern style is marked by both its standardization and its radicalism. Huxley voices his own feelings against an aseptic modernism, “To dine off an operating table, to loll in a dentist’s chair—this is not my idea of domestic bliss.”73 Yet he recognizes that this modern style has laid a unique claim on the future: “I have no doubt whatever that it is destined to become (under the pressure of economic necessity and of mass suggestion through advertisement) the domestic bliss of all but a very few rich people in the future,” and in time “we shall go for our furniture to the nearest Ford or Morris agent.”74 As a result of interwar economic and social conditions, modernism has been established as the style of the future, and even the style that will usher in the future. “Our Ford,” the pseudo-religious title bestowed upon Henry Ford in Brave New World, becomes representative of a future where you can have any kind of house you want so long as it is glass, steel, and concrete. Because modernism assimilates into modern material life so seamlessly, Huxley, like Lewis, fears the advent of a compromised and all-consuming 70 Ibid. 71  Ibid., 242. 72 R.  A.  Scott-James, Modernism and Romanticism (London: John Lane, 1908), 109. See Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 24 for Scott-James’s early use of the term “modernism” in arts criticism. 73  Huxley, “Notes,” 241. 74  Ibid., 242.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   101 international modernism, a monumental aesthetic that stifles dissenting modern styles, with ominous implications for political dissent. Huxley’s concern that the Werkbund would bring such standardization (at the lowest common denominator) that citizens would purchase furniture at car dealerships leads us to Lewis’s formulation of a materialist modernism as the “Ford Plant Wagnerized,” a political and economic tool of Marxist standardization and mass production cloaked as an aesthetic.75 While Huxley catalogs multiple modern styles, the Continent reveals a future in which such differentiation is unthinkable. The monumentality of this modernism, its ability to claim an entire era for itself by abolishing the possibility for difference—the difference of national tradition, of social class, and so on— leads Huxley to jump from the Werkbund to Le Corbusier with no transition. Huxley closes his essay with one weighty line, centered below the final paragraph: “Le Corbusier’s dream will have come true; the home will have all the appearance of a machine for living in.”76 Huxley finds himself the prophet for a style he himself does not profess. In outlining the social uniformity that the emerging modernism seemingly demanded, Huxley explicitly addresses its ties to collectivist political projects in “The New Romanticism” (1931), published as he was writing Brave New World. This modern style, evident in some contemporary lit­era­ ture as well as in the visual arts, is the “new romanticism,” which is to say “the old romanticism turned inside out, with all its values reversed.”77 These two romanticisms diverge most notably within “the sphere of politics.”78 While the “revolutionaries of a hundred years ago were democrats and individualists,” the new revolutionaries devalue “personal liberty, which Mussolini has described as a putrefying corpse and which the Bolsheviks deride as an ideal invented by and for the leisured bourgeoisie”; left-wing and right-wing collectivist movements are interchangeable in Huxley’s “new romanticism.”79 He defines the old and new versions of romanticism by their adherence to extremes, and Soviet-style communism is the paragon of the new romanticism: “Godwin and Shelley believed in pure individualism. The Bolsheviks believe in pure collectivism.”80 Huxley establishes individualism and collectivism as the key terms for understanding modern history; he works and reworks them until they become limber verbal constructs

75  Lewis, “One,” 234. 76  Huxley, “Notes,” 242. 77  Aldous Huxley, “The New Romanticism,” in Music at Night (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 212–13. 78  Ibid., 213. 79 Ibid. 80  Ibid., 215.

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102  Reconstructing Modernism that allow him to consider artistic movements and political movements sim­ul­tan­eous­ly. While literature led the old, individualist Romanticism, Huxley argues, architecture and design lead the new Romanticism. This emerging modern style undergirds a state-enforced collectivism, as Huxley declares that the Russian Revolution made the individual a “component cell of the great ‘Collective Man’—that single mechanical monster who, in the Bolshevik millennium, is to take the place of the unregimented hordes of ‘soul-encumbered’ individualists who now inhabit the earth.”81 Modernism becomes the visual representation of the approaching “Bolshevik millennium,” for which “[i]ndividuals must be organized out of existence” until they merge into a “huge ‘collective mechanism.’ ”82 Returning to the standardized aesthetic of factory and automotive design in order to examine modernism as a herald of communism, Huxley asserts, “To the Bolshevik idealist, Utopia is indistinguishable from one of Mr. Henry Ford’s factories.”83 Placing this aesthetic in a utopian political context has great consequences, for “[i]nto the Christian Kingdom of Heaven men may only enter if they become like little children. The condition of their entry into the Bolsheviks’ Earthly Paradise is that they shall have become like machines.”84 And it is not only citizens’ uniformity but also their in­fi­nite manipulability that makes them machines. “The Bolsheviks,” Huxley argues, “are romantic in denying that man is anything more than a social animal, susceptible of being transformed by proper training into a perfect machine.”85 Much as the London Zoo used architecture to condition animal behavior, the substitution of harsh geometry for organic forms manipulates human behavior and in effect erases citizens’ very humanity. British vulnerability to this movement comes through as Huxley emphasizes that, although communism as a political system had not established itself in Britain, the new romanticism has global reach: “the Bolsheviks’ romantic disparagement of spiritual and individual values has affected, to a greater or less extent, the ‘young’ art and literature of every Western people.”86 By figuring modernism as a “ ‘young’ art,” Huxley gives it an agency and a future that he does not foresee for the inhabitants of the future world built by this monumental modernism. Communism has entered Western consciousness by directing citizens’ cultural lives and hence preparing them psychologically for a new political regime. Huxley consequently casts “the whole ‘Cubist’ tendency in modern art” as the aesthetic expression 81  Ibid., 213–14. 85  Ibid., 215.

82  Ibid., 213, 214. 86  Ibid., 216.

83  Ibid., 214.

84 Ibid.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   103 of collectivist politics at the expense of the individual, and Cubism comes to stand for the extreme attention to form in modernism.87 “The Cubists deliberately eliminated from their art,” Huxley contends, “all that is ‘mystically organic,’ replacing it by solid geometry.”88 Cubists, a label Huxley earlier extended to modern architects, disregard the human and individual in favor of pure geometric form much as Huxley saw com­mun­ism as a dismissal of  individuals and their human qualities. Huxley argues that Cubism “is addressed exclusively (and addressed very often, let us admit, with consummate skill) to an abstract Aesthetic Man, who stands in much the same relation to the real complex human being as does the Economic Man of the socialist, or the mechanized component of the Bolsheviks’ Collective Man.”89 Huxley thus locates a politics behind pure geometric form. Socialist politics, he maintains, are written into modernist style, and modernism, like col­lect­ iv­ist politics, requires a loss of individuality. While Cold War politicians later upheld formalist modernism as a symbol of Western individualism and creativity, the very antidote to Stalinism, Huxley asserts that its dehumanizing abstraction is in fact the medium for communist conformity. Reviewing the scope of the automatism he attributes to a cross-medium Cubism, Huxley turns to modernist architecture in particular. “The Cubist dehumanization of art,” he maintains, “is frequently accompanied by a romantic and sentimental admiration for machines . . . . The ambition of advanced architects is to make dwelling-houses indistinguishable from factories; in Le Corbusier’s phrase, a house is a ‘machine for living in.’ ”90 The countercultural Huxley’s depiction of modern architecture is again eerily reminiscent of the stance that the stridently traditionalist Evelyn Waugh took in Decline and Fall. Waugh’s portrayal of a modernist factory aesthetic—architect Otto Silenus is, after all, known for his bubblegum factory design—signals a larger dehumanization, one that Waugh later linked to a politics of forced collectivity. His use of a traditional aristocratic house turned modernist monstrosity to represent social decline finds an unexpected parallel in Huxley’s use of the machine aesthetic to refute modernists’ social progress narratives. “The passion for machines,” Huxley tells us, “so characteristic of modern art, is a kind of regression to what I may call second boyhood . . . . growing up, most of us found that human souls are really more odd and interesting even than the most elaborate mechanism. The modern artist seems to have grown down.”91 Huxley qualifies his characterization of modernism as a 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89  Ibid., 216–17. 90  Ibid., 217. 91  Ibid., 218–19.

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104  Reconstructing Modernism “ ‘young’ art”: though “young” implies a future lifespan in which the movement reaches maturity, Huxley associates this movement with decline. “The new romanticism . . . is headed straight towards death,” Huxley pronounces, “But then, what I call death, the new romantics would call life.”92 In negating modernist narratives of progress, Huxley undercuts the professed social mission of modern architecture like the nascent London Zoo projects. Modernism may not just die; it might take an entire society with it. In the void left by negated social mission, Huxley holds up literature as a counterpoint to the trend in architecture and the visual arts. Though he acknowledges that writers too can become enamored of machines, Huxley identifies something elemental in literature that resists the collectivist pol­it­ics of Cubism in all its manifestations: “[The Cubists] were the enemies of all ‘sentimentality’ (a favourite word in the Bolsheviks’ vocabulary of insult), of all mere literature—that is to say, of all the spiritual and individual values which give significance to individual life.”93 To counteract the modern tendency toward the “new romanticism,” Huxley ultimately finds it better to err on the side of the individual than on the side of the collective. “An ex­ag­ ger­ation of the significance of the soul and the individual, at the expense of matter, society, machinery, and organization,” he argues, “seems to me an exaggeration in the right direction.”94 Huxley envisions literature as the battle­ground for confronting the collectivist politics that he saw written into the form of modernist architecture, and, through the extremity inherent in dystopian fiction, Brave New World enacted this “exaggeration” literarily.

Brave New World, Eyeless in Gaza, and the Future of British Literature If we consider Brave New World in light of the growing gap between Aldous’s stances and the policies Julian backed, we begin to see the novel as a portrayal of a dystopian future not just for the state but also for this politicized modernism. In a 1931 letter, Huxley reveals the stakes of the novel: “I am writing a novel about the future—on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it.”95 Huxley writes not just against H.  G.  Wells but also against the utopian vision that Wells attributed to modernist architects 92  Ibid., 220. 93  Ibid., 216. 94  Ibid., 220. 95  Aldous Huxley, Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 348.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   105 and cultivated in his Hampstead gatherings. We will thus read Brave New World against the political and aesthetic ideas that Julian, Wells’s friend and collaborator, later formalized in If I Were Dictator, ideas with which Aldous was wholly familiar through his participation in PEP and his social inter­ actions with scientists and architects. In this context, we can understand the role Aldous assigns to literature in thwarting the utopias proposed by those who saw modern architecture as a political tool. What Aldous offers is a lit­era­ture that, unlike Wells’s, sets itself against this appropriation of modernism. Though Brave New World defends literature as a form, in many places it reads more like a critical treatise than a novel. Connolly grouped Brave New World with books like Waugh’s Decline and Fall, for these novels found “success quite out of proportion to their undoubted merit” by “hit[ting] upon the contemporary chemical combination of illusion with disillusion”; their “up-to-dateness passes as originality.”96 Connolly faults Huxley’s prose for repetitiousness that produces the effect of “fake analysis,” and he diag­ noses an “inability to create character or see a character except in an intellectual way.”97 This is a significant charge, for character is a defining quality of fiction, particularly the novel. Indeed, when Armstrong writes of the “modern subject,” what she describes is the use of character to formulate and advance liberal individualism. As Connolly suggests, the characters in Brave New World often act as vehicles for voicing competing ideas about the proper relation between individual and community. Psychological nuance is sacrificed in order to communicate the extremities of the ideas in play, and conflict between characters provides an occasion for debate. Even as Huxley ostensibly advances the cause of liberal individualism—and, with it, literature as a higher form of expression—he does not treat his characters as individuals and relies on rhetorical strategies drawn from polemical essays. Connolly’s depiction of Huxley as a “moralist and a puritan” calls to mind Auden’s “parable-art,” a concept Samuel Hynes borrows to define 1930s lit­era­ture: this body of work is “message-bearing” and “non-realistic, because it takes its form from its content, and not from an idea of fidelity to the observed world”; it is “moral, not aesthetic, in its primary intention” and “offers models of the problem of action.”98 In its representation of an alternate Britain, we might consider Brave New World as a quasi-parable that straddles the line between story and commentary while also checking 96 Connolly, Enemies, 7. 97  Ibid., 54, 53. 98  Ibid., 44; Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation (London: Bodley Head, 1976), 15.

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106  Reconstructing Modernism planners’ “didacticism.”99 By studying the workings of the dystopian world as a whole, Huxley draws from modernist architects and planners’ strategies for envisioning the future Britain, though Huxley shifts the burden of in­ter­ pret­ation and action to the reader. By contrast, Julian engaged in a thought experiment aimed at transferring power to the state. Though the title of his If I Were Dictator rings odd in light of 1930s opposition to Stalinism and German and Italian fascism, it was part of an entire series published by Methuen in which prominent intellectuals imagined what they would do if given dictatorial powers.100 In Julian’s text, despite his protestation that a dictator would naturally settle into a “universal, if authoritarian, benevolence,” what he proposes is nothing less than using the practices of fascist and, especially, communist leaders to serve his own aims.101 Outlining the political program he wished to install, Huxley acknowledges the problem of “rival opinions” and predicts that “after studying the various types of machinery for engendering mass enthusiasm and unified belief which have been tried during the last few years in Italy, Germany, Russia, and the United States, I shall put my own selection into operation.”102 As a “dictator,” Huxley aims to learn from fascism and communism and to refine their methods because he sees the need for ideas in common. Modernism is not inherently fascistic and authoritarian, but fascism and Soviet-style socialism were, for Julian, the available models for thinking about communities of taste and belief in the wake of a falling away from religious belief, an era when, as Jay Winter has shown, utopian thinking emerged from the ashes of discarded religious narratives.103 Huxley is quick to acknowledge the evils of these political systems in practice, but he emphasizes the continued need to institute radically alternative social organizations: “If we want to destroy Fascism, it must be to go on beyond it, not back to a dying past.”104 Fascism and communism, for Huxley, represent “crude . . . early attempts” at replacing a “God-religion” with a “social religion,” and the dictator serves as a visionary for this new order.105 In this future, national identity emerges not through keeping traditions but through “belief in the possibility of the change.”106 Within Britain, the

99  Hynes calls Auden’s poetry an “escape from didacticism” (15). 100  See “Dictators All: Essays in the New Rule,” The Times, August 24, 1934, 6. 101  Julian Huxley, If I Were Dictator (New York: Harper, 1934), 1. 102  Ibid., 32, 32–3. 103  See Jay Winter, “Minor Utopias and the British Literary Temperament, 1880–1945,” in Utopian Spaces of Modernism, ed. Rosalyn Gregory and Benjamin Kohlmann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 71–84. 104 Huxley, If, 160–1. 105  Ibid., 160. 106  Ibid., 31.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   107 markers of social progress—“a noble building,” a “work of art,” and “a city beautified”—have more than just use value; they attain a sort of autonomy in being valuable in and of themselves, serving as “achievement for its own sake.”107 Huxley’s language of achievement according to the laws of the medium foreshadows a wide swath of mid-century modernist criticism dealing with aesthetic autonomy, represented most notably by Clement Greenberg, all while including these achievements as part of a larger pol­it­ ical vision. Huxley makes “public taste in architecture and art” part of his mission as dictator, and he identifies the nation as an important institution for inculcating this taste.108 A community’s worth thus becomes intertwined with its taste in aesthetic objects, themselves found worthy according to the internal laws of the medium. National belonging merges paradoxically with a particularly modernist aesthetic of universality, a natural rather than customary (and thus geographically and temporally defined) beauty. Under Huxley’s “dictatorial” rule, this education in taste ushers in a new patriotism, one based not on national superiority but on living in accordance with good design.109 Addressing his part in Aldous’s Brave New World, Julian remonstrates, Most people seem to imagine that Aldous came to me for help over the biological facts and ideas he utilized so brilliantly in Brave New World . . . . This was not so. He picked them all up from his miscellaneous reading and from occasional discussions with me and a few other biologists, from which we profited as much as he.110

This praise hints that Brave New World was not just about Julian, but about a larger body of thought, one tied to modernist architects and designers. 107 Ibid. 108  Ibid., 157. 109  In the same year that If I Were Dictator was published, the Prince of Wales endorsed this renovated, collectivist national identity in a speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects: “Today we are not the individualists we were in Victorian and Edwardian days. We are now living, mostly because of the results of the world war, a life which is far more collective in principle than individualistic,” and the changed economy had prompted a “closer con­sid­er­ation of the mass of the people and their requirements.” Quoted in “R.I.B.A.  Centenary Conference,” Architects’ Journal 80 (November 29, 1934), 809. He recommended planning at the national level—“we should take a bigger and more generous outlook on the planning of our cities following the trend of our times, which is to think less of the limited group of individualists and more of the national point of view” (809)—and he urged his listeners to “carry the principle of mass production over to architecture and the building trades” (810). That, he avowed, was the only means of “rais[ing] the living conditions of the great majority of our people” (810). 110  Julian Huxley, ed., Aldous Huxley, 1894–1964: A Memorial Volume (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), 22.

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108  Reconstructing Modernism In the novel’s epigraph, we see the degree to which Aldous saw himself—and, as we shall see, literature as a form—responding to the future world im­agined alongside modernist forms. Entering Huxley’s novel, one first encounters these lines from the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, written in French: Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: Comment éviter leur réalisation définitive? . . . Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique, moins « parfaite » et plus libre. Utopias appear much more attainable than we formerly believed. And we now find ourselves before a more agonizing problem: How can we ward off their ultimate attainment? . . . Utopias are attainable. Life marches toward utopias. And perhaps a new age is beginning, an age in which intellectuals and the cultivated class will dream about ways of avoiding utopias and of returning to a non-utopian society, less “perfect” and more free.111

By including this passage, Huxley moves readers from viewing utopia as an impractical fantasy—utopia as, literally, nowhere—to considering utopia as a specific place with a visible form. For Julian and his circle, social planning encompassed urban planning and architectural design. The challenge, then, lies not in creating these utopias but in keeping them from materializing, because social perfection limits individual freedom. Large-scale social planning efforts in this way infiltrate individual identity in Brave New World, a novel populated by characters with names like Polly Trotsky, Bernard Marx, Benito Hoover, and Lenina Crowne; the self is inextricably bound up with collectivist schools of thought, most prominently Soviet attempts at attaining utopia. Aldous highlights the role of design in assimilating citizens into this new world. The gardens hold “steel and rubber benches,” the hatchery features “spidery steel-work of gallery above gallery,” and Huxley describes Charing-T Tower as “lift[ing] towards the sky a disk of shining concrete.”112 Linda fondly remembers the Abortion Centre as “[t]hat lovely pink glass tower,” and population planning meets urban planning in carefully regulated 111  My translation. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). 112  Ibid., 33, 11, 61.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   109 parkland and “satellite suburbs.”113 John’s outsider status renders this landscape especially visible. The modern materials of steel, glass, and concrete become salient as he tours the buildings that direct collective conditioning: “At Eton . . . the fifty-two stories of Lupton’s Tower gleamed white in the sunshine. College on their left and, on their right, the School Community Singery reared their venerable piles of ferro-concrete and vita-glass. In the centre of the quadrangle stood the quaint old chrome-steel statue of Our Ford.”114 Even in his attempt to withdraw from this society, John must shelter in an “abandoned air-lighthouse” of “ferro-concrete.”115 Yet I would like to explore not just the appearances of modern architecture—I cannot say just how much these designs conformed to those of Huxley’s day—but also, much more importantly, how modern design influenced the political contours of this brave new world. By reading this novel in tandem with Huxley’s architectural criticism, we can see how the ideas about literature and collectivist politics expressed in Brave New World emerge from Huxley’s reflection on the world promised by modern architects. Contemplating architectural design allowed him to work out a personal political stance, exaggerated though it was in this novel. State-imposed architectural uniformity led Aldous to confront the question of whether social evolution guides individual evolution, or whether individual innovation drives a society. In refuting a potential loss of individuality under a collectivist political system, Julian maintains that the “era of individualist and democratic industrialism, whose decay we English and some other nations are still living, was particularly favourable to an illusion of freedom.”116 Individualism was an illusion, and true personal fulfillment comes within an expertly planned community, apart from the “false in­di­ vidu­ al­ ity” written into the old mismatched architectural landscape.117 Aldous takes that unity through expert state and aesthetic planning to what he sees as its logical conclusion (“La vie marche vers les utopies”) in Brave New World, where the World State’s motto is “Community, Identity, Stability.”118 In this world, it is “the knowledge that they were individuals” that condemns Bernard and Helmholtz.119 Unorthodox behavior is worse than murder: “ ‘Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.’ ”120 Instead, as hypnopaedia socializes children into believing, “ ‘every one belongs to every one else.’ ”121 113  Ibid., 120, 62. 117  Ibid., 148. 120  Ibid., 148.

114  Ibid., 161. 115  Ibid., 243. 118  Ibid., 3. 119  Ibid., 67. 121  Ibid., 40.

116  Ibid., 4.

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110  Reconstructing Modernism The individual can be inseparable from the collective in Brave New World because people too have become mass-produced. Much as Julian anticipated the mass production of houses along the lines of mass-produced cars, he also envisioned state and architectural planning as a step toward eugenics.122 In Brave New World, this materializes as the “principle of mass production at last applied to biology.”123 Like the design of objects, the design of human beings can be perfected for their function. The crowning achievement of standardizing human “models” is the Bokanovsky Process, the creation of  identical human beings. That process becomes explicitly utopian when John, confronted with the “nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness,” discovers that sameness to be at the heart of the “ ‘brave new world’ ”: “ ‘How many goodly creatures are there here!’ The singing words mocked him derisively. ‘How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world . . . . ’ ”124 More than just bodily repetition, the Bokanovsky Groups signal a loss of individual thought. During the opening hatchery tour scene, passages of free indirect discourse echo the Director’s description of the Bokanovsky Process; that free indirect discourse effectively acts as the voice of an insinuating social rather than individual consciousness. “Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress,” this voice slips into the text, and later, “a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature.”125 The Bokanovsky Groups’ uniformity readies them to staff the spaces of  mass production. In “The New Romanticism,” Huxley argued that a collectivist-aligned modernist aesthetic would dictate that “[l]ife outside the factory must be exactly like life inside.”126 Brave New World takes that prediction to the extreme: life itself becomes a product of the factory, and that includes mental life. It is in part a problem of consumption, as individual taste yields to a state-induced taste for consuming the state’s products, but it also concerns the psychology of production, since workers create the material base of the new world through factory work. Huxley later criticized that mass-produced beauty’s toll on the masses in a 1935 review of the same Art in Industry exhibit that reshaped Wyndham Lewis’s relationship to modernism in the design arts. Ruskin and Morris were right to shrink from mass-produced objects, Huxley acknowledges, since Victorian industrial design was ugly. However, twentieth-century collaboration between good design and mass production meant that in “a well-managed industrial world” with a 122  For mass production, see Huxley, Scientific, 54–5; for eugenics, see Huxley, If, 19–22. 123 Huxley, Brave, 7. 124  Ibid., 209. 125  Ibid., 6, 7. 126  Huxley, “New,” 214.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   111 “comparatively small number of highly talented artists,” all objects could be beautiful.127 Ugliness, which D.H.  Lawrence saw as the greatest assault against the working class, could thus be completely elim­in­ated, but as Huxley argues, we must also consider “the psychology of the individuals who produce those objects.”128 Mass production rewards the individual genius of artists, but the mental acuity of those who produce their designs suffers. Huxley, like Lewis, feared the possible machine-mindedness of a mass-produced modernism (and, by extension, a mass-produced populace), but he viewed this machine-mindedness stemming not from the passive consumption of modernism, as did Lewis, but from the act of its (mass) production, itself a mentally passive act. In this way, the well-designed society in Brave New World threatens the mind. Through representing the effects of mass production, Huxley qualifies the belief that creating a beautiful en­vir­on­ ment will necessarily enrich citizens’ inner lives. Huxley’s novel likewise challenges the belief that a well-designed world, in which humans are standardized and perfected, is a more democratic world. Mustapha Mond, World Controller for Western Europe, recounts prior attitudes toward the “Caste System”: “ ‘Constantly proposed, constantly rejected. There was something called democracy. As though men were more than physico-chemically equal.’ ”129 Individual equality is simply brute biological sameness; Julian’s charge that liberalism gave a false sense of in­di­ vidu­al­ity meets Aldous’s insinuation that the new collective system would give a false sense of equality. The real utopia in Brave New World is being sent away, like Bernard and Helmholtz, to an island full of “[a]ll the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own.”130 The erasure of individual difference likewise brings with it the erasure of national difference, and Julian’s drive for a “World Society” becomes fulfilled in Brave New World through “World Controllers” presiding over a uniformly governed world. For Julian, centralizing power necessitated centralizing taste, to be accomplished by integrating art into the state. In If I Were Dictator, he makes artistic revolution a task of society rather than of breakaway individuals and envisions a volunteer organization in charge of beautifying urban areas. Members would construct public buildings (no matter what their professional training), 127  Aldous Huxley, “Art and Craftsmanship in Industry,” Everyman 14 (January 11, 1935): 314. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 35. 128  See ibid., 36. 129 Huxley, Brave, 47. 130  Ibid., 237.

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112  Reconstructing Modernism “demolish . . . slums and re-house the tenants in a way worthy of the city,” and might even “build new aeroplanes or bridges for the community.”131 These citizens direct their own self-creation through architecture, under state guidance. Julian regarded sponsorship of volunteers and state-funded artists not as a politically neutral act but as an explicit pol­iti­ciza­tion of design.132 Aesthetic discernment meets political discernment as Julian reflects on the role of the aesthetically “modern” in political organization: “In order to safeguard this governmentally promoted art against becoming fossilized in officialdom, banalized in conventionality, or, equally disastrous, captured by some single sect of the ‘moderns’ (sad word, the hallmark of the aboutto-be-out-of-date!), I shall arrange for . . . two organizations, Right and Left” to provide alternative design programs.133 He promises that school boards and city councils would have the option of “vot[ing] for Right or Left” as they determine the aesthetic style in which they would like to mold themselves politically.134 Julian foresees the state giving new life to modern style, which continually risks becoming obsolete or obscure. While Lewis also envisioned the possibility of modern style being advanced by state sponsorship, he saw the relationship as a lower organization, the state, feeding into the higher (and politically independent) institution of art. For Julian, however, modern design needs the state’s energies in order to keep remaking itself, part of the continuous social evolution he imagines. Defining his ideal state becomes a matter of defining the modern, and by extension, modernism. The true fulfillment of modernism arrives only as its practitioners and politicians integrate it into the state, as they make politics a design style. A tension arises between, on one hand, the power of this new form over citizens and, on the other, a rhetorical need for that form to continue to evolve alongside changing social forms. In short, the British modernist movement is asked to exercise the ultimate power to reform the outer world, to produce the formal perfection necessary for laying the foundations of this new world, but also the power to reform itself.

131 Huxley, If, 142, 143. 132  Like Wyndham Lewis, he believed in the power that well-designed buildings and objects wield in molding the minds of their users, but here an education in modern form leads not just to a better appreciation of modernism in all its forms but also to a better relationship with the state; modern form inducts citizens into a society as well as into a cross-medium movement. 133  Ibid., 149–50. 134  Ibid., 150. By contrast, influential architectural critic Nikolaus Pevsner proclaimed in 1936 that the modern style, “because it is a genuine style as opposed to a passing fashion, is totalitarian.” Stamp, “Introduction,” 22.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   113 Brave New World, in contrast, discredits the link between evolution and progress entirely and suggests that aesthetic conditioning stifles democratic assent. The cost of feeling that one has achieved the best of all possible worlds is the loss of history, because history provides a means of looking critically at one’s own era. Accordingly, all history before the Model T is effectively erased with the new dating system. In anticipation of this lost history, Aldous writes a history of the future. His novel documents the move from utopia envisioned to utopia achieved as he predicts that British liberalism will succumb to collectivist politics, a reform unsuccessfully resisted. World Controller Mustapha Mond echoes Julian’s assertion that liberalism would be no real loss as he describes the former government, “ ‘Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable.’ ”135 A political system of individuals, Aldous predicts, would not survive another world war and the ensuing economic crisis: “ ‘Liberalism, of course, was dead of anthrax, but all the same you couldn’t do things by force.’ ”136 What replaces force is a gradual conditioning to the new world through a change of environment. Much as Aldous in “Puritanism in Art” mourned his inability to opt out of the collectivist world that modern design promised, here he predicts a loss of independent perspective once modern design lays the new world’s physical and psychological contours. Julian himself welcomed an end to artists’ apartness. In If I Were Dictator, he faults modern artists for a “toomuch protesting of their own individuality” as they “show their disgust with philistinism by running to bizarre extremes,” and he predicts that dis­mant­ ling capitalism would require the state to intervene directly in the art world to eliminate the “esoteric” and “fatally individualistic.”137 Through Brave New World, Aldous anticipates a forced participation in the state’s sanctioned modernism, such that it becomes impossible to think around that system. 135 Huxley, Brave, 46. 136  Ibid., 49. 137 Huxley, If, 145–6, 146, 156, 156. If not employed by the community, Huxley writes, the artist will either “capitulate to its current philistine view on art” (146) or “pursue abstraction into the remoteness of his own socially distorted individuality” (146–7). Revolution comes only through the state, and Huxley in this way ties abstraction, the severance of form from referent, to extreme individuality, a severance of the self from the life-giving society. Abstraction with no social purpose acts as nothing more than narcissistic indulgence. The solution is to reintegrate the artist into society as a model of the ideal relationship between the self and the state and between form and function. Huxley thus sees aesthetic reform as a step toward dismantling the capitalist system, which has severed art from everyday life and produced an inferior art (146).

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114  Reconstructing Modernism In this new world, the primary aesthetic experience is communal, manifested in the “feely” films that link individual sensation to collective experience. Indeed, design rewires taste and pleasure itself. The form of Ford’s cars, a streamlined aesthetic seen by Betjeman and others as an inspiration for modernist architecture, gives structure to this new world: the stalls in the theatre where John and Lenina see the “feely” are “pneumatic,” the sofas in Bernard’s room are “pneumatic,” and the chairs in Mustapha Mond’s office are “pneumatic.”138 Design explicitly acts as pacification when Mond poses to John, “where would [King Lear’s] Edmund be nowadays? Sitting in a pneumatic chair, with his arm round a girl’s waist, sucking away at his sex-hormone gum and looking at the feelies.”139 Design has entered and structured consciousness such that Lenina and those around her frequently describe her human form as “pneumatic”; as design molds the person to the setting, it reorganizes the terms on which social relationships are conceived and conducted. For Aldous, the guided evolution championed by Julian appears not so much a participative reform as an engineered future in which human nature must be changed to fit the utopian environment. Aldous’s increasingly vocal criticism of Julian’s causes was effectively a struggle for the soul of modernist innovation. Redefining patriotism, Julian argues that “an atmosphere should and could be created in which to be selected as an experimental object and to serve in the application of science to social progress would be regarded as an honour.”140 As “experimental object[s]” rather than “subject[s],” those citizens view themselves as representatives of the group (a stand in for the population as a whole) rather than individually nuanced. The research Huxley proposes ranges from trials in housing, town planning, and birth control to “experimental communities” of a spiritual nature.141 Experiments, as Julian describes them, propose multiple possible futures in order to narrow down the best possible future. In contrast to social engineering, the future to which citizens are moving responds to their feedback. Aldous, however, foregrounds the inability to opt out of that future, and he consequently blurs the distinction between social experimentation and social engineering; for Aldous, experimentation that actually produces alternatives lies within the realm of individuals rather than that of the collective. Invention takes place in Brave New World through a desire to manipulate and improve innate tendencies, as with the improved natural environment that zoo architects were thought to produce. 138 Huxley, Brave, 167, 69, 217. 139  Ibid., 235. 140 Huxley, If, 101.

141  Ibid., 125.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   115 Yet Aldous dwells on the final result of social experimentation: discovery is censored if it challenges political ideology. Mond, as a World Controller, reviews an academic article and regrets that its potentially heretical content makes it unpublishable. Invention becomes an empty symbol for social change that cannot take place. Aldous thus undermines the promise of continuous progress through collective design reform. In Brave New World, it is mass production—hailed as the tool that would bring good design to the masses—and its political counterpart, a politics of the masses, that obstruct earnest efforts to produce social progress. Mond reflects on the goals of early planners, “It’s curious . . . to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely . . . . Mass production demanded the shift [from truth and beauty to happiness and comfort] . . . . And, of course, when the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.”142

Huxley approaches Lewis’s fear that modernism had not improved the lot of the masses but instead stagnated in that effort. In Brave New World, modern design promotes comfort rather than change-producing discomfort. The open future promised by experimentation becomes a mass-produced present, where each day looks like the one before, and manipulating human nature through the environment and through the Social Predestination Room eliminates individual opportunity. What John understands as he tours this world is the need for literature as an institution set apart, a realm in which oppositional individuality can flourish away from the demands of collectivity. Julian criticizes British lit­ era­ture for this very remoteness: “Our literature is highly accomplished, but takes refuge in playfulness or aloofness; compared with American literature it is less crude but far more unreal.”143 Julian attributes to British writing, much as he did to British art, a tendency toward isolation and the esoteric, which inhibits his goal of making the arts continuous with everyday existence under the reformed state. However, Julian’s aim to dismantle literature’s “unreality” in order to merge it with the reality envisioned by the state leads Aldous to imagine, like George Orwell and Wyndham Lewis, a world in

142 Huxley, Brave, 228.

143 Huxley, If, 155.

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116  Reconstructing Modernism which literature no longer functions. The literary arts represented an ad­mir­ably individualistic pursuit, so any attempt to harness them for a collective political project would mean their death, a fate acted out in Brave New World.144 In Aldous’s vision of the future, literature does not undergo the renaissance that Julian imagined it would as it moved to the masses; instead, the state bans it in the name of group stability. Aldous projects a future in which “Simple Lifers” would try to go “ ‘[b]ack to culture” by substituting reading for consumption, prompting the “British Museum Massacre.”145 In Aldous’s estimation, literature fundamentally opposes the consumption of stateendorsed, mass-produced objects. Part of the danger of literary texts, unlike reference books, is that they contain a beauty antithetical to the state’s products: “ ‘Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.’ ”146 Literary artistry threatens state power by offering a beauty that does not need to pace its development with that of the state, and Huxley consequently stands against an alliance of literature with socialism. It is no accident that George Bernard Shaw’s work precipitates sleep teaching. After hearing a broadcast in his sleep, “Little Reuben woke up repeating word for word a long lecture by that curious old writer (‘one of the very few whose works have been permitted to come down to us’), George Bernard Shaw, who was speaking, according to a wellauthenticated tradition, about his own genius.”147 Shaw’s lecture remains “perfectly incomprehensible” to the child, but Huxley calls attention to the subconscious effect of Shaw’s words and his position as one of the few ­writers whom the totalitarian state endorses.148 Shaw, by tying the future of lit­era­ture to that of the socialist state, joins H. G. Wells in Huxley’s mind as authors who have compromised the status of literature as an independent institution. Shaw’s catalog introduction for the MARS Group’s 1938 modern architecture exhibition would only underline that tie. In contrast to Shaw’s role in producing hypnopedia, the control of thoughts through citizens’ unconscious reception of state messages, Huxley emphasizes that literature’s true gift is its ability to de-condition. Books are banned because “there was always the risk of [the lower classes’] reading something which might un­desir­ably decondition one of their reflexes.”149 If modern design teaches citizens subconsciously, literary works allow one to fight those instincts. 144  In much the same way, Bernard writes of John, “ ‘The Savage . . . persists in regarding [the soul] as an entity independent of the physical environment.” Brave, 158. As the champion of literature, John also becomes the representative of the individual infinitely separable from the environment. 145 Huxley, Brave, 50. 146  Ibid., 219. 147  Ibid., 24. 148 Ibid. 149  Ibid., 22.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   117 In setting up literature as an institution apart from the everyday, an art form that requires conscious engagement, Huxley emphasizes the value of the esoteric. As with Lewis, he stresses aesthetic autonomy and difficulty after high modernism, and the esoteric becomes that which resists appropriation into political language. Reflecting on the alliance between the state and the arts that Julian proposed, Aldous predicts the death of art as an institution once aesthetic autonomy and the esoteric disappear. After John protests that Othello is better than anything the new world has produced, Mond counsels, “ ‘You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed high art.’ ”150 The distinctiveness of lit­era­ture vanishes when language, like modern design, is mass-produced. “ ‘Writing when there’s nothing to say’ ” is “ ‘idiotic,’ ” Helmholtz complains of his work as Emotional Engineer, but Mond maintains that such a task “ ‘requires the most enormous ingenuity. You’re making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel—works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation.’ ”151 This passage echoes Huxley’s criticism that “strict modernists” in literature allowed “the mortification of . . . language” much as modern architects brought the “mortification of steel and glass and concrete”; language loses its power to foster individual thought when creation is subject to stricture, be it aesthetic or political.152 Watson’s linguistic rebellion, then, is to compose a poem about the feeling of being alone, which un­covers a “ ‘power I feel I’ve got inside me—that extra, latent power.’ ”153 Literature and its difficult, unorthodox language similarly transform John, who is deeply affected by The Complete Works of William Shakespeare despite his mother’s dismissal of the extremely old text: “ ‘I looked at it, and it seemed to be full of nonsense. Uncivilized.’ ”154 In contrast to his mother’s instilled rejection of literary works, the text “talked to him; talked wonderfully and only half-understandably,” which leads John to discover the beauty of the esoteric.155 Fiction becomes John’s refuge for evaluating the claims of the new, utopian world. Because Brave New World’s title comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, we are prompted to follow John’s lead by using literature to read this dys­topia. Literary language becomes the measure of this new world, as when John recites Othello’s “ ‘Goats and monkeys!’ ” because “[o]nly in Othello’s words could he find an adequate vehicle for his contempt and hatred” of this new  world’s aesthetic controls.156 Literature also provides an alternative 150  Ibid., 220. 153  Ibid., 182.

151  Ibid., 221. 154  Ibid., 131.

152  Huxley, “Puritanism,” 200. 155  Ibid., 132. 156  Ibid., 219.

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118  Reconstructing Modernism orien­ ta­ tion toward the future. Macbeth’s soliloquy, “To-morrow and ­to-morrow and to-morrow,” that echoes in John’s head stands against the future world’s willed ahistoricity; it questions the possibility for unlimited progress by bringing history down to the level of an individual life.157 Yet Huxley is quick to show the messiness of the individuality advanced by literary works. John uses Shakespeare’s words to attack Lenina after she falls short of the ideals of love he acquired through reading those texts. This world of the individual offers fallibility, not perfectibility; John’s efforts to establish a “brave new world” of his own are ill-advised. Huxley consequently casts lit­era­ture not as a medium for conjuring up utopian worlds but as a medium for exposing the dystopian in the utopian, a means of modeling a possible future even while working against that future. In this sense, literature is better equipped to voice dissent than to instill virtue. Under the assumption that literary works best serve as a check on utopian thinking, Huxley attempts to write a future for literature as an institution. Huxley, via Helmholtz, confronts the challenges for producing an op­pos­ ition­al literature amidst social uniformity: “[H]ow can one be violent about the sort of things one’s expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. That’s one of the things I try to teach my students—how to write piercingly. But what on earth’s the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really pier­cing—you know, like the very hardest X-rays—when you’re writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?”158

Helmholtz attributes to words the ability to cut through the material landscape, but in a world that has standardized thought, the struggle is to find language that can make a person think something non-standard. After acknowledging the difficulty of sustaining literature under tyranny, Huxley aims to envision a literature for the future, a body of work that evolves not with but against the state. “ ‘If there was some different way of writing . . . . Or else something to write about,’ ” Helmholtz speculates, and he continues, “I’m pretty good at inventing phrases—you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you’d sat on a pin, they seem so 157  Ibid., 136.

158  Ibid., 70.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   119 new and exciting even though they’re about something hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn’t seem enough. It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.”159

Huxley thus ventures an aesthetic autonomy that resists the urge to see language as a mere material, a novel object; instead, he returns to the notion he developed in “The New Romanticism” of literature as the repository for “the spiritual and individual values which give significance to individual life.”160 In reclaiming aesthetic autonomy and the esoteric as literary qualities that help “give significance to individual life,” he drifts toward Lewis’s definition of literary difficulty as “highly individualised expression” that renders those texts “useless for purposes of propaganda.”161 Depicting the propagandist Helmholtz’s struggle to create literature allows Huxley to address the problem of a modern literature, as he confronts the limited power of Shakespeare’s language in the future world. Helmholtz revisits his image of a material landscape-penetrating X-ray upon hearing Shakespeare from John, though he determines that “ ‘it won’t do. We need some other kind of madness or violence. But what?’ ”162 Helmholtz recognizes the need for a new literature for this new world. Yet Mond stresses the difficulty of creating a truly modern literature, for when Helmholtz confides that they have been seeking to write “ ‘something new that’s like Othello,’ ” he retorts, “ ‘And it’s what you never will write . . . if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if it were new, it couldn’t possibly be like Othello” because “ ‘[y]ou can’t make flivvers without steel—and you can’t make tragedies without social instability.’ ”163 Just as Virginia Woolf later concluded in “The Leaning Tower,” the body of lit­era­ ture that would emerge in a radically changed social and political landscape would be a literature virtually unrecognizable to earlier readers. Instead of enacting this formally inventive literature through Brave New World, Aldous thematizes aesthetic experimentation. Architectural criticism spills over into his fiction, as avid readers and writers debate the value of esoteric art with the World Controller, who resembles Julian Huxley. By outlining both the struggles and the stakes of literary invention, Aldous uses Brave New World to outline a project for later authors. Modern literature becomes an exercise in writing a literature not for the present but for the future, a future that may never come for literature. Accordingly, Huxley’s novel ends with 159  Ibid., 69. 160  Huxley, “New,” 216. 161 Lewis, Letters, 235. 162 Huxley, Brave, 185. 163  Ibid., 219, 220, 220.

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120  Reconstructing Modernism John’s suicide: when his body is discovered hanging inside the lighthouse, his feet are described as twisting “like two unhurried compass needles,” failing to settle on any final direction. Despite the finality of this scene, the debate spilled back into architectural criticism after the publication of Huxley’s novel. In 1934, a regular columnist for the Architects’ Journal characterized the two models of reform—inner and architectural—as complementary rather than conflicting: “As Aldous Huxley recently remarked: ‘What is wanted is a world psychological conference.’ Followed, I suggest, by the compulsory study of M. le Corbusier’s new book by statesmen everywhere.”164 This endorsement came even after the columnist accused Huxley seven months earlier of “an astonishing misunderstanding of the modern movement in design” because Huxley deemed the new architecture “aseptic.”165 Yet one of the greatest transformations in the years following the publication of Brave New World seems to have been in Huxley himself, as he reconsidered the balance between individual and collective in his political and aesthetic thought. In 1936, Huxley turned from dystopian fiction of the far future to a semiautobiographical novel of the present with Eyeless in Gaza. Written shortly after Huxley adopted pacifism, the novel features sociologist Anthony Beavis, who in the mid-1930s abandons his “habit of detached irony” and his desire for personal freedom—from institutions and from emotional ties—in order to cultivate a commitment to the social whole.166 As Daniel Aureliano Newman has shown, Huxley’s novelistic representation of development drew directly from Julian’s groundbreaking research on axolotls. For the two brothers, these amphibians signified “unrealized potential,” for axolotls as a species “have lost the ability to produce their own thyroid . . . yet remain receptive to its effects.”167 Beavis, “[n]icknamed ‘Benger . . . because 164  Astragal, “Notes & Topics,” Architects’ Journal 80 (December 13, 1934): 874. 165  Astragal, “Notes & Topics,” Architects’ Journal 79 (May 10, 1934): 664. The columnist quotes the offending passage from Beyond the Mexique Bay, which echoes Huxley’s “Puritanism in Art”: “ ‘For us, today, the highest luxury is a perfect asepsis. The new casino at Monte Carlo Beach could be transformed at a moment’s notice into a hospital . . . . The Wagon-lit Company’s latest coaches are simply very expensive nursing homes on wheels’ ” (664). As architectural modernism fell from favor in the 1980s, one prominent architectural commentator, a Betjeman protégé, applauded Huxley’s prescient understanding of 1930s planning: “Aldous Huxley, like old C F A Voysey, was one of the few to see where love of order might lead, although visitors to Russia or Germany ought to have had an inkling.” Stamp, “Introduction,” 5. 166  Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 470. In fact, he acknowledges that he himself had acted like a “dictator” in his habit of “[f]orcing ideas to associate or come apart” and “[b]ullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern” (129). 167  Daniel Aureliano Newman, “ ‘Education of an Amphibian’: Anachrony, Neoteny, and Bildung in Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza,” Twentieth-Century Literature 62.4 (2016): 404.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   121 [he] looked so babyish,’ ” accordingly mimics the axolotl in his development: “Neoteny . . . conserves Anthony’s ‘actualizable potentialities’ until he is ready, in middle age, to ‘modify himself.’ ”168 By attending to Beavis’s work as a social scientist, we can fully witness the political applications of these zoo­logic­al reflections, in line with the zoo-based architectural experimentation that Julian saw as a corollary to his laboratory work. While Miller, the doctor and anthropologist who converts Anthony to pacifism, doubts that the knowledge gained from “[a]stonishing and moving” animal documentaries will sway viewers from their “belie[f] in automatic progress,” a measure of Anthony’s change of heart comes in the discomfort he feels when his former classmate boasts of imagining himself as a man amongst insects.169 Huxley thus reconfigures the image of swarming bees and ants that he frequently used to illustrate human and architectural standardization. As Anthony moves from insisting upon his own in­di­ vidu­al­ity to acknowledging others as individuals, he proposes a zoo­logic­al model for human social life: “Each organism is unique. Unique and yet united with all other organisms in the sameness of its ultimate parts.”170 He similarly ponders the permeability even of species boundaries by musing, “A cow’s pituitary will make frogs breed out of season. Urine of a pregnant woman brings the mouse on heat.”171 Through zoological contemplation, Anthony prioritizes unity over distinction. These reworked sociological and political principles lead Anthony to a reevaluation of planning and British liberalism. Anthony—and by extension Huxley—continues to warn against the authoritarian potential of planning: “A government with a comprehensive plan for the betterment of society is a government that uses torture.”172 If the state (or any other abstraction) is the term of value, then individuals are expendable. Yet Anthony also argues that British liberalism will be increasingly untenable, for “technological advances” and a population decline through birth control will eliminate the heretofore “steadily expanding markets” and create the need for “a largescale plan.”173 Against architectural reform’s method of acting on a person from the outside, Anthony offers a model of planning that starts at the 168  Ibid., 414, 416. 169 Huxley, Eyeless, 371, 372. Julian directed a documentary called The Private Life of the Gannets soon after Brave New World was published, and he appeared alongside Lubetkin in a television broadcast to publicize the Elephant House design. See Pyrs Gruffudd, “Biological Cultivation: Lubetkin’s Modernism at London Zoo in the 1930’s,” in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places, ed. Chris Philo and Chris Walbert (London: Routledge, 2000), 232. 170  Ibid., 467. 171 Ibid. 172  Ibid., 342. 173  Ibid., 342, 341, 341.

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122  Reconstructing Modernism individual rather than the national level. Self-searching, he ventures, yields knowledge that can be applied first to “inter-individual relations” and then to international relations.174 “Construction . . . from without” must be matched by “[c]onstruction from within.”175 Anthony identifies “imaginative literature” as a vehicle for this reflection, for it produces human knowledge that exceeds the “intellect.”176 Much as in Brave New World, Huxley’s reevaluation of the concepts of planning and progress necessitate a reevaluation of literary form. Whereas Brave New World explores the effect of collectivism on fiction, asking what place there is for the restless protagonist under authoritarian social stability, Eyeless in Gaza concerns itself with the tyrannical individual, the man who sees all others as insects. In place of the novel of the future, Huxley analyzes the novel of the present. Armstrong defines the genre’s “ideological core” as “the presupposition that novels think like individuals about the difficulties of fulfilling oneself as an individual under specific cultural historical conditions.”177 Nowhere is that more pressing than the dystopian future Huxley describes in Brave New World, but it is precisely his individuality that Anthony sees as a barrier in Eyeless in Gaza. We might read Anthony’s disavowal of his previous “liberty to read his books and exercise his talents for sarcastic comment” as a disavowal of satire and even of the dystopian novel, for the future setting allows the author to detach him- or herself from that world and its inhabitants.178 It is instructive that Eyeless in Gaza ends with Anthony preparing to speak at a peace rally despite being threatened with grave violence, an act of self-sacrifice and community-mindedness that stands in contrast to John’s isolated suicide. Yet Huxley relies on nonfictional genres—Anthony’s diary entries and excerpts from his Elements of Sociology manuscript—to model his transformation. We are left with little concrete guidance on how Huxley’s model of interior reform, a trans­for­ma­ tion of the self through meditation rather than outer conflict, might be conveyed by modern novelists, while also representing a social body composed of individuals.179 As a result of this formal dilemma, Connolly identifies in 174  Ibid., 315. 175  Ibid., 399, 398. 176  Ibid., 398. 177  Ibid., 10. 178  Ibid., 469. 179  Newman suggests that the axolotl provided Huxley as a novelist with an alternative model of character development: “induced metamorphosis” is “Eyeless in Gaza’s privileged mode of development,” for Huxley enacts “the amphibian trope . . . formally, through anachrony.” “Education,” 404. In Huxley’s modernist bildungsroman (404), “the temporal shifts between chapters transcend the boundaries of the self ” (421). Yet because we perceive other characters as individuals through Anthony’s perception, the “ ‘super-personality’ ” to which Anthony aspires (421) is unrealized novelistically; instead, the individual largely stands in for the many. Or, as Connolly complained, the many are simply projections of the individual: “the

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   123 Eyeless in Gaza a “fatigued introspection,” and Huxley’s model of individualdriven, pacifistic reform was further tested by the burst of planning and entrenchment of national identity that World War II precipitated.180

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: World War II Draws the Dystopian Future Nearer The preparations for World War II and the destruction that it caused brought the language of planning even further into political rhetoric. In order to plan for the better, rebuilt postwar world, the state first had to plan for national ruin. Planning was a way to imagine a future beyond the immediate future, a means of defining the state not through its present wartime violence but through its ideal form. Accordingly, Julian Huxley celebrated the opportunities that the war afforded national planning efforts. He participated prominently in a 1941 edition of Picture Post that compiled a range of visions for the postwar world and invited readers to make their own contributions. In Town and Country Planning one year later, he co-authored a statement of “support [for] the National Planning Basis” with leading planners and public figures, including the writer Naomi Mitchison.181 Huxley also submitted an individual statement that pronounced the war a chance to “[get] rid of some of the disastrous results of unplanned development in the last century.”182 Through these public efforts, he aimed to harness wartime collectivism to achieve the planned postwar world: “Once the idea of a planned Britain becomes an active ingredient in our patriotism, we shall be more likely to realize it effectively.”183 Julian gained a key role in planning both the aesthetics and social contours of the postwar world by assuming leadership of the newly established UNESCO, which took as its priority “the reconstruction and rehabilitation of educational, scientific, and cultural activities in war-devastated countries.”184

only people [Huxley] can write about at length are those with whom he can carry on an intellectual discussion.” Enemies, 53. 180 Connolly, Enemies, 54. 181  Julian Huxley, “The National Planning Basis,” Town and Country Planning 10 (Autumn 1942): 96. 182  Ibid., 97. 183  Ibid., 98. 184  Julian Huxley, “The Role of UNESCO in the Domain of the Arts,” The Studio (1947): 110. In the early years of the war, some at the zoo questioned the direction in which Huxley was leading the institution, and the Council took advantage of Huxley’s leave of absence while on a

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124  Reconstructing Modernism As an outgrowth of his mission to place the arts under pol­it­ical governance, he anticipated that the organization would commit itself to “study[ing] the effect of good architecture and good planning, and the good design of industrial and household items.”185 Much as he saw UNESCO as a boon to designers’ work, Julian used his position to consider the ways in which the arts would be the ideal medium for communicating political ideas. “This function of the ‘sugar coated pill’ of propaganda,” he ventured, “though obviously secondary, is one which deserves to be studied.”186 Huxley refigures Lewis’s notion of the “bitter pill” of modernism: the arts, for Huxley, take on an explicitly political role in the postwar world, as the sugar coating for propaganda rather than the bitter pill in themselves. In this case, form does the dirty work of politics. By contrast, Aldous Huxley’s “War and Peace” (1943) emphasizes the limits of using the arts to promote pacifism or any other sort of political project. Aldous looks back on the period between the wars, the period in which Brave New World and Eyeless in Gaza were published, as one in which writers set forth “blue prints for a better world . . . by the hundred,” along with “a whole literature of uplift, tinged by sociology and political economy.”187 These authors forsook the true power of literature, which does not rest in representing “the horrors of war or the iniquities of aggressive imperialism,” nor in “drawing up Utopian blueprints for better worlds”; instead, it arises through writers who “genuinely believ[e] in transcendental values” and “giv[e] effective expression to their beliefs in . . . literary forms.”188 In other words, literature answers the call to produce a better world through providing a nudge of opposition from the privileged vantage point enabled by aesthetic autonomy. Yet again, Huxley qualifies a previous position in response to new political circumstances, this time the aversion Anthony expressed toward “looking on from [his] private box” in Eyeless in Gaza.189 A better political world needs more autonomy, not more engagement, from the literary world, a message made more urgent by the opportunities for planning that World War II brought. In his essay “Ozymandias, the Utopia That Failed” from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1956), Huxley impresses upon readers the dangers lecture tour to force his resignation in 1942. He moved into a house in Hampstead and had it renovated by modernist architect Ernst Freud, the son of Sigmund Freud. See Memories, 260–3. 185  Ibid., 111. 186 Ibid. 187  Aldous Huxley, “War and Peace.” ARTnews 42 (November 1943): 24. 189 Huxley, Eyeless, 466.

188 Ibid.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   125 of putting too much faith in utopian postwar planned communities. Summoning Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Huxley describes the fate of a ruined utopian town founded by a Marxist lawyer in the desert of southern California, where “propagandists” drew residents by means of a “detailed plan of the city.”190 For Huxley, the town’s failure has great consequence for thinking about national planning efforts, because those within larger utopian communities often do not have the opportunity to opt out. In recounting what went wrong in Llano, its founder recalls, “ ‘Believing that life arose out of chemical action and that form was determined by the impinging environment, I naturally believed that all would react more or less alike to the same environment,’ ” and Huxley adds as commentary, “But in fact they didn’t.”191 Creating the model environment does not create the model society; individuality mires social evolution in ways the theory of planning cannot explain.192 Aldous turned his attention to utopian communities on a larger scale in Brave New World Revisited (1958), where he reflects on how much closer the dystopian future seemed after the war than it did when he composed Brave New World. Living in the “depression years,” “[o]urs was a nightmare of too little order; theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much.”193 From Huxley’s postwar perspective, however, it appears that “the much too orderly Brave New World” will follow very quickly on the heels of “the disorderly world of liberalism,” yielding a “nightmare of total organization.”194 Accordingly, Huxley identifies “over-organization” as the force behind the “modern metropolis,” the ultimate planned environment.195 In contrast, lit­era­ture could act as a discourse of counter-planning. Set against the “orator” who “speaks to masses of individuals,” “[r]eading is a private, not a col­lect­ive activity. The writer speaks only to individuals, sitting by themselves in a state of normal sobriety.”196 While assessing the rapid growth of totalitarianism, Huxley takes a sharp look at a cross-medium modernist style to emphasize the hazards of

190  Aldous Huxley, “Ozymandias, the Utopia that Failed,” in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (New York: Harper, 1956), 89. 191  Ibid., 90. 192  Huxley instead urges readers to consider attempts at utopia not as models but as experiments, which encourage an analytical eye (98). Huxley acknowledges community as a sort of art, but one that should foster experimentation rather than broad theoretical models. This experimentation is also an education in scale and individuality, because what works within a limited model does not necessarily work within a large model (100). 193  Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 1. 194  Ibid., 2, 1–2, 2. 195  Ibid., 118. 196  Ibid., 42.

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126  Reconstructing Modernism bringing the principles of aesthetic organization into political organization. For Huxley, the tools of mass marketing taste and products, so central to the good design movement, are dangerous when appropriated by political figures.197 The same rules of organization that make an artwork beautiful can make a ruler tyrannical. To combat this dangerous borrowing, Huxley differentiates an intense focus on form—aesthetic order—from an extreme social order imposed by a political system. Whereas the artist who “takes the innumerable diversities and uniquenesses of the outer world and his own imagination and gives them meaning within an orderly system of plastic, literary or musical patterns” is “mainly beneficent,” the “ ‘Will to Order’ ” can be fatal “in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics”: “human diversity” is sacrificed to “subhuman uniformity.”198 Huxley expresses this danger aphoristically: “The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.”199 The problem with applying scientific order and the formal discipline of modernist aesthetics to politics, in the manner of Julian Huxley, is that the social system produced will inevitably be a dictatorship. Once aesthetic order becomes an instrument of political order, it is hard to separate the aesthetic object from the political project. Huxley wrestles with the possible alliance of the two spheres: “On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if beauty were incompatible with nonsense and tyranny, there would be precious little art in the world.”200 According to Huxley, “painting, sculpture and architecture”—he notably exempts lit­era­ture—have throughout history served as “religious or political propaganda.”201 In contrast to his brother’s argument that art has been too little integrated into politics, Aldous acknowledges that “[g]enius has been the servant of tyranny.”202 The challenge facing modern citizens is to learn to differentiate a good aesthetic from a bad politics at the time of art’s cre­ation, rather than from the perspective provided by the passage of time.203 Aesthetic discernment and political discernment are important skills that must be exercised simultaneously. Particularly troubling to Huxley in the entwinement of artistic order and political order is the concept of engineering, so central to modern architecture, now applied to the perfection of social order. “ ‘[T]echnical engineering,’ ” Huxley argues, laid the groundwork for “ ‘social engineering.’ ”204 Out of the building methods that enabled architectural modernism came the model of 197  See ibid. 200  Ibid., 52.

198  Ibid., 21, 21, 21, 21, 22, 22. 201 Ibid. 202  Ibid., 53.

199  Ibid., 22. 203  See ibid.

204  Ibid., 26.

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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND THE “ BRAVE NEW WORLD ”   127 organization that could propel tyranny in the post–World War II era and beyond. To proponents of expert social planning, Huxley poses the question “who will engineer the engineers?”205 In this way, Huxley highlights the limits that individual fallibility places on political systems, while recognizing that very soon biology could be made to match environment, thus producing the ultimate engineering feat: “standardized machine-minders for standardized machines.”206 Despite showing how easily the design arts could be appropriated into politics, Huxley heeds his own call to differentiate formal order from systems of political order by examining instances where architectural modernism might be redeemed. In doing so, he returns to his early task of isolating a style fit to show modernity to itself, albeit with the added perspective of intervening political developments. As Huxley makes the case for individual distinction from the “collective environment,” he tweaks the language of both zoology and the modern movement: “human beings are not completely social . . . . Their societies are not organisms, like the hive or the anthill; they are organizations, in other words ad hoc machines for col­lect­ive living.”207 By appending “ad hoc” to Le Corbusier’s description of the ideal house as a “machine for living,” Huxley reemphasizes the experimental (and provisional) nature of the modernist aesthetic. Finally, in the last chapter of Brave New World Revisited, Huxley considers smaller utopian communities that have the potential to fight the “disease of over-organization.”208 He holds up the Peckham Experiment, which featured the modernist Pioneer Health Centre by architect Owen Williams and Sassoon House by architect Maxwell Fry and housing reformer Elizabeth Denby: “meanwhile, in London, the Peckham Experiment has demonstrated that it is possible, by co-ordinating health services with the wider interests of the group, to create a true community even in a metropolis.”209 Using this prewar scheme as his model, Huxley separates aesthetic and social experimentation from the scale of the state. In this way, he sets the stage for pondering what an innovative aesthetic sphere might look like, a place where formal order is ad hoc, insofar as it promotes individual as well as aesthetic autonomy within the larger collective sphere. In short, Huxley waxes nostalgic for an era when modern style was experimental. Like Lewis, he creates a revisionist modernism by identifying small communities of experimentation—bastions of autonomy—as the antidote to the collapse of aesthetic order into political 205  Ibid., 27. 208  Ibid., 119.

206  Ibid., 108. 209 Ibid.

207  Ibid., 107.

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128  Reconstructing Modernism order, a synthesis that many modernists initially embraced. The postwar world thus presented a special call for literature: as the very medium of the individual and consequently, in Huxley’s mind, the seat of distinction and variety, literature could at a time of mass planning lead the charge in refiguring an experimental modern style. Even as Huxley condemned the potentially disastrous political applications of modernist formal discipline, he ultimately saw literature as an exception to that danger. In his opinion, aesthetic order could work against political order because literature is an inherently anti-totalitarian form, unlike architecture. In an age when British politicians seized upon modern architecture as a symbol of political progress, along with a modernist vocabulary of ruin and rebirth, not all mid-century writers believed that literature could be so incorruptible. This heightened attention to form as a political vehicle caused George Orwell, Christopher Isherwood, and Elizabeth Bowen to turn an intensely critical eye to their own literary style. As wartime brought a barrage of frenzied warnings to guard against the enemy within, these authors feared that their own literary style might already be compromised.

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3

“Swastika arms of passage leading to nothing” Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “New” Britain

In the opening month of 1938—and the closing year of peacetime—George Bernard Shaw introduced the MARS Group’s groundbreaking “New Architecture” exhibition to catalog readers by sharply contrasting modernist architecture with the long-favored “impressive architecture”: “In impressive architecture it is the outside that matters most; and the servants do not matter at all.”1 By implying that modern architecture would no longer sequester occupants of lower social rungs, Shaw anticipates Britain’s postwar social reorganization. His charge that “we shall have to get used to” the new materials of steel, glass, and concrete employed by modern architecture becomes, by extension, a charge to “get used to” new social structures.2 As Shaw’s comments suggest, the MARS Group presented a radically different design response to Britain’s changing class structure than did the yearly

1  George Bernard Shaw, “On Architecture,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 27 (2007): 8. 2  Ibid. The MARS Group actively sought Shaw’s participation because of his stature as a public literary figure. Godfrey Samuel, a founding member of Tecton, approached Shaw while creating a design for the National Theatre. Samuel indicated that MARS was “very anxious that you should open the Exhibition, which you already know about.” Proposed National Theatre building on the South Kensington site (Cromwell Road/Thurloe Place), London, Nov 1937– Mar 1938 (SaG/73/2), The Godfrey Samuel Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Shaw’s initial reply was, “Nothing can induce me to ‘open’ an exhibition of any kind. If I shew the least weakening of my iron rule against it I should have every picture gallery in London down on me for this unmeaning and ridiculous ceremony. Ask Lutyens.” Ibid. (Lutyens had judged the Architects’ Competition at the Daily Mail’s Ideal Home Exhibition.) Samuel indicated that they were keen to secure Shaw because of  his reputation as an “anti-sentimentalist.” File on MARS Group exhibitions, 1935–1938 (SaG/91/4), The Godfrey Samuel Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Shaw eventually acceded, and the MARS Group sent him materials to educate him fully on the movement and on the exhibition’s aims before he drafted his catalog preface. Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State. Ashley Maher, Oxford University Press (2020). © Ashley Maher. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198816485.001.0001

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130  Reconstructing Modernism Ideal Home Exhibition.3 Rather than marketing products to the upwardly mobile middle class, the MARS exhibition proposed a cross-class architecture that Le Corbusier dubbed “ ‘poems in steel, glass and concrete.’ ”4 As visitors exited, they were prompted to pledge allegiance to the MARS mission: “ ‘We claim your loyalty for an architecture that is worthy of this age and worthy of the future.’ ”5 The MARS Group had already signaled its ambitions to act as a quasi-political entity by organizing a “Propaganda” working group for its members, and it capitalized on the well-attended exhibition to publish its provocative scheme, the MARS Plan for London (1942), which called for widespread (further) demolition of London’s historic core in concert with governmental authorities.6 With its focus on public architecture and planning entire communities, the MARS Group pitched its ideas to citizens, not simply consumers.7 In linking this ambitious new architecture to social leveling, without the horror of that term that Betjeman and Waugh displayed, Shaw’s account of the MARS exhibition also prefigures the 1943 “Rebuilding Britain” exhibition. Curated by Jane Drew, “Rebuilding Britain” presented architecture as a 3  The Ideal Home Exhibition was both a direct inspiration and an antagonist in the MARS Group’s planning process. John  R.  Gold records this statement from Maxwell Fry: “Some of the group wanted a popular exhibition and thought in terms of the Daily Mail (Ideal Homes Exhibition) and so on. I was violently opposed to that and so was Tolek (Lubetkin) . . . We argued that if you wanted to disseminate information, you had to disseminate it at the highest level and let it disseminate downwards and through the schools. To go direct to the public would have been a pure disaster . . . . ” “ ‘Commoditie, firmenes and delight’: Modernism, the  MARS Group’s ‘New Architecture’ Exhibition (1938) and Imagery of the Urban Future,” Planning Perspectives 8 (1993): 360. The exhibition thus exposed a significant rift in the organization’s notion of good governance through architecture and its understanding of democracy and collectivism more generally. 4  Le Corbusier, “The MARS Group Exhibition of the Elements of Modern Architecture: A  Pictorial Record,” Architectural Review 83 (March 1938): 110. The Ideal Home Exhibition presented much more conservative designs. Mock-Tudor architecture dominated because that style starkly contrasted with “the plain neo-Georgian architecture of local authority housing estates.” Deborah S. Ryan, The Ideal Home through the 20th Century (London: Hazar, 1997), 27. 5  Quoted in Gold, “ ‘Commoditie,’ ” 364. 6  See Design Museum, “The MARS Group.” Design at the Design Museum, accessed August 11, 2010 at design.designmuseum.org/design/the-mars-group.html. 7  On top of the sample rooms that made the Ideal Home Exhibition so popular, the MARS exhibition invited attendees to consider the theoretical underpinnings of the new architecture through exhibits like the “form and purpose platform.” Royal Institute of British Architects, “MARS Group Exhibition, New Burlington Galleries, London: the form and purpose platform,” RIBApix, architecture.com, RIBA 24910. Before leaving, the attendees encountered a placard reading, “Many times in history architecture has been re-fashioned . . . . To-day we recognise the beginning of a new phase in the English tradition.” Royal Institute of British Architects, “MARS Group Exhibition, New Burlington Galleries, London: display panels in the exit corridor,” RIBApix, architecture.com, RIBA 17095. MARS thus conditioned visitors to associate architectural renewal with national renewal.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  131 means of establishing—symbolically and literally—a new Britain after the war. Yet this latter exhibition was qualitatively different, opened instead by a left-wing policymaker, Sir William Beveridge, who had just authored the plan to convert Britain into a welfare state after the war. As British politicians on the Left adopted modern architecture and planning as models of good governance, a later literary generation became spokespeople for modern architecture not through the influence of architects themselves—as did Shaw—but through the Ministry of Information. Under that state sponsorship, authors like Graham Greene and Dylan Thomas composed films popularizing modern architecture and planning as symbols of a new, postwar Britain. Drawing on Mark Wollaeger’s incisive account of the shared rhetorical strategies and uneasy “symbiosis” of propaganda and literary modernism, this chapter will examine how the confederacy of modern architecture, ­literature, and the state brought these stylistic affinities to a crisis, leading many authors to break from the example established by Shaw, Greene, and Thomas.8 In defiance of British reformers who wedded their message to MARS’s vocabulary of newness, wartime novelists Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell, and Elizabeth Bowen examined interior and architectural design as a means of expressing their apprehension about their own style and its political implications in years when form became newly politicized. Formal allegiances, they suspected, could be just as compromising as political loyalties, and cross-medium collaboration took on new connotations during the war. In what follows, I show how reading these writers alongside the British state’s adoption of MARS rhetoric affords new historical perspectives on mid-century authors’ uneasy relationship with democracy and collectivism— and with literary modernism. I begin by exploring how Greene and Thomas lent literary expressiveness and narrative tension and resolution to statesponsored architectural documentaries, and I contrast that authorial cooperation with the skepticism Bowen, Orwell, and Isherwood express towards architecture as a tool for reform. Using Cyril Connolly’s division of literary style into the Mandarin and the vernacular, I argue that modernist anti-ornamentation and mock-Tudor embellishment allowed the three authors not only to announce their own stylistic and political commitments but also to scrutinize them from within their own works. The state’s use of 8  Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007), xiii.

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132  Reconstructing Modernism modernist forms to communicate political progress prompted these authors to consider literary style as something similarly open to political cooption; their chosen styles, they feared, did not express authorial originality so much as the consensus-inducing repetition and false revelation of propaganda.

The New Architecture and “The New Britain” Exploring the Bauhaus’s failure to prevent fascism, Stephen Spender concluded in 1940 that Germans’ belief in the transformative power of environments had weakened their commitment to individual determination, yet he argued in Connolly’s little magazine Horizon that literary publications should attend to “constructing a better Britain after the war” and “planning better cities where the old ones have been bombed.”9 Writers, he underlined, could become the nation’s conscience, for “literature deals with longer term and more universal aims than any political programme.”10 Nonetheless, authors’ wartime employment by the state confounded literary aims with political aims and the author’s voice with the state’s. Despite Orwell’s warning that the Ministry of Information and other governmental entities “squeezed dry” the literary output of authors engaged in war work, poets and novelists like J. B. Priestley, Graham Greene, E. M. Forster, and Dylan Thomas frequently composed scripts for wartime Ministry of Information films.11 Among those writers, Greene and Thomas devoted themselves to crafting a promodernist governmental voice through short films that promoted modern architecture and large-scale planning as the embodiment of  the future Britain, a mass aesthetic that could be ushered in only through the masses’ wartime sacrifice. An early example of these propaganda films, Graham Greene’s The New Britain (1940) reassures its audience that a postwar welfare state would not be a radical break but a fulfillment of its prewar work.12 At the end of 9 See Stephen Spender, “September Journal,” Horizon 1 (February 1940):108; Stephen Spender, “Comment,” Horizon 3 (February 1941): 89. Reworking Auden’s “New styles of architecture, a change of heart,” Spender laments that “[t]he change of heart, sunbathing and sexual freedom, was almost as uneconomical an investment as the new architecture.” “September,” 117. 10  Spender, “Comment,” 90. 11  George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, October 13, 1944, in The collected essays, journalism, and letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 254. 12  Graham Greene, writer, The New Britain 1941. Words for Battle: Writers at War, Production Ministry of Information (Alexander Shaw), Distribution Imperial War Museum, 2007.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  133 World War I, Greene recounts, “Britain turned to build a new world. Over our one million dead we raised this colossal monument: a new architecture for our people.”13 Among “more achievements than we can remember now” were modern housing estates, bridges, highways, and even welfare provisions greatly similar to those promised in the Beveridge Report released one year later.14 “We had a peaceful revolution here,” Greene recounted, “We each of us paid our share for the new social services which looked after our people from birth to old age . . . . We were building inhabitants for the brave new world.”15 In contrast to the violence of World War II and early-twentieth-century revolutions on the Continent, British citizens had produced a “peaceful revolution” within British borders, a revolution in which not only their architecture but also their very national values were rebuilt. About this “brave new world” Greene pronounces, “In the council school and the technical college our children were prepared for peace: their only war was to be against the germ, the jerry-built building and the unjust law.”16 Britain had been built for peace, Greene tells citizens facing death from the Blitz, and the momentary break in that peace through World War II would not necessitate class revolution, because “we had had our revolution, so quietly that we hardly noticed it.”17 The British had already been inculcated in welfare state knowledge, and the achievements of modern architecture that flashed across the screen assured citizens that the work of remaking British life had already taken place. The violence of the People’s War takes a backseat to the prior, peaceful revolution. In New Towns for Old (1942), Dylan Thomas presents the war as no more than an aberration, perhaps even a benefit, in the more important prewar planning and architectural revolution; as in Greene’s film, plans for war are repackaged as plans for peace. In the town of Smokedale (a fictionalized Sheffield), a local man with a marked Yorkshire accent escorts a southern English man around the town, pointing out prior planning failures—no green space for children, flats near factories—and informing his skeptical foil about the town’s recent measures to replan Smokedale.18 When coming upon destroyed buildings, the companion assumes they are “bomb damage,” but the Yorkshire man proudly proclaims, “No! We pulled it down ­ourselves . . . . Now see, we can plan a town if we want to. And we have 13  Greene, Graham, “The New Britain,” in The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film Stories, ed. David Parkinson (New York: Applause, 1994), 504. 14  Ibid., 505. 15  Ibid., 506. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18  Dylan Thomas, writer, New Towns for Old 1942. Dylan Thomas: A War Films Anthology, Production Ministry of Information, Distribution Imperial War Museum, 2007.

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134  Reconstructing Modernism planned it an’ all!”19 In the Yorkshire man’s account, wartime damage becomes a boon to slum clearance: “ ‘Up to this war we’d 26,000 slum ’ouses condemned and 14,000 we’d already got rid of, and ’itler knocked us a few more down.’ ”20 The town’s chosen planner is shown mapping out the future city, followed by a series of aerial plans and culminating in elevations of the modern “low rent flats,” “social centres,” and other buildings that will define the new Smokedale.21 “Ay, and new schools, new hospitals, news roads, new life,” the Yorkshire man proclaims, against a montage of newly completed modern structures, “But war’s put a stop to all this. Just for a time. When this war’s won we’ve got to re-build all our big towns.”22 After his companion pressures him on “[w]ho’s going to make them come true?” he addresses the camera: “They are! You are! You’re the only folk that can make these plans come true. Not only plans for this town. But for every town. For your town. Remember! It’s your town!”23 This call for citizens of working-class neighborhoods to support planning, in the mouth of the markedly less patrician Yorkshire man, ties modernist planning intimately to citizen dem­ ocracy and the wisdom of the working class, whose energies were currently dedicated to winning the war. Within Thomas’s fictional scenario, MARS’s vocabulary of expert planning becomes the voice of the common person. In his script for A City Reborn (1945), originally titled Building the Future, Thomas confronts the war even more directly by narrativizing the conversion of Coventry’s citizens to modern housing amidst their heroic rebuilding efforts.24 He begins by recounting how the historic industrial town, important for wartime production, became marked as “a City of Destruction”: the heavy bombing raid in November 1940, during which “60,000 houses were damaged out of a total of 75,000,” “introduced a new word into the vocabulary of mass murder, to Coventrate.”25 Against that affront to language itself, Thomas portrays Coventry’s residents grappling with the unfamiliar architectural forms the planners present; “make it new” becomes not a choice but a necessity. As a soldier and his future wife, Betty,

19  Dylan Thomas, “New Towns for Old,” in Dylan Thomas, The Complete Screenplays, ed. John Ackerman (New York: Applause, 1995), 11. 20 Ibid. 21  Ibid., 12. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24  Dylan Thomas, writer, A City Reborn 1945. Dylan Thomas: A War Films Anthology, Production Ministry of Information, Distribution Imperial War Museum, 2007; for the original title, see John Ackerman, ed., Dylan Thomas, The Complete Screenplays (New York: Applause, 1995), 82. 25  Dylan Thomas, “A City Re-Born,” in Dylan Thomas, The Complete Screenplays, ed. John Ackerman (New York: Applause, 1995), 86.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  135 survey the damage, they dream about the home they will occupy, and the soldier explains a new construction method: “ ‘Prefabrication, dear . . . you must have read about it in the papers . . .’ ”26 The scene shifts to an engineer, newly directed to Coventry, as he settles into a hostel built for Coventry’s workers, many dancing the hokey pokey in the recreation room: “In Coventry thousands now live in these hostels finding a new communal way of life.”27 In that democratic setting, the engineer strikes up a conversation with a local engineer, Arthur, who claims that Coventry can easily move from producing shells to making “peace things”; war production capabilities correspond to rebuilding capabilities.28 The scene then shifts to Betty, who explains the assembly of a prefabricated structure to a newly arrived fellow factory laborer, while over at the pub, a man describes the prefabrication process in even more depth, against the objection of one skeptic who deems these houses “  ‘Chicken houses!’ ”29 Voice-over commentary takes over from the citizen at this point: “After the war there can be no thinking of returning to the good old days, the days of cramped houses in crippling streets. . . . That is why within a year of the blitz Coventry had already begun to design houses which could be made in her factories—prototypes of which are being assembled now for everyone to see.”30

Including an objector only to silence him, Thomas banishes nostalgia for prewar housing forms. Carrying on the commentary’s note of patriotism about Coventry’s capabilities for wartime production, the pub-goer continues, “ ‘Why not call ’em what they really are—factory-made houses. If you can make a good-looking motor car in factory, you can make a good-looking house.’ ”31 This pitch recalls founding MARS member John Betjeman’s early  admiration for modern architecture’s streamlined aesthetics, borrowed from automobile design. Against the skeptic’s objection that no one “ ‘wants to be cooped up in a mechanised soapbox,’ ” the advocate draws specific plans for prefabricated houses, an amateur citizen voice of planning that transitions directly into the engineers’ discussion of postwar rebuilding 26 Ibid. 27  Ibid., 87. 28  Ibid., 88. The commentator recounts, “Plans had to be made immediately for rebuilding the city after the war—It had to look to a future when people must have houses, and these worthy of their courage.” Ibid. 29  Ibid., 89. 30 Ibid. 31  Ibid., 90.

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136  Reconstructing Modernism plans as the voice-over commentary proclaims, “Coventry was one of the first cities in Britain to have a complete plan for rebuilding.”32 Coventry becomes an exemplar of both wartime sacrifice and projecting the city’s self-imagination into peacetime. As an engineer explains the city’s “ ‘proper people’s plan,’ ” the camera cuts to the soldier and Betty, who are surveying the architectural model on display in the town (Figure 3.1).33 The camera pans across the model, revealing sleek modern and uniform schools, health centers, and flats gathered around the cathedral.34 The camera finally pans to the couple, and the commentator exhorts viewers, “Every man must believe in the good and happiness that is to be shared . . . to be shared, equally.’ ”35 Town planning and modernist architecture, linked to foreign

Figure 3.1  Viewing the Model of the New Coventry in A City Reborn Dylan Thomas, writer, A City Reborn 1945. Production Gryphon Films, Distribution bfi.org.uk.

32  Ibid. 90, 92. 33  Ibid., 93. 34  The MARS Group also showcased the Coventry rebuilding plans at a MARS-organized CIAM meeting. See Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 211. 35  Thomas, “City,” 95.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  137 political thought in Huxley’s condemnation of “Bolshevik idealist[s],” now promise a new era of communal politics in Britain; one must believe in modernism in order to believe in the new nation. The welfare state, though not fully formed, existed in miniature within those model towns.36

The New Britain and the Old Literary Modernisms While MARS-style planning schemes gained new life through state sponsorship—an endorsement forcefully represented in these films that announced national renewal through architectural renewal—Bowen, Orwell, and Isherwood assessed the valedictory condition of literary modernism. In The Heat of the Day (1948), Bowen’s postwar novel of intrigue set during the Blitz and its aftermath, Robert, a traitor working for the British government, tells his lover, Stella, after revealing his treason, “You’ll have to re-read me backwards.”37 In this instance, Bowen develops a theme established in her prewar novel The Death of the Heart (1938), which begins with Anna Quayne describing the strange contents and style of the diary of Portia, her young sister-in-law, to her friend St Quentin. Having opened Portia’s diary at the last entry, Anna turns to the beginning “to see what had got her into that state of mind.”38 Through these examples of reading the beginning from the point of view of the ending, Bowen thematizes a project common to mid-century authors and aging early modernists like Wyndham Lewis: the attempt to reread modernism from a belated position. In A Singular Modernity, Fredric Jameson emphasizes that late modernist authors engaged with modernism as a repeated experiment, governed by preexisting formal conventions, whereas for high modernists the “form is 36  When We Build Again (1943), a film spoken and partially written by Dylan Thomas and sponsored by Cadbury, goes beyond these models by including shots of Quarry Hill, a housing complex in Leeds “regarded as the most progressive flatted estate to be constructed in interwar England.” John R. Gold and Steven V. Ward, “We’re Going To Do It Right This Time: Cinematic Representations of Urban Planning and the British New Towns, 1939 to 1951,” in Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, ed. Stuart C. Aitken and Leo E. Zonn (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 241. Andrew Lycett notes that, because of Thomas’s record of successful travelogues, he was commissioned to write text to accompany an illustrated book to be called Twelve Hours on the Streets, documenting the city of London: “Dylan’s proposal ended fawningly: ‘The streets one would like to see in the future. This section which is really a discussion of town planning schemes as they exist now in this country would make the book have, I think a positive and creative end.’ ” Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life (New York: Overlook, 2005), 217. 37  Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (New York: Anchor, 2002), 304. 38  Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (New York: Vintage, 1961), 7–8.

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138  Reconstructing Modernism never given in advance: it is generated experimentally in the encounter.”39 Jameson’s formulation illuminates the multiple instances of reading backwards that appear in Bowen’s fiction: beyond revealing that heightened awareness of precursors (and consequently explaining how modernist style could be emptied of its connotations of innovativeness), Jameson attests to how extensively modernism had been institutionalized and historicized by the mid-century.40 Instead of embodying the “formal autoreferentiality” of high modernism, through which high modernist works became “allegories of their own production,” late modernist texts, according to Jameson, are primarily “art about art” and thus promote the “autonomy of the aesthetic.”41 The aesthetic autonomy that Jameson describes, as theorized at mid-century by critics such as Clement Greenberg, entailed the growing segregation of art forms as each branch came to make its own form and materials its content.42 In contrast to Jameson’s account of intensified formal isolation, the mid-century writers that I discuss appeal directly to other art forms— namely, architecture and the design arts—within their novels in order to define their own style. In fact, there is a surprisingly wide gap between Jameson’s influential theorization of late modernism and the actual practice of mid-century Britain’s heirs to literary modernism, as many like Bowen would extend to the literary arts the monolithic category of a “modern ‘style’ ” that for poet and MARS Group member Herbert Read crossed visual, industrial, and architectural forms.43 Tracing the need for an art “of our Today” that “reconciles the individual with his time” in her speech “Subject and the Time” delivered to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1953, Bowen says the novelist “is reinforced by more inspiring contact with other arts than may have been possible till now: painting, music, architecture aid him to extend the bounds of his medium—or, better, cause him to feel it need not be bounded. He feels a fusion between all manners of saying.”44 Bowen, who as a teenager aspired to be an architect, emphasizes that “the contemporary novel . . . is stayed upon an inner regard of form; it is visual, and in feeling musical; and in sense and intention it is at heart poetic.”45 39  Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (New York: Verso, 2002), 208. 40  Ibid., 209–10. 41  Ibid., 200, 159, 199, 208. 42  For Greenberg, ibid., 177; for the growing separation, ibid., 200. 43  Hayward, “Good,” 226–7. 44  Elizabeth Bowen, “Subject and the Time,” in Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010), 147, 150, 151. 45  For Bowen’s aspirations, see Elizabeth Bowen, “Frankly Speaking: Interview, 1959,” in Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010), 330; Bowen, “Subject,” 152.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  139 In Bowen’s account, late modernism appears focused most clearly on a form-crossing style that engages with the unique historical challenges of the mid-century. By discussing the work of Bowen, Isherwood, and Orwell in the context of late modernism, I too am critically rereading literary modernism through its mid-century reverberations. The institutionalization of modernism enabled the migration of its practices from a limited coterie to the wider public and meant that, for example, writers could no longer view language as transparent; Bowen, Isherwood, and Orwell followed a prior generation in highlighting the materiality of language, even as they refigured that materiality in more literal and historical terms. Their fiction and essays strikingly compare language to steel, concrete, and other materials of state wartime production and postwar reconstruction.46 If foregrounding the materiality of language was once a primarily aesthetic move, the utility of language as a wartime material shows a move toward the pragmatic, a move exemplifying the wider migration of modernist art from rarefied aesthetic to everyday design and its associations with the once-feared middlebrow.47 The integration of modern architecture and design into British political life meant that modernism, in both its literary and architectural iterations, deeply mattered to mid-century British writers far beyond those typically considered “modernists.” In observing these wartime permutations of modernism, Bowen, Isherwood, and Orwell wrestle with the consequences of early literary modernist projects now coming to fruition. The cultural integration of British modernist style that they witness greatly resembles the reform proposed by Wyndham Lewis in The Caliph’s Design (1919). Lewis adopted the language of political revolution in calling for “complete reform . . . of

46 Bowen interprets modern construction through wartime experience even for sites untouched by war damage. In “New York Waiting in My Memory” (1950), futuristic steelframed structures built on the backs of “architectural ghosts” suggest memories of the Blitz: “Out round New York’s rawer edges, the effect, to me, was as though bombs had ploughed their way: construction and destruction, at one phase, operate much the same.” “New York Waiting in My Memory,” in People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008), 109–10. 47  In using the term “middlebrow,” I acknowledge its role in dismissing the literary value of texts assigned to that category. Kristin Bluemel and Elizabeth Maslen argue persuasively for a reconsideration of the critical use of the term, suggesting “intermodernism” as an alternative that embodies a style, period, and sociopolitical orientation of its own. See Kristin Bluemel, ed., Intermodernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009). I have continued to use the word “middlebrow” because I believe these authors did fear that their work was in some way a derivative modernism.

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140  Reconstructing Modernism every notion . . . on the significance of the appearance of the world,” and he imagined modernist style as a sort of aesthetic collectivism.48 Through “a Rhetoric of buildings,” the “imagination of the multitude could be captured and fixed.”49 As I have already claimed, Lewis imagined nothing less than a total cultural integration of modernism in all media. By contrast, the world that Bowen, Isherwood, and Orwell encountered was a world in which the “Rhetoric of buildings” had indeed been seized by politicians and modernist style was mass marketed: these authors could no longer claim the “position of freaks” that Lewis had attributed to early modernists even if they wanted to do so.50 That fulfilled cultural integration of high modernist forms, once longed for by Lewis and Roger Fry, prompts the turn Orwell, Bowen, and Isherwood make to public forms through their writing. In his essay “Art and the State” (1936), John Maynard Keynes asserts that “[a]rchitecture is the most public of the arts, the least private in its manifestations and the best suited to give form and body to civic pride and the sense of social unity.”51 Keynes labels literature the most private art. Architecture in this period was particularly socially attuned. CIAM, the modernist architectural group that united Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, produced what MARS vice chairman Maxwell Fry labeled a “bill of human architectural rights” through the Athens Charter.52 Le Corbusier’s insistence on the need to plan whole towns rather than individual buildings spread to Britain through MARS, which joined architects like Fry and Wells Coates with recent émigrés like Ernö Goldfinger and zoo architect Berthold Lubetkin.53 Turning to the forms of architecture and design, Bowen, Isherwood, and Orwell participated in what Marina MacKay calls the “public modernism” of the British mid-century through borrowing the public status of architecture.54 Yet they often did so with grave reservations. Their reevaluation of the perceived privacy and autonomy of the literary arts emerged as wartime governmental intervention increasingly blurred the boundary between the public and the private in the arts and daily life. As with Aldous Huxley, literary categories like authorial detachment and aesthetic autonomy became 48 Lewis, Caliph’s, 28. 49  Ibid., 28, 30. 50  Ibid., 39. 51  John Maynard Keynes, “Art and the State,” in Social, Political and Literary Writings, ed. Donald Moggridge (London: Macmillan, 1982), 345. 52  Arthur Korn, Maxwell Fry, and Dennis Sharp, “The M.A.R.S. Plan for London,” Perspecta 13/14 (1971): 165. 53  Lubetkin was even further to the left than some MARS members and departed the organization in 1938. 54  Marina MacKay, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 21.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  141 political questions for the three authors as British politicians adopted the  “Rhetoric of [modernist] buildings”; form became inseparable from political speech in this era. As I move from discussing perceived alliances between modern architecture and international communism to discussing the role that modern architecture played in Britain’s transformation to a welfare state, I recognize the importance of the turn Jed Esty locates from the international and imperial to the national in British late modernism. At the same time, I want to modify Esty’s story of “demetropolitanization” and revival of a (partially imagined) national culture by considering the wartime rhetoric of a planned peace.55 At the center of those plans was the rebuilding of London and other major cities. The discourse these plans for peace engendered, I argue, was as much or more about regenerating culture as about reviving imagined tradition. The ideological connotations of the architectural forms used to rebuild Britain made writers increasingly conscious of their own style. Connolly anticipated this self-consciousness in his prewar work Enemies of Promise (1938), where he divided written style into two camps: the Mandarin and the vernacular. Following the example of mid-century authors such as Bowen and Read who identified the emergence of cross-medium modern styles, I will extend Connolly’s division from literary style to artistic and architectural style. For Connolly, Mandarin writers prioritize literary form such that, at the extreme, their ornamented language can lack underlying content. In contrast, the vernacular writers’ emphasis on conveying content prompts them to adopt a colloquial style, though Connolly distinguishes them from popular novelists.56 According to Connolly, Mandarin and vernacular literary styles were not a matter of modernism versus antimodernism but rather of two diverging approaches to modernism (and, indeed, to written language across history).57 While Isherwood and Orwell can be taken as representative of vernacular style and Bowen of Mandarin style—in line with their respective political and social commitments more 55  Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004), 3. 56  Connolly defines style as a “relation . . . between form and content.” Enemies, 9. Style is also a matter of audience within Connolly’s schematization: the formal difficulty of Mandarin works makes them inaccessible to most readers, while vernacular works’ colloquial style allows them to reach a wider audience. Connolly links this question of accessibility to political sentiment, attributing conservative tendencies to Mandarin writers and leftist tendencies to vernacular writers. See ibid., 69–70. 57  Connolly identifies the two tendencies at war in James Joyce’s Ulysses. See Enemies, 54–5.

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142  Reconstructing Modernism generally—it is nevertheless characteristic of the age’s extreme consciousness of style that all three writers express the greatest apprehension about their own chosen style through intense scrutiny of its manifestations in other creative forms. Attention to their own style signals the fact that, even as Bowen, Isherwood, and Orwell address the collective, their work maintains marked autobiographical elements. In her 1940 address to the Workers’ Educational Association in Brighton, Virginia Woolf accused this generation, even in light of their political commitments, of being “great egotists” who wrote fiction primarily using themselves as their subjects.58 The line between author and character consequently blurs in these writers’ fiction: Bowen shares an approximate birth date with her protagonist Stella Rodney, and Orwell even shares an adopted first name with his protagonist George Bowling, a manifestation of Orwell’s wider inclination towards self-chronicling evident in works such as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938). Isherwood frequently stars as a character in his own novels, just one step away from his somewhat fictionalized autobiographies like Lions and Shadows (1938). In fact, Isherwood would later claim that he wrote himself into Goodbye to Berlin (1939) to avoid putting himself into all the characters: “[T]he ‘I-ness’ of oneself was like a poison that was apt to seep into everything else and confuse the clear lines of the character.”59 Using a narrator called Christopher Isherwood was a way for him “to pin the ‘I’ down.”60 In effect, the protagonists of these texts, because they contain autobiographical elements, ventriloquize the authors’ aesthetic and social concerns. To establish the links between individual attention to style and (sometimes unintentional and reluctant) political involvements, I turn to the novels Orwell and Isherwood published in 1939. In Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, insurance salesman George Bowling’s hometown, already altered beyond recognition, becomes even less recognizable after the RAF accidentally bombs it. Complementing Orwell’s focus on England, Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin elegizes the international lifestyle and the Weimar creativity that the buildup to World War II interrupted. I will trace the vernacular style in Orwell’s streamlined interiors and in Isherwood’s engagement with photography and modernist architecture to explore the political elements of style. I  will then describe Bowen’s encounter with Mandarin style in Robert’s 58 Virginia Woolf, “The Leaning Tower,” in The Moment and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1947), 120. 59  Christopher Isherwood, “The Berlin Stories,” in Isherwood on Writing, ed. James J. Berg (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007), 166. 60  Ibid., 167.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  143 labyrinthine childhood home of Holme Dene, containing “swastika arms of passage leading to nothing.”61 By examining her treatment of this English suburban home, I will demonstrate how Bowen simultaneously addresses three different passages—the literal architectural passage, the written passage, and the passing of modernist literary form—which I will argue all tie into the forthcoming passage of the British nation into a welfare state.

“The mischief was in her own and other rooms”: The Politicization of Architectural Style After witnessing the accidental bombing of Lower Binfield, George Bowling in Coming Up for Air looks into a damaged house and spots unmade beds and jars of marmalade, objects of private space now exposed to onlookers.62 That breakdown between interiority and exteriority finds full expression in Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, where, despite the strong barrier between inside and outside that is created by blackout curtains, the Blitz can easily turn the home inside out. Moreover, Bowen recognizes that much of the wartime activity evolves from the home. After Harrison, Robert’s accuser, reappears at Stella’s flat, the narrator divulges that “tonight, ‘outside’ meant the harmless world: the mischief was in her own and in other rooms. The grind and scream of battles . . . were indoor-plotted; this was a war of dry cerebration inside windowless walls.”63 Although Bowen differed from Orwell stylistically and politically, the threat of war to civilians of all stripes meant that they necessarily shared similar concerns about the impact of warfare on domestic life. At the same time as the wartime nation was imagined as a domestic space, the domestic interior increasingly staged social dramas. Mid-century literature and the state—buoyed by its Ministry of Information housing films—simultaneously inserted the public into the private. In the postscript of The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945), Bowen recalls that “during the war the overcharged subconsciousnesses of everybody overflowed and merged,” as if the possibility of private space had passed.64 Perhaps the most literal representation of war in a domestic setting appears in Coming Up 61 Bowen, Heat, 289. 62  See George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (San Diego: Harvest, 1950), 264. 63 Bowen, Heat, 157. 64  Quoted in Neil Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford: Clarendon P, 2004), 182–3.

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144  Reconstructing Modernism for  Air, when George Bowling concludes that the future will inevitably bring “machine-guns squirting out bedroom windows.”65 The private, in the pathological language of the era, consequently symptomizes the national condition. But interior design also embodies hope for a stable civilization in Bowen’s work: “Pictures would not be hung plumb over the centres of fireplaces or wallpapers pasted on with such precision . . . if life were really not possible to adjudicate for. These things are what we mean when we speak of civilization.”66 Maintaining the proper relationship between things enacts the hope for a proper relationship between people, and the scale of the home rapidly expands until it encompasses civilization as a whole. In Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood similarly locates social and political forces in domestic forms. The state of Christopher’s rented room becomes a barometer of 1930s Germany. Although Isherwood did not share Bowen’s conservatism, he did share a sense that form itself could be a conduit for political thought. Even more, the possibility that everyday objects might make citizens more violent rather than more peaceful caused these authors’ representation of domestic objects and spaces to be graver than Lewis’s, Fry’s, and Lawrence’s calls for reform. In Christopher’s room, “[t]hree sham mediæval halberds,” “heavy and sharp enough to kill,” form a hatstand.67 They signal the domestic naturalization of militarism. “Every morning,” Isherwood writes, his landlady arranges these surreal objects “very carefully in certain unvarying positions” as “an uncompromising statement of her views on Capital and Society, Religion and Sex.”68 As Mia Spiro and Thomas S. Davis both argue, the process of observing and interpreting domestic objects in Goodbye to Berlin gives the narrator a means of recording and analyzing the historical moment.69 Spiro identifies in Isherwood an “anti-Nazi aesthetic” that uses acts of self-reflective witnessing to counteract “mass culture spectacles,” while Davis treats “everyday life as a barometer of historical change.”70 The Weimar setting thus allowed Isherwood to portray the thin line between democracy and fascism, and 65 Orwell, Coming, 31. 66 Bowen, Death, 221. 67  Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories: Goodbye to Berlin (New York: New Directions, 1963), 2. 68 Ibid. 69  Spiro reads the decorative objects from Christopher’s room as symbols of “imminent war”: “Musing on the fate of the room and its objects, Christopher sets the context for a world on the verge of destruction.” Mia Spiro, Anti-Nazi Modernism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 63. 70 Spiro, Anti-Nazi, 4, 11; Thomas S. Davis, The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 104.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  145 scholars have also noted the significance of Weimar decadence and sexual freedoms for Isherwood, Auden, and other gay British authors as they shaped themselves into a literary group in the 1930s.71 By reading this novel in the context of architectural as well as political history, we can not only interpret the overdetermined spectacles and design objects that populate the novel but also comprehend the importance of Weimar to Isherwood’s understanding of literary style. Norman Page notes that Isherwood experienced Berlin as it became known as “the centre of the modern movement in architecture,” and Spender describes the aesthetic revelations that this new architecture prompted as he, Auden, and Isherwood traveled throughout Germany.72 Modernist architecture, Spender explains in “Brave New Rooms,” promised to obliterate the “stuffy bourgeois standards” of the older generation and enact leftist ideas, changing “the pattern of [citizens’] lives through architecture and design objects.”73 As a result, Weimar represented to these authors more than just a site of sexual and political spectacle—what Linda Mizejewski identifies as “the curious intersection of Nazism and eroticism”: it marked an emergent left-wing movement encoded in and invigorated by a new aesthetic order.74 In Spender’s account, modernist architecture and design objects moved beyond the present by revealing— and even actualizing—future political formations, yet Isherwood, like Spender in “September Journal,” also considered the ways in which planned environments might ready citizens for fascism. Bowen similarly drew upon domestic objects to explore how form can inculcate an idea of society. Stella’s son Roderick obtained his model of an ideal society as an infant from “a painted fan, and of that beau monde of figures, grouped and placed and linked by gestures or garlands, he never had, [Stella] suspected, lost interior sight.”75 Bowen likewise identifies herself as the product of domestic forms in Bowen’s Court (1942), the history she compiled of her Georgian family estate house in Ireland, where she testifies that “steady behaviour of some sort, even formality, is enjoined by 71  Beyond identifying how that “closely knit group of gay intellectuals . . . invent[ed] their own legend about their days in wild, Weimar Berlin,” Linda Mizejewski connects Weimar sexual and political spectacle through the figure of Christopher: “As a writer, he will serve as both witness and prophet, through whose authority we will come to understand Sally’s ‘divine decadence’—as Sally herself cannot—as the moral corruption of a culture that is about to embrace the Third Reich.” Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 42, 5. 72  Norman Page, Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 66. 73  Spender, “Brave,” 2. 74 Mizejewski, Divine, 6. 75 Bowen, Heat, 65.

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146  Reconstructing Modernism every line of the house” and that, in fact, “Bowen’s Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.”76 As Allan Hepburn demonstrates, Bowen had “a taste for well-proportioned, classical buildings,” and she found a London home in Clarence Terrace, which “exemplif[ied] Georgian values: stability, unity, grandeur, and colonial expansion.”77 Though the conservative values Bowen associates with the home prompt her declaration of the house’s role in maintaining social structure, her rhetoric has a surprising crossover with that of British housing reformers and even Julian Huxley, who saw architecture as a means of conditioning behavior. Even more, modernist architects like Jane Drew and Ernö Goldfinger drew inspiration from the clean lines and community-mindedness of Georgian architecture. The movement from domestic forms to social organization was widespread within MARS circles, prompting architects like Maxwell Fry to envision housing that could provide “a means to citizenship” by opening the occupant up to public space.78 In keeping with that crossover from private to public via modern domestic architecture, the position of Minister of Reconstruction—a position created in November 1943 that gave its holder a place in the War Cabinet—testified to the perceived importance of national rebuilding long before the end of the war.79 Plans to feature improved housing in a postwar welfare state gained momentum with the success of the Beveridge Report. Compiled by Sir William Beveridge, chair of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, and published in late 1942, the report called for the establishment of “a free national health service, child allowances, [and] full employment.”80 Selling over 600,000 copies, the Beveridge Report found a public as well as governmental audience, and an adapted edition was disseminated to British soldiers worldwide.81 The excitement about postwar reconstruction entered

76  Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court (New York: Ecco, 1979), 26, 32. 77 Allan Hepburn, “Architectural London: Elizabeth Bowen in Regent’s Park,” in Irish Writing London, vol. 1, ed. Tom Herron (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 113, 114. Hepburn argues that Bowen moved beyond the household to the neighborhood as a structuring device in The Death of the Heart, where the Quaynes’ home strongly resembles her own Regent’s Park house. Like the work of the twentieth-century planners that architect John Nash “anticipated” (114), these structures bridged public and private space and compelled “civility and neighbourliness” (115). Yet, as Hepburn demonstrates, these houses ultimately “create strained, even histrionic, behaviours” in Bowen’s novel (116). Architecture can corrupt as well ennoble, and style can deceive: “architectural theatricality cannot create authentic civic virtues” (117). 78 Darling, Re-forming, 116. 79  See Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain—1939–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 535. 80  Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–1951 (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 74. 81  See ibid., 75–6, 73.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  147 artistic channels through events such as the display of postwar temporary housing prototypes at the Tate Gallery in 1944 and the “Rebuilding Britain” exhibition hosted by the Royal Institute of British Architects at the National Gallery in 1943 and opened by Beveridge himself.82 Although many of these housing promises went unfulfilled and what was constructed often deviated from modernist design principles, the plans for rebuilt and improved housing and the modernist contributions to that effort were central to the national imaginary of a postwar Britain. Housing was a pivotal factor in the Labour Party’s electoral victory at the war’s close: 40 percent of voters cited housing as the major issue; social security was a distant second with around 15 percent. Promising millions of new houses, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the Wartime Coalition, proclaimed, “The better the house, the better the people.”83 Bevin indicates that architectural environments, rather than simply reflecting national character, could in fact remake it. These housing prototypes foregrounded the materials of construction, themselves often the materials of war. As with the “phalanx of metal objects” inside Christopher’s flat, material becomes important as a way of linking domestic objects to the nation through its associations with wartime production.84 Orwell and Isherwood both illustrate the easy convertibility of design objects to munitions; this convertibility extends, and even confirms, citizens’ fear that their own belongings could kill them during an air raid.85 Isherwood, mindful of the endings and canonization of styles, initially speculates that his landlady’s metal objects might ultimately rest in a museum only to surmise that “perhaps they will merely be melted down for  munitions in a war,” a dangerously close formal relationship between domestic objects and weapons.86 While Dylan Thomas’s A City Reborn would celebrate the opportunity for munitions factories to make houses and other “ ‘peace things,’ ” Isherwood imagines the alternative, that these household objects can easily revert to war objects. Similarly, the concrete trucks that Orwell’s George Bowling spots become sinister when he hears of the new glass, concrete, and bomb factories in Lower Binfield; his former home produces the materials needed for a new style of architecture and of  warfare. In this instance, the materials of modern architecture, which Read saw as the heart of an architectural movement fit to inculcate virtue,

82 For the prototypes, see Nicholas Bullock, Rebuilding the Postwar World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London: Routledge, 2002), 180. 83  Quoted in Calder, People’s, 579. 84 Isherwood, Goodbye, 2. 85  See Corcoran, Elizabeth, 164. 86 Isherwood, Goodbye, 2.

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148  Reconstructing Modernism are agents of destruction. Isherwood’s and Orwell’s ominous accounts of militarism arising from domestic materials became jarringly realized after the war, such that the forms of war were written into the domestic. In the period between German and Japanese surrender, Lieutenant-Colonel  R.  M. Lester celebrated in Country Life the government’s authorization for factories to move from building airplanes to building houses—a move heralded in Thomas’s Ministry of Information film—because it enabled “the introduction of aircraft precision into permanent house construction.”87 Lester echoes the militaristic language of Maxwell Fry’s Fine Building, a vision for rebuilding begun, Fry emphasizes, during the Blitz and whose later sections he composed as “a particular aeroplane . . . passe[d] over [his] head.”88 Fry envisions the rebuilding process via martial craftsmanship. The process, he states, would take the same amount of “thought and labour . . . as goes to the making of a first-class fighter aeroplane.”89 Indeed, ex-aircraft factories produced approximately one-third of postwar temporary houses.90 Against those wartime associations, steel, glass, and concrete—though not a priori ideologically imbedded—were lauded even before the war by architects like Wells Coates, who thought modernist architecture, in conjunction with progressive politics, could move Britain forward. In a special issue of the Architects’ Journal entitled “The New Materials” (1931), Coates portrays these materials as relatively neutral, but he foresees a future when they might be ideologically marked: “That is the choice; the use of the new resources of materials as the prisoners—the slaves—of old habits, old social prejudices, old visual prejudices; or as the means to new forms, new habits of life, a new vision.”91 Coates thus recognizes the possibility for material to be linked not only to a particular style but also to a particular social outlook. Architectural modernism realized that possibility by achieving what architectural historian Elizabeth Darling calls the “hybridization of progressive form with progressive content.”92 According to Darling, this infusion of content into form characterized British modernism: instead of viewing designs’ overt formal similarity to Le Corbusier and Mies’s as “evidence of the lack of a true modernism in Britain, we might, instead, understand [architects’] deployment of such radically different forms as a rhetorical device to propagandize whichever cause their building served.”93 Marked

87  R. M. Lester, “Aircraft Precision Brought into Housing,” Country Life 98 (1945): 204. 88  Maxwell Fry, Fine Building (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), 123. 89  Ibid., 163. 90  See Jackson, Politics, 170. 91  Quoted in Darling, Re-forming, 9–10. 92  Ibid., 50. 93 Ibid.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  149 formal shifts operate rhetorically to signal the break from old social structures. As examples of how architectural modernism intersected with British social reform movements, Darling cites the concrete and glass Pioneer Health Centre (1935) and the adjacent working-class Sassoon House (1934), which Aldous Huxley praised in Brave New World Revisited as “a true community.”94 In a like manner, some prewar Labour politicians conveyed the social progressivism of the party through modernist architecture, as in Finsbury, where in 1938 the predominantly Labour council aimed to construct “ultramodern housing as the showpiece of plans to transform the borough.”95 In prewar Britain, Adolf Hitler’s opposition to left-wing artists intensified the practice of connecting certain styles to particular political viewpoints. The architectural schools registered the resulting leftward shift especially strongly. According to Anthony Jackson, “At the time of the General Strike in 1926, the students of the AA [Architectural Association] . . . could patriotically answer the call to help defeat the workers by acting as police and railwaymen. Ten years later AA students were registering their alarm at ‘the Fascist elements in this country attacking progressive art.’ ”96 The editors of the Architects’ Journal similarly exhibit the growing association of architecture and politics in “A Question to Sir Oswald Mosley” (1934). “Political complexion has only been openly identified with architectural forms recently,” they write, and they turn from German to internal politics by addressing British Union of Fascists leader Mosley: “[W]hat, we may ask, are the ideas of, shall we call him the Leader, about architecture that will represent the glory and the power, the empire . . . and the innate decency and sportsmanship of England? Will the Leader favour banker’s Classic or builder’s Tudor?”97 The editors ignore the obvious template for Mosley’s imagined architectural program, the fascist modernism Mussolini was shaping through Rationalist architecture (among other variations); instead, by linking extreme right-wing politics to sham traditional building styles, they make fascism the ally of an architectural copying of the old Britain.98 Among mainstream Conservative politicians, most lacked their Labour counterparts’ vocal architectural commitments. Winston Churchill’s characterization of reconstruction plans as

94  See ibid., 54–69; Huxley, Revisited, 119. 95 Darling, Re-forming, 87. 96 Jackson, Politics, 66. 97  “A Question to Sir Oswald Mosley,” Architects’ Journal 79 (1934): 269. 98  Anthony Jackson notes that this article prompted the Fascists to correct the record: “On the contrary, replied the British Union of Fascists’ spokesmen, they wanted a new architecture but this would only come by using modern materials and techniques for a modern purpose.” Politics, 43.

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150  Reconstructing Modernism little better than “false hopes and airy visions of Utopia and Eldorado” until the war was over exemplifies how Conservatives’ lack of commitment to modern architecture and the movement’s connotations of social progress granted Labour a postwar advantage.99 In her 1953 address to an American audience entitled “The Idea of the Home,” Bowen took Churchill’s representation of the envisioned postwar world as ungrounded fantasy and applied it to domestic forms that were then readily obtainable. Against Wyndham Lewis’s and D.H.  Lawrence’s calls for a widespread clearance of older forms in favor of modernist ones, Bowen cautioned against replacing “the plan [that] is inherited” with the “hermetic picture-home,” the “Never-neverland” marketed to the broader population in the “glossy pages” of magazines as an “attainable” ideal.100 For Bowen as well as for Waugh, social order is not simply illustrated in architecture; it is facilitated through those forms. Bowen warns against conformity not only to new models of the physical home—these new “environments [that] lack associations”—but also to new forms of social organization.101 When she thinks about housing, Bowen’s political sensibilities confront her design sensibilities. In “Subject and the Time,” she espoused the need for a contemporary style to address “the sensation of living now” in a specific historical context.102 Yet Bowen’s political leanings make her shy away from this new style aligned with mass taste. Bowen asks, “How far should the home resist, and how far admit, exterior influences, pressures, theories, and trends?”103 She instantly answers, “A degree—I say, a degree only—of conservatism is so inseparable from the home concept that it cannot be altogether wrong.”104 In response to the “mass-produced uniformity” of “contemporary American surroundings,” she acknowledges that a “new kind of expressiveness—concrete in architecture, furniture and regional planning based on a social idea, unconcrete in modes and rhythms of living—is being sought,” but she emphasizes, “first, what there actually is to express must be known, felt, and in the main agreed upon.”105 Though Bowen addresses these words to the context of postwar America, it is significant that she, like Betjeman in the 1930s, tries to empty planning and the

99  Quoted in Bullock, Rebuilding, 11. 100  Elizabeth Bowen, “The Idea of the Home,” in Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010), 163, 171, 171, 171, 171. 101  Ibid., 169. 102  Bowen, “Subject,” 148. 103  Bowen, “Idea,” 172. 104 Ibid. 105  Ibid., 173, 173, 174, 174.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  151 new domestic forms of their utopian content; for Bowen these new social and design responses are, in the main, a “purely material solution.”106 The conflict the home produces between Bowen’s aesthetic and political sensibilities reveals the degree to which time, place, and the political inscribed the material in this period. The wartime and stylistic aspects of steel become one as Isherwood describes his pupil Hippi’s house, in which the “metalstudded doors” and “modernist lamps, designed to look like pressure-gauges, thermometers and switchboard dials” ominously recall German submarines.107 Thus, while Davis reads these features as “objects of everyday life” and “insignificant details” that “delineate Weimar’s combustible economic situation,” Spender’s account of the importance of German modernist household objects to his, Isherwood’s, and Auden’s political beliefs reveals an even tighter connection between planned spaces and British authorship.108 Even more, the process of pulling together design elements disconcertingly mimics the process of assembling wartime materials and munitions; design not only registers conflict but prepares one for it. In Bowen’s prewar novel The Death of the Heart, Portia’s course of assembling the jigsaw puzzles given to her by Major Brutt, a World War I veteran, dramatizes this common cultural linking of material to social conditions. As Portia joins the pieces, she merges the elements depicted by the puzzles: the airplanes, the  officers, the spectators, and finally the element Portia cannot bear to assemble herself, the ambulance. Much as these three authors fear the convertibility of domestic objects into war objects, they fear the extent to which language functions as a wartime material. Bowen, like Greene and Thomas, was employed by the Ministry of Information. In The Heat of the Day, she foregrounds the role language plays in conducting the war through Roderick’s claim that “conversations are the leading thing in this war!”109 The use of language as a wartime material, exhibited so clearly in the Ministry of Information films, made language subject to great scrutiny: World War I had taught the British population to link propaganda with deception.110 In World War II, the security censorship of the newspapers combined with the government’s purchase of up to one-third of major newspapers’ advertisements meant an even greater connection between language-production and the state.111 106  Ibid., 173. 107 Isherwood, Goodbye, 14. 108 Davis, Extinct, 95. 109 Bowen, Heat, 67. 110  See Mark Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon P, 2000), 20. 111  See Calder, People’s, 507–8.

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152  Reconstructing Modernism The unquestioning belief of Louie, a wayward soldier’s wife, in the British newspaper’s truthfulness and its importance to defining her role as a citizen exemplifies Bowen’s recognition of the potential falsity of language—and of national loyalties. Those concerns with fraudulent or compromised forms of language quickened broader anxieties about fraudulent and appropriated styles; while the literary voice may be lent to the state, so too can politics infiltrate both literary and architectural style. Falsity of design pervades The Death of the Heart, where imitation marble and a painted fire grace the Quaynes’ residence. Similarly, Isherwood and Orwell dramatize the false continuity that design can provide by producing nostalgia for periods and places that never wholly existed. The Baltic Sea beach village Christopher visits in Goodbye to Berlin actually evacuates place because its “various styles of seaside architecture—sham Moorish, old Bavarian, Taj Mahal, and the rococo doll’s house” refer to everywhere except their own location.112 Architectural critic Charles Jencks, responsible for the term “late modernist,” lumps the “Ersatz”—the borrowing of old styles, often cut off from their space of origin, for new buildings—with “Modern Architecture” and its pared-down aesthetic, since both styles produce alienation and a failed sense of place.113 Hence, only a few years after the Museum of Modern Art announced the “International Style,” the 1940s saw a need to develop regional strains of modernism, and British architects turned to countries like Sweden to see how modernism might be nationalized.114 Darling in fact argues that “the new architecture in Britain formed part of an ongoing attempt to make a modern nation” through an “elision of modernist concepts with modern ones.”115 If creating a new Britain was to be done architecturally, it could not be done using old British styles; as the editorial addressed to Mosley implies, the use of sham-traditional architecture might amount to a fake construction of Britain itself, a fabrication linked in the article to British fascists’ perverted idea of the nation. When Bowling returns to Lower Binfield in Coming Up for Air, he finds sham-traditional style first in the “fake-medieval” design of the St George 112 Isherwood, Goodbye, 77. 113  For “late modernist,” see Charles Jencks, Late-Modern Architecture and Other Essays (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 32; for the “ersatz,” Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 6th ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 25–6. Jencks identifies the “Late-Modern” in  architecture as beginning roughly around 1960, concurrent with the “Post-Modern.” Late-Modern, 32. Orwell himself picks up on the association between the ersatz and modern architectural design that Jencks would later identify: in Coming Up for Air, George Bowling jumps from thinking about the ersatz sausage to disparaging the “slick and streamlined” (27). 114  See Bullock, Rebuilding, 30–2. 115 Darling, Re-forming, i, 56.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  153 Hotel—St George being, of course, England’s patron saint—and then in the  tearoom that has filled George’s childhood home with antiques such as  his lower-class parents could never have owned.116 The recycling of styles  increasingly disturbs George Bowling until, as he gazes upon the “sham-Tudor colonies” of Upper Binfield, he wishes for “a hand-grenade in [his] pocket.”117 Ersatz design triggers George’s imaginary violence, but The Heat of the Day underscores the converse possibility, that design—such as “the pretty pelmet” that hides Stella’s black-out blind roller—can conceal violence.118 The resistance to ersatz forms does not mean that only one authentic modern style can exist. In Connolly’s formulation, the vernacular style and the Mandarin style are inverses, one in recession at the height of the other’s popularity. The vernacular is “realist . . . the style of rebels, journalists, common sense-addicts and unromantic observers of human destiny,” while the Mandarin is “the artificial style of men of letters.”119 Architectural modernism certainly employed journalistic strategies during the phase of modernism Darling calls “rhetorical modernism,” when public exhibitions, print media, and films distributed British modernists’ message while actual building projects remained unattainable.120 Echoing Walter Benjamin’s assessment of the modern novel, Tyrus Miller argues that the period was characterized not by waxing and waning of styles but by the “tense coexistence” of “polarized extremes.”121 These “polarized extremes” encompassed political systems as well as aesthetic styles. Connolly usefully illuminates how the style of vernacular writers like Isherwood and Orwell overlapped with populist political leanings, whereas the style of Mandarin writers like Bowen overlapped with a traditional class system. Nevertheless, it is also necessary to examine how and why these two opposing styles coexisted at that historical juncture. Mid-century authors themselves projected the divide between the vernacular and the Mandarin onto the design arts and architecture, and they used it as the basis for different alliances with history. The narrator of Evelyn Waugh’s august estate novel Brideshead Revisited (1945)—an artist who admits to finding modern art “great bosh”—contrasts the bathroom at 116 Orwell, Coming, 220. 117  Ibid., 253, 255. 118 Bowen, Heat, 20. 119 Connolly, Enemies, 45. 120 Darling, Re-forming, 5. Fry identified the “capacity of the common people to understand and to appreciate the quality of good things” as crucial to the success of the postwar rebuilding process. Fine Building, 2. 121 Miller, Late, 15.

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154  Reconstructing Modernism Brideshead, “the water colours dimmed by steam and the huge towel warming on the back of the chintz armchair,” with “the uniform, clinical little chambers, glittering with chromium plate and looking-glass, which pass for luxury in the modern world.”122 Through this aesthetic judgment, Waugh’s narrator commits himself to the conservative outlook of the class system implied by the estate house. He condemns the “uniform” and the “modern,” expressed through the materials of glass and steel, and in doing so he distances himself from both modern style and progressive politics. By contrast, these temporal and political orientations of vernacular style are celebrated in the “Rebuilding Britain” catalog, which encourages open-mindedness toward the aesthetically new: “Once man has got over the first feeling of strangeness that he generally feels when faced with a new thing, he may see a new sort of beauty that hasn’t occurred to him before.”123 This embrace of the new in turn necessitated a demythologization of the old. Beveridge’s exhibition address accordingly banished nostalgia for the sake of social and aesthetic progress: “When I told a schoolgirl friend of mine that I was coming to open an  exhibition, she said: ‘I hope it has a Chamber of Horrors.’ Well, it has . . . . You will see . . . the plans of London at four dates, including as the last two dates 1914 and 1939. Please look at those plans and think what they mean.”124

By foregrounding these momentous dates alongside horrifying city plans, Beveridge sought to teach the public that a return to past forms—aesthetic and political—was unthinkable. While the ongoing architectural reeducation in part promoted a specific style, it also channeled pragmatic concerns. In proclaiming that “we can see, already, what things are likely to change our ways of building, and what effect this change may have on our ideas of what is beautiful architecture,” the exhibition catalog reveals its task of making the new materials, economically as well as stylistically expedient, attractive to the greater public.125 Material was thus key to Viscount Esher’s article “Freedom from Want” in 122 Waugh, Brideshead, 152, 154, 154. 123 Royal Institute of British Architects, Rebuilding Britain, exhibition catalog (London: National Gallery, 1943), 59. 124  William Beveridge, “The Opening of the ‘Rebuilding Britain’ Exhibition,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 50 (1943): 100. 125 RIBA, Rebuilding, 57.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  155 the April 1942 issue of Connolly’s Horizon. By acknowledging the “levelling down” necessary to improve conditions for the poor, Viscount Esher cites the “loss to art and beauty” that the process would bring, but suggests that cultural loss could be minimized through a “taste . . . fast spreading into mass-production.”126 Likewise Sir Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, assured attendees at the “Rebuilding Britain” exhibition that mass production might even bring better design: “In the past a skillful local craftsman could give distinction to a mediocre design: but when the parts of a building are mass produced . . . the responsibility placed on the original design becomes very heavy.”127 Because the design process constitutes just a fraction of mass production’s costs, investment in good design is practical.128 Viscount Esher also notes the availability of better materials to “the moderate income” as part of his case for uniting good design with the political project of the welfare state; modern materials mean progressive social values.129 The tension between a traditional, conservative style and a populist style that billed itself as the style of the future manifests itself most powerfully within Goodbye to Berlin in Hippi Bernstein’s neighborhood, which hosts houses “ranging from the eccentric-rococo folly to the cubist flat-roofed steel-and-glass box.”130 A recourse to consciously artificial and traditional style tempers and even challenges the streamlined modernist design, a style associated in some quarters with material and national progress and in others disparaged as part of the simultaneous collapse of class differences and formal differences between products.131 Employing such wider cultural pairings of style with politics, Connolly links Isherwood and Orwell to the vernacular tradition with its left-wing politics and lauds them for their readability and consequent accessibility.132 Accordingly, Isherwood’s narrator asserts the guilelessness of his style: he is, famously, “a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”133 Conversely, Neil 126  Oliver Sylvain Baliol Brett, 3rd Viscount Esher, “Freedom from Want,” Horizon 5 (1942): 238, 239, 239. Fry called modern architecture “in tune with the skill of the machine craftsman.” Fine Building, 102–3. 127  Quoted in Beveridge, “Opening,” 102. As we saw in Chapter 2, Aldous Huxley argued that this drive to mass produce good design would harm the working-class citizens who staff the spaces of mass production. 128  Ibid., 102. 129  Brett, “Freedom,” 239. 130 Isherwood, Goodbye, 14. As Aldous Huxley’s “The New Romanticism” revealed, midcentury authors used the term “cubist” to describe modernist architecture as well as painting. 131  See Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London: Comedia, 1988), 63–66. 132 Connolly, Enemies, 69–70. 133 Isherwood, Goodbye, 1.

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156  Reconstructing Modernism Corcoran describes Bowen’s style as one that “has been accused . . . of mannerism, and it is certainly often deeply unconventional in its syntactical and grammatical structures; in some forms of negative construction, repetition, inversion, and ellipsis; in turning back in upon itself rather than a committed motion forward.”134 That lavish Mandarin style aligns with her commitment to Tory politics, with the class system Bowen’s Court represents, and with the influence of high modernist literary structure.135 Predictably, all of these writers voice in their novels their distrust of the  opposing style. In Isherwood’s novel, Bernhard’s flat, which is home to  “Greek and Siamese and Indo-Chinese statuettes,” combined with his characteristic indirectness, make him a Mandarin, someone difficult for Christopher to understand.136 Bowen registers her discomfort with the “journalistic” vernacular through the gullible Louie’s trust in newspapers in  The Heat of the Day, which Bowen sets against Connie’s approach of “re-reading . . . everything” and “reading between the lines.”137 Intense stylistic consciousness ultimately turned that distrust of style inward. When Connolly draws a very fine line between high-quality vernacular authors and journalists and popular novelists, he stresses the risks of readability. He describes Orwell and Isherwood as “the ablest exponents of the colloquial style,” yet he performs an “experiment” by combining sentences from The Road to Wigan Pier, Goodbye to Berlin, and Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not in order to show how, as he quotes one critic, “ ‘[t]he diction, the run of phrase of each of them seems quite undistinguishable from that of the others.’ ”138 By exposing the uniformity of the vernacular style, Connolly implies that these writers are unable to exert control over the political content of their own style. “I have discussed [the vernacular style’s shortcomings] with Isherwood, whom I regard as a hope of English fiction,” Connolly divulges, “and I have suggested how dangerous might become that fatal readability of his.”139 Isherwood, and perhaps Orwell as well, would certainly have been conscious of his style’s potentially “fatal readability,” but Bowen, situated in  the Mandarin camp, also expressed self-doubt. Corcoran submits that 134 Corcoran, Elizabeth, 3. In a diary entry, Isherwood criticizes Bowen’s Mandarin style: “I’m reading Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day. Quite exciting—and some good characters. But I hate her little bits of fancy writing.” Diaries: Volume One: 1939–1960, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London: Harper Collins, 1996), 410. 135  For class, see Heather Bryant Jordan, How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992), 2; for literary structure, Corcoran, Elizabeth, 4–5. 136 Isherwood, Goodbye, 154. 137 Bowen, Heat, 170. 138 Connolly, Enemies, 69, 71, 71. 139  Ibid., 74.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  157 Bowen’s circular language betrays “anxiety that the mere writer herself may not remain in control of the riot.”140 As with the fears of traitors within the country, these mid-century authors’ treatment of their own styles revealed the fear that the enemy might not be without but within.

“This did not look like home; but it looked like something—possibly a story”: Language and Architecture Intersect While struggling to write The Heat of the Day, Bowen began writing Bowen’s Court.141 Because the Bowen line ended with her—she had no children— the book served to memorialize the estate; consequently, she transformed the house’s form into the book, an instance of using language as a material in a domestic form, one made public through circulation.142 In a 1951 radio address, Bowen professed attachment to the forms of tradition: “How can we not seek, in some form, an abiding city?”143 Bowen thus uses architectural tropes to emblematize desire and anxiety—political and personal—and architecture provides a way to think about literary style in her description of Bowen’s Court, “[l]ike Flaubert’s ideal book about nothing, it sustains itself on itself by the inner force of its style.”144 Style, rooted in aesthetic autonomy, is the defining attribute of the house. Yet it is a belated style, because it is linked to the formal structures of Gustave Flaubert, the author whom Roger Fry used to explain modern design to Henry James in 1912. Stella’s flat, like Bowen’s Court, becomes an architectural form made into language when the narrator observes from Roderick’s perspective that “[t]his did not look like home; but it looked like something—possibly a story,” and so translates form into content.145 Bowen’s move is not idiosyncratic; other mid-century authors made the leap between literary and architectural forms to illustrate states of inhabiting language. In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh portrays a ship’s interior in terms of writing implements.146 Charles, the 140  Corcoran, Elizabeth, 3. 141  See Kristine  A.  Miller, British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 28. 142  See Elizabeth C. Inglesby, “ ‘Expressive Objects’: Elizabeth Bowen’s Narrative Materializes,” Modern Fiction Studies 53 (2007): 319. 143  Quoted in ibid., 308. 144 Bowen, Bowen’s, 21. 145 Bowen, Heat, 48. 146  Gavin Stamp notes, “The machine which had the greatest influence on architecture was the one which was the biggest and most architectural by nature: the boat and in particular, the Transatlantic liner.” “Introduction,” 6.

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158  Reconstructing Modernism narrator, characterizes the carpet, walls, and tables—set amid the 1930s bent-timber-style modernist furniture—as made of blotting paper.147 The fact that blotting paper would not bear original writing but its distorted copy establishes a distance between mid-century writing and high modernism, joining the Quaynes’ “Picasso-blue curtains” in exemplifying the extension of modernism into design objects as the movement became institutionalized and middlebrow.148 In Coming Up for Air, George’s concern with repeated style comes from the mass production of vernacular styles; he reacts strongly to the streamlined steel interior of the milk-bar that he enters while in London to collect his new false teeth. Gavin Stamp observes that “[c]ountless books” used “clean milk-bars” as emblems of modern style, an instructive contrast to “rowdy wicked Victorian public-houses.”149 While Dick Hebdige attributes Bowling’s unease to his association of “ ‘modern’ materials” with “American influence,” I would argue that Bowling consistently displays resistance to reverting to previous materials and forms; his reaction to the pseudo-medieval décor of the St George surely indicates his antipathy to any uncritical revival of British tradition through design.150 Given Orwell’s mindfulness of language, I read the milk-bar incident as a reaction to the British deployment of modernism as rhetoric in the service of creating a modern nation and as  a register of Orwell’s uncomfortable identification with the milk-bar’s vernacular style. Accordingly, there is a “sort of propaganda floating round, mixed up with the noise of the radio, to the effect that food doesn’t matter, comfort doesn’t matter, nothing matters except slickness and shininess and streamlining. Everything’s streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler’s keeping for you.”151 Bowling reacts not to the aesthetic of streamlining but to its deceptive political message and its pacification of the people through style. Even before Greene’s and Thomas’s propaganda films debuted, Bowling connects streamlined design to propaganda and the radio. In doing so, he summons the fear that vernacular design comes too close to the journalistic. Moreover, because of its mass appeal, it can be manipulated by the state. Through merging streamlined design with “the bullet Hitler’s keeping for you,” George connects that style to the enemy and to the ending death implies. Streamlined, vernacular design might in its materials contain its own ruin and even that of the nation. 147  See Waugh, Brideshead, 236–7. 148 Bowen, Death, 29. 149  Stamp, “Introduction,” 3. 150 Hebdige, Hiding, 58.

151 Orwell, Coming, 26.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  159 This confrontation with the streamlined, “propagand[istic]” modern style presents us with a much different picture of Orwell from that which we are used to seeing. While Orwell is often regarded as a model of moral and stylistic clarity, most notably through such oft-cited essays as “Politics and the English Language,” we witness in this confrontation more self-inspection than clear-eyed conviction. In George Bowling, we see the roots of the model mid-century author Orwell presents through “Inside the Whale” (1940): “the ordinary, non-political, non-moral, passive man.”152 The conflation of modernist style and political event that Orwell records in his prewar novel would only become more complete—and more dangerous— in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a novel in which the Britain of the future comes under the grip of a communist-inspired totalitarianism and the state erases records of the past. In that new Britain, modern architecture, perverted linguistic innovation, and the state are collapsed in the Ministry of Truth: “It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. Here where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party,” slogans manufactured as part of the invention of Newspeak, a state-controlled rhetoric.153 Though Bowling links streamlined design to Hitler, Orwell in the later novel connects modern architecture to a Stalin-like Big Brother who assumes control of Britain after World War II.154 But in Nineteen Eighty-Four too, the modern style is inescapably linked to the militaristic destruction summoned by its very materials: “The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons.”155 In Orwell’s fiction, the politics projected onto modernist architecture reflect the fear of a Britain taken over by  totalitarianism. Those of other political persuasions aligned modernist design with a future ruin instigated by outside forces they themselves 152  George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in Collected essays, vol. 1, 501. 153  George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Plume, 2003), 4. For a basic discussion of the role of modernist architecture in Orwell’s novel, see Gerald  S.  Bernstein, “The Architecture of Repression: The Built Environment of George Orwell’s 1984,” Journal of Architectural Education 38.2 (1985): 26–8. Bernstein compares Victory Mansion to “Bauhaus designed Worker Housing” (27) and links the state’s erasure of history with Philip Johnson’s claims for modernist ahistoricism (28), though Bernstein does not follow the significance of the British context of the novel. 154  The sites of these political threats, Germany and the Soviet Union, double as the birthplaces of many of the major émigré architects. 155 Orwell, Nineteen, 76.

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160  Reconstructing Modernism perceived as threatening. Witness the architect who, in a 1935 Architects’ Journal, reacts against a piece predicting the rise of modernism alongside socialism by warning against “too readily drinking in Jewish-Communist doctrine” that has taken on the guise of a pleasing modernist aesthetic.156 While that disturbing anti-Semitic and reactionary attack on modernism represents an extreme case, it nonetheless evokes a more generally held fear that modernism could never be fully domesticated. In the “Rebuilding Britain” catalog, the authors proclaim that the “skeleton plan [for the country] must be bold and imaginative, even at the risk of being called ‘unpractical’ and ‘visionary,’ and, yes, even at the risk of being attacked as ‘un-British.’ ”157 Linking modernism and planning to real or imagined enemies demonstrates a very real fear that the nation may be preserved only as something “un-British”; victory might actually bring defeat. The discomfort with deracinated modern style metamorphoses into actual discomfort in an interior setting within the Bernsteins’ house in Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood observes, The place is like a power-station which the engineers have tried to make comfortable with chairs and tables from an old-fashioned, highly respectable boarding-house. On the austere metal walls, hang highly varnished nineteenth-century landscapes in massive gold frames. Herr Bernstein probably ordered the villa from a popular avant-garde architect in a moment of recklessness, was horrified at the result and tried to cover it up as much as possible with the family belongings.158

Because the modernist, vernacular architectural style conveys progressiveness without the familiarity of tradition, Herr Bernstein anxiously resurrects traditional forms, creating a sort of kitsch at odds with the modernist aim to  banish such nostalgia.159 The perceived unlivability of the streamlined modern later resurfaced in Isherwood’s reaction to architecture in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, who became a personal acquaintance after Isherwood emigrated to the United States. Isherwood recorded “accus[ing]” Jim Charlton, a student of Wright’s with whom he was in a relationship, of “not wanting people to live in the houses he designed—because people were so 156  Quoted in Jackson, Politics, 67. 157 RIBA, Rebuilding, 24. 158 Isherwood, Goodbye, 14–15. 159  What Isherwood describes is, of course, German modern architecture, but that architecture exercised significant influence over British modernism, especially given the relocation of Bauhaus architects like Walter Gropius to England in the 1930s.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  161 messy, they choked the rooms with furniture, cluttered them with cooking pots and books and violated the purity of their wall spaces by hanging pictures.”160 For Isherwood, modern living conditioned by architecture to some degree remains a fantasy way of life, because it leaves no room for actual individuals (or their books). And since Isherwood describes the streamlined metal fixtures of the Bernsteins’ modernist house by invoking images of military technology, that vernacular form accumulates militaristic and nationalistic associations much like Orwell’s “streamlined” milk-bar. Moreover, this vernacular style does not suggest populism at all: the items connected to the inhabitants are from older styles, and the Bernsteins’ neighborhood inhibits contact with those of other social classes, since the “[t]error of burglary and revolution has reduced these miserable people to a  state of siege.”161 In addition to stifling contact with those outside, the modern space, rather than promoting conversation through design, causes the Bernsteins to use telephones to communicate. If, as Connolly suggests, the vernacular stems from language that people would “use . . . in conversation,” the Bernsteins stifle vernacular style at its very root.162 Even in the immediate prewar period, writers like Isherwood and Orwell began to doubt the democratic potential of redesigned forms, here architectural but with potential application to less concrete structures like the state because of the political meanings attributed to particular styles. Isherwood’s retreat from presenting his narrative style as ingenuous in its camera-like neutrality to seeing the deceitful possibilities of photography underlines this discomfort with vernacular style. Goodbye to Berlin opens with Chris declaring himself a camera, but he distances himself from that metaphor near the end of the novel. Chris visits the clubhouse where an acquaintance’s communist youth organization produces its magazine and sees “dozens of photographs of boys, all taken with the camera tilted upwards, from beneath, so that they look like epic giants.”163 The supposedly neutral medium of photography thus reveals its capacity for distortion, not  least because the photos are accompanied by articles “all written in super-enthusiastic style, with a curious underlying note of hysteria.”164 Photographic style abets this journalistic approach, which itself mimics the 160 Christopher Isherwood, Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 165. Isherwood also notes the absorption of modernism into kitschy mass cultural objects: “all over the Los Angeles area, soda fountains and hot-dog stands began to appear which were crude but recognizable distortions of Wright’s style.” Ibid. 161 Isherwood, Goodbye, 14. 162 Connolly, Enemies, 63. 163 Isherwood, Goodbye, 198. 164 Ibid.

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162  Reconstructing Modernism fervent enthusiasm of Hitler Youth rallies. Isherwood simultaneously grows disillusioned with vernacular style and with left-wing politics, conflated as they are in the magazine. The propagandistic and pseudo-sacred drawing of another communist youth “of unearthly beauty, gazing sternly into the far distance, a banner in his hand,” prompts him to conclude, “The whole place made me feel profoundly uncomfortable. I excused myself and got away as soon as I could.”165 The supposed transparency of vernacular design masks its potential deceptiveness. While Orwell and Isherwood questioned the value of these future-oriented forms influenced by leftist politics, Bowen examined older styles that had become almost fascistic in their extended use. Designers fill the cast list of  The Death of the Heart: Anna, a (failed) interior designer; Thomas, an advertiser; St Quentin, a writer; Eddie, a novelist and largely failed copy writer; and Portia, an amateur writer and “arranger” of figurines who horrifies Anna with her creations.166 The novel is a prime spot to examine design perversions, since the designers and the spaces they inhabit are largely and even claustrophobically impenetrable. Much of the action occurs in the Quaynes’ London home, where Portia—long exiled from the two main domestic spaces, the family home and England, because of her late father’s affair with her late mother—often sits “so that she could keep her back to the room.”167 In a nightmare, Portia’s resistance to Windsor Terrace’s engulfing interior merges with resistance to the esoteric language it represents. She dreams that she cannot read her book but eschews informing Anna because she “knew they must read.”168 Her imaginary predicament reveals a wider struggle to read space, people, and the nation, as well as the language that no longer helps her understand them. That forced reading adumbrates the frequent incidents of reading backwards in Bowen’s novels, which come to signify reading modernism after its institutionalization, and interrogates the value of the esoteric, a marker of high modernist difficulty. Bowen apprehends that her rereading of modernism has become not only compulsive but also fixed upon an object whose esotericism offers not special insight but perplexed entrapment. Whereas Wyndham Lewis linked T.  S.  Eliot’s “crossword puzzles in the place of poems (as it seems to the uninitiated)” to Wells Coates’s architectural plans—perceived to be of a similarly beneficial formal difficulty—Bowen associates literary modernist esotericism with older, potentially compromised architectural styles.169 165  Ibid., 198, 198–9. 166  See Bowen, Death, 4, 23. 168  Ibid., 148. 169  Lewis, “Plain,” 247.

167  Ibid., 34.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  163 Portia’s seemingly ingenuous language presents its own dilemmas for Anna, who recoils at her incorporation into Portia’s diary entries. Portia’s compositions “misconstruct” so much that Anna concludes, “it was not like writing at all.”170 Anna finds the apparently innocent writing of Portia, a representative of the younger generation, not simply wanting; to her, its form is almost unrecognizable. Anna’s reaction also associates writing with construction and initiates Bowen’s complex pairing of language and interior space. That interweaving of domestic space, language, and the nation intensifies in The Heat of the Day, where Bowen’s scrutiny of interiors becomes momentous in light of Beveridge’s proclamation that architects involved in housing reform “must be . . . even more concerned with the insides than with the outsides of what they design.”171 The first significant interior of this novel is Stella’s flat, which Harrison, an ever-mysterious guest, observes scrupulously. He declares that all her belongings—which are actually not hers because the owners furnished the entire apartment in a prewar style— are “so pretty.”172 Her things are received forms: their prewar style links the sense of repetition that World War II produced with feelings of literary belatedness. While the old style may be “pretty,” neither is it up-to-date, nor does it suit Stella. That datedness merges with more explicitly literary received forms within Stella’s bookcase, where her books “were wedged among those not hers,” as if no space remains for new books of the prewar style.173 In her earlier novel, Bowen addresses authentic but unoriginal feelings: “The strongest compulsions we feel throughout life are no more than compulsions to repeat a pattern: that pattern is not of our own device.”174 In The Heat of the Day, those compulsions to repeat a pattern extend to literary and design style, particularly in the received domestic forms and the new books, perhaps also crafted in a prewar style, that try to wedge themselves in amongst the others. The need for contemporary style that Bowen acknowledges in “Subject and the Time” confronts the conservatism that she attributes to the preservation of traditional interior design elements, a conservatism that is both aesthetic and social. The older pattern appears to have the same emptiness as the “regional planning based on a social idea” that Bowen characterizes as ideologically precarious and dangerous because of its deliberate repeatability.175 Because the formal experimentation of high modernism was at this point of a prior generation, high modernist literary

170 Bowen, Death, 8, 7. 171  Beveridge, “Opening,” 100. 172 Bowen, Heat, 27. 173  Ibid., 23. 174 Bowen, Death, 180. 175  Bowen, “Idea,” 174.

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164  Reconstructing Modernism style, instead of representing formal innovation, could imply a corresponding aesthetic conservatism. Through questioning the a priori value of older design forms, Bowen seems to acknowledge the problems inherent in Toryism of privileging older social structures. These repetitions of form imply a kind of circularity, historical and formal. In The Death of the Heart, Thomas censures the repetitive impulse; there was a time, he asserts, when people “didn’t go round in rings. And also there was a future then.”176 He denounces circularity in spatial terms that begin to represent historical processes, and he consequently favors a more linear—and translated into literary terms—vernacular style to enable movement into the future. Their house’s structure stands in sharp contrast: “Behind the doors at Windsor Terrace, they had heard each other’s voices, like the continuous murmur inside the whorls of a shell.”177 The description implies a circularity within the house’s design. It is as though the honesty Thomas desires cannot exist in a structure of that style. Corcoran similarly describes The Heat of the Day, in which Britain’s public narrative gets pulled into the circuitous confines of domestic space, as “a kind of vortex which has sucked the outer wartime atmosphere into itself and vertiginously whirls it around, even in its syntactical structures.”178 Holme Dene, Robert Kelway’s childhood home, epitomizes the uneasy circularity and recycling of architectural form, language, and national history. Built in 1900, the approximate birth year of both Bowen and her similarly well-bred and reputed interior design enthusiast protagonist, the house becomes host to ghastly, even fascistic mutations of traditional forms. In this, Holme Dene realizes the earlier musing of the editors of the Architects’ Journal on whether Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, would adopt “builder’s Tudor” as his preferred architectural style.179 An initial association of the home with indecipherable language comes in the armlet that Peter, Robert’s nephew, wears. It displays “cryptic letters,” signifying “ ‘nothing you would have heard of.’ ”180 As in The Death of the Heart, where esoteric language reflects Windsor Terrace’s fundamentally unlivable construction, the armband’s esoteric language embodies a duplicity that ultimately reveals its fascistic undertones. The radical inwardness of Holme 176 Bowen, Death, 30. 177  Ibid., 158. 178 Corcoran, Elizabeth, 172. 179  With their mock-Tudor house, the Kelways are the target audience for the Ideal Home Exhibition and its sham and aspirational designs. Discussing the value of the house with Robert, Mrs Kelway notes “the improvements to the garden, including the pergola and the statues of fairies, which were ordered by Ernestine at the Ideal Home Exhibition” (286). 180 Bowen, Heat, 122.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  165 Dene further reveals itself in its matriarch, Robert’s mother. Mrs Kelway has “no reason to go out,” a containment redolent of Connolly’s assertion that Mandarin writers can become “prisoners of their style.”181 Esoteric language also signals decay: “The Kelways communicated with one another with difficulty, in the dead language,” language that lost its function.182 While Herbert Read called architectural modernism a “living language,” unlike “the dead language of bourgeois styles,” Bowen turns to literary styles that may themselves constitute a “dead language.”183 Like Stella’s own books, the books in Robert’s room show the physical effects of aging or atrophying styles. They give “the impression of being gummed together in some sort of secretion from their disuse.”184 Even the house testifies to the Kelways’ deceitful language: the top floors are “flock-packed with matter— repressions, doubts, fears, subterfuges and fibs.”185 Robert’s treachery thus proceeds from a house where falsity and fetidness mark its very language and structure. As scholars frequently note, the accumulation of memory is vital to Bowen’s themes as well as her style, but in Holme Dene, it is not only the repression and alteration of memory that are pathologized but also the language that records those states. While Bowen cautions against the “new kind of expressiveness” made visible through architecture and planning, sham architecture allows her to see that outmoded expression is just as dangerous. Thus, in contrast to the hauntings that Leo Mellor identifies in Bowen’s fiction—registered most acutely in the bombsites of World War II— the corrupted Holme Dene suggests that mourning channeled through architecture must not lead to an overvaluation of traditional styles.186 Bowen’s concern with inheritance and loss looks much different when we consider her warning that the structures and styles that survive might be equally threatening to individual and national identities.187 Even as she formulates her conservatism and her literary model of memory through architecture, Bowen gestures toward the necessity of reformulating civic virtues through new styles of architecture, which in turn demand new approaches to literary style. 181  Ibid., 120; Connolly, Enemies, 18. 182 Bowen, Heat, 283. 183  Read, “Gropius,” 315. 184 Bowen, Heat, 128. 185  Ibid., 287. 186  Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites, and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 160. 187  See Mellor for a discussion of Bowen’s response to “totalising metropolitan destruction.” Reading, 160. For a discussion of Anglo-Irish property loss and Bowen’s understanding of the incipient British welfare state, see Thomas S. Davis, “Elizabeth Bowen’s War Gothic,” Textual Practice 27.1 (2013): 29–47.

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166  Reconstructing Modernism The linguistic and architectural threat that Holme Dene poses surfaces most visibly in its layout. “Upstairs, as elsewhere,” this house “had been planned with a sort of playful circumlocution—corridors, archways, recesses, half-landings, ledges, niches and balustrades combined to fuddle any sense of direction and check, so far as possible, progress from room to room.”188 The tortuous path of movement through Holme Dene mirrors the linguistic circularity that Corcoran identifies in Bowen’s possibly imitative high modernist style and embodies the fear Thomas expresses in Bowen’s earlier novel. And since the “many twists of the passages had always made it impossible to see down them,” the human element disappears; the twisting hallways allow the family to move through the space without even seeing each other.189 When aggravated by historical circumstance, this architectural design acutely influences the family: “upstairs life, since the war, had up there condensed itself into very few rooms—swastika-arms of passage leading to nothing.”190 The home’s physical structure and the wartime pressures of the home front can produce only a perverse political structure. The passages of esoteric and circular writing, literalized in the passages of Holme Dene, have allowed the passage of fascistic elements into English domestic space. As she surveys Holme Dene’s interior, Stella observes that “if this were not England she did not know what it was.”191 The statement is ironic because “Holme Dene” literally means “Home of the Dane.”192 The name plays upon widespread fears of enemy infiltration, insofar as Denmark was occupied by Nazis during the war. Beyond having its Englishness subverted through its name, Holme Dene reproduces history and the nation in the form of a traditional architectural style that is ultimately misleading and false. Though less than a half a century old, this house, a Tudor replica with imitation oak beams, claims a tradition for itself through assuming an  antique form. The false traditionalism and vulgarity of Holme Dene, which aspires to connect—if only formally—to an illustrious point in British architectural history, acquire the added weight of Bowen’s concern that her style is a crude and outmoded copy of high modernism, itself a chief marker in British literary history. Pathologized in Holme Dene is not literary modernism but its quasi-fascist replication. Belated architectural style and Bowen’s belated literary style merge into the belatedness of the nation itself, or what Ian Baucom, writing of the heritage industry, describes as an

188 Bowen, Heat, 287. 192  See Jordan, How, 158.

189 Ibid.

190  Ibid., 289.

191  Ibid., 125.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  167 “England that survives as its own counterfeit.”193 When the most English of houses is also the “Home of the Dane,” national tradition—historical, literary, and architectural—can exist only as a manipulated and manipulating reproduction. Through examining the perversion of the British citizens living within this sham Tudor, Bowen implies that there can be no return to the prewar during the postwar reconstruction. Her message of a perverted Britishness thus transposes the fear, acknowledged by the “Rebuilding Britain” catalog, that architectural modernism might save Britain after the war at the expense of transforming it into something “un-British.”

“The thin air which had taken the house’s place”: Rethinking Modernism Though Bowen’s political and aesthetic commitments caused her to examine the idea of a national style in a manner different from Isherwood and Orwell’s, the doubts the authors express about their own affiliations led them to arrive at a surprisingly similar position. In the works of all three novelists, even traditional or seemingly innocuous literary, artistic, and architectural forms have the potential to degrade into forms of fascistic manipulation that endanger the nation, as with Orwell’s streamlined interior that can morph into Hitler’s bullet, Isherwood’s photographs that veer dangerously close to Hitler Youth propaganda, and Bowen’s most English of houses that produces a fascist sympathizer. Bowen, representative of the Mandarin tendency, and Isherwood and Orwell, representatives of the vernacular tendency, all communicate the sense that their own styles suffocate language itself: the Kelways of Bowen’s sham-Tudor house join the Bernsteins of Isherwood’s sleek modernist house in displaying a breakdown of language stemming from the formal failures of their respective structures. Stella’s original living room is an “extinct pretty room,” and as Stella leaves Holme Dene—that magnified representation of Bowen’s own literary style—she asks, “How can they live, anyone live . . . in a place that has for years been asking to be brought to an end?”194 These expressions of living at the end of a long-dying form fall into the “sense of bringing modernism to a close” that Tyrus Miller identifies in the period’s writing.195 Yet these mid-century authors’ impetus to bring modernism to an end was not a simple aesthetic 193  Ian Baucom, Out of Place (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), 178. 194 Bowen, Heat, 318, 133. 195 Miller, Late, 23.

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168  Reconstructing Modernism reaction to its staleness; fascist undertones at Holme Dene testify to the political element of Stella’s and Bowen’s horror. Whereas Miller’s account of late modernism describes it as an international movement that links modernism to postmodernism, the unique historical circumstances of World War II–era Britain caused a whole range of novelists to disavow narratives of aesthetic progress. The appropriation of architectural modernism and the language of absolute “nowness” by the state in establishing a new Britain blurred the line between aesthetic and sociohistorical eras. As a result, Bowen’s, Isherwood’s, and Orwell’s adopted task of ending modernism signaled not so much their aesthetic progression toward postmodernism as  it did a reaction against the perceived complicity of the concept of “modernism” with the collectivism of institutionalized leftist thought in the mid-century.196  The role of World War II in conflating the political goals of Britain’s Left with a cross-medium modernist style materializes in the contrast between a World War I propaganda poster depicting thatched English cottages with the admonition “Isn’t this worth fighting for?” and a series of propaganda posters produced by Abram Games in October 1942 (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). Instead of using that recognizably English architecture, Games’s posters showcase the modernist Impington Village College (by Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry), Finsbury Health Centre (by Lubetkin), and Kensal House (by Fry) amongst the ruins of outmoded buildings. All three posters feature the charge “Your Britain: Fight for it Now.”197 In this way, Games’s posters extend the Ministry of Information’s strategy of using modern architecture to illustrate the postwar British future. The posters present “Britain” as something rooted in the architectural landscape, an abstract entity that can be transferred from one set of representative structures to another, but more importantly, even the example of domestic architecture these posters feature is a semi-public space, a block of flats. Indeed, Maxwell Fry identified the need for (architectural) individuality and private space to submit to public space and the collective: the standardized housing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Fry tells us, demonstrates “how the surrender of individual liberty of expression in the dwelling” allows for a “loftier and 196  Tyrus Miller rightly stresses that literary works do not have architecture’s immediate social impact and that architectural modernism’s peak differed from literary modernism’s. Late, 10. What I am underlining is not that these movements were nearly identical but that authors understood their work in relation to wider design movements and, most importantly, positioned their writing against the public stature of those forms. 197  For a description of Games’s propaganda posters, see Darling, Re-forming, 208.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  169

Figure 3.2  Rural Cottages in a World War I Propaganda Poster “Your Country’s Call.” 1915. ©Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM PST 0320)

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170  Reconstructing Modernism

Figure 3.3  World War II Propaganda Poster Featuring Modernist Housing Abram Games. “Your Britain—Fight for It Now (Housing).” 1942. ©Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM PST 2909)

more completely implied conception of the community, in which the houses are the setting and the public buildings the precious stones, and both inseparable.”198 MARS Group architecture, when taken up by the British state, would merge this aesthetic theory with the welfare state’s reorganization of the relationship between the individual and the collective. In “The Prevention of Literature” (1946), Orwell identifies this alleged loss of individuality as a threat to the very survival of literature. That same year, he questioned the benefit of moving whole portions of the population from “their old-fashioned, isolated homes” to “labour-saving colonies where they will lose much of their privacy.”199 His evaluation of popular leftist thought leads him to echo Bowen’s language from “The Idea of the Home” by stating that until Britons have decided “what kind of lives we want to live,” “we shall never solve our housing problem and are merely making it rather more likely that the atom bombs will solve it for us.”200 198 Fry, Fine, 93. Beveridge himself called for the “use of all land in the country [to be] determined according to a national plan.” “Opening,” 99. 199 George Orwell, “The Reilly Plan by Lawrence Wolfe,” Tribune, January 24, 1946, in Collected Essays, vol. 4, 90, 91. 200  Ibid., 92.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  171 In this case, MARS-style planned communities are not aids in recovering from the destruction of World War II but instead threaten individual citizens, a menace graphically registered in citizens’ vulnerability to the new weapons the war produced. The threat to bourgeois individualism that modernist architecture presented certainly registers in Bowen’s experience of the war: “I felt one with, and just like, everyone else. Sometimes I hardly knew where I stopped and somebody else began.”201 Bowen ultimately shared Robert’s distrust of the wartime unity of the people that journalism buttressed, and she expressed trepidation when the Labour Party ascended to power after the war. Yet she also realized that the repetition of old styles frequently yields inferior versions, which embody a dangerous falsity. In her essay “A Way of Life” (1947), she acknowledges the danger of not striving to “re-architect” both physical and social structures: “It seems symbolic that in our houses, even, we are hampered . . . by an outmoded plan.”202 The “average middle- and upper-class British home” for Bowen represents “a material way of living, now gone for good,” and she concludes that “No, we did not re-architect our houses while we could, although their coming impossibility foreshadowed itself as early as World War  I.  (Did we take some oblique pride in their unmodernity?) Now, we cannot.”203 In this assessment, Bowen connects British modernity to a certain style of domestic design, and she identifies memory accumulated through architecture as a source of political and aesthetic paralysis. Significantly, both The Death of the Heart and The Heat of the Day, which take place chiefly in domestic interiors, end outside architectural structure altogether. The Death of the Heart concludes with Matchett standing outside a hotel after having traveled “off to where [she’d] got no idea,” a scene Yoriko Kitagawa reads as Bowen standing outside modernism without having yet entered a new form.204 But while Kitagawa understands this hesitation as Bowen balancing on the cusp of postmodernism, The Heat of the Day demonstrates how the refusal to enter new forms was a political statement as well. That novel ends with Louie standing in open space, a space, symbolically, where her deceased parents’ house stood before it was destroyed in the war. 201  Quoted in Corcoran, Elizabeth, 183. 202  Elizabeth Bowen, “A Way of Life,” in People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008), 390. 203 Ibid. 204 Bowen, Death, 340; Yoriko Kitagawa, “Anticipating the Postmodern Self: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart,” English Studies 81 (2000): 484–96.

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172  Reconstructing Modernism Holme Dene’s “passage leading to nothing” in effect took Bowen to a space of nothingness, where her distrust of the collectivity of the wartime rebuilding effort met her recognition of the impossibility of reverting to prewar social structures. Bowen’s disdain of collectivism and her desire to seal off modernism historically in the face of its architectural appropriation by the Left may not be surprising. Orwell’s and Isherwood’s distrust of the increasingly politicized forms of modernism, however, exposes a significant rift in the Left.205 Like Bowen, Isherwood and Orwell react against the “nowness” of nationhood promised by modernist architects—a mass leveling of the old not so far removed from that of the enemy bombers—by refusing to participate in modernism’s continuous renewal, a process of erasing the old in favor of the new adopted by the state as a sort of cultural cleansing. That perceived creation of state power through abolishing old architectural forms led Orwell to evaluate Britain’s postwar trajectory in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the bombing of the Blitz becomes a permanent condition possibly directed by the state itself. But it was not just the modern movement’s complicity with the state that prompted Isherwood and Orwell’s retreat; its associations with the now-institutionalized socialist thought they once expounded made it particularly alarming. Their distrust of the collectivism formed from a diluted leftism registers in Chris’s extreme discomfort in viewing the communist youth publication and Bowling’s distaste for mass cultural objects. In his later novel, Orwell reflects on the consequences of the modernist style MARS advocated: “In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.”206 Though these modernist forms made to appeal to a mass readership came to fruition under the state, “experiment and invention [had] largely stopped.”207 MARS rhetoric, taken 205  Orwell portrays the fragility of this leftist identity in Coming Up for Air, where George Bowling attends the Left Book Club lecture of a “ ‘well-known anti-Fascist’ ” (170), a gathering also attended by members of the Liberal, Labour, and Communist Parties, including a Trotskyist. The meeting dissolves into a fight between the communist factions, and Bowling comes to see the speaker as a “gramophone” (171), spouting slogans to inspire hatred, and wonders whether the speaker even has “a private life” (172). Orwell himself had been on rocky terms with the Left Book Club, after it published The Road to Wigan Pier with an introduction distancing itself from Orwell’s criticism of the Soviet Union. 206 Orwell, Nineteen, 76. 207  Ibid., 193. Though “experiment and invention” primarily stand for scientific endeavors in this passage, that lost spirit of innovation also carries over into linguistic innovation in the novel.

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Bowen, Isherwood, Orwell, and the “ New ” Britain  173 up by the state in adopting modernist architecture, became a part of the state vocabulary. This perceived attenuation of modernist language would cause Orwell and Isherwood, remarkably, to desire to bring modernism to an end as a way of preserving its aesthetic autonomy. Ultimately, they wanted a politicized modernism only so long as it was a politically dissident modernism. As we will see in Chapter  4, the postwar rebuilding period brought renewed efforts to distinguish literary style from architectural style. Along with Orwell, Betjeman and Waugh responded to state-sponsored modern architecture by composing dystopian novels and poetry and by scripting anti-modernist architectural documentaries. This body of work confronted not only modern architecture but also the media used to popularize it through parodying the conventions of planning films, exhibits, and state propaganda. If World War II and the on-setting Cold War brought the fear of the collaborator within, resulting in extreme stylistic self-consciousness among writers, this postwar dystopian literature would purposefully absorb the conventions and language of planning literature in order to expose those forms’ flawed—and seemingly totalitarian—imagination.

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4

Planning for War and Peace Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and the Dystopian Documentary

If modernist zoo housing showed British citizens what expert state planning could achieve, the cold calculations of wartime turned animals from model citizens to civilian-victims. Shortly before World War II, Winston Churchill visited Julian Huxley at the London Zoo.1 Upon hearing that dangerous animals would be shot if conflict erupted, Churchill declared, “ ‘Imagine a great air-raid over this great city of ours—squadrons of enemy planes dropping their bombs on London, houses smashed into ruins, fires breaking out everywhere—corpses lying in the smoking gashes—and lions and tigers roaming the desolation in search of the corpses—and you’re going to shoot them! What a pity! . . .’ ”2 According to Huxley, Churchill “must have been thinking what a splendid chapter it would make in the book he was already planning about the war that had not yet broken out.”3 When war was declared, Huxley killed venomous spiders and snakes himself and arranged for an “air-raid squad of keepers, allowed by special dispensation to carry rifles, to be on guard during the night to deal with bombs and, as [he] had told Winston, to shoot any dangerous animals that might escape.”4 Huxley even chased a zebra into Camden Town after a nighttime bombing, and Kenneth Clark instructed a war artist to document that event. The zoo, fashioned into a pinnacle of social and architectural planning, now represented civilian death under state planning for war. Huxley was certainly not the only figure in modernist circles who pursued war planning. Solly Zuckerman, who introduced Lubetkin to ZSL officials, used apes and goats to model blasts’ effects on civilian behavior and civilian 1  The zoo had recently acquired a panda, and Churchill had a “cherished hot-water bottle with a panda cover.” See Huxley, Memories, 247. 2  Ibid., 248. 3 Ibid. 4  Ibid., 249.

Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State. Ashley Maher, Oxford University Press (2020). © Ashley Maher. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198816485.001.0001

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  175 bodies in October 1939, at the British government’s request.5 Even before war emerged, H.G.  Wells’s screenplay for Things to Come (1936)—a film based on his earlier book, The Shape of Things to Come (1933)—fused modernist planning for utopia with state planning for wartime death. While Wells celebrated the possibilities world war offered for imagining political futures via new architecture, George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh distrusted the alliances between film, architecture, and the state. Along with John Betjeman, they turned instead to parodic documentaries, poems, and novels as media of political dissent. Through these works, they documented futures that differed radically from those presented in planning films, a genre that the Labour Party adopted to garner support for postwar policies. In the face of planners’ insistence that war did not nullify utopian visions but enabled them, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins (1953) portray a modernist future irrevocably intertwined with violence. As architectural modernism transformed from a verbal phenomenon to  a physical reality through state sponsorship, these authors placed the dystopian future not in A.F. 632 but in the near future. The British government that Orwell and Waugh portray is a nightmarish bureaucracy perpetually at  war, the same state that calculated bombs’ effect on civilian behavior. When compared to Brave New World, the institutions they represent are much closer to those of contemporary Britain. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Love Among the Ruins thus emerge from a mid-century body of “anti-state fantasy,” which Marina MacKay argues is “best understood as extreme iterations of a more widespread anxiety about the potentially totalitarian elements of a centralising and technocratic democracy at war.”6 Orwell and Waugh certainly distrusted state power, though their fiction also examines a  form of centralizing—and perhaps pseudo-democratic—power wielded even before the war: architectural and town planning, along with the film and print media used to engender citizen support. MacKay demonstrates that mid-century literature drew creative energy from the “novelty of modern totalitarianisms” and the “political fantasy” of planning discourse, yet architects’ language of rationality and functionalism also invited imaginative

5  See Hermann Knell, To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II (Cambridge: Da Capo, 2003), 63. 6  MacKay, “Anti-State,” 27.

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176  Reconstructing Modernism treatment.7 Against these figures’ assertion that their proposals were the sane—and only—choice, Betjeman, Orwell, and Waugh portrayed the uncertainty and risk inherent in that joint political and aesthetic project. Betjeman chiefly parodied planning films and literature, while Orwell and Waugh used the dystopian novel to anticipate these schemes’ imperfect implementation; they emphasize the fundamental irrationality of modernist functionalism and the allied bureaucratic state. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Love Among the Ruins thus suggest that the British government, as it shapes citizens’ behavior spatially, might be planning for war, not peace.

Towards a New Britain: Modern Architecture at War As modern buildings became symbols of a more egalitarian postwar Britain, architects played many roles in the war effort, from fighting (as did Maxwell Fry, in the West African Forces), to designing bomb shelters, to obtaining Home Office permission to oversee the cases of Continental architects seeking refugee status.8 With reinforced concrete now assuming wartime applications, Lubetkin aided the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) and consulted Solly Zuckerman about “the problems of expected casualty statistics.”9 In contrast to the government’s policy of dispersing people to minimize casualties, effectively calculating what loss of life was acceptable—“They wanted to hush it up, that way no fuss would be made”—Lubetkin designed safer structures.10 He petitioned Finsbury, the Labour-dominated borough responsible for early modernist housing and an innovative health center designed by Tecton, to adopt deep bomb shelters in place of the cheaper surface shelters the government advocated.11 Instead, Finsbury punished 7  Ibid., 38. 8  Royal Institute of British Architects, Refugees Committee minutes and papers, 1939–1941 (RIBA/OA), Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Fry reported that his experience tempered his enthusiasm for utopian visions. In a letter to John Summerson, he references Summerson’s article in Horizon but says that he would not comment on it, as he had a “faint nausea at [the] thought of better worlds chiefly as a result of BBC commentators’ . . . droolings.” Maxwell Fry, Letter to John Summerson, January 1943 (SuJ/3/2), Sir John Summerson Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 9  Lubetkin, LuB/25/4/3, 29. 10 Ibid. 11 Lubetkin notes, “The first bomb which fell on Finsbury smashed a governmentrecommended surface shelter in Farringdon Road, designed by [modernist engineer Ove] Arup.” Ibid., 30. Early in the war, RIBA’s Refugee Committee noted that government sponsorship of “deep bomb-proof shelters” would expand employment for Continental refugee architects. RIBA, “Refugee.”

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  177 the town clerk responsible for publicizing those shelters’ vulnerability, and Winston Churchill subsequently rebuked Lubetkin for heightening civilian fear of bombs. After Lubetkin submitted a report, Planned ARP, to Churchill and Parliament, he received a reply from Churchill’s personal secretary, dated 20 March 1939: Mr. Churchill has to-day studied this book with some attention, and he has not been favourably impressed thereby. It appears to be inspired by a wish to exaggerate the dangers of air attack and to emphasize the futility of basement protection in the interests of some particular scheme with which you are associated. The wide circulation of such a book would not be helpful at the present juncture.12

A surveyor later reported that Lubetkin’s design had been implemented at  Chartwell, Churchill’s personal residence.13 Lubetkin acknowledges, “The truth is that the government saw our shelter as being morale-sapping. People would run to the shelters when the sirens sounded—but the government preferred that they should take a fatalistic attitude and carry on with  the manufacture of munitions: they promoted the ‘We can take it’ philosophy—and no doubt that is why Churchill won the war.”14 In forecasting a future for Britain, Churchill planned wartime civilian structures to  impart morale. Through the government’s creation of strategically bad conditions and its silencing of architects, the modernist planning advocated by Lubetkin clashed with state planning, and Lubetkin retired to the countryside to farm pigs for the war’s duration.15

12 O.  Harrington, Private Secretary to Winston Churchill, Letter to Berthold Lubetkin, 20  March 1939 (LuB/11/1/15), The Berthold Lubetkin Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 13  Lubetkin, LuB/25/4/3, 32. 14  Ibid. Lubetkin further observes, “the government opted for Anderson and surface shelters . . . . Arup recommended these reinforced concrete surface shelters, rectangular in shape and divided by brick or concrete walls into small compartments, each taking eight people. This was the theory of dispersal at work: if a bomb dropped on a shelter, only a few people would be killed because they were dispersed into separate compartments.” Ibid. 15  Lubetkin was prepared for a state betrayal of modernist efforts through his experience of  the Soviet Union, which, as he saw it, had separated form from content and “threatened to transform the products of art into mere accessories of statecraft.” LuB/25/4/1, xxiv. When leaving the École Spéciale d’Architecture, he reacted directly against architecture put in service of state violence: “All students in my year were set the project of designing a memorial for the Battle of the Somme. My monument consisted of a modified Howitzer of vast proportions erected in the Gardens of the Trocadero, boldly facing the Tour Eiffel. The vertical feature of the monument was a huge glass cylinder of such a capacity as to contain the volume of blood

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178  Reconstructing Modernism Yet many other architects embraced planning for war as a necessary precondition for advancing architectural modernism—and Britain—in the postwar period. A particularly vocal proponent of that approach was Edward Carter, the RIBA librarian who promoted modernist architecture before joining UNESCO at Julian Huxley’s invitation. Carter cautioned against repeating World War I architects’ failure to “adjust to the new scale of values, new means & new ends” that accompany war.16 Planning for peace is not only intertwined with planning for war, but also dependent on war for its energies, including marshaling public support for architectural reform. In an article for British Book News, published by the British Council, Carter examines the popular audience for reconstruction literature: “It is interesting to record that these detailed technical reports are considered so important for the general public to study, indeed public interest demands this, that they are published at specially low cost and in large editions.”17 Whereas Woolf ’s narrator observes in To the Lighthouse (1927), “The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry,” World War II made architectural publications a form of the masses.18 “Now it seems we can see light through the ruins,” Carter declares, “and the light is in all this literature of planning.”19 In keeping with this public appeal, the MARS Group transformed its image from renegade dissidents, many from other countries, to the voice of the British people. In the first edition of MARS’s newsletter, published in July 1944 to communicate with war-scattered members, MARS’s secretary announced a coming of age for the organization. MARS “can no longer afford to remain as ‘The Boys in the Back Room’ ”; indeed, governmental and planning groups like the Ministry of Information and Political and Economic Planning were already seeking its assistance with reconstruction plans.20 MARS accordingly reconceptualized modernism in light of the need

spilt at the Somme. This red liquid overflowed onto the Howitzer below, at one side of which lay a huge mass grave-pit . . . .” LuB/25/4/3, 4. 16  Edward Julian Carter, Notes for Article 2 (CaE/1), The  E.J.  “Bobby” Carter Papers, 1930–1981, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 17  Edward Carter, “Wartime Books on Architecture and Town Planning,” British Book News 66–76 (February 1946): 42. 18  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1989), 134. 19  Carter, “Wartime,” 44. 20  Goldfinger, Ernö, ed., MARS News 1 (July 1944) (MARS/1), MARS Group Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 6.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  179 to turn modernism into an aesthetic for the masses through rebuilding.21 In response to the question “what is modern architecture,” members cited the opportunity to harness wartime innovation for utopian ends. “The world is in the birth pangs of immense social achievements,” and the “living art” of modernist style must draw from war applications: “We are staggered by the devastating power of our energy and can only dimly see the diversion of this energy from destruction to construction. A growing power of production is the result of this war. Immense strides have been made in technics and organisation.”22 Modernism would be irrevocably changed by war, but MARS members could rewrite wartime violence for peaceful ends. They insisted that the movement must now materialize as a national style.23 Crediting architects like Lubetkin with crafting a British mass modernist aesthetic, Carter asserted, “the architecture that is gaining ground is the architecture in the common vocabulary of the people.”24 When modernism is the language of an entire nation, that architecture becomes an ethic as well as an aesthetic, and meeting chairman Sir Charles Reilly consequently proclaimed, “The last word is that the new architecture is humanism in a new age that the war and everything else is making.”25 Modernist architecture, in contrast to Waugh’s characterization, did not dehumanize; it embodied humanism for the “new age” that World War II produced. The joining of the modernist future to the postwar future manifested itself in RIBA’s booklet, Towards a New Britain, which rebranded modernism as uniquely British.26 Playing off Frederick Etchells’s translation of Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture as Towards a New Architecture, Towards a New Britain initially ventriloquizes public fears of Continental modernism, only to reassure readers that “England after the war must be England, and not a schematically planned and blueprinted utopia”; it similarly instructs citizens to “[b]y all means distrust the planner who promises an England gleamingly and glitteringly streamlined.”27 Britishness initially appears to lie in thwarting utopian schemes, yet RIBA separates planners from the “public enemies . . . whose idée fixe is to tear out the ancient core of our towns in the cause of . . . Brave New Worldliness,” and it characterizes the

21  “What is Modern Architecture?” MARS Report 3 (June 1945) (MARS/1), MARS Group Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 1. 22  Ibid., 2. 23  Ibid., 7. 24  Ibid., 23. 25  Ibid., 32. 26  This booklet accompanied the 1943 “Rebuilding Britain” exhibition. 27  Royal Institute of British Architects, Towards a New Britain (London: The Architectural Press, 1943), 3.

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180  Reconstructing Modernism effort to rebuild Britain through steel and glass structures as a tool for enacting Beveridge’s plan.28 RIBA tethered modernist futures to national futures and harnessed the energies of the People’s War for modernism. More than rebuilding, modernism promised nation-building. The Labour Party conversely summoned the mass energies of modern architecture for political advantage, as it distributed a pamphlet to women, “Your Home Planned by Labour,” during the war. Labour vowed to conduct wartime activities with an eye to peacetime, giving postwar citizens the housing they deserved: “Don’t you agree that it is better to put up with inconvenience for a bit longer—and then get the right home where you can settle down in lasting comfort?”29 Starting with the kitchen Labour would provide, the pamphlet moved to large-scale planning. It used Impington Village College, designed by Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry, to show potential Labour supporters its vision for governmental planning, if Labour were brought to power to conduct the war.30 “Labour means to get new homes for the British people,” the pamphlet concludes, “Modern. Sunlit. Laboursaving.”31 Modern interiors communicated progressive politics, and the British government packaged its message for those on the war-torn Continent as well, seen especially clearly in a 1945 letter from the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department to Ernö Goldfinger, requesting permission to reprint his children’s playground design in a Yugoslavian publication.32 If authors like Waugh once characterized modernist architecture as a post–World War I infiltration of Britain, this immigrant architect’s work served as a means of exporting British principles, a new weapon in a wider war.

Documenting the Future: The British Documentary Movement and Things to Come The burgeoning British documentary movement, bolstered through state sponsorship, provided modern architecture and planning with an even 28  Ibid., 14–15. Most illustrations of good planning and good building were drawn from the Continent; RIBA attempted to bring an appreciation of international modern architecture in through the back door. 29  Labour Party, “Your Home Planned by Labour,” (London: Labour Party, 1943), 4. 30  Ibid., 11. 31  Ibid., 14. 32  Margaret Muirhead, Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, Letter to Ernö Goldfinger, March 19, 1945 (GolEr/277/7), The Ernö Goldfinger Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. “[U]nder these circumstances,” the letter reads, “we hope you will understand if we are unable to show [the publication] to you.”

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  181 larger mouthpiece. Through governmental documentaries, the modern movement gained not just state backing but the ability for practitioners to speak to citizens as the voice of the state. Britain’s documentary movement emerged in the 1930s when technological advances enabled film production beyond the major studios, and modern architects and housing reformers used that medium to proffer their designs as solutions to social problems; British modern architecture thus came of age through film. From the early stages of the documentary movement, prominent films like Arthur Elton and Edgar Antsey’s Housing Problems (1935) diagnosed architectural ills through interviewing subjects about slum life, and they used models of proposed modernist housing developments to represent alternative ways of living. These documentaries forecast modernist integration into the fabric of British society, and Housing Progress (1938) even praised the modern style of flats like Kensal House and Ossulton Estate.33 John  R.  Gold and Stephen V. Ward note that with the 1940s came a widening of scale, from individual housing efforts to town and city planning, and with it, the Ministry of Information funded films that promoted the state’s rebuilding foresight.34 War thus brought planning from MARS’s exhibition halls to the cinema, through efforts like Graham Greene’s and Dylan Thomas’s Ministry of Information films. As war strategy led the state to align itself with planners, modernist architects achieved not only governmental sponsorship and publicity but also the opportunity to plan an entire nation, a modernist Britain. Of “the documentary’s liberal avant-garde project,” Thomas  S.  Davis argues that mid-century filmmakers strove to “[e]stablish consensus.”35 While Davis characterizes documentarians’ use of film as a “reconfiguration of what is” rather than a representation of what is “yet-to-come,” architectural models and the use of voiceovers allowed filmmakers to transcend the material present.36 The cinema became a site during World War II to envision a mass modernism, to unite modernist and national futures, and to integrate modernist aesthetics into the nation’s understanding of itself. 33  See John R. Gold and Stephen V. Ward, “Of Plans and Planners: Documentary Film and the Challenge of the Urban Future, 1935–52,” in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clarke (London: Routledge, 1997), 65. Housing Problems made an enormous contribution to the documentary form by pioneering the use of interviews with subjects facing the camera. The sponsor of Housing Problems, the British Commercial Gas Association, followed up that successful documentary with Kensal House (1937), which used that Maxwell Fry–designed housing development to entice working-class people to move into the soon-to-be-completed modern (gas-powered) flats. See Darling, Re-forming, 169–70. 34  See Gold and Ward, “We’re Going.” 35 Davis, Extinct, 31. 36 Ibid.

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182  Reconstructing Modernism The modern style thus arose in Britain at the moment that planning became a profession, even an obsession. Planning for war, town planning, and planning for the modernist future each drew upon the others’ energies and rhetoric, especially through film. State sponsorship of modernism continued after the war, as the Labour government seized upon the documentary form, crucial for motivating war efforts, to assure citizens that wartime success made them fit for the task of rebuilding. As one character underlines in Town and Country Planning (1946), “ ‘Remember how we cleared those airfields and built those airports. Well, we have got the same machines and we know the new methods so we can do it again for the new housing sites, the roads, and the towns.’ ”37 Modern architects and documentarians thereby summoned the political will necessary for implementing the Labour government’s 1946 New Towns Act and 1947 Town and Country Planning Act.38 Housing models and drawings, acted scenes of solved housing dilemmas, guest appearances by planners and architects, and even cartoons of a duck in overalls creating blocks of modern flats all gave citizens a nearconcrete presentation of the nation’s still-to-materialize future.39 Yet even in the mid-1930s, before the war occasioned these governmental documentaries, Wells turned to film to predict the world war that would launch a better society, and he chose modernist architecture to convey that community’s rationality and harmony. Prior to this, as Matthew Taunton has demonstrated, Wells was a member—albeit a critical one—of the Garden City Association and placed primary importance on homes and suburbs, vehicles for “domestic sociality.”40 But Wells came to believe that giving the 37  Gold and Ward, “We’re Going,” 229. 38  Some of these media efforts were launched in response to failed campaigns to rally citizen support. In Stevenage, the first of these new towns, swift governmental action brought citizen outrage, including that of E. M. Forster. As a result, the Labour government relied even more heavily on documentary film to market “proposals for a specific new town to an area’s existing local inhabitants” and “prospective residents” and “to help secure approval for a potentially controversial new idea.” Gold and Ward, “Of Plans,” 234. 39 See Gold and Ward, “Of Plans.” That future, however, became a sore point with the Labour government when shortages meant that plans could not be implemented quickly. Gold and Ward reveal that, despite the passage of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, the word “planning” became increasingly taboo in political speech; what had worked in wartime documentaries might not work in the slow-moving reconstruction period: “Discussing a prospective film in April 1947, the Public Relations Officer of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning felt it wise to give the remarkable advice to the Central Office of Information that ‘the words “plan” and “planning” be kept out of the film altogether if possible.’ ” Ibid., 77. 40 Taunton, Fictions, 67. Wells argued in 1902 that the future had superseded the past in providing political cachet, as citizens shifted their social self-conception from what they had done to what they could do. Allegiance to the past is deadening not just mentally but physically: “we live in uncomfortable, inconvenient, life-wasting houses out of a love of

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  183 future a definite shape required a shift in scale, from the individual—and the individual house—to the society, and he embraced the modernist city. As we saw in Chapter  2, Wells’s eagerness to put a concrete form on the future found an outlet in the circles of Bauhaus architects and designers who socialized in his Hampstead home, and the literary circles in which Wells moved also took up the call of modernism.41 Rebecca West, author, journalist, and Wells’s one-time mistress, wrote of modern design in a 1934 issue of Decoration, “ ‘Till the modernists got working the English house was not only stately, it was soup-coloured. It was dark, muddy and congested. I claim for the modern decorator that he has washed the public eye . . . design should be coherent and colours should be clean.’ ”42 Modernist design thus allowed these authors to see the home and the nation anew. Even before the mass Bauhaus emigration to Britain, the Times conveyed Wells’s prediction of “architectural changes,” establishing him as a literary backer of modern architecture. Wells forecast a much vaster break from ­tradition than that already underway, and he warned that without “rehousing all mankind” and “rebuilding every city in the world,” “social disaster” would occur: “It was not a Utopian idea” but instead “plain necessity.”43 Citizens should replace towns, much like outworn clothes, and then “the whole layout of human life would be reconstructed.” Through modernism, Wells united his aesthetic and political commitments. A socialist, Wells in 1920 visited Lenin and in 1934 met Stalin, whom he advised to establish rule by “ ‘aviators, operating engineers,’ ” and other experts.44 The collectivism Wells desired stretched beyond the nation: like the individual, the nation must yield to a World State. In a BBC broadcast entitled “Whither Britain?” (1934), Wells called for internationalizing the air industry under “ ‘one great Planning Board’ ”; he stated of this expanded planning, “ ‘Is that utopian? That is for you to judge. I consider I am talking plainest common sense. And I cannot help reminding you that once or twice in the past I have been a successful prophet.’ ”45 Wells used the prescience of familiar shapes and familiar customs and a dread of strangeness.” Wells, The Discovery of the Future (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1913), 19–20. 41  See Anker, “The Bauhaus,” 231. 42  Quoted in Christopher Frayling, “Things to Come,” in British Film Institute Film Classics, vol. 1, ed. Edward Buscombe and Rob White (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003), 341. 43  “Architectural Changes,” The Times, April 22, 1931, 11. The changes Wells anticipated could later be seen in the Everytown sets in Things to Come. 44  Frayling, “Things,” 320. 45  Quoted in ibid., 322. “Whither Britain” prefigures his 1936 film, originally titled Whither Mankind?

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184  Reconstructing Modernism his literature to generate political cachet, and he suggested that war might be the only solution to achieve peace. When World War II did materialize, Wells pronounced it “ ‘a vast tragic clearance for a new order.’ ”46 In the early 1930s, Wells used literature to consider the form such a foundations-shaking war would take. In The Shape of Things to Come (1933), which Wells called an “ ‘imaginative history,’ ” he predicted architectural reform spurred by a vast war: The world, which had been far too stupid to realize in 1930 that the direct way out of its economic difficulties lay in the modernization and rebuilding of its houses set itself, in a state of war panic . . . to as complete a revision of its architecture in the face of bombs and gas as its deepening impoverishment permitted.47

War made necessary a new architecture, but those innovative structures in turn removed citizens from the mental and physical entrenchments of war. “We grovel no longer,” Wells wrote from the perspective of the future world, “because we are ceasing to fear each other. The soaring, ever improving homes in which we live today would have sent our great-grandfathers scurrying to their cellars in an ecstasy of terror.”48 Wells projected himself into the future in order to write the future, even if that meant planning for war, using the cold calculations the government later ran to estimate civilian casualties. To plan for a new world, he also planned for ruin. When Wells adapted his book to the screen in Things to Come (1936), he turned to planning and modernist circles to produce a concrete vision of the world that would emerge from the ruins; the film’s visuals announce that the new socialist order could be achieved through modernist rebuilding.49 In contrast to historic styles, a future-looking modernism promised an evolving social order. To make his film, Wells employed Alexander Korda, who oversaw Julian Huxley’s documentary The Private Life of the Gannets (1934).50 46  Quoted in Leon Stover, ed., Things to Come: A Critical Text of the 1935 London First Edition (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007), x. 47 Quoted in Laura Marcus, “Literature and Cinema,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 340; H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), 60. 48  Ibid., 61. 49  H.G. Wells, writer, Things to Come. 1936. Distribution Criterion Collection, 2013. 50  Korda later produced Graham Greene’s The Third Man. Frayling notes that Korda confided in John Betjeman toward the end of filming Things to Come, “ ‘This is the most difficult film to make I’ve ever come across.’ ” “Things,” 322.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  185 Korda himself had established relationships with Bauhaus artists and ­architects. László Moholy-Nagy was a consultant for Korda’s Corvin Studios in Hungary, and Walter Gropius “informally advised Alexander Korda on the layout of the Denham laboratories (the first colour labs in Britain).”51 As Korda’s brother Vincent, the set designer for Things to Come, visualized the new world alongside Wells, they reached out to the modernist community. They commissioned “concept sketches and costume ideas for the city of the future” from Fernand Léger, a friend of Vincent’s, but Wells thought the designs “too much like a kinetic backdrop,” and they turned to Le Corbusier for a more substantial sketch of the new world.52 As Frayling argues, Le Corbusier’s prior work made him an ideal candidate for imagining a futuristic city. The speculative design he produced in Ville Contemporaine (1922), where he envisioned housing for “three million people with sixty-storey towers and aeroplanes flying around below roof level,” meant that he was already a designer of “fantasy cit[ies].”53 Le Corbusier refused, however, on ideological and aesthetic grounds: “the people living in Wells’ city of 2054 were far too old-fashioned in their attitudes,” and Le Corbusier’s vision for hygienic, light-filled architecture differed from Wells’s vision of an underground city, artificially lit and supplied with conditioned air.54 Following these failures to secure a single modernist designer, Korda turned to modernist publications for inspiration. The future Everytown is  consequently a revealing mash-up of modernist design as it had been digested by the 1930s periodicals to which authors were frequent contributors and as it had been formulated in the manifestos and exhibitions authors reviewed in those journals. Korda’s son recalls that his father “ ‘busily ransack[ed] the libraries for avant-garde furniture designs, architectural fantasies, helicopters and auto-gyros.’ ”55 Through Korda’s set innovations, the film prompted innovation in modernist design, and constructing a set became a lesson in constructing a new world. Korda also secured the help

51  Ibid., 320. 52  Ibid., 337. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55  Ibid., 338. Korda took inspiration from plans in Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture for a “geometrically laid out” city, which he implemented in the view that can be seen from the office of the future Everytown’s leader. Korda also appears to have drawn from Le Corbusier’s newly translated Aircraft as he represented the aircraft and aerial perspectives of  this new world, where order is brought about through the work of airmen. Many of the interiors and staircases of the film have strong formal ties to the De la Warr Pavillion, which was designed by modernist architects Erich Mendelsohn (praised by Aldous Huxley) and Serge Chermayeff. Korda likewise turned to the 1933 Exhibition of British Industrial Art to reimagine Oliver Hill’s bent glass furniture design as the plastic furniture used in Things to Come. See ibid for Korda’s borrowings.

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186  Reconstructing Modernism of Moholy-Nagy as he compiled a montage depicting the rehousing effort.56 Modernist film techniques for documenting space were thus adopted by a large studio to document the architecture of the future, and designers were treated as political visionaries.57 Wells had very clear ideas about how viewers should receive this new architecture. This future city must not look like “ ‘an imaginative utopia, an  ideal but impracticable existence,’ ” Wells instructed director William Cameron Menzies in a 1935 memo, “ ‘I want . . . . to convey the effect that the condition of life shown on the screen is a practicable objective; in fact the only sane objective for a reasonable man.’ ”58 The film would not only provide a proper representation of planning but also counsel viewers in how to achieve the new world. Yet Wells was cognizant of how that world’s inhabitants might appear on film, and to that end he sent a memo to producers, later included in the published script. “All the balderdash one finds in  such a film as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis about ‘robot-workers’ and ultra skyscrapers, etc., etc., should be cleared out of your minds before you work on this film,” Wells advised, and he explained how to differentiate a uniform world from a uniform populace: “Machinery has superseded the subjugation and ‘mechanization’ of human beings. Please keep that in mind. The workers to be shown are individualised workers doing responsible co-operative team work.”59 A mechanized environment, Wells argued, eliminated the mechanization of human labor.60 Wells’s script, published before the film’s release, adds a narrative to his  vision of the future and tracks historical change through the fate of Everytown. As the film opens, a second world war erupts on Christmas Day 1940 and leaves the civilized world in shambles. John Cabal, a former citizen of Everytown, institutes order through an international group of airmen, Wings Over the World. Cabal represents a new aesthetic as well as a new world order, as we witness in the headquarters of his airmen, which Wells describes as “rather like an ultra-modern board room. It is bleakly and 56  Moholy-Nagy was then a recent immigrant to Britain who had been reintroduced to Vincent by Gropius. See Terence A. Senter, “Moholy-Nagy: The Transitional Years,” in Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006), 88. 57  The gap between the requirements of big studio films and modernist films persisted, however, and much of Moholy-Nagy’s experimental footage was cut. Frayling, “Things,” 342. 58  Frayling, “Things,” 325. 59 Stover, Things, 19. 60  Frayling argues that Wells wrote directly against the anti-technological stance of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. See “Things,” 333.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  187 rationally furnished. . . . It is a sudden contrast to the general ruinousness that has prevailed throughout the film since the war sequences.”61 That functionalism heralds the reconstruction of Everytown as a modernist underground city. Wells presents this event not through the work of central characters but through a long, conceptual montage of construction, which employed footage from Moholy-Nagy along with abstracted shots “suggesting experiment, design and the making of new materials.”62 Individual heroism gives way to a characterless assembly of modern forms until the “lines of this new subterranean city of Everytown begin to appear, bold and colossal.”63 In this new city, flexible glass replaces the brittle formulation, common spaces filled with artificial light and conditioned air have made a police force and weaponry unnecessary, and the town leader governs from “a chair of modernist form.”64 Citizens learn about the past from documentaries, including “a brief fantasia on the theme of windows done in the Grierson style,” a reference to Scottish documentarian John Grierson.65 Wells imagines a long future via the new state, a modernism that evolves with the new materials innovation brings (Figure 4.1).66 Wells’s film made him a spokesperson for modern architecture as well as  for his brand of socialism. In 1936, the year after Betjeman left the Architectural Review, the journal published seven photographs of the film’s sets with the observation, “ ‘Light Architecture in the subterranean city mechanically constructed by the post-war generation of a yet better and brighter Armageddon than the last . . . . How encouraging they are—easily the best work of its kind yet done in England—will be obvious.’ ”67 The journal even included a still of Everytown alongside a model from Le Corbusier’s The City of Tomorrow in an article about the future of the British town; the author pronounces Wells “so often wise before the event” while cautioning that Corbusier’s and Korda’s designs are of the distant future.68 Wells’s act of imagining future cities was recognized as a legitimate—if before its

61 H.G. Wells, Things to Come: A Film Story Based on the Material Contained in His History of the Future ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ (London: Cresset Press, 1935), 82–3. 62  Ibid., 92. 63 Ibid. 64  Ibid., 99. 65  Ibid., 95. 66  Wells demonstrates that experimentation and progress in this new world must continue as he stages a conflict between town leader Oswald Cabal and the artist Theotocopulos, who urges citizens, “Make an end to Progress now. . . . What is the future to us?” Ibid., 119. 67  P. Morton Shand, “Things to Come,” Architectural Review 79 (February 1936): 88. 68  Thomas Sharp, “The English Tradition in The Town: IV.* Back to the Town?” Architectural Review 79 (April 1936): 163, 167.

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Figure 4.1  Aerial Perspective and Plastic Furniture in the New Everytown H.G. Wells, writer, Things to Come. 1936. Production London Films, Distribution Criterion Collection, 2013.

time—instance of town planning.69 Proponents of modern architecture in this way turned to the literary community to secure vivid illustrations of the future world under modernism. Others had significant reservations. Fabians Beatrice and Sydney Webb criticized the loss of nature and individuality in Wells’s new world.70 In his review of Things to Come, Graham Greene praised the “horribly convincing detail” of war scenes yet found the planned world wanting: “The unreligious mind when it sets about designing a heaven for itself is apt to be trivial, portentous, sentimental.”71 Following the outbreak of war, Rex Warner countered the film with a dystopian novel that largely rewrites Wells’s 69 See Frayling, “Things,” 340 for a discussion of these articles. Frayling observes that the  Architects’ Journal was more circumspect in its praise, as it expressed doubt that 1930s modernist aesthetics would be considered cutting edge in the next century. Nonetheless, a prior issue included “two full-page stills, with captions about the challenging idea of a ‘whole city roofed in, with traffic circulations at various levels.’ ” 70  See ibid., 339–40. 71  Graham Greene, “Things to Come—Bonne Chance,” Spectator, February 28, 1936, in The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film Stories, ed. David Parkinson (New York: Applause, 1994), 78.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  189 narrative. The Aerodrome (1941), as Leon Stover recounts, is “a contest of opposites: the totalitarian utopia (Aerodrome) and everyday reality (Village). In Wells the Aerodrome wins, to the Abolition of Man; in Warner the Village prevails over that hideous outcome.”72 Though Wells rereleased Things to Come in 1940 to show his prescience in predicting World War II and the Blitz, Warner’s novel marks the literary world’s growing resistance to planning, both planning for war and planning for a modernist postwar world. As Betjeman, Orwell, and Waugh intimated, planning for peace might be just as insidious as planning for war, and totalitarianism can exist in utopia as well as in the “independent combatant State.”73

Betjeman’s Anti-Planning Documentaries and Literature Beyond his integration into modernist circles through the Architectural Review, Betjeman had a close connection to the world of pro-modernist documentaries: he maintained a long-standing friendship with schoolmate Arthur Elton, who co-directed Housing Problems (1935) and supervised wartime film production for the Ministry of Information. According to Betjeman’s daughter, that friendship molded Betjeman’s approach to film: “ ‘The revelation of ordinary Britain in short black and white films excited JB the most.’ ”74 By 1935, four years before his name disappeared from the MARS Group membership list, Betjeman had developed a strong relationship with the BBC, which provided a platform for Betjeman’s alternative populism.75 In the mid-1930s, he also worked as a film critic for the Evening Standard, and he entered wartime documentary-making in 1943, after assuming a post at the Ministry of Information Films Division, where he oversaw the series The Pattern of Britain.76 As Betjeman grew skeptical of architectural modernism, he used the documentary form, theretofore a key medium for promoting the modern style, against that movement. In these anti-planning documentaries, Betjeman undercuts planners’ authority by ventriloquizing them. According to Jonathan Stedall, Betjeman “ ‘had various characters in his repertoire, one of which was a property developer.’ ”77 Tewdwr-Jones notes,

72 Stover, Things, 1. 73 Wells, Film Story, 63. 74  Quoted in Mark Tewdwr-Jones, “ ‘Oh, the planners did their best’: the planning films of John Betjeman,” Planning Perspectives 20 (October 2005): 397. 75  See ibid., 398. 76  See ibid., 397–9. 77  Quoted in ibid., 401–2.

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190  Reconstructing Modernism Indeed, in the narration to the Bath film, Betjeman adopts the voice of a London property developer who is in conversation with “Mr. Betjeman” about the need for “modern” buildings and the demolition of “Georg-ee-an” properties: “Today, building must express itself honestly and sincerely, as for instance in this feature [shot of a concrete external stairwell on a brutal modern development in the centre of Bath], which might be termed ‘the vital buttocks’ of the construction. As you can see, it expresses its purpose, whatever that may be, sincerely, and this causes it to blend harmoniously and naturally with the Georgian on the left there. Each age should express itself as it really feels and you can see how this age feels about Georgian.” And then Betjeman, returning to his normal voice, replies: “Well, I suppose you may be right. You must know what you’re talking about as you make such a lot of money as a developer.”78

To undermine that supposed expertise, Betjeman turned also to the radio: his contributions to the BBC Home Service were “ ‘so libelous’ ” that producers had to intervene, and a broadcast on “The Country Town” generated “a  lengthy rant on ‘progressive development’ [and] his loathing for local government and public officials.”79 That impassioned rhetorical excess stood in stark contrast to planners’ aura of cool rationality, yet Betjeman’s parodies emphasized the partisan quality of planners’ language. By removing their speech from the authoritative speech of wartime documentaries—which made that voice of the state simultaneously a voice of the people—Betjeman put a class on that voice, one removed from working-class realities. He denaturalized the projected modernist future and dissociated the new government from populism, through the mass medium of film. Reworking the conventions of pro-modernist documentaries, he created a rival ­people’s voice. Betjeman launched an even more direct attack on planners in “Bird’s Eye View: An Englishman’s Home.” Using footage obtained from a helicopter, Betjeman turned the broad views of the planner against the planner. For this installment in his BBC series, Betjeman started from the historical roots of homebuilding. “I don’t think we can ignore the hovels which are the ancestors of the Council houses and suburban semi-detached of every big cities’ [SIC] home counties,” he advised.80 Indeed, Betjeman’s documentary 78  Ibid., 402. 79  Ibid., 398. 80  “A Letter from John Betjeman: Ideas for the first ‘Bird’s Eye View’ episode,” BBC, http:// www.bbc.co.uk/archive/aerialjourneys/5351.shtml.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  191 catalogs a history of English homebuilding in order to discredit modernist postwar housing. In a letter to his producer, Betjeman communicates his vision for moving from garden cities to modern architecture: “Two wars brought this escape architecture [garden cities] to a stop. Individualism died out. The Welfare State took its place. New do-gooders built taller blocks than ever Peabody dreamed, and we have the compulsory fun displayed in  the new plan for Piccadilly Circus, and in those consciously cheerful shopping precincts and community centres of the new towns.”81 Postwar tower blocks visually indict modernists’ collaboration with the welfare state. In Betjeman’s eyes, this collaboration killed individualism and presented a false utopia to the duped working class. Although these charges seem commonplace from the perspective of the twenty-first century, producer Mirzoeff later argued that “An Englishman’s Home” was a marked break from the contemporary consensus about modernist housing and town planning: “The strongest images and writing were those high-rise flats near Greenwich, which was really quite counter to the accepted view of the time, and it brought quite a backlash for Betjeman. The view was, how dare this old buffoon criticize what we know is the best way of living, and it was the precursor of the now clichéd accepted view of the flats. People wrote letters to me saying it was absolutely outrageous we could say these things, and it was viewed as antiworking class; at last we have decent houses for the people and you are knocking it. But something clicked as a result of this and it was very much at the forefront of new ways of looking at tower blocks as evil, as places that people don’t really want to live in. In  terms of planning, that was probably the most important moment in the series.”82

Through detailing the backlash Betjeman received for his anti-planning rhetoric, Mirzoeff stresses that Betjeman, though regarded as a national treasure, put that reputation on the line. By doing so, he sought to depose Labour-backed modernism as the voice of the people. His producer notes, however, that Betjeman’s film drew an outpouring of public support.83 “An Englishman’s Home” thus signaled that the poet, not the planner, is best suited to speak for the nation on the morality of this new architecture.

81 Ibid.

82  Quoted in Tewdwr-Jones, “Oh,” 406.

83 Ibid.

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192  Reconstructing Modernism After starting with the remnants of ancient dwellings, the film soon arrives at a village moved by a nineteenth-century duke to improve his view, an intervention that leads Betjeman to disparage contemporary housing efforts: “I can’t see why this sort of thing is any more inhuman than what a council does today.”84 Betjeman similarly uses the individuality of post–World War I housing to discredit Harlow, a post–World War II New Town that featured housing by Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. The camera moves from a  mother holding a child in a small backyard to a distant view of their complex, revealing through stark geometry the uniformity of these homes; mother and child lose individual detail in this aerial view. While modernist publications and films placed enormous emphasis on photography to market the new architecture, the position and movements of this camera undermine modernist iconography.85 Over the scene, Betjeman proclaims,

Figure 4.2  Tower Blocks in “An Englishman’s Home” John Betjeman, writer, “An Englishman’s Home.” Bird’s Eye View. 1969. Production BBC, Distribution bbc.co.uk.

84  John Betjeman, “Bird’s Eye View: An Englishman’s Home.” 1969. John Betjeman: A Bird’s Eye View. Production BBC, distribution Simply Home Entertainment, 2011. 85  For the reliance on photography, see Stamp, “Introduction,” 20–1.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  193 “Harlow in Essex. Just after the Second World War. A new New Town. And as the guidebook says, [putting on voice] you’ve come to live in an area of Harlow which incorporates the most up-to-date ideas and layout. [back to own voice] Indeed it does.”86 Following that mimicry, Betjeman surveys Harlow’s amenities as shots of modern buildings fill the screen. “Do you think this is the way we ought to live?” he asks, “Perhaps we should, and do as we are told.”87 By raising the question of how one “ought to live,” Betjeman makes refusing modernism an ethical position; his question implies that the modernist future is not inevitable, nor even progress. A national moral duty to stop modernism emerges most clearly as Betjeman surveys postwar tower blocks, which receive an inordinate amount of attention in a film with such a wide scope (Figure 4.2). Of the war that made possible this construction, Betjeman recalls, “Germans bombed the little streets, which had been home for thousands. . . . out of the devastation, slabs arose. [some sneer in his voice, camera quickly tilts up tall tower block] Sometimes they call them towers. And these replaced the liveliness of streets.”88 In response to these modernist housing projects, Betjeman drifts from observation to poetic monologue: The planners did their best. Oh yes, they gave it all a lot of thought, putting in trees and grassy rides and splendid views across to Richmond Park and landscaped streets and abstract sculpture. Oh, Roehampton won the prizes. It was all so well laid out: just so much space from one block to the next. Perhaps this is the way we ought to live? But where can be the heart that sends a family to the twentieth floor of such a slab as this? It can’t be right, however fine the views across to Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs. It  can’t be right, caged half way up the sky, not knowing your neighbor, frightened of the lift, and who’ll be in it, and who’s down below, and are the children safe?89

Planning, Betjeman implies, is better at parsing space than parsing morality. While he presents a seamless alliance between literary and architectural style in previous eras through quoting lines by Thomas Gray, Andrew Marvell, and Alexander Pope over shots of contemporaneous structures, these tower blocks lead Betjeman to use poetic repetition to censure the architectural forms he perceives to be fundamentally inhumane.

86  Betjeman, “Bird’s.”

87 Ibid.

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid.

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194  Reconstructing Modernism In light of the “Englishman’s Home” theme, Betjeman’s question—“What is housing if it’s not a home?”—impugns welfare state housing policies. As a  rebuke to the state documentaries promoting New Towns, the camera surveys a piece of desolate marshland, slated to become Thamesmead. Against modernists’ claim to represent a new humanism for the new age, Betjeman intones, “Another town. How human will it be?” as the camera locates modernist buildings arising on this land. He opines, New towns, new housing estates, new homes, new streets, new neighbors, new standards of living, new financial commitments, new jobs, new schools, new shops, new loneliness, new restlessness, new pressure, new tension. And people: people who have to cope with all this newness, people who cannot afford old irrelevances, people who have to find a God who fits in.90

Summoning the vocabulary of newness until it stretches thin, Betjeman turns to the people, for whom newness is not freedom but a burden. Through aerial coverage like that used to document natural disasters, Betjeman shows that construction can be indistinguishable from a devastated landscape; modernist planning has not redeemed wartime violence but instead repeats it architecturally. Much like these poetic monologues, Betjeman’s postwar literary publications amplify his critique of modernist speech, publications, and documentaries. By incorporating planners’ utopian visions, literature—as a form, but also, as it came to represent for authors like Huxley and Orwell, an alternative ethics—could weigh those aspirations and expose the dystopian within the utopian. Even before his Bird’s Eye View series, Betjeman created an antiplanning literature in his poetry anthologies. Just as he used planners’ sweeping views against them, these poems turned the planners’ language against itself. That language was defamiliarized through entering established verse forms, modes of speech that encourage a parsing of the language therein. Betjeman’s poems were anti-planning in their form as well as their content. In “The Planster’s Vision” (1945), published at the height of the movement from wartime to town planning, sonnet form undercuts the administrator’s language of rationality and foresight.91 Poetic structure provides an alternative 90 Ibid. 91 John Betjeman, “The Planster’s Vision,” in Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 2000), 104.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  195 reason and order, exposing the planner’s insincere populism and the cracks in his envisioned future. The first stanza introduces the commanding voice of the “planster”—“Cut down that timber!”—while the second shows the erasure of social history that acquiescing would bring. Cottages—“a huddled throng”—are destroyed because they have hosted countless births and deaths; like the caskets that carry the dead, they have been the repository of human form. In the sonnet’s turn—“I have a Vision of the Future, chum”— the planner’s logic comes to a reckoning, for his present work yields to a startling vision of the future under his guidance. By capitalizing “Vision of the Future,” Betjeman conveys that this future, made visible in concrete, steel, and glass buildings, has become pseudo-sacred, wielded as a political tool for ensuring citizens’ cooperation. The false populism that accumulates around that hallowed future shows itself in the planner’s very address to those people: “chum,” a term that reeks of false intimacy. Underneath the veneer of populism, Betjeman suggests, lies a uniformity that is mistaken for social perfection. In acting as voices of authority, proponents of these “workers’ flats . . . [that] tower up like silver pencils” have laid the foundations for dystopia. Under Betjeman’s authorship, the traditional literary form of the sonnet challenges these new forms of living, which promise perfection to the “Surging Millions” at the expense of morality: “No Right! No Wrong! All’s perfect, evermore.” From the sonnet, a verse form often associated with private life that indicts planners’ intrusion, Betjeman turns to the heroic couplet in “The Town Clerk’s Views” (1948). By translating this public official’s objectives into a form linked to epic poetry, Betjeman undercuts the authority of the planner’s voice along with his ambitions. “So let us hear this cool careerist tell/His plans to turn our country into hell,” Betjeman introduces the town clerk, who has fully accepted the need to make Britain into a uniform entity, with a common modernist landscape: “I blush to think one corner of our  isle/Lacks concrete villas in the modern style.”92 The clerk anticipates replacing “Georgian relics” and boasts that the “modernistic” in these rebuilt towns “has come to stay.”93 In Betjeman’s poem, modern architects and planners have performed an aesthetic and political coup. By projecting itself into a perfected future, the movement outlives its time and destroys older styles to make itself the permanent face of Britain, yet it survives only in its compromised form—the “modernistic.” This modernism is not merely

92  John Betjeman, “The Town Clerk’s Views,” in Collected Poems, 144.

93  Ibid., 145.

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196  Reconstructing Modernism a tool of totalitarian politics; instead, Betjeman portrays these figures as themselves totalitarian. Their destruction of the British past is commensurate to the erasure of history in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Betjeman’s representative planner manipulates the language of urgent rebuilding from World War II to justify his own architectural destruction to the public. The town clerk looks to a future when rebuilding will be a means not of righting war but of waging planners’ own war against “Hamlets which fail to pass the planners’ test.”94 Betjeman ultimately communicates that the language of planning has been used to make the modernist future inevitable, a concrete rather than hypothetical future: “So don’t encourage tourists. Stay your hand/Until we’ve really got the country plann’d.”95 Prefiguring Aldous Huxley’s fear of mid-century over-organization, Betjeman’s heavy-handed couplets show the limits that planning puts on thought in this new world. More than simply organizing the land, planning organizes the nation’s entire sense of self. In “Huxley Hall” (1954), Betjeman assumes the perspective of a citizen in one of these new towns, as they pass from planner’s vision to reality. “In the Garden City Café with its murals on the wall/Before a talk on ‘Sex and Civics’ I meditated on the Fall,” the speaker begins, and wonders whether those who live in older homes can “know the deep depression of this bright, hygienic hell.”96 Architecture provides a form of knowledge, a consciousness, and to move to a uniform built environment means the loss of a future tantamount to a fall from grace; the Fall takes place not in the Garden of Eden but in a Garden City Café. Symbolic violence pervades the utopia that promised to erase that violence: “Barry smashes Shirley’s doll, Shirley’s eyes are crossed with hate,/Comrades plot a Comrade’s downfall ‘in the interests of the State.’ ” Much as these state-sponsored forms corrupt inhabitants’ behavior, Betjeman feared that the very materials of modernism would make materialists out of British citizens. In “Inexpensive Progress” (1966), he begins, Encase your legs in nylons, Bestride your hills with pylons O age without a soul.97

Though he distinguished modern materials from communist materialism in the prewar Antiquarian Prejudice, Betjeman came to share Waugh’s fear 94  Ibid., 146. 95  Ibid., 147. 96  John Betjeman, “Huxley Hall,” in Collected Poems, 160. 97  John Betjeman, “Inexpensive Project,” in Collected Poems, 286.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  197 that the new materials—architectural as well as consumer—would ultimately change citizens’ values; the planner’s “pylons” and the manufacturer’s “nylons” create a perfect rhyme. Betjeman predicts that the entire modern age, not just individuals, would lose its “soul” through contact with the seemingly “inexpensive progress” of modernism. Like Elizabeth Bowen, he warned against imbuing materials with the weight of political ideas: Human actions, not materials, should be the seat of ethics.

Orwell’s Leftist Anti-Planning Given the conservative roots of Betjeman’s opposition to state-sponsored planning, it is significant that George Orwell began his career with a poem not far afield from Betjeman’s anti-planning poetry. “On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory” (1934) was published in John Middleton Murry’s literary magazine The Adelphi and in The Best Poems of 1934. Orwell even suggested to his agent that they use the poem as leverage for placing Burmese Days.98 Orwell’s speaker sets himself outside both the lost pastoral and modern near-utopia. He stands “With warring worlds on either hand,” on one side a post-apocalyptic landscape and on the other “factory-towers, white and clear/Like distant, glittering cities.”99 These factory towers gain added weight because, just two years before, Betjeman had praised the “clear cut lines of a new ostentatious factory” that could only add to the beauty of the countryside.100 Orwell’s speaker concludes that “they who planned these soaring towers” see in the “glittering world” their “accepted destiny,” while he is “Between two countries, both-ways torn.”101 On some level, this is a simple poem of lyric loss, in the style of A. E. Housman, whom Orwell greatly admired in his youth. But on another level, the insistent imagery of the modern structures—“where steel and concrete soar/In dizzy, geometric towers”—underlines the compulsoriness of this new world.102 “There is my world, my home,” the speaker reflects, “yet why/So alien still? For I can neither/Dwell in that world, nor turn again/To scythe and spade.”103 As in Betjeman’s later poems, the speaker 98  See George Orwell, Letter to Leonard Moore, October 3, 1934, in Collected Essays, vol. 1, 141. 99  George Orwell, “On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory,” Adelphi, April 1934, in Collected Essays, vol. 1, 134. 100  Betjeman, “Passing,” 3. 101  Orwell, “Ruined,” 135. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid.

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198  Reconstructing Modernism ponders how to make the new architecture “home,” and, beyond that, to what degree the nation should find a home in these steel and concrete structures. That question became even more insistent for Orwell after war erupted five years later. H.G. Wells’s heavy influence on Orwell further complicated his relationship to national planning and modern architecture. “Of course the book [Coming Up for Air] was bound to suggest Wells watered down,” Orwell acknowledges in a 1948 letter, “I have a great admiration for Wells, i.e. as a writer, and he was a very early influence on me.”104 Yet much as Waugh’s Paul Pennyfeather describes Le Corbusier as a holdover from another era,  a  nineteenth-century utilitarian, Orwell argues that Wells’s optimistic embrace of modernism shows a backward-looking perspective: the future that Wells anticipates, where steel, glass, and concrete can build a World State, is a product of nineteenth-century scientific optimism. By contrast, totalitarianism made technological breakthroughs subject to state manipulation; an object for society-building can also be an object for war. Reviewing Wells’s Guide to the New World in 1941, Orwell notes that a false dichotomy has compromised Wells’s work, so that he cannot acknowledge the overlap between planning for war and planning for utopia. Wells has drawn a “supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a  planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past,” and that antithesis runs through his literature and films: “In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene; on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses.”105 Through exposing this false binary, Orwell tacitly criticizes the progress-bestowing aviators of Things to Come. Planning is not necessarily an evil itself, Orwell admits—Wells is “probably right in assuming that a ‘reasonable’, planned form of society . . . will prevail sooner or later”—but planning can just as easily be a tool of totalitarianism. Indeed, Nazis have instituted the material progress that Wells demands: “The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.”106 Germany produced

104  George Orwell, Letter to Julian Symons, May 10, 1948, in Collected Essays, vol. 4, 422. 105  George Orwell, “Wells, Hitler and the World State,” Horizon, August 1941, in Collected Essays, vol. 2, 142. 106  Ibid., 143.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  199 both the Bauhaus and the Nazi regime, Orwell suggests, and steel and concrete can just as easily be used for bunkers. Reflecting on this conflation of violence and utopia, he observes that “A crude book like The Iron Heel, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come.”107 Despite his skepticism toward planning, Orwell devoted himself to housing reform efforts, particularly in The Road to Wigan Pier. Architect Clough Williams-Ellis even provided leads for the images Victor Gollancz used in that publication.108 With the advent of World War II, Orwell addressed the connection between advances in war technologies and advances in domestic design. In a 1945 installment of his regular Tribune column, he considered the labor-saving home in the context of the meager flat that wartime neglect had left him. The drudgery of washing dishes leads him to ponder the unevenness of human innovation, such that “A saucepan, say, or  a comb, is very much the same thing as it was when the Greeks were besieging Troy. In the same period we have advanced from the leaky galley to the 50,000 ton liner, and from the ox-cart to the aeroplane.”109 Beyond proposing a communal dish service that would diminish his drudgery, Orwell adopts the language of modernism when describing the housing of the future: “If one thinks simply in terms of saving trouble and plans one’s home as ruthlessly as one would plan a machine, it is possible to imagine houses and flats which would be comfortable and would entail very little work.”110 Orwell, in the spirit of Le Corbusier—if not drawing directly from him—describes the house as a machine, one that requires “ruthless” planning. Yet this ruthless planning exposes the similarities between planning for  better housing and planning for war. Measuring housing innovations against wartime innovations, Orwell chides, “If our methods of making war had kept pace with our methods of keeping house, we should be just about on the verge of discovering gunpowder.”111 For all the talk of channeling war energies into rebuilding, those war energies had proven more powerful. Orwell’s proposed solution is not to pretend that these activities are unconnected, but to redirect British innovation from war to housing, much as the

107  Ibid., 144. 108  See Peter Davison, ed., Orwell Diaries (New York: Random House, 2009), 72. 109  George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, February 9, 1945, in Collected Essays, vol. 3, 329. 110  Ibid., 330. As he contemplates these modern, labor-saving flats, Orwell indicates that “Central heating, rubbish chutes, proper consumption of smoke, cornerless rooms, electrically warmed beds and elimination of carpets would make a lot of difference.” Ibid. 111 Ibid.

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200  Reconstructing Modernism MARS Group advocated. Britons, Orwell proclaims, must “devote as much intelligence to rationalising the interiors of our houses as we have devoted to transport and communications.”112 Because Orwell recognized that this imagined postwar housing could not be separated from wartime political machinations, he used rehousing schemes to expose politicians’ and planners’ shortsightedness. In a 1944 newspaper column, he observed that rehousing could undermine a tightly knit community in the same way that wartime evacuation could.113 But it was not until he reviewed Lawrence Wolfe’s account of the Reilly Plan in early 1946 that Orwell fully analyzed the near-totalitarianism he saw written into the forms of government-administered, working-class flats.114 This rebuilding proposal created a pattern for nurseries, community centers, communal kitchens, and housing that could accommodate 1,000 people, and each “Reilly unit” could be repeated to form a larger town. Of these planned communities, Orwell acknowledges, “Mr Wolfe is probably within his rights in claiming that in such communities there would be less drudgery, less disease, earlier marriages, a higher birthrate, less crime and fewer neuroses than we have at present. And yet—!”115 These labor-saving flats come at a steep price: the loss of individual freedom. Orwell counsels that liberty need not be traded for comfort, for British quality of life had greatly improved without this modern, standardized housing; moreover, the war had the unintended benefit of reducing income inequality.116 What is lost when residents are “resettled” is not only their privacy but also Britain’s social structure, built around the family.117 For families who lose a kitchen in their flats, and instead rely on a communal food service, the loss of self-determination in cooking reveals a wider loss: “A deep instinct warns them not to destroy the family, which in the modern world is the sole refuge from the State.”118 As whole areas become available for rebuilding after the war, clinging to older—albeit flawed—architectural traditions might allow families to resist governmental encroachments.119 112 Ibid. 113  George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, November 29, 1944, in Collected Essays, vol. 3, 277. 114  The Reilly Plan was named for Sir Charles Reilly, who chaired the MARS meeting held to discuss the question “what is modern architecture?” Yet, as Orwell points out, the plan was not authored by Reilly but was instead a tribute to his prior work: “Sir Charles Reilly, who confesses that he did not originally foresee the far-reaching consequences deduced by his disciple—indeed he has slightly the air of a man who has mounted a hobby-horse which turns out to be a unicorn—contributes an Introduction.” Orwell, “Reilly,” 88. 115  Orwell, “Reilly,” 89. 116  Ibid., 90. 117  Ibid., 90–1. 118  Ibid., 91. 119 Ibid.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  201 Orwell thus argues that, amid state efforts to educate citizens in modern architecture, a resolute taste for older models is not simply reactionary. “A question not asked by Mr Wolfe, and seldom asked by anybody, is why we are on earth at all,” a question with great import for how Britons choose to structure their lives.120 Over that architectural, political, and ethical dilemma hovers the threat of a deadlier Blitz: possible annihilation from an  atom bomb.121 The material fact of improved housing cannot in itself produce the democratic ideals attributed to it. Orwell’s reference to atomic weaponry and future war is particularly significant, given modern housing’s association with war overcome. Orwell had argued in “You and the Atom Bomb” that the great cost of manufacturing this weapon meant that more power would be placed in the hands of the state, resulting in a less democratic and less rebellious world.122 In Orwell’s assessment of the Reilly Plan, this ultimate tool of state power—able to put citizens on permanent guard against war—looms over the supposedly democratic postwar housing, itself criticized for creating in citizens a dependence upon the state for survival. These flaws challenge the wisdom of transforming national identity through modernist revitalization. To a friend living in Sweden, a country that English architects treated as a paragon of good governance and national self-definition through modernism, Orwell writes, “I have never been able to like these model countries with everything up to date and hygienic and an enormous suicide rate.”123 Orwell thus departs from the course taken by his friend Mulk Raj Anand. Embracing modern architecture as a means of shaping the newly independent nation of India, Anand edited the journal Marg, whose name was simultaneously a Hindi word meaning pathway and the first letters of the journal’s founders, the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARG); that organization drew inspiration from the MARS Group, of which Anand was a member.124 Orwell eschewed Anand’s faith in 120  Ibid., 91–2. 121  Ibid., 92. 122  George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb,” Tribune, October 19, 1945, in Collected Essays, vol. 4, 6–10. 123  George Orwell, Letter to Michael Meyer, March 12, 1949, in Collected Essays, vol. 4, 480. As William Whyte notes, “the link between Sweden’s social democracy and modernism appealed to English modernists, who looked across the North Sea to a welfare state that embodied its ideals in the most modern buildings.” “The Englishness of English Architecture: Modernism and the Making of a National International Style, 1927–1957,” Journal of British Studies 48 (2009): 451. 124 See Rachel Lee and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Marg Magazine: A Tryst with Architectural Modernity,” ABE Journal 1 (2012), http://journals.openedition.org/abe/623 and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Beyond the Masters: Modernism in South Asian Architecture,” in The Modernist World, ed. Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross (London: Routledge, 2015), 101.

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202  Reconstructing Modernism nation-building through modernism and instead emphasized that the state and the individual have conflicting futures. To consider what role literature should play in resisting a style that ­bolsters state power, Orwell turned to Herbert Read, the writer and literary critic with ties to anarchism who, as we have seen, also promoted modernist art and architecture. Orwell identifies a “clash between Read’s political beliefs and his aesthetic theory,” and he criticizes Read’s faith in human ­perfectibility and his status as “a defender, on aesthetic grounds, of the products of the machine.”125 “Anarchism implies a low standard of living,” Orwell asserts, “it rules out the kind of air-conditioned, chromium-plated, gadget-ridden existence which is now considered desirable and enlightened. The processes involved in making, say, an aeroplane are so complex as to be only possible in a planned, centralised society, with all the repressive apparatus that implies.”126 Modernist design, reliant as it is on mass production, is fundamentally opposed to individual liberty, and instead requires the same “planned, centralised society” that airplanes and other advanced weapons of war require.127 Aesthetic uniformities align with state-enforced human uniformity. While Kenneth Clark, speaking alongside Sir William Beveridge, advocated the democratization of good design through mass production, Orwell sees housing and design templates as a means of erasing individuality, and with it, art itself. Literature for Orwell serves as the testing ground for this new aesthetic attitude. To weigh Read’s claim that “beauty” is not diminished through “reproduc[tion],” Orwell considers the effect of hearing a poem over and over again.128 By the end, “it would become the most hideous collection of  words that has ever existed.”129 The ideas Orwell develops in Nineteen Eighty-Four are evident as he assesses the potential for machine reproduction to become the dominant mode of literary production as well: “It is just thinkable that books may some day be written by machinery.”130 Performing thought experiments much like Huxley in Brave New World, Orwell argues that to remove individual authorship would be a loss not only for literature

125  George Orwell, “A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read,” Poetry Quarterly, Winter 1945, in Collected Essays, vol. 4, 48. 126  Ibid., 49. 127  At the same time, Orwell exposes a “contradiction” between newness in art and newness in politics: “[Read] is in favour of abstract painting and streamlined teapots because the aesthetic conservatives don’t like them: and he is in favour of Anarchism because the political Conservatives, including the official Left, don’t like that.” Ibid., 50. 128  Ibid., 49. 129  Ibid., 50. 130 Ibid.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  203 but also for any hope of resisting the planned society aligned with the abstract, functionalist aesthetic. Against the projections of a glorious future that pervaded planning ­documentaries and exhibitions, Orwell dissociates utopianism from socialism in order to eliminate the straw man of “Human Perfectibility,” which carried associations of inevitable social progress.131 He identifies the danger of confounding the collectivist utopian future with the national future when reviewing Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave. “The Beehive State is upon us, the individual will be stamped out of existence, the future is with the holiday camp, the doodlebug, and the secret police,” Orwell summarizes Connolly’s book.132 Unlike others of his generation, Connolly disavows the proposition that citizens “ ‘will find fulfillment only through participation in the communal life of an organised group,’ ” but he “sees no escape from the Beehive future.”133 Through conflating wartime cooperation with utopian aspiration, British collectivism had become, for authors like Connolly, indistinguishable from totalitarianism. In contrast to the gleaming structures promised by planning documentaries, Orwell upholds the value of contemplating ugliness as well as future beauty.134 These refusals to participate in a state-sponsored, uniform view of the future drove Orwell’s dedication to the dystopian genre. To resist the siren call of this collectivist utopian vision, Orwell in “Writers and Leviathan” (1948) recommends that authors separate “group loyalties,” the political ties one feels to the nation (especially in wartime), from their practice of literature.135 Writers must “make it clear that,” whatever they do in the service of political parties, “[their] writing is a thing apart,” and they must “keep part of [themselves] inviolate.”136 Orwell proposes a new sort of modernist autonomy for the World War II era; Henry Miller, who writes from “inside the whale,” serves as Orwell’s model writer for this political age. To lose autonomy is to lose serious writing, especially the novel, the representative form of the individual for Orwell. In 1938, he thus anticipated “that what with Hitler, Stalin & the rest of them the day of novelwriting was over. As it is if I start it in August I daresay I’ll have to finish [Coming Up for Air] in the concentration camp.”137 131  George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, December 24, 1943, in Collected Essays, vol. 3, 64. 132  George Orwell, “The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by ‘Palinurus,’ ” Observer, January 14, 1945, in Collected Essays, vol. 3, 319. 133 Ibid. 134  See, for example, “Inside the Whale.” 135  George Orwell, “Writers and Leviathan,” in Collected Essays, vol. 4, 412. 136  Ibid., 412, 412, 414. 137  George Orwell, Letter to Jack Common, 1938, in Collected Essays, vol. 1, 330.

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204  Reconstructing Modernism Like Huxley, Orwell predicted a possible end to literature, but writing from the perspective of World War II, he emphasized the role of war in compromising its future. In “The Prevention of Literature (1946), Orwell accordingly assessed the historical relationship between literary and social upheaval. “[T]hroughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up,” meaning that artistic and political currents were largely in sync, but in the collectivist atmosphere of the mid-century, individualism is deemed politically reactionary, and resisting writers are accused “of wanting to shut [themselves] up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of [their] own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges.”138 However, to cooperate with totalitarianism would bring the death of literature. This is especially true for prose: “the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet . . . might possibly find it breathable.”139 Poetry draws from group energies, but in totalitarian regimes that endure multiple generations, “prose literature . . . must actually come to an end” because that literature “has to be composed in solitude.”140 In that future, state planning and mass production would invade even literature: “Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line.”141 Orwell wryly notes that, by contrast, architecture might “find tyranny beneficial.”142 Beyond defending literature, Orwell emphasizes the need to defend language itself, and in this, he goes beyond Huxley’s notion of literature as a removed language. Orwell makes linguistic innovation a task for all citizens, as they learn to articulate thoughts not already supplied by the state. The future of liberalism depends on the future of the language, produced as it is across the nation as a whole. In the face of major technological innovations that made possible a new kind of architecture and warfare, one might “invent new words as deliberately as [one] would invent new parts for a motor-car engine,” taking innovation from the concrete to the linguistic realm.143 Under this plan, writers would gain an ability to represent the inner life beyond anything literary modernists had managed to do. Language, 138  George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” Polemic, January 1946, in Collected Essays, vol. 4, 60, 61. Orwell’s summary recalls Julian Huxley’s characterization of modern British literature. 139  Ibid., 65. 140  Ibid., 65, 68. 141  Ibid., 70. 142  Ibid., 68. 143  George Orwell, “New Words,” in Collected Essays, vol. 2, 7.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  205 Orwell suggests in “The English People,” should “be the joint creation of poets and manual workers, and in modern England it is difficult for these two classes to meet.”144 A joint reimagination of the English language would bring a new communal understanding, one that would arise from heightened individual expression rather than state-enforced uniformity. Even more, the ability to express what had hitherto been inexpressible would make headway in the conjoined realms of aesthetics and ethics: “All likes and dislike, all aesthetic feeling, all notions of right and wrong (aesthetic and moral considerations are in any case inextricable) spring from feelings which are generally admitted to be subtler than words.”145 In Orwell’s vision for language reform, the entire practice of literature would change. Likening modern authorship to warfare, he observes that “ ‘Imaginative’ writing is as it were a flank-attack upon positions that are impregnable from the front.”146 Orwell diverges from Huxley’s model of literature for a new world—esoteric language that produces non-standard thoughts—by arguing that for the discipline to survive, experimentation must be taken from literature to everyday language itself. “For one man, or a clique, to try and make up a language, as I believe James Joyce is now doing, is as absurd as one man trying to play football alone,” Orwell contends, “What is wanted is several thousands of gifted but normal people who would give themselves to word-invention as seriously as people now give themselves to Shakespearean research.”147 To preserve literature, linguistic invention is even more important than studying venerated texts. By referring to Joyce, Orwell suggests that modernist authors had tried to achieve this reform through their individual literary efforts. What Orwell champions is taking modernism to the people, not through an education in taste, in the manner of pamphlets and documentaries, but through making all English speakers responsible for innovation. The English language might become the ultimate modernist form.

Nineteen Eighty-Four To counter the rosy postwar futures promised in wartime documentaries, Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four uses a protagonist who is a product of the 144 George Orwell, “The English People,” Manchester Evening News, April 20, 1944, in Collected Essays, vol. 3, 29. 145  Orwell, “New,” 4. 146  Ibid., 5. 147  Ibid., 9.

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206  Reconstructing Modernism war, born in 1944 or 1945.148 Orwell turns “Britain can take it” on its head, for Winston Smith enters a world where the aerial bombardment of the Blitz is made a permanent condition. By importing the form of the political essay into the novel through excerpts from the fictional Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, Orwell collapses nonfiction and fiction. In doing so, he impresses on readers what Winston could not understand, that planning for war is a better tool for binding the citizen to the state than planning for peacetime reconstruction is. The collectivism of the People’s War can very easily serve an authoritarian purpose, and the British Labour Party may not turn the machines of war to machines for rebuilding so easily. Orwell writes in the voice of Goldstein about the corruption of socialism in the twentieth century, “Socialism . . . was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned.”149 This was not because equality evaded reach but because the products of mass production could erase inequality by, as Huxley feared, erasing distinction: “The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable.”150 Much as Coming Up for Air revealed that modernist rebuilding materials were also the materials of war, Orwell’s later novel emphasizes that collectivism can be a front for authoritarianism. In what is perhaps a direct reference to Labour’s plans to nationalize land during reconstruction, Goldstein continues, “The so-called ‘abolition of private property’ which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before.”151 The utopian postwar world becomes inextricably tied to the violence of World War II as O’Brien admonishes Winston, “Do you not begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment . . . a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.”152

The notion of progress—albeit perverted into something unrecognizable to early reformers—is a powerful tool for inspiring citizens to collaborate with totalitarianism. 148  See Orwell, Nineteen, 7. 152  Ibid., 276.

149  Ibid., 208.

150  Ibid., 210.

151  Ibid., 211.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  207 The potential for the touted future to reinforce state powers gained during war is apparent in the postwar landscape. Victorian slums and vacated bombsites abound while modern architecture is reserved for monumental government buildings. Contrary to the democratic promises of modern architecture, it has become the style of state power, wielded by IngSoc (English Socialism): “The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak—was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous ­pyramidical structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air.”153 The Ministry of Truth, where Winston works, is generally considered to be modeled after Senate House, which had been used by the Ministry of Information during the war, while Orwell’s wife was a member of the censorship department. Commissioned by William Beveridge to be “something that could not have been built by any earlier generation than this,” the building was praised by modernist architect Erich Mendelsohn, but it also represented a compromised style: famed architectural critic and historian Nicholas Pevsner called it “ ‘a strangely traditional, undecided modernism.’ ”154 Indeed, throughout Orwell’s novel, these ministries present modernism as an architecture of “doublethink,” at once an expression of progress and of brutality. Defined by its emphasis on light and hygiene, the modern style is employed by the windowless Ministry of Love and paired with “a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests”; the steel of this new architecture is weaponized.155 Orwell depicts modernism not just as a tool of IngSoc but as the very embodiment of IngSoc values: The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering— a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy 153  Ibid., 4. 154  For Beveridge, see University of London, “The History of Senate House,” https://london. ac.uk/about-us/history-university-london/history-senate-house. For Mendelsohn, see Eitan Karol, “Naked and Unashamed: Charles Holden in Bloomsbury,” Past and Future 4 (2008): 7. For Pevsner, see Bridget Cherry, London: North (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998), 276. 155 Orwell, Nineteen, 5. Architecture is a key element in the state’s erasure of history: the Party claims that “impressive” and “new” buildings were constructed after the Revolution, such that “One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books” (101).

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208  Reconstructing Modernism cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dust bins.156

The new architecture is no more than an empty slogan. The lower classes live in the ruins of a war-torn Britain while modernism yields only the virtual bunkers that are the governmental buildings. Goldstein’s book frames the once-imagined modernist future as the catalyst that produced the political will necessary to carry out the Revolution, and IngSoc’s betrayal of revolutionary ideas registers architecturally. Orwell writes from the perspective of the dystopian future, “The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward.”157 Citizens in this new world suffer a loss not just of the past but also of the projected future, and modern architecture merely expresses state power. Against this state modernism, literature symbolizes a lost liberalism. In Orwell’s dystopia, no books are written by individuals, and instead the Ministry of Truth composes films and other media to give citizens a common thought life. Literature is seen to be so dangerous to this shared consciousness that books written before 1960 have been destroyed. Accordingly, when Winston dreamed of a carefree girl of another time, he “woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.”158 As in Brave New World, Shakespeare represents British literature more generally, a vehicle for freedom of thought.159 When Winston exercises individual expression through writing in a diary, a form meant to mark the individual as an individual through recording personal experience, he describes watching government war films. In doing so he inadvertently slips into a collective, state-directed consciousness. Recalling the graphic images of a young refugee and her child gunned down by helicopters, he writes, “there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of the kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares 156  Ibid., 76. 157  Ibid., 193. 158  Ibid., 32. 159 The slogan “freedom is slavery” underlines this twisted liberalism and recalls Julian Huxley’s assertion that individual liberty under liberalism was always an illusion.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  209 what the proles say typical prole reaction.”160 While Winston momentarily adopts the voice of this woman as his own in his act of dissent from the state, propaganda infiltrates his writing when he recalls the moment the police enter; it becomes impossible to say where individual consciousness stops and the state begins. Through creating the language of Newspeak in such detail and importing it into his novel, Orwell writes a language for the future, a future he hopes will not come, a future in which literature has no place. Whereas Huxley ended Brave New World by considering what a literature of the future might look like, Orwell widens his sights to the entire English language. The threat to literature is not simply eliminating literary language; it is changing everyday language itself, which makes language, not simply literature, the ultimate battleground, as we have seen in Orwell’s essays and reviews. While Huxley believed that literature made liberalism possible, Orwell believed that literature and liberalism must both spring from the English language. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell draws from nonfiction once more to envision this fictionless world—or rather, a world in which fiction must be regarded as fact—by compiling his own Newspeak dictionary, an appendix that explains the rules of this new language. Yet by writing about the formation of Newspeak in the past tense, not as a character but as Orwell himself, he suggests that these changes in language had already crept in during the war. Unlike Winston, who composes his diary for a future he hopes will come, Orwell writes against a future that he sees materializing. By adopting the form of the dystopian novel, Orwell engages in an alternative documentary. He projects a future that will mobilize citizens not to cooperate with the state but to be wary of its “vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete.”161

Evelyn Waugh’s Near Future Despite their political differences, Waugh and Orwell genuinely respected each other as writers. At the time of his death, Orwell was composing an essay on Waugh, and his notes describe Waugh as “abt as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.”162 160  Ibid., 9. 161  Ibid., 76. 162  George Orwell, Extracts from a Manuscript Notebook, in Collected Essays, vol. 4, 513.

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210  Reconstructing Modernism Orwell was careful to separate political orthodoxy from literature, and he indicated that not belonging to “[t]he movement (Auden etc)” put Waugh at an advantage.163 In 1945, Waugh thanked Orwell for sending a copy of Animal Farm, his “ingenious & delightful allegory.”164 He likewise praised Nineteen Eighty-Four, finding “it possible that in 1984 we shall be living in  conditions rather like those you show,” though he disagreed with Orwell’s “metaphysics” and his decision to write the Catholic Church out of existence.165 For the two writers, a dedication to literature trumped political loyalties, and even became a coalition of sorts: both feared for literature under a vehemently orthodox state. Waugh’s service in the armed forces during the war, much of it spent alongside Winston Churchill’s son Randolph, left him disillusioned about the conduct of Britain in wartime. Like Orwell, Waugh believed that politicians’ utopian promises concealed the near-totalitarian underpinnings of postwar plans, and he found socialism to be particularly complicit in promoting violence of all sorts. “Gas chambers were not a Nazi invention,” Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford in 1950, “All ‘Progressives’ believed in them and called it Euthanasia and had a Society all the Fabians belonged to simply to build gas chambers and that is what Health Centres are for besides castrating men and sterilizing women and giving french letters to children. Didn’t you know?”166 Despite his teasing tone, Waugh insists that British socialists had advocated a policy he perceived as similar to Nazis’, thereby casting the “progress” communicated through welfare initiatives like health centers in an authoritarian light. He characterizes modernism as a direct accessory to social engineering when he tells Mitford to “take Prod [Mitford’s husband] by the hand & lead him to Peckham where the Donaldsons will deal with him in a jiffy”167 Waugh references the Pioneer Health Centre, designed by Owen Williams to provide healthcare for the working class, alongside housing by Maxwell Fry and Elizabeth Denby.168 Because the project preceded the National Health Service and other welfare provisions, Waugh implies that architects helped lay the foundation for these governmental initiatives. In line with his conflation of socialism and National Socialism, Waugh referred to the “post-war Labour Government” as the “Occupation,” and his 163  Ibid., 512. 164 Waugh, Letters, 211. 165  Ibid., 302. 166  Ibid., 320. 167 Ibid. 168  By contrast, Aldous Huxley described the Peckham Experiment as an exception to modernist “over-organization,” as we saw in Chapter 2. Revisited, 119.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  211 satirical piece “What to Do with the Upper Classes: A Modest Proposal” (1946) links planning to wartime invasion.169 Reworking Jonathan Swift’s famous essay, Waugh examines the future not of Ireland’s poor but of Britain’s wealthy, whom he characterized as the seat of national aesthetic taste. “The classless society, if and when it comes, will not be the fruit of purely English methods,” he predicts, “it will come . . . by the use of ‘social engineering’ of the sort that is prevalent in half of what was once Europe.”170 Deeming Britain “a danger to peace,” the UN will send “a punitive expedition . . . to occupy the reactionary islands.”171 Waugh’s dystopian fantasy merges seamlessly with his serious nonfiction, for he stresses that the assault has already started from within and can be witnessed through architecture: “our surviving fine buildings and corners of landscape now only serve to accentuate the prevailing desolation.”172 For his “modest proposal,” he suggests that “ ‘planners’ ” design “reservations” for those unsuited to life under “the socialist state.”173 Styling himself as one of these planners, Waugh assures readers that this “scheme” will satisfy even “the extreme advocates of total class-war” because it “render[s] all the more easy the eventual massacre.”174 Waugh confounds utopian town planning with plans for violence that mimic a system of ghettos and concentration camps. No matter the amount of facetiousness that went into this piece, Waugh for his part actively sought to acquire property in Ireland rather than “face the century of the common man.”175 For Waugh, socialism was an artistic as well as political program. Despite the fact that Le Corbusier expressed sympathy for the far right during France’s wartime occupation, Waugh treats Corbusian modernism as the aesthetic expression of left-wing collectivism: “If you had heard a lecture by an English francophile socialist on the wireless in praise of Corbusier’s fiasco at Marseille [Unité d’habitation],” he wrote to Nancy Mitford in 1952, “I think even you would have been sick.”176 In Waugh’s imagination, modernist architecture effectively served as an advance guard for socialism 169 Evelyn Waugh, “The Scandinavian Capitals: Contrasted Post-War Moods,” Daily Telegraph and Post, November 11, 1947, in Essays, 339. 170  Evelyn Waugh, “What to Do with the Upper Classes: A Modest Proposal,” Town and Country, September 1946, in Essays, 313. 171 Ibid. 172  Ibid., 314. Waugh’s rhetoric resembles the “parody” of the “fear of a totalitarian Britain” that MacKay identifies in Put Out More Flags, but the boundary between comedy and bitter sincerity grew increasingly unclear in his postwar work, as we will see with Campbell’s mistaken assumption that Waugh’s Picasso diatribe was a hoax. MacKay, “Anti-State,” 37. 173  Ibid., 315. 174  Ibid., 316. 175 Waugh, Letters, 236. 176  Ibid., 368.

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212  Reconstructing Modernism because it could manipulate the consciousness of those with whom it came into contact. The abundance of ornament in Victorian houses was beneficial to the mind, while minimalism prompted mental decline. “How much of the neurotic boredom of today comes from the hygienic blankness of offices, aerodrome waiting-rooms, hospitals?” Waugh asked, “The eye must be caught and held before the brain will work.”177 In December 1945, Waugh publicized the unseemly effect of Picasso’s art, then being exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He compares modernism’s influence to the hold teen idols had over adolescents, but Waugh hints that there may be something more sinister at play: “Modern art, whether it is Nazi oratory, band leadership, or painting, aims at a mesmeric trick and achieves either total success or total failure.”178 When Robin Campbell chastised Waugh for his reactionary stance, asking if his letter to The Times was a “hoax,” Waugh referred to the experience of another exhibition attendee: “He claims to have suffered the Aristotelian purge and further says that he emerged from Picasso’s ­exhibition ‘dazed’ and in a mood in which he could ‘hardly bear to look’ at the masterpieces of the middle ages and the renaissance . . . . An experience which dazes and leaves one blind to other beauties must be brutish.”179 The unconsciousness with which modernism was consumed and idolized allowed this art to work in tandem with political movements that, in Waugh’s view, demand a similar level of unconscious assent. He made a habit of peppering his letters with the phrase “Death to Picasso,” and in one 1946 letter to Mitford he added, “The pure clear witness against him grows with the years. You are all either dupes or traitors. You are a traitor.”180 Long gone is Waugh’s youthful prediction of “a glorious future” for Cubism and, especially, Picasso.181 As Waugh implies with his language of “traitors,” a taste for modernism was a political offense committed against Britain.182 Waugh publicly shamed authors who aided planning by acting as “prophets” of this future Britain. In these historical circumstances, Waugh asserts, “a writer must face the choice of becoming an artist or a prophet,” with the difference being that the “recluse at the desk has a bare chance of giving 177  Evelyn Waugh, “Those Happy Homes,” Sunday Times, November 28, 1954, in Essays, 465–6. For Waugh, Victorian aesthetics also represented a healthy class system: “Victorians furnished their homes for their own delight and their homes were of predominant importance. There was no great breaking up of class distinctions in that age. There was rather a great multiplication of classes” (465). 178 Waugh, Letters, 214. 179  Ibid., 216, 214–15. 180  Ibid., 221. 181  Waugh, “In Defence,” 7. 182  Waugh describes a taste for modernism as a mortal sin as well: “It would be a pity to go to HELL because you prefer Henry Moore to Michelangelo.” Letters, 243; the social, aesthetic, and divine orders are inseparable.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  213 abiding pleasure to others; the publicist has none at all.”183 Like Orwell, Waugh upheld the value of authorial autonomy as writers became the spokespeople, official and unofficial, of the future state, and he too used Cyril Connolly— known for his efforts to keep culture alive during and after the war—to assess the relationship between the literary community and postwar planning efforts.184 While Orwell emphasized Connolly’s fear of the “Beehive State” in 1944, Waugh’s “Palinurus in Never-Never Land: Or, the Horizon Blue-Print of Chaos” (1946) labels Connolly a new collaborator. Connolly’s Horizon, Waugh argues, had resisted the pull of political affiliations, so that readers perceived not just the journal but England as a whole as a venue for individuality and free thinking. “With the armistice the influence of the magazine has spread abroad, where the intellectuals look to England, as in our troubles we English looked to Bloomsbury, as the still unliberated ­fortress of the mind,” Waugh writes, “Somewhere, we believed, in the minds of the editors of Horizon there existed a free and wise society of which we were all members.”185 Waugh emphasizes his shock when on “the eve of the general election . . . its editor disconcerted his readers by suddenly exhorting them to vote Socialist. Now, in the June issue, he is more explicit and, under ten headings, offers us the first ground plans of the estate he has been preparing for us.”186 Connolly had turned the journal, a symbol of literary autonomy, into a mouthpiece for planning. Moreover, the “revelation” for the planning principles “came to [Connolly] in what he, less than poetically, describes as ‘a lyric contribution to the poetry of motion’—the new cocktail bar of the Golden Arrow train.”187 In the streamlined space of the cocktail bar, united (like much modern design) with the aesthetics of transportation technology, Connolly compromised literary form by collapsing literature, the state, and modern design forms. The pleasure of modern space had enticed him to embrace and publicize Labour’s “ground plans.” Of greatest danger, in Waugh’s mind, is that Connolly is a false prophet. The future he predicted was the naïve version of the more likely future; 183  Evelyn Waugh, “Literary Style in England and America,” Books on Trial, October 1955, in Essays, 481. 184  In spite of his criticism of “publicist[s],” he tried (and failed) to obtain a Ministry of Information position at the start of the war. See Waugh, Letters, 125. 185  Evelyn Waugh, “Palinurus in Never-Neverland: Or, the Horizon Blue-Print of Chaos,” Tablet, July 27, 1946, in Essays, 309. 186  Ibid. Examples of Connolly’s demands include “Model prisons (criminals can be rehabilitated),” “No slums (The material conditions which produce crime need not exist)” (309), and “Light and heat supplied free, like air and water” (310). 187  Ibid., 312.

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214  Reconstructing Modernism Connolly was planning a “Never-never land” and his “Blue-print” was not for greater social discipline but for “Chaos.” “The significant feature of the Palinurus plan is that none of it makes any sense at all,” Waugh explains, “It has been a hobby among literary men for centuries to describe ideal, ­theoretical States. There have been numberless ingenious contrivances, some so coherent that it seemed only pure mischance which made them remain mere works of reason and imagination without concrete form,” but “[i]t has been Palinurus’s achievement to produce a plan so full of internal contradictions that it epitomizes the confusion of all his contemporaries.”188 Despite the disorder of Connolly’s plans, they were not mere visions. Instead, because of circumstances generated by the war, “Palinurus’s Utopia” actually had the ability to be implemented.189 The likely result is a confusion of form, both social and aesthetic. In these plans, Connolly advocated many of the reforms (model prisons, state-directed medical services, and so on) satirized in Waugh’s novella Love Among the Ruins. As Waugh saw it, by writing a future for the state, Connolly had compromised his future as an author: “a tiny doubt rises; can Palinurus be absolutely sure that he would find himself ‘called’ to edit Horizon? It is just conceivable that he would find himself down a mine, and we should all be greatly the losers.”190 Authors themselves were a “threatened class” in this new world, making it imperative that writers of all political stripes oppose this new Britain.191 Waugh was equally quick to reprimand John Betjeman in “Mr. Betjeman Despairs” (1952). Despite Betjeman’s mid-century campaigns against planners, the postwar welfare state, and modern architecture, Waugh criticizes him for adopting an equally egregious populism: “The broadcast pieces were popular . . ..The present writer attempted to listen on several occasions and each time turned off the machine in embarrassment. Now, printed, they still bear the awful stains of their birth—the jauntiness, the intrusive, false intimacy, the sentimentality—which seem inseparable from the medium.”192 188  Ibid. Palinurus was Connolly’s pen name. 189  Ibid., 311. 190  Ibid., 310. 191 Ibid., 312. By contrast, Waugh praises Graham Greene, who, after working for the Ministry of Information during the war, held himself free from the grasp of politicians: “Out of hearing, out of sight, politicians and journalists and popular preacher exhort him to sing the splendours of high wages and sanitation. His eyes are on the Four Last Things, and so mountainous are the disappointments of recent history that there are already signs of a popular breakaway to join him, of a stampede to the heights.” “Felix Culpa?” Commonweal, July 16, 1948, in Essays, 360. 192  Waugh, “Mr. Betjeman” 429.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  215 The cause of literature, Waugh implies, is undermined by writers who move to film and radio broadcast. Much as Waugh faults the medium through which Betjeman’s anti-planning sentiments were expressed, so too does he fault his motives. To explain the inefficacy of Betjeman’s anti-planning pieces, Waugh returns to Connolly from the perspective of 1952, when the plans for the welfare state had materialized: In one of the editorial “Comments” in Horizon, Mr Connolly imagined a benevolent dictator of England who would seek to clean the country of all its hideousness and leave only the old and the beautiful. Methodically his airmen set to work, but before the sound of their engines had died away the inhabitants had crept out of their burrows and were busy re-erecting all that was beastly.193

Connolly’s anticipated reform is now destruction, epitomized in the work of Blitz-style bombers who recall Wells’s airmen. Yet Britain could not be saved by this Blitz, because the populace’s taste is irrevocably flawed. Beauty resides not in the new but in the old, that which is already ruin. “That is the point Mr Betjeman has reached,” Waugh explains, “No prospect pleases because man himself is vile. He is not troubled by the cosmic despair of George Orwell. He thinks it is possible that the politicians and planners will succeed in their task. He thinks security is just round the corner. He looks about him and despairs.”194 As in the epigraph of Brave New World, the greatest threat is not utopia thwarted but utopia achieved. For Betjeman, “There is nothing to look forward to except mediocrity, forcibly imposed, infidelity and vulgarity . . . . He is not greatly concerned with the future. The present is hell.”195 Once planners began to institute their visions, the past, ever in danger of being erased, was all that remained. From an “insular” British tradition, Betjeman made an alternative utopia, always already achieved yet forever out of reach.196 Preservationism can be no more than a distraction from the welfare state, and allegiance to the irrecoverable past may be just as dangerous as allegiance to the future. Waugh is quick to identify Betjeman’s role in making the planners’ future a concrete present. “One must sympathize, but it would be becoming in Mr Betjeman to show more penitence and less condemnation in his palinode,”

193  Ibid., 429–30.

194  Ibid., 430.

195 Ibid.

196  Ibid., 429.

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216  Reconstructing Modernism Waugh writes of Betjeman’s anti-modernism and anti-planning.197 Equally damaging to the nation is Betjeman’s form of resistance to the planners: he “denounces suburban mediocrity, while he himself has been the leader and sole instigator of the fashionable flight from Greatness, away from the traditional hierarchy of classic genius.”198 Indeed, in a 1947 letter to Waugh, Betjeman praised the “sham half-timber” of Tudorbethan Metroland.199 Betjeman, in Waugh’s mind, had turned to the second-rate after abandoning modernism, yet Waugh acknowledges in Love Among the Ruins that little can be done beyond destroying the wanting modern landscape. Just as the state leveled older social structures, modernist building projects erase the aesthetic past.

Love Among the Ruins As I explored in Chapter 1, Waugh criticized Continental modernism in his earliest satirical fiction as well as in his essays. After 1930s exhibitions popularized large-scale plans for rebuilding, Waugh likewise sent up town planning in “An Englishman’s Home” (1939), which he published in Good Housekeeping. In that short story, an heir to a historic country estate furnishes its upkeep by first threatening to build something unsightly in picturesque villages and then selling the land to panicked area estate holders for more than its worth. Waugh describes the duped villagers’ efforts to thwart planning and state-sponsored housing: “Build. It was a word so hideous that no one in Much Malcock dared use it above a whisper. ‘Housing scheme,’ ‘Development,’ ‘Clearance,’ ‘Council Houses,’ ‘Planning’—these obscene words had been expunged from the polite vocabulary of the district.”200 However, the upper classes cannot escape these horrors, as Waugh hints in the town’s compromise with the developer, “the great Hodge Plan for appeasement and peace-in-our-time.”201 Just as war seemed inevitable in 1939, so too did the onslaught of planners and developers. When Waugh published Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future shortly after “Mr. Betjeman Despairs,” large-scale planning had gone 197  Ibid., 430. 198 Ibid. 199  John Betjeman, “Betjeman on Architecture,” Perspectives on Architecture 1.2 (1994): 21. Waugh’s distaste for Metroland is evident in Decline and Fall: Margot becomes Lady Metroland after destroying an authentic Tudor county house. 200  Evelyn Waugh, “An Englishman’s Home,” in The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000), 224. 201  Ibid., 235.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  217 from the exhibition hall to the British landscape, fueled by the dissolution of “peace-in-our-time.” Especially significant in Waugh’s dystopian novella is its setting, the “near future”; unlike Huxley’s and Orwell’s more distant settings, dystopia is little removed from this present. Also unlike the two earlier novels, Waugh imagines the modernist planned community not as a bastion of state power but rather as ruins. In that short period between 1953 and the “near future,” Waugh’s caricatured British state had managed to undermine the older forms that once provided social stability. Much as Waugh forecast the upper classes’ dispossession in his “modest proposal,” the owners of the country estates are stripped of their houses in Love Among the Ruins. Those buildings become model prisons that house citizens who threaten social order. At Mountjoy Castle, arsonist Miles Plastic moves freely among “panels of faded satin and clouded gold” and “islands of old furniture,” while the original owner, injured in World War II, is forced into a home for the disabled.202 Older houses and objects are in grave danger, through abuse and through declining aesthetic judgment. Miles, however, discerns that harboring alternative tastes can be a form of rebellion when, inside his love interest’s prefabricated steel hut, he sees art that is over two hundred years old: Two little paintings hung on the walls, unlike any paintings Miles had seen before, unlike anything approved by the Ministry of Art. One represented a goddess of antiquity . . . the other a vast, tree-fringed lake and a party in spreading silken clothes . . . . The gilt frames were much chipped but what remained of them was elaborately foliated.203

Miles associates these objects with the individuality of Clara, who has grown a beard through a botched sterilization surgery; the art symbolizes the less-than-uniform, the non-state-approved. Miles values the unplanned because, in Waugh’s description of the near future, the state attempts to control the environment, much as Julian Huxley proposed. Through new materials and new uses of space, it molds the behavior of citizens, including the aptly named Miles Plastic, who moves between carefully controlled governmental institutions, from an orphanage to the armed forces to a prison to a government job. Waugh observes that 202 Evelyn Waugh, Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future, in Complete Stories, 470. 203  Ibid., 487.

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218  Reconstructing Modernism “The State had made him” into “the Modern Man”; human beings too are styled in the modern manner.204 Yet, despite the power implied in the ­oft-repeated phrase “State be with you,” the “New Britain” can never exercise complete control.205 The model prisons produce not one successful rehabilitation, and in the very first line of the novella, Waugh exposes the inherent flaws of this environmental manipulation. “Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate,” a failure that results in a “rich, old-fashioned Tennysonian night”; literature and the past cannot be fully suppressed.206 The state’s failure to make the environment uniform reveals a larger shortcoming in the plans used to fashion the New Britain. Miles and Clara’s romance takes place among “the high cow-parsley and willow-herb of the waste building sites,” and Miles later visits Clara in a “hospital, one of the unfinished edifices, all concrete and steel and glass in front and a jumble of huts behind.”207 Most models for the New Britain, which lent so much weight to wartime rebuilding documentaries, never materialize. Instead, the synthetic materials Waugh mocked in Otto Silenus’s structure invade the human form in Love Among the Ruins. Doctors reconstruct Clara’s face with “a wonderful new substance, a sort of synthetic rubber that takes grease-paint perfectly,” leaving “something quite inhuman.”208 The untested new and the synthetic sculpt the human, but only through a process of dehumanization. Waugh more explicitly addresses modernism as a tool for remaking social order through the “Picassos and Légers” carefully chosen for the walls of Miles’s orphanage and hostel.209 While Wells and Korda used Léger and others to imagine a utopian world in Things to Come, these modernists define the dystopian future for Waugh. He addresses modern architecture and planning in particular when Miles is torn away from Mountjoy and assigned to live in “Satellite City.”210 The regional and historical demarcations of place names have disappeared in the rebuilt world, leaving only the vocabulary of planning. Even more, the city is one of many units produced by a template, similar to the “Reilly units” Orwell criticized in 1946. Satellite City’s modernist governmental building reveals the full danger of this planned world. That structure hosts the state-sponsored euthanasia center where Miles works and where Waugh stages the demise of modernism, collectivism, and literature. The ostensible progress of the postwar welfare state was an illusion; neither planning nor modernist environments nor the 204  Ibid., 472. 207  Ibid., 488, 492.

205  Ibid., 477, 476. 208  Ibid., 493.

206  Ibid., 469. 209  Ibid., 473, 482.

210  Ibid., 478.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  219 socialist state eliminate the wartime violence that propelled those reforms. As in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, war in Love Among the Ruins is continuous and imbedded in the structure and architecture of the city: Satellite City, one of a hundred such grand conceptions, was not yet in its teens but already the Dome of Security showed signs of wear . . . . On the day of its dedication, among massed politicians and People’s Choirs the great lump of building materials had shone fine as a factory in all its brilliance. Since then, during one of the rather frequent weekends of international panic, it had been camouflaged and its windows blackened. Cleaners were few and usually on strike. So the Dome of Security remained blotched and dingy, the sole permanent building of Satellite City. There were no workers’ flats, no officials’ garden suburb, no parks, no playground yet. These were all on the drawing boards in the surveyor’s office, tattered at the edges, ringed by tea cups; their designer long since cremated and his ashes scattered among the docks and nettles. Thus the Dome of Security comprised, even more than had been intended, all the aspirations and amenities of the city.211

In place of a monumental architecture proclaiming the power of the warring state, as Orwell depicted, Waugh looks to a near future when war will leave modernism and the government it buttressed in ruin. As state-sponsored architecture went from model—the climax of planning documentaries—to reality, its hold over the imagination had diminished, and so had the state’s. The promised workers’ amenities had not materialized, and the one modern building that had arisen, the Dome of Security, showed just how insecure citizens were. As in Orwell’s postwar dystopia, lifts fail and the power supply is unstable, leaving the modern refrigerators promised in wartime documentaries full of “tiny rations . . . quietly putrefying.”212 The People’s War was lost after it had ostensibly been won, and the architecture of light and hygiene becomes a dark and dirty place. It is fitting that the most efficient and beloved social service is the Dome of Security’s euthanasia center, where Miles has been assigned to work: “Euthanasia had not been part of the original 1945 Health Service,” but “[u]nder the Bevan-Eden Coalition the service . . . won instant popularity” as a source of succor for “welfare-weary citizens.”213 As a dystopian rather than

211  Ibid., 478–9.

212  Ibid., 479.

213  Ibid., 479, 479–80, 481.

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220  Reconstructing Modernism utopian planner, Waugh offers his own account of the “real” future history of the welfare state. If staging its demise in a euthanasia center located in modernist ruins were not a strong enough statement, Waugh uses the same vigor employed in “Mr. Betjeman Despairs” to convict the 1930s literary community that collaborated with the “destroying forces.” Of the euthanasia center’s director, the ultimate cross-medium modernist collaborator, Waugh writes, The Director was an elderly man called Dr. Beamish, a man whose character had been formed in the nervous ’30s, now much embittered, like many of his contemporaries, by the fulfilment of his early hopes. He had signed manifestoes in his hot youth, had raised his fist in Barcelona and had painted abstractedly for Horizon; he had stood beside Spender at great concourses of Youth, and written ‘publicity’ for the Last Viceroy. Now his reward had come to him.214

Beamish is embittered not by seeing his utopia thwarted but by seeing it achieved. The “reward” for his 1930s literary and artistic credentials is to kill the literary figures who worked to achieve the new architecture and the new state. Parsnip and Pimpernell, the fictionalized Auden and Isherwood from Waugh’s World War II novel Put Out More Flags, are among the citizens who choose death at the hands of the state that they willed into existence. Parsnip (Auden) frequently visits the center but fails to follow through on his decision. On the day Parsnip does choose to die, Beamish recalls, “ ‘I knew him well once, him and his friend Pimpernell. New Writing, the Left Book Club, they were all the rage. Pimpernell was one of my first patients. Hand Parsnip in and we’ll finish him off.’ ”215 Indeed, Waugh includes an illustration of a decrepit Parsnip clutching a journal called Newest Writing. Though he devoted himself to aesthetic and political newness, Parsnip is now set to be killed in a “gas chamber” in a modernist building in a socialist state.216 Waugh’s likening of the 1930s Pioneer Health Centre to an extermination center echoes in this modernist euthanasia center, where literary figures have become complicit in their own killings. Miles, the arsonist, provides the one remaining hope. He recognizes that older aesthetic forms are bankrupt after Clara, the possessor of fine 200-year-old French paintings of female figures, nonetheless chooses the 214  Ibid., 480.

215  Ibid., 496.

216 Ibid.

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Betjeman, Orwell, Waugh, and Planned Futures  221 synthetic and ugly by having her face reconstructed. Miles realizes that the world he desires no longer exists.217 He consequently burns Mountjoy Castle, where beautiful furniture and art objects were repurposed after the government disinherited the aristocrat who gave them their meaning and social function. After destroying that older world, Miles returns to “the reek of State sausages frying in State grease” that permeates his “asbestos cubicle.”218 Waugh acts out this destruction not only through his narrative but also through his illustrations. While he provided his own drawings for Decline and Fall, for this novella he manipulated engravings of the work of Antonio Canova, commonly recognized as the leading Neoclassical sculptor. Waugh used scissors to trim the engravings and ink to change details. For the cover art, Waugh adapted a scene featuring Cupid and Psyche by adding Clara’s beard to Psyche’s face.219 As we saw in Chapter 1, Neoclassicism signified to Waugh a conjoined aesthetic and social order. Through modifying these forms, Waugh enacts the modern destruction of this classical order. At the same time, the beard he adds is a symbol of failed standardization. In this irreverence, the illustrations do similar work to Waugh’s satire. By labeling his “Exiles from Welfare” illustration “Canova fec. Moses delin. Waugh perfec.,” Waugh jokingly places himself alongside these artists; he uses Neoclassical work to indict the false social order instituted through modern architecture, but like Miles, Waugh’s strategy is ultimately a defacement, since the old social and aesthetic order cannot be reinstated. For Miles to destroy the environments that shaped him would be to shed those planned environments’ continued control over him. As Miles is shown the model for the new Mountjoy, “a familiar, standard packing case, set on end,” he feels the tug of his governmental education in modernism: “It fitted. It fell into place precisely in the void of his mind, satisfying all the needs for which his education had prepared him. The conditioned personality recognized its proper pre-ordained environment . . . . The Modern Man was home.”220 The standardized object—the packing case—resonates with the standardized environments and the standardized people they ostensibly produce; state-endorsed design had become “home,” and the new architecture 217  This aligns with Orwell’s observation that Waugh’s “loyalty is to a form of society no longer viable, of which he must be aware.” Extracts, 512. 218  Ibid., 495. 219  See a discussion of this technique in Frederick John Stopp, Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of an Artist (London: Chapman & Hall, 1958) and Jeffrey A. Manley, “Waugh, Canova, and Cupid and Psyche,” Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies 38.3 (2008): 8–9. 220 Waugh, Love, 500.

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222  Reconstructing Modernism had achieved its “Modern Man.” If the novella were to end there, state conditioning would triumph, as it did in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Winston dies loving Big Brother. Totalitarianism would be complete when both citizens and the environment are truly predictable and manipulable. After Miles leaves, he feels an object in his pocket: “It proved to be his cigarette lighter, a most uncertain apparatus. He pressed the catch and instantly, surprisingly, there burst out a tiny flame—gemlike, hymeneal, auspicious.”221 Though Miles knows that reinstituting older aesthetic and social orders is beyond his power, Waugh raises the hope that individuality can survive state conditioning. While planning may work on the larger level, the individual—“a most uncertain apparatus”—remains unpredictable and at times irrational; as Wells acknowledged, personal futures are beyond the grasp of planners.

221  Ibid., 501.

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Epilogue: Modernist Afterlives J. G. Ballard’s “Handful Of Dust”

Through the work of influential postmodernist critics like Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, we are much more likely to consider the influence of architecture on postmodernist authors than on modernists. Indeed, Jameson used the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles as the key to interpreting the cultural conditions that fueled postmodernism.1 Yet, because so many of these studies link the postmodern understanding of space to the workings of global capitalism, scholars have often failed to recognize that this engagement with space—particularly in the British context—is an outgrowth of modernist and mid-century authors’ long preoccupation with modern architecture. Critical attention to J. G. Ballard’s built environments is a case in point. Scholars often characterize these environments as postmodern hyperspace, in the style of Jameson, or hyperreal spaces, in the style of Baudrillard, but we should also acknowledge the continued hold that the nation, World War II, and modernist architecture had on postwar British literature.2 By doing so, we can understand Ballard’s work as an extension of the mid-century body of dystopian fiction created by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh in response to the modernist trans­­forma­ tion of the British built environment. This longer history reveals a haunting at the core of Ballard’s writing: in much the same way as his childhood internment in a Japanese prison camp kindled his fictional landscapes of violence and survival, Ballard portrays a modernism and a nation seemingly unable to escape the extreme violence of World War II. While the devastation of World War I may have led Europeans to seek answers in a more 1  See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), 38–45. 2  The work of Alison and Peter Smithson—particularly their creation of a post-nuclear war structure for the “This is Tomorrow” exhibition (1956)—has been recognized as an important influence, but I would argue that Ballard ultimately understood postwar architecture in the context of prewar architectural earnestness and commitment to planning for peace. Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State. Ashley Maher, Oxford University Press (2020). © Ashley Maher. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198816485.001.0001

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224  Reconstructing Modernism democratic architecture, concrete and steel buildings after World War II were always already blood-spattered for Ballard.3 In his 2006 article for the Guardian, “A Handful of Dust,” Ballard dissects the legacy of both architectural and literary modernisms. With a title that repurposes an oft-quoted line from The Waste Land—Eliot’s record of postwar social ruin—the essay addresses a modernism that was itself in ruins.4 Ballard describes a trip to see the remains of Utah Beach blockhouses, and he links these concrete and steel Nazi fortifications to postwar British public housing and infrastructure: The “scattered rubbish and tang of urine” that Ballard discovered from those who sought temporary shelter prompt him to “think of structures closer to home in England—run-down tower blocks and motorway exit ramps, pedestrian underpasses sprung from the drawing boards of enlightened planners who would never have to live in or near them.”5 Ballard suggests that the violent, dystopian landscapes at the heart of his fiction are very real. They are the legacy of architectural modernism, particularly its ties to World War II, when that style functioned as a visual promise of a new, more equitable Britain. Architecture’s modern movement, for Ballard, is both a failed aesthetic program and a failed social program; it represents a crisis point for the nation that had attempted to reinvent itself through modernism, as well as for the literature that had imagined its own possibilities through that of modern architecture. Ballard consequently uses these blockhouses as a point of reference for tracing the history of modernist utopianism, and he turns to playwright Bertolt Brecht, who, “no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom.” Ballard sympathizes with that impulse, for he notes that “[m]odernism’s attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic.” 3 Laura Colombino’s Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature (New York: Routledge, 2013) offers a bridge between exploring postmodern space and identifying a lingering modernist presence. Colombino establishes the Bauhaus’s postwar influence and explores the impact that the 1960s avant-garde group Archigram had on Ballard. 4  It is possible that someone at the newspaper, rather than Ballard, selected the title for this essay, but Ballard had referenced The Waste Land in The Drowned World. (See Patrick  A.  McCarthy, “Allusions in Ballard’s The Drowned World,” Science Fiction Studies 24 (1997): 302–10.) This would not be the first time that a British author appropriated “a handful of dust” to weigh the social consequences of modern design: in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (a title Waugh chose late in the writing process), a chrome-plated interior is installed in a sham Gothic house. Ballard thus continues a mid-century tradition of rereading literary modernism via modern architecture and design. 5  Ballard, “Handful.”

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MODERNIST AFTERLIVES: J. G. BALLARD’S “ HANDFUL OF DUST ”   225 He credits modernism with challenging classical architecture, a system that used elements like columns and pilasters to embody “a hierarchical order” and included “huge flights of steps” to keep the people in the “common street” apart from the seats of “[p]ower and authority.”6 Through instituting architectonic reforms, modernists promised to overhaul the relationship between citizens and the state. Interwar modernism acted as a “vast utopian project,” though it is “perhaps the last utopian project we will ever see” because of a more recent cultural understanding that “all utopias have their dark side.” Ballard thus declares that “modernism of the heroic period, from 1920 to 1939, is dead, and it died first in the blockhouses of Utah beach and the Siegfried line.” Even as the state violence of World War II killed a heroic modernism, totalitarianism breathed new life into its shell. “Hitler and Stalin were intrigued by modernism,” Ballard argues, but totalitarianism in modern architecture did not come from so direct a source: “the dictators were ner­vous of clear-headed people who thought for themselves,” and in projects like the Festival of Britain and “Corbusier’s state capital buildings at Chandigarh in India,” modern architects and planners put themselves in the service of democracy.7 However, like Orwell and Waugh, Ballard feared that form itself could instigate inhuman violence. Through “the styling of Mercedes cars, at once paranoid and aggressive, like medieval German armour,” and “1960s kitchens and bathrooms, white-tiled laboratories that are above all clean and aseptic, as if human beings were some kind of disease,” modern forms carry within them the legacy of war, eugenics, and even genocide. Ballard goes so far as to cast the repository of British modern art, the Tate Modern, as “a vast totalitarian space that Albert Speer would have admired, so authoritarian that it overwhelms any work of art inside it.” Rather than opening the possibility of a better way of life to be achieved through this new art, modern architecture worked against those reforms. Though Ballard asserts that postwar modern architecture, through its visual similarity to the architecture of war and through its origins in the warring states, could be only a dystopian prospect, he also distinguishes himself from the postmodern architectural critics who argued that modernism was a priori authoritarian. “I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton,” Ballard writes, “But I know that most people, 6  Ballard’s assessment recalls Shaw’s disapproval of “impressive architecture.” 7  Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry were partners in the Chandigarh project.

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226  Reconstructing Modernism myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry.” In spite of the efforts of early modernists like Roger Fry and Wyndham Lewis, modern design failed to create a new citizenry to populate its new forms. Auden’s appeal to “look shining at/New styles of architecture” in his poem “Petition” was answered, but it had not come with the “change of heart” that proponents thought would arise naturally from the new architecture. Instead, in an echo of the Utah Beach blockhouses—themselves an echo of a failed prewar modernism— Ballard concludes that “[a]rchitecture supplies us with camouflage.” The “honesty” that John Betjeman had once identified in the clean lines of modernism was untenable in a world wracked by conflict. As Ballard describes architects’ failure to mold a population that would find itself morally opposed to war and violence, he traces the death throes of modernist utopianism by turning his attention to yet another player in World War II. “Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were two utopian projects that turned into the greatest dystopias the world has known,” Ballard writes of these rival political systems; “Modernism briefly survived them both, but lost its nerve in the 1960s when the municipal high-rise estates in St Louis, Missouri, were deemed social catastrophes and dynamited.” Ballard refers here to the proclamation of architectural historian Charles Jencks: “Modern architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972, at 3.32pm (or thereabouts).”8 Jencks pronounces modernism dead at the time the PruittIgoe public housing project, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, was demolished.9 He thereby concludes that Pruitt-Igoe—and, by extension, modernism as a whole—is unlivable, a failed social experiment.10 While modernism “died first in the blockhouses of Utah beach and the Siegfried line,” according to Ballard, Jencks declares it fully dead through the failures of postwar social housing. However, Ballard emphasizes that modernism did fulfill an important function in its afterlife: But all is not lost for admirers of modernism. They should visit the mortuary island of San Michele in the Venice lagoon, where many pioneers of modernism such as Igor Stravinsky, Serge Diaghilev and Ezra Pound are interred . . . . This is a place beyond hope, of haunted gateways and

8 Jencks, Language, 9. 9  Yamasaki was also the architect for the World Trade Center. 10  Ballard frames this as an act of the people as well as the state. He surmises, “that social catastrophe was what the dirt-poor residents secretly longed for.”

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MODERNIST AFTERLIVES: J. G. BALLARD’S “ HANDFUL OF DUST ”   227 melancholy statues . . . . But then, in the heart of the cemetery, there is a sudden lightening of tone, and you find you are strolling through what might be a Modern suburb of Tunis or Tel Aviv. The lines of family tombs resemble cheerful vacation bungalows, airy structures of white walls and glass that might have been designed by Le Corbusier or Richard Neutra. One could holiday for a long time in these pleasant villas, and a few of us probably will.

In Ballard’s telling, buildings of the International Style are indistinguishable from funereal structures. Architectural modernism is seemingly an “architecture of death,” designed to mark the passing of literary modernism (among other prewar experiments), since early modernists like Pound had sought to revolutionize literature via modern architecture. As I have noted in Chapter 1, Waugh argued that the world envisioned by Le Corbusier and other prominent architects had become totally divorced from war-torn Europe; it was a modernism of an alternative, unreachable, modernity. Ballard takes this one step further as he characterizes modernist authors’ embrace of modern architecture not just as an attempt to imagine other worlds, but as something unworldly. Ballard finds it fitting that only in the afterworld of death could literary and architectural modernisms reach their apotheosis. Reworking utopia as, literally, both “no place” and “good place,” Ballard identifies a resting spot for modernism that is a particular place, the “one place where modernism triumphs,” a fulfillment that is also an absence. Even as modernism offered a vantage point from which its alternative world might be glimpsed, though never entered, its ruins became channels of violence, places where World War II atrocities had never ceased. Of the quasi-modernist blockhouses of Utah Beach, Ballard writes, “Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.” These ruins also litter Britain: “Whenever I came across these grim fortifications along France’s Channel coast and German border, I realised I was exploring a set of concrete tombs whose dark ghosts haunted the brutalist architecture so popular in Britain in the 1950s.” Even if the modernist movement had been pronounced dead, it lived on in “every high-rise sink estate of the time, in the Barbican development and the Hayward Gallery in London, in new towns such as Cumbernauld and the ziggurat residential blocks at the University of East Anglia.” Britain’s council housing, art repositories, new towns, and universities bear the mark of politicians’ previous faith in a curative modern architecture. Like the blockhouses on Utah Beach, this British

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228  Reconstructing Modernism architecture not just invites but incites violence. Modernism lives on as ruins that nonetheless forecast a future, albeit one of violence. Through Ballard’s “A Handful of Dust,” the stakes of “One Afternoon at Utah Beach” (1978) become clear. In that short story, Ballard’s protagonist, David, believes that he has discovered a German soldier who—unaware that the war has ended—inhabits a blockhouse, a discovery that unleashes David’s own desire to attack his wife’s lover, Richard. In the later Guardian essay, Ballard describes his experience “some years ago” of entering a Utah Beach blockhouse, “as indifferent to time as the pyramids,” where he noted the “sinister letter box view of the sea” as well as the feces and other debris left behind by all those who had taken up residence in the blockhouse since the war. Much like the British airplane factories that were repurposed for manufacturing prefabricated houses, these military constructions transform into an ominous sort of postwar housing for transient residents. In Ballard’s short story, despite the fact that his young wife, Angela, has “ ‘forgotten about the war,’ ” David becomes enamored of the history of Utah Beach, especially of the large steel and concrete blockhouses, the “concrete monsters” that dot the coast near their vacation house.11 Modernist architecture turns against itself in the narrator’s observation that “[l]ike all ex­amples of  cryptic architecture, in which form no longer revealed function . . . these World War II blockhouses seemed to transcend time, complex ciphers with a powerful latent identity.”12 The functionalism that defined steel and concrete modernist architecture comes unmoored from those forms. The blockhouses lose contact with the environment for which they were created as well as their original historical context, for, to David’s eyes, the “wet anthracite” in the midst of the sunny weather “existed within a climatic zone of its own.”13 Instead of responding to history and environment, these structures rewrite those seemingly intractable facts. The form of the blockhouses captivated Ballard as well as David. In the archive that Ballard prepared for the British Library before his death, he included two series of Normandy blockhouse photographs that are heavily attendant in their composition to the varied geometry and the play of light across the surfaces of those buildings. In addition to the set of color photographs from the 1970s for which he provided captions, Ballard submitted a set of professional quality black and white prints, each twelve by sixteen 11  J.  G.  Ballard, “One Afternoon at Utah Beach,” in The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001), 972. 12  Ibid., 973. Emphasis mine. 13  Ibid., 974, 978.

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MODERNIST AFTERLIVES: J. G. BALLARD’S “ HANDFUL OF DUST ”   229 inches.14 These fine art-style photographs of Nazi bunkers underline the aesthetic qualities of the concrete and steel structures; rather than serving as historical documentation, these images collapse past into present through their focus on looming, quasi-futuristic forms. Beyond this aesthetic unmooring, the blockhouses kindle violence in “One Afternoon at Utah Beach,” such that the war transcends its own end: the Nazi soldier David discovers is dressed in a ragged uniform but nonetheless sports a youthful face three decades later. When David realizes that the soldier missed the Allies’ landing and has been on guard for decades, he plots the mid-century conflict’s final “military action” by rehabilitating the soldier and convincing him that Angela and Richard—who has begun to carry a shotgun—are part of the long-awaited Allied invasion.15 As David and the soldier launch this “last war crime committed during World War II,” David is killed by Richard, and Angela and Richard discover his body dressed in a German uniform.16 In this concrete and steel blockhouse, which prompts a British man to transform himself into a Nazi, state violence and personal violence are inseparable. Reading “A Handful of Dust” alongside “One Afternoon at Utah Beach,” we see that these blockhouses indict postwar Britain more generally. For Ballard, welfare state planners mistakenly placed their faith in a utopian modern architecture that had been perverted by the war; the rebuilt world looked no different from the structures built for conflict. Through his British Library archive, we can further identify how Ballard’s understanding of hybridized civilian and military architecture emerged from a firsthand experience of the architecture of internment camps. Documents from the Lunghua Camp reveal the extent to which camp residents assessed their architectural surroundings.17 Ballard includes residents’ comprehensive architectural plan of the complex, including ruins, as well as section plans and detailed descriptions of the condition, construction materials, and structure types of the individual buildings. A report on “the State of Lunghwa Civil Assembly Centre” describes the architectural history of the 14  See finding aid for Add MS 88938/1/12/5 Photographs of German Bunkers, Utah Beach, Normandy ([1970s]) and Add MS 88938/1/12/10 Large Printed Photographs of World War II Bunkers (Normandy) ([c 1980]) of The Papers of James Graham Ballard (Add MS 88938: 1931–2010), Archives and Manuscripts, British Library. These fifteen prints are almost entirely of bunkers, but there are a few of war-damaged buildings. 15  Ballard, “One,” 977. 16  Ibid., 980. 17  The documents were given to Ballard by the wife of a fellow internee in 1996. See Chris Beckett, “The Progress of the Text: The Papers of J. G. Ballard at the British Library,” Electronic British Library Journal (2011): 4.

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230  Reconstructing Modernism site and efforts by camp residents to improve the infrastructure and hygiene provisions. Through funds contributed by internees, money raised via the canteen, and materials from the British Residents’ Association, internee-led construction work was undertaken.18 A picture emerges of architecture as a determinant of civilian survival during times of war. The lengths to which the residents went to control their environment testifies to the dangers they perceived in lapsed architectural and social order. By contrast, Ballard’s body of work emphasizes that architecture itself can act as a channel for violence and disintegration. Through Concrete Island (1974), Ballard explored this idea of residual wartime violence using the postwar architecture and infrastructure of London. In that novel, architect Robert Maitland finds himself stranded after he crashes his car within sight of his office.19 He is trapped in an urban wasteland where an old air raid shelter survives amid the surrounding modern buildings and motorways. Ballard characterizes the roofs of these shelters—which had been repurposed during the Cold War by the Civil Defence Corps—as “the backs of ancient animals buried asleep in the soil.”20 Much as Orwell depicted how easily an atom bomb could erase modernist progress, Ballard introduces the idea of a mass violence committed by warring states so extreme that it could cause mass extinction: through these bomb shelters, the link between modern architectural innovation and heightened domestic militarism is clear.21 Amid this residue of history, Maitland contemplates the modern landscape as future ruin. He recalls a trip to La Grande Motte, a “futuristic resort complex” that recycled the forms of ancient societies through its “ziggurat hotels and apartment houses, and the vast, empty parking lots laid down by the planners years before any tourist would arrive to park their cars.”22 Architecture not only testifies to social ruin; it even anticipates it, since the work done by “the planners” results in a city that appears to be “abandoned in advance of itself.”23 Modern architecture, for Ballard as well as for Waugh, is not-so-distant ruins. Whereas Waugh argued that modernism was merely incapable of taking Britain beyond the state violence of World War I, Ballard portrays a 18  See Add MS 88938/2/1/7/2 Plans of Lunghua [‘Lunghwa’] Camp, and Documents in The Papers of James Graham Ballard. 19 J. G. Ballard, Concrete Island (London: Picador, 2001), 132. 20  For the Cold War use, see ibid., 69; ibid., 173. 21 Recall the technological strides that MARS Group architects believed the war would bring for modern architecture. 22  Ibid., 65. 23 Ibid.

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MODERNIST AFTERLIVES: J. G. BALLARD’S “ HANDFUL OF DUST ”   231 post–World War II Europe where architects and civil servants unwittingly plan not for an unreachable utopia but for ruin itself, a negation of architectural and human form. Through rewriting Robinson Crusoe in Concrete Island, Ballard presents fiction as a means of recording future extinction even as it documents human survival in hostile environments. The missed future of modernism becomes—as an extension of Huxley’s, Betjeman’s, and Orwell’s dystopian literature—a very real future. That future is not simply one of modernist corruption at the hands of totalitarianism, as Orwell, Isherwood, and Bowen feared. Instead, the modernist future has effectively displaced the entire human future. By weighing a humanist literature against cities seemingly designed to be unpopulated, Ballard indicates that modern architects’ aims have become completely divorced from modern authors’. With High-Rise (1975), Ballard even more pointedly explores modern architecture as the very antithesis of the higher social order that it was meant to produce; Ballard’s narrative chronicles the widespread dissolution into violence that Concrete Island left largely in the future tense. In Ballard’s later novel, a designer of a new set of high-rises—each a Corbusian “vertical city” in itself—takes up residence on the top floor of the first building completed.24 This architect, Anthony Royal, discerns violence written into the very form of the building: “With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and swimming-pools, bank and junior school—all in effect abandoned in the sky—the high-rise offered more than enough op­por­tun­ities for violence and confrontation.”25 The centrality of architecture to this novel manifests itself in the growing importance of Royal’s character in the successive drafts. In Ballard’s first typescript, Royal is not the building’s designer but merely its first tenant and an interested observer: he has a “liking for experiment” and is interested in the high-rise as a new architectural “riddle,” because it entices architects like him to determine whether that template is a “viable social structure.”26 By changing Royal from theorist to planner in later drafts, Ballard underscores the self-destructive nature of this architectural experiment. Rather than acting as a referendum on the practicality of the high-rise, a design problem, Ballard’s tower block implicates architects themselves. In a lecture noted by the Architects’ Journal, Sibylle Heil explicitly connects Ballard’s high-rise to the rocky legacy of a particular modernist architect in Britain. She remarks that, like Anthony Royal, Ernö Goldfinger lived on 24 J. G. Ballard, High-Rise (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), 9. 25  Ibid., 7. 26  The Papers of James Graham Ballard, Add MS 88938/3/10/2/1, 139, 130, 130.

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232  Reconstructing Modernism the top floor of his Balfron Tower project (1968) in order ‘to publicise its qualities.’ ”27 By making architects major characters in Concrete Island and High-Rise, Ballard scrutinizes the modernist architectural legacy of using aesthetic experimentation as a means of social experimentation. Like the architect Goldfinger in Balfron Tower, Royal interacts socially with the residents in order to gauge the building’s effect on them. Through the white jacket he wears, Royal merges with the building’s white walls, markers of “its smooth functionalism.”28 Significantly, he is the first victim of the violence written into the site’s plans: after he is injured in a car accident, he bears the distinction of being not only “the project’s first road casualty” but also responsible for “help[ing] to design the site of the accident.”29 The dys­ topian reality of the tower’s utopian design leads resident Richard Wilder to picture Royal “ ‘hovering over us like some kind of fallen angel.’ ”30 Unlike Goldfinger, Royal finds himself unwilling to leave the new social order that he unleashed through his structure. It is he, as the occupant of the top floor, who violently enforces the order that initially emerges, with power increasing the higher the floor. The fighting that results among the residents is not a simple domestic spat but draws its energies from World War II and the Blitz, which made way for a host of tower blocks. Ballard circles back to Utah Beach when the protagonist of High-Rise, the physician Robert Laing, notes that the luxury tower blocks of the complex are “an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other,” virtually “a row of concrete bunkers.”31 The residents experience the conflict within the building much like “civilians in a war-torn city dealing with yet another air-raid.”32 Ballard directly connects this warlike architecture to the British experience of World War II when Royal imagines his move toward leaving the tower as “his personal Dunkirk,” and early in Ballard’s first typescript, inhabitants view a World War II documentary, even as the mythology of wartime cooperation crumbles in their building.33 Drawing attention to 27  See Ed Firth, “JG Ballard was inspired by the Westway and the Trellick Tower,” Architects’ Journal 229.10 (2009): 49. If Goldfinger was Ballard’s inspiration, it would not be his first brush with postwar British literature: Ian Fleming famously used Goldfinger’s name for his villain, Auric Goldfinger. The architect threatened to sue over the use of his distinctive last name—and received many prank phone calls because of that shared moniker. Cyril Connolly’s suggestion that Fleming rename his title character Goldprick became unnecessary when Goldfinger settled with Fleming’s publisher. See Nigel Warburton, Ernö Goldfinger: The Life of an Architect (London: Routledge, 2003), 1–3. Goldfinger had twice contributed to Connolly’s little magazine Horizon. 28 Ballard, High-Rise, 86. 29  Ibid., 43. 30  Ibid., 17. 31  Ibid., 10. 32  Ibid., 71–2. 33  Ibid., 82; The Papers of James Graham Ballard, Add MS 88938/3/10/2/1, 48–9.

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MODERNIST AFTERLIVES: J. G. BALLARD’S “ HANDFUL OF DUST ”   233 civilian death, Ballard reframes World War II as something unheroic. Blood joins concrete, glass, and steel as a modern material, spread across the white walls and concrete sculptures. If state-sponsored architects promised to fulfill the sacrifices made in the People’s War by improving opportunities and living conditions across class, Ballard’s novel suggests that the modern movement failed to deliver its promised egalitarianism. “The old social sub-divisions, based on power, capital and self-interest,” Ballard writes, “had re-asserted themselves here as anywhere else.”34 The physical layout of the building stands in for the more abstract boundaries of class, leading Wilder, a resident of the lower floors, to conclude that “their real opponent was not the hierarchy of residents in the heights far above them, but the image of the building in their own minds, the multiplying layers of concrete that anchored them to the floor.”35 As Ballard addresses the failure of modern housing to improve citizen life, he skirts Waugh and others’ criticism of the enforced collectivity that they perceived in modernist architecture. Instead, Ballard describes the col­lect­ive­ly owned high-rise—a “ ‘glorified tenement’ ”—as “a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation.”36 Ballard too repurposes Le Corbusier’s “machine for living,” but he does not simply see these forms as extensions of socialism; in fact, they instill resistance to collectivist systems as a whole. Whereas earlier authors like Orwell feared that authoritarian masterminds could manipulate modernism for their own ends, Ballard portrays modernism as a run­away aesthetic, almost with its own will: the engineer as well as the machine.37 Indeed, in the first typescript of Chapter 1, Laing picks up a “paperback biography of Le Corbusier” to read when the power fails; by Chapter 17, Ballard describes the building as a “domestic machine” that had “ceased to function.”38 Wartime politicians had used design to shape the public’s appetite for new models of governance, but modern architecture in High-Rise runs beyond the control of artists and the state, producing citizens of its own making: “A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere.”39 In this figuration, people, 34 Ballard, High-Rise, 62. 35  Ibid., 69. 36  Ibid., 18, 11. 37  Accordingly, although Royal lives at the top of the building, the structure is the most dominant force; it survives its creator. 38  The Papers of James Graham Ballard, Add MS 88938/3/10/2/1, 24–5; ibid., 285. 39 Ballard, High-Rise, 42.

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234  Reconstructing Modernism not houses, are the machines. Gone is the MARS Group’s formulation of the new architecture as “humanism in a new age that the war and everything else is making.”40 In Ballard’s novel, the modernism that materializes is unrecognizable to its own planners, even antithetical to their objectives. “In principle,” the narrator observes, “the mutiny of these well-to-do professional people against the building they had collectively purchased was no different from the dozens of well-documented revolts by working-class tenants against municipal tower-blocks that had taken place at frequent intervals during the post-war years,” and this mutiny prompted the “breakdown of the building as a social structure.”41 Welfare state collectivity, in Ballard’s telling, disintegrated when planners’ trusted aesthetic came to embody not the optimism of the People’s War but the horrors of civilian death during the Blitz. As modern architecture slid into ruin, its alternative futures emerged, and those forms were haunted by the legacy of architects like Berthold Lubetkin who designed bomb shelters during the war. Ballard thus pushes back against earlier authors’ faith in shared taste as a social glue. As he writes from Royal’s perspective, The building was a monument to good taste, to the well-designed kitchen, to sophisticated utensils and fabrics, to elegant and never ostentatious furnishings—in short, to that whole aesthetic sensibility which these well-educated professional people had inherited from all the schools of industrial design, all the award-winning schemes of interior decoration institutionalized by the last quarter of the twentieth century. Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbours’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape. Royal would have given anything for one vulgar mantelpiece ornament, one less than snow-white lavatory bowl, one hint of hope. Thank God that they were at last breaking out of this fur-lined prison.42 40  “What is Modern Architecture?” 32. 42  Ibid., 96–7.

41 Ballard, High-Rise, 83.

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MODERNIST AFTERLIVES: J. G. BALLARD’S “ HANDFUL OF DUST ”   235 As Royal observes the building’s effects on its inhabitants, he recognizes that good design has no civilizing power, and the “proletariat of the future” would be no better off with the intervention of a modernist designer. While Stephen Spender early in his career sincerely believed that exchanging poorly designed everyday objects for beautiful modern objects would create social revolution, these examples of good design in High-Rise have no power to stop the tide of violent upheaval. Modern materials and modern forms show themselves to be at odds with the progressive politics to which this architecture was assumed to be inherently joined. By tracing the fallout of modern design, Ballard underlines that High-Rise is not simply the story of an anomalous tower block but rather a narrative that would likely be replicated in every other tower block in the complex— and, implicitly, beyond. Royal discerns that “the present breakdown of the high-rise might well mark its success rather than its failure. Without realizing it, he had given these people a means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organization that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks.”43 As the novel closes, Laing spots a power outage in the more recently built neighboring tower and finds himself “ready to welcome [those occupants] to their new world.”44 The “new life” that Royal envisions— and that Laing sees fulfilled in this expanding “new world”—is in fact “the emergence of [a] new social and psychological order,” and Royal accordingly devotes himself to “helping the two thousand residents towards their new Jerusalem.”45 The utopian future initially described by architects, politicians, and sympathetic authors is replaced with another model of the future, one in which “violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.”46 For Laing, however, this substituted utopia is the mere ruins of the future. “Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them,” Laing observes, and “sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.”47 Tracing the fate of the architectural style through which postwar Britain had sought to reinvent itself, Ballard documents a national future that had been exhausted, a promised future that was now ruin. The only future left to be imagined is one of emptiness: buildings that had outlived the violence of their inhabitants, no longer housing but mere forms.

43  Ibid., 84. 46  Ibid., 109.

44  Ibid., 204. 47  Ibid., 173.

45  Ibid., 91, 84.

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236  Reconstructing Modernism As the utopian future underwent this transformation, so too did the media that had undergirded and publicized modern architecture. After Britain’s nascent documentary film movement popularized modernism in the 1930s through incorporating architectural models and other representations of future construction, television producer Richard Wilder in HighRise chronicles modern structures’ slide into ruin, a testament to that “future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.” His wife labels his attempt to record the “physical and psychological pressures of living in a huge condominium” as “ ‘[a]nother prison documentary,’ ” and Wilder notes that his bedroom does in fact remind him “of a cell he had filmed two days earlier in the psychiatric wing of the prison.”48 Instead of documenting modern architecture’s possibilities or its achievements, Wilder documents its strictures. His scheme draws from the same aerial perspectives that Betjeman repurposed in the Bird’s Eye View series: Wilder im­agines moving from helicopter views to extreme close-ups of a representative in­ter­ior, “one cell in this nightmare termitary.”49 Soon other residents begin making their own films to screen in the tower block’s theatre. This effort proves so popular that the building’s “floors were littered with the blackened negative strips” of Polaroid cameras as residents document their acts of aggression.50 The integration of violence into the documentary medium becomes complete as the novel draws to an end, when Wilder shoots Royal with a gun instead of a camera.51 Much as Ballard refigures 1930s filmmakers’ embrace of modernism, which led to the wartime documentaries of writers like Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene, so too does he refigure Julian Huxley and Berthold Lubetkin’s modernist zoo, which modeled civilian casualty during the Blitz. Observing the layers of balconies lining the building, Laing feels “uneasily like a visitor to a malevolent zoo, where terraces of vertically mounted cages contained creatures of random and ferocious cruelty.”52 Indeed, “[z]oos, and the architecture of large structures, had always been Royal’s particular interest,” and his designs for the high-rise had drawn from the physical and social organization the zoo represented.53 “As for the new social order that he had hoped to see emerge, he knew now that his original vision of a high-rise aviary had been closer to the truth than he guessed,” Royal reflects on his marriage of British modernism’s most notable structures, “Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the 48  Ibid., 18, 53, 53. 51  See ibid., 196.

49  Ibid., 61. 52  Ibid., 122.

50  Ibid., 129. 53  Ibid., 95.

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MODERNIST AFTERLIVES: J. G. BALLARD’S “ HANDFUL OF DUST ”   237 events of the past few months made sense if one realized that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.”54 Later, Royal concludes that the “zoo had rebelled against its keeper.”55 The fantasy of human housing that is also zoo housing emerges from the landscapes devoid of humans that Ballard explores. Royal had designed a structure for birds, not people—birds that hover “among the cornices of a mausoleum,” “flick[ing] their wings against the bone-like concrete.”56 The high-rise’s “bone-like concrete” draws us back to Ballard’s assessment of modernism as an “architecture of death” in “A Handful of Dust.” That characterization stands in stark contrast to the hygienic and life-supporting structures that Lubetkin promised to provide through model animal housing. Unlike Aldous Huxley’s fear of totalitarian over-organization, however, Ballard’s repurposed zoo presages human extinction. Yet Ballard’s novel also provides a third-person narrator, a remaining human observer. As such, ­ ys­topian Ballard teaches readers to learn not from utopian models but from d ones, not merely from projected futures but from the ruins of past futures. That, he implies, is the value of modern literature’s “fear in a handful of dust.” Other postwar writers joined Ballard in treating modernism as a funereal architecture. In Jeff Torrington’s Swing Hammer Swing! (1992), the workingclass Glaswegian protagonist resists “ascend[ing] into Basil Spence’s ‘Big Stone Wigwam in the Sky,’ ” the notorious Gorbals high-rise housing designed by the architect made famous for rebuilding the Cathedral Church of St Michael in Coventry.57 Clay lives rent-free in his former tenement slum but knows it will soon be demolished: “ ‘Building gone away: addressee demolished. Return to sender,’ ” he imagines written on his mail.58 Clay compares demolition sites to post-nuclear war landscapes, and—like Ballard’s description of San Michele as the apotheosis of modernism—he identifies an elegiac aspect to this working-class housing: “Much imbued by the ­so-called merits of functionalism the planners and architects had taken wardrobes and tombstones to be their thematic design models.”59 Yet Torrington diverges from Ballard by approaching modernist architecture not in terms of a wider cultural violence, a sort of architectural death drive, but in terms of carelessness and contempt for working-class culture and ways of life. Against Lawrence’s call to rebuild his native village in order to bolster the working class’s already strong sense of community, Clay concludes, 54  Ibid., 159. 55  Ibid., 168. 56  See ibid., 192; ibid., 101. 57  Jeff Torrington, Swing Hammer Swing! (London: Minerva, 1993), 14. 58  Ibid., 145. 59  See ibid., 9; ibid., 317.

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238  Reconstructing Modernism “it was with such a sense of transience that Basil Spence had sat down to fashion yon concrete spike he’d driven into the Gorbals’ vitals.”60 A friend describes a funeral party’s inability to carry a former resident down “horizontally as is dignified and proper” because Spence hadn’t made the lifts big enough to accommodate a coffin, and Clay describes these blocks as a tool for manipulating working-class residents, along with the system of “housing points”: “The concreted concepts that’d been erected so far had a sort of penitentiary glaze to them, a visual smack of censure. What else were high flats but punishment blocks—vertical Barlinnies?”61 This passage recalls the Wilders’ description of the high-rise as a virtual prison in Ballard’s novel, but unlike Ballard’s characterization of this architecture as a form that thwarted planners’ intentions, Torrington identifies these structures as a weapon for isolating working-class citizens, all in the name of welfare state integration. As Peter Clandfield and Christian Lloyd note, the late twentieth century saw “alliances between architectural modernism and the emergent forces of what is now called Thatcherism” such that eco­nom­ic­al modernist structures no longer symbolized progressive politics.62 Clay regards his rehousing as inevitable, and because Torrington’s novel took thirty years to write, it preceded the demolition of Spence’s unpopular structures by only one year; it is a record of vibrant, pre-modernist housing Gorbals life and the destruction of that life in one, less prophecy of a “new social order” than elegy for the old. Not all contemporary literary treatments carry that sense of finality. Even as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) surveys the lingering effects of World War II, she portrays the triumph of chance over the planned world. Smith primarily addresses futurity through genetics, in the form of the bio­engin­ eered Future Mouse, but the key scene in the novel occurs in a planned space that Smith uses to weigh the legacy of postwar social engineering through design. In the Perret Institute, where the Future Mouse press conference is held, the storylines of the novel’s diverse characters converge: “all these people are heading for the same room. The final space. A big room . . . a clean slate; white/chrome/pure/plain (this was the design brief), used for people who want to meet somewhere neutral at the end of the twentieth century.”63 Smith describes an exhaustion precipitated by hyper-planned

60 Ibid, 61  Ibid., 317, 281, 377. 62  Peter Clandfield and Christian Lloyd, “Concretizing the 1970s in Hodges’s Get Carter and Torrington’s Swing Hammer Swing!” Mosaic 35.4 (2002): 166. 63  Zadie Smith, White Teeth (New York: Random House, 2000), 428.

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MODERNIST AFTERLIVES: J. G. BALLARD’S “ HANDFUL OF DUST ”   239 spaces, and she connects this aesthetic reform to the postwar rebranding of British identity: “people can finally give the answers required when a space is being designed, or when something is being rebranded, a room/furniture/ Britain (that was the brief: a new British room, a space for Britain, Britishness, space of Britain, British industrial space cultural space space).”64 Ultimately, citizens at the turn of the century want to shed the planned world—and the past century’s violence—for a world of possibility. Smith optimistically enacts that open-ended future through an experimental animal, akin to Lubetkin’s penguins and Solly Zuckerman’s apes and goats, that never­the­less thwarts its planning role. In an institute named for a former Nazi scientist, Future Mouse escapes, running “through the hands of those who wished to pin it down.”65 Despite sharing some of this optimism, novelist Angus Wilson approached postwar architecture and design not through an imagined thwarting of British institutions but through offering another institution, the university, as an alternative to Ballard’s cemetery. Wilson portrayed New Town life as a failed experiment in Late Call (1964), yet he praised the concrete architecture of the University of East Anglia, where he, along with novelist and modernist literary critic Malcolm Bradbury, had founded the first creative writing program in Britain. As Bradbury recalls, UEA emerged from postwar governmental efforts to “re-plan the future of British higher education,” and the campus structures created by Corbusier-admirer and former Lubetkin partner Denys Lasdun were “the architectural symbols of that change.”66 The university architecture—which Ballard describes as “ziggurat residential blocks”—furnished a new space for literature during a period of literary rebuilding: after the “infra-structure” provided by “magazines,” “small presses” and “generous or ambitious bourgeois patrons” crumbled during the war, the university became a leading patron of literary production and criticism, in the form of English department employment.67 As the Architects’ Journal noted, Lasdun’s 1977 RIBA Royal Gold Medal cere­ mony featured Wilson, who offered an “analysis of why he liked 64  Ibid., 429. 65  Ibid., 448. That scientist shares a last name with Auguste Perret, the architect who popularized reinforced concrete. Le Corbusier and Ernö Goldfinger both worked for Perret early in their careers. 66  Malcolm Bradbury, “Creative Writing and the University—Andrew Wilkinson Lecture,” http://malcolmbradbury.com/uea_creative_writing.html. As Kenneth Powell notes, Lasdun also designed the National Theatre, and T. S. Eliot was an influence. “An Untheatrical Knight,” Architects’ Journal 205 (February 13, 1997): 26. 67  Bradbury, “Creative.”

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240  Reconstructing Modernism Lasdun’s work.”68 Wilson praised the “ ‘sense of awe and wonder’ of [Lasdun’s] building, largely created by his ‘soaring verticals’ while the ‘narrative’ is carried by the insistent horizontals.”69 In contrast to Ballard’s and Torrington’s more cynical accounts, Wilson describes a partnership between architecture and literature, where authoritative “soaring verticals” complement the human scale of “narrative,” and both of these contribute to the welfare state vision of expanded education. While Lasdun for some represented the “last pre-war Modernist,” his architecture signified to Wilson a new start for lit­era­ture after modernism.70

68  Astragal, “Astragal,” Architects’ Journal 166 (July 6, 1977): 8. 69  Ibid. The columnist Astragal titled this account “As others see us.” He describes Wilson’s interpretation of these structures as the “most fascinating part of last week’s ceremony”: “Although you might not have agreed with Wilson’s analogies or his choice of comparisons, the spectacle of a writer struggling to interpret modern architecture was impressive and, for most of the audience, heartwarming. As one architect remarked afterwards ‘it made you realise that we aren’t alone.’ ” Ibid. 70  Powell, “Untheatrical,” 8.

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Bibliography Ackerman, John, ed., Dylan Thomas, The Complete Screenplays (New York: Applause, 1995), 82. Anderton, Frances. “Gray Eminence,” review of Eileen Gray—Architect/Designer, by Peter Adam, Architectural Review 183 (April 1988): 10. Anker, Peder, “The Bauhaus of Nature,” Modernism/modernity 12.2 (2005): 229–51. Anker, Peder, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2010). “Ants and Socialism,” The Times, March 10, 1928, 7. “Architectural Changes,” The Times, April 22, 1931, 11. “Architecture Old and New,” The Times, March 2, 1923, 7. Armond, Kate, “Wyndham Lewis and the Parables of Expressionist Architecture,” Modernist Cultures 9.2 (2014): 282–303. Armstrong, Nancy, How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia UP, 2005). Astragal, “Astragal,” Architects’ Journal 166 (July 6, 1977): 8–9. Astragal, “Notes & Topics,” Architects’ Journal 79 (May 10, 1934): 664–5. Astragal, “Notes & Topics,” Architects’ Journal 80 (December 13, 1934): 874–5. Auden, W. H., “What is Wrong with Architecture?” Architectural Review 74 (August 1933): 66. Ballard, J. G., Concrete Island (London: Picador, 2001). Ballard, J. G., “A Handful of Dust,” Guardian, March 19, 2006, G2, p. 16. Accessed at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/mar/20/architecture. communities. Ballard, J. G., High-Rise (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975). Ballard, J.  G., “One Afternoon at Utah Beach,” in The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001), 972–81. Banham, Reyner, “History,” Architectural Review 118 (July 1955): 54. Baucom, Ian, Out of Place (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999). “Beauty in New Buildings: The Direct Appeal,” The Times, October 5, 1937, 15–16. Beckett, Chris, “The Progress of the Text: The Papers of J. G. Ballard at the British Library,” Electronic British Library Journal (2011): Article 12. Bernstein, Gerald  S., “The Architecture of Repression: The Built Environment of George Orwell’s 1984,” Journal of Architectural Education 38.2 (1985): 26–8. Betjeman, John, Antiquarian Prejudice (London: Hogarth Press, 1939). Betjeman, John, “Architecture in Fiction,” Architectural Review 76 (November 1934): 174–5. Betjeman, John, “Architecture,” London Mercury 29 (November 1933): 65–7. Betjeman, John, “Betjeman on Architecture,” Perspectives on Architecture 1.2 (1994): 20–1.

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242 Bibliography Betjeman, John, “Bird’s Eye View: An Englishman’s Home.” 1969. John Betjeman: A Bird’s Eye View. Production BBC, distribution Simply Home Entertainment, 2011. Betjeman, John, “The Death of Modernism,” Architectural Review 70 (December 1931): 161. Betjeman, John, “1837–1937, A Spiritual Change is the One Hope for Art,” London Studio 13 (1937): 56–73. Betjeman, John, “Frederick Etchells,” Architectural Review 154 (1973): 271–3. Betjeman, John, “Honour Your Forbears,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 61 (January 1954): 87–93. Betjeman, John, “Huxley Hall,” in Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 2000), 160. Betjeman, John, “Inexpensive Project,” in Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 2000), 286–7. Betjeman, John, Letters, ed. Candida Lycett Green (London: Methuen, 2006). Betjeman, John, “The Passing of the Village,” Architectural Review 72 (September 1932): 89–93. Betjeman, John, “The Planster’s Vision,” in Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 2000), 104. Betjeman, John, “The Town Clerk’s Views,” in Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 2000), 144–7. Beveridge, William, “The Opening of the ‘Rebuilding Britain’ Exhibition,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 50 (1943): 99–102. Bluemel, Kristin, ed., Intermodernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009). Bowen, Elizabeth, Bowen’s Court (New York: Ecco, 1979). Bowen, Elizabeth, The Death of the Heart (New York: Vintage, 1961). Bowen, Elizabeth, “Frankly Speaking: Interview, 1959,” in Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010), 323–43. Bowen, Elizabeth, The Heat of the Day (New York: Anchor, 2002). Bowen, “The Idea of the Home,” in Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010), 162–74. Bowen, Elizabeth, “New York Waiting in My Memory,” in People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008), 105–10. Bowen, Elizabeth, “Subject and the Time,” in Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010), 147–52. Bowen, Elizabeth, “A Way of Life,” in People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008), 386–91. Bradbury, Malcolm, “Creative Writing and the University—Andrew Wilkinson Lecture.” Accessed at http://malcolmbradbury.com/uea_creative_writing.html. Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” in Modernism: 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 19–56. Bradshaw, David, “Introduction,” Decline and Fall (London: Penguin, 2001), ix–xxxiv.

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Bibliography  243 Brett, Oliver Sylvain Baliol, 3rd Viscount Esher, “Freedom from Want,” Horizon 5 (1942): 237–42. Brown, Andrew, J. D. Bernal: The Sage of Science (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007). Bryher, Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle (New York: New Directions, 2002). Bullock, Nicholas, Rebuilding the Postwar World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London: Routledge, 2002). Calder, Angus, The People’s War: Britain—1939–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1969). Carpenter, Humphrey, W. H. Auden: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Carter, Edward Julian, Notes for Article 2 (CaE/1), The E.J. “Bobby” Carter Papers, 1930–1981, Royal Institute of British Architects Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Carter, Edward, “Wartime Books on Architecture and Town Planning,” British Book News 66–76 (February 1946): 39–46. Chermayeff, Serge, “A New Spirit and Idealism,” Architects’ Journal 1920 (November 1931): 619–20. Cherry, Bridget, London: North (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998). Clandfield, Peter, and Christian Lloyd, “Concretizing the 1970s in Hodges’s Get Carter and Torrington’s Swing Hammer Swing!” Mosaic 35.4 (2002): 163–80. Colombino, Laura, Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature (New York: Routledge, 2013). Connolly, Cyril, “Comment.” Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art 15 (April 1947): 151–4. Connolly, Cyril, Enemies of Promise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Corcoran, Neil, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford: Clarendon P, 2004). Darling, Elizabeth, “Focus: A Little Magazine and Architectural Modernism in 1930s Britain,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 3.1 (2012): 39–63. Darling, Elizabeth, and Lynne Walker, “Paving the Way: Celebrating a Centenary of Women at London’s Architectural Association,” November 14, 2017. Accessed at https://www.archdaily.com/883572/paving-the-way-celebrating-a-centenary-ofwomen-at-londons-architectural-association. Darling, Elizabeth, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (London: Routledge, 2007). Davis, Thomas  S., “Elizabeth Bowen’s War Gothic,” Textual Practice 27.1 (2013): 29–47. Davis, Thomas S., The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life (New York: Columbia UP, 2016). Davison, Peter, ed., Orwell Diaries (New York: Random House, 2009). Dean, David, Architecture of the 1930s: Recalling the English Scene (New York: Rizzoli, 1983). Design Museum, “The MARS Group.” Design at the Design Museum. Accessed August 11, 2010 at design.designmuseum.org/design/the-mars-group.html. “Dictators All: Essays in the New Rule,” The Times, August 24, 1934, 6. “E. McKnight Kauffer,” Architectural Review 116 (December 1954): 351–2.

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244 Bibliography Esty, Jed, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004). File on MARS Group exhibitions, 1935–1938 (SaG/91/4), The Godfrey Samuel Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Firth, Ed, “JG Ballard was inspired by the Westway and the Trellick Tower,” Architects’ Journal 229.10 (2009): 49. Frayling, Christopher, “Things to Come,” in British Film Institute Film Classics, vol. 1, ed. Edward Buscombe and Rob White (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003). Friedman, Alice T., Women and the Making of the Modern House (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006). Fry, Maxwell, Fine Building (London: Faber and Faber, 1944). Fry, Maxwell, Letter to John Summerson, January 1943 (SuJ/3/2), Sir John Summerson Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Gallagher, Donat, ed., The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (London: Methuen, 1983). Gasiorek, Andrzej, “ ‘Architecture or revolution’?: Le Corbusier and Wyndham Lewis,” in Geographies of Modernism, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London: Taylor and Francis, 2005), 136–45. Glendinning, Miles, “Architectures and Public Spaces of Modernism,” in The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017), 200–19. Gold, John R., “ ‘Commoditie, firmenes and delight’: Modernism, the MARS Group’s ‘New Architecture’ Exhibition (1938) and Imagery of the Urban Future,” Planning Perspectives 8 (1993): 357–76. Gold, John R., The Experience of Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City, 1928–53 (London: Routledge, 2013). Gold, John  R., and Stephen  V.  Ward, “Of Plans and Planners: Documentary Film and the Challenge of the Urban Future, 1935–52,” in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clarke (London: Routledge, 1997), 59–82. Gold, John R., and Steven V. Ward, “We’re Going To Do It Right This Time: Cinematic Representations of Urban Planning and the British New Towns, 1939 to 1951,” in Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, ed. Stuart C. Aitken and Leo E. Zonn (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 229–58. Goldfinger, Ernö, ed., MARS News 1 (July 1944) (MARS/1), MARS Group Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Greene, Graham, “The New Britain,” in The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film Stories, ed. David Parkinson (New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1994), 504–7. Greene, Graham, writer, The New Britain 1941. Words for Battle: Writers at War, Production Ministry of Information (Alexander Shaw), Distribution Imperial War Museum, 2007.

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Bibliography  245 Greene, Graham, “Things to Come—Bonne Chance,” Spectator, February 28, 1936, in The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film Stories, ed. David Parkinson (New York: Applause, 1994), 77–9. Gruffudd, Pyrs, “Biological Cultivation: Lubetkin’s Modernism at London Zoo in the 1930’s,” in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places, ed. Chris Philo and Chris Walbert (London: Routledge, 2000). Guppy, Shusha, “Obituary: Dame Jane Drew,” Independent, August 1, 1996. Accessed at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituarydame-janedrew-1307641.html. Hall, Radclyffe, “Anthology,” Architectural Review 65 (January 1929): 51. Harrington, O., Private Secretary to Winston Churchill, Letter to Berthold Lubetkin, 20 March 1939 (LuB/11/1/15), The Berthold Lubetkin Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Hayward, Stephen, “ ‘Good Design Is Largely a Matter of Common Sense’: Questioning the Meaning and Ownership of a Twentieth-Century Orthodoxy,” Journal of Design History 11 (1998): 217–33. Hebdige, Dick, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London: Comedia, 1988). Hennessy, Peter, Never Again: Britain 1945–1951 (New York: Pantheon, 1993). Hepburn, Allan, “Architectural London: Elizabeth Bowen in Regent’s Park,” in Irish Writing London, vol. 1, ed. Tom Herron (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 112–26. Hillier, Bevis, Young Betjeman (London: John Murray, 1988). Huxley, Aldous, “Architecture and the Modern Environment,” House & Garden 3.3 (January 1922): 28. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 26–8. Huxley, Aldous, “Art and Craftsmanship in Industry,” Everyman 14 (January 11, 1935): 314. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 35–7. Huxley, Aldous, “Art and Industry,” House & Garden 3.5 (March 1922): 28. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 38–40. Huxley, Aldous, “Beauty in Common Life,” House & Garden 2.1 (May 1921): 24. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 20–2. Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). Huxley, Aldous, Eyeless in Gaza (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009). Huxley, Aldous, Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). Huxley, Aldous, “The New Romanticism,” in Music at Night (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). Huxley, Aldous, “Notes on Decoration,” Creative Art 7 (October 1930): 239–42. Huxley, Aldous, “Ozymandias, the Utopia that Failed,” in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (New York: Harper, 1956), 84–102. Huxley, Aldous, “The Problem of Uniformity,” Architecture 2 (February 1924): 166–8. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 9–11. Huxley, Aldous, “Puritanism in Art,” Creative Art 6 (March 1930): 200–2. Huxley, Aldous, “War and Peace.” ARTnews 42 (November 1943): 8–9, 24. Huxley, Aldous, “The Work of Some Modern Decorative Artists,” Vogue 64.16 (August 1926): 28–31, 68. Rpt. in Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 49–52.

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246 Bibliography Huxley, Julian, ed., Aldous Huxley, 1894–1964: A Memorial Volume (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965). Huxley, Julian, If I Were Dictator (New York: Harper, 1934). Huxley, Julian, “The Liverpool School Exhibition,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 44 (1937): 688. Huxley, Julian, Memories (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Huxley, Julian, “The National Planning Basis,” Town and Country Planning 10 (Autumn 1942): 96–8. Huxley, Julian, “The Role of UNESCO in the Domain of the Arts,” The Studio (1947): 110–11. Huxley, Julian, Scientific Research and Social Needs (London: Watts & Co., 1934). Hynes, Samuel, The Auden Generation (London: Bodley Head, 1976). Inglesby, Elizabeth  C., “ ‘Expressive Objects’: Elizabeth Bowen’s Narrative Materializes,” Modern Fiction Studies 53 (2007): 306–33. Isherwood, Christopher, The Berlin Stories: Goodbye to Berlin (New York: New Directions, 1963). Isherwood, Christopher, “The Berlin Stories,” in Isherwood on Writing, ed. James J. Berg (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007), 161–72. Isherwood, Christopher, Diaries: Volume One: 1939–1960, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London: Harper Collins, 1996). Isherwood, Christopher, Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000). Jackson, Anthony, The Politics of Architecture: A History of Modern Architecture in Britain (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1970). James-Chakraborty, Kathleen, “Beyond the Masters: Modernism in South Asian Architecture,” in The Modernist World, ed. Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross (London: Routledge, 2015), 100–8. Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991). Jameson, Fredric, A Singular Modernity (New York: Verso, 2002). Jencks, Charles, “Jencks’s Theory of Evolution,” Architectural Review 208 (July 2000): 76–9. Jencks, Charles, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 6th ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). Jencks, Charles, Late-Modern Architecture and Other Essays (New York: Rizzoli, 1980). Jordan, Heather Bryant, How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992). Kalliney, Peter, Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2006). Karol, Eitan, “Naked and Unashamed: Charles Holden in Bloomsbury,” Past and Future 4 (2008): 6–7. Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1972). Keynes, John Maynard, “Art and the State,” in Social, Political and Literary Writings, ed. Donald Moggridge (London: Macmillan, 1982), 341–9. Kitagawa, Yoriko, “Anticipating the Postmodern Self: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart,” English Studies 81 (2000): 484–96.

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Bibliography  247 Knell, Hermann, To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II (Cambridge: Da Capo, 2003). “Kodak House,” Historic England. Accessed at https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/ the-list/list-entry/1379260. Kohlmann, Benjamin, Committed Styles (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014). Kohlmann, Benjamin, “Introduction,” in Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945, ed. Rosalyn Gregory and Benjamin Kohlmann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 1–15. Korn, Arthur, Maxwell Fry, and Dennis Sharp, “The  M.A.R.S.  Plan for London,” Perspecta 13/14 (1971): 163–73. Labour Party, “Your Home Planned by Labour” (London: Labour Party, 1943). Latham, Sean, and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Lawrence, D. H., “Pictures on the Walls,” Architectural Review 67 (February 1930): 55–7. Lawrence, D.  H., “Then Disaster Looms Ahead: Mining-Camp Civilization: The English Contribution to Progress,” Architectural Review 68 (August 1930): 47–50. Lawrence, D.  H., The Letters of D.H.  Lawrence, vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). Le Corbusier, “The MARS Group Exhibition of the Elements of Modern Architecture: A Pictorial Record,” Architectural Review 83 (March 1938): 109–16. Lee, Hermione, Virginia Woolf (New York: Random House, 1997). Lee, Rachel, and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Marg Magazine: A Tryst with Architectural Modernity,” ABE Journal 1 (2012). Accessed at http://journals. openedition.org/abe/623. “Lenin Memorial in Finsbury: Unveiling by M. Maisky,” The Times, April 23, 1942, 2. Lester, R. M., “Aircraft Precision Brought into Housing,” Country Life 98 (1945): 204–5. “A Letter from John Betjeman: Ideas for the first ‘Bird’s Eye View’ episode,” BBC. Accessed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/aerialjourneys/5351.shtml. Levenson, Michael, A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984). Lewis, Wyndham, “Art in Industry,” in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 241–5. Lewis, Wyndham, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967). Lewis, Wyndham, The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex? (Berkeley: Gingko Press, 1986). Lewis, Wyndham, and Ezra Pound, Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985). Lewis, Wyndham, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1963). Lewis, Wyndham, Men Without Art (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987). Lewis, Wyndham, “One Picture is More Than Enough,” in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989): 231–5. Lewis, Wyndham, “Plain Home-Builder: Where Is Your Vorticist?” in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989): 246–56.

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248 Bibliography Lewis, Wyndham, “Power-Feeling and Machine-Age Art,” in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 236–40. Lewis, Wyndham, Rude Assignment (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984). Lewis, Wyndham, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Berkeley: Gingko Press, 1993). Lubetkin, Berthold, Notes for Lubetkin’s “Samizdat” (a personal memoir of his life) (LuB/25/4/1-3), The Berthold Lubetkin Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Lycett, Andrew, Dylan Thomas: A New Life (New York: Overlook, 2005). MacKay, Marina, “Anti-State Fantasy and the Fiction of the 1940s,” Literature & History 24.2 (2015): 27–40. MacKay, Marina, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). Manley, Jeffrey  A., “Waugh, Canova, and Cupid and Psyche,” Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies 38.3 (2008): 8–9. Marcus, Laura, “Literature and Cinema,” in The Cambridge History of TwentiethCentury English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 335–58. “Marginalia,” Architectural Review 67 (February 1930): 107–10. Maslen, Elizabeth, “A Cassandra with Clout: Storm Jameson, Little Englander and Good European,” in Intermodernism, ed. Kristin Bluemel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009), 21–37. McCarthy, Patrick  A., “Allusions in Ballard’s The Drowned World,” Science Fiction Studies 24 (1997): 302–10. Mellor, Leo, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites, and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011). Miller, Kristine  A., British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Miller, Tyrus, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999). Mizejewski, Linda, Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992). “Modernism in Art: Work of the Decorator,” The Times, July 22, 1932, 7. Moholy-Nagy, László, dir., The New Architecture and the London Zoo. 1936. Distribution, Moholy-Nagy Foundation. MoMA, Exhibit of Modern English Architecture, MoMA Press Release Archives, February 2, 1937. Accessed at https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/ docs/press_archives/367/releases/MOMA_1937_0007_1937-02-02_2237-5.pdf. Muirhead, Margaret, Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, Letter to Ernö Goldfinger, March 19, 1945 (GolEr/277/7), The Ernö Goldfinger Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Mumford, Eric Paul, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge: MIT P, 2002). Nash, Paul, “Nature and Art,” The Times, May 19, 1933, 10. Nash, Paul, “Unit One: A New Group of Artists,” The Times, June 12, 1933, 10. “New Gorilla House: Novel Building at the Zoo,” The Times, December 31, 1932, 5.

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Bibliography  249 Newman, Daniel Aureliano, “ ‘Education of an Amphibian’: Anachrony, Neoteny, and Bildung in Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza,” Twentieth-Century Literature 62.4 (2016): 403–28. “1922–1934,” Architectural Review 199 (May 1996): 42–52. Orwell, George, “A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read,” Poetry Quarterly, Winter 1945, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 48–52. Orwell, George, “As I Please,” Tribune, December 24, 1943, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 63–5. Orwell, George, “As I Please,” Tribune, October 13, 1944, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 252–5. Orwell, George, “As I Please,” Tribune, November 29, 1944, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 276–9. Orwell, George, “As I Please,” Tribune, February 9, 1945, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 329–32. Orwell, George, Coming Up for Air (San Diego: Harvest, 1950). Orwell, George, “The English People,” Manchester Evening News, April 20, 1944, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 1–38. Orwell, George, Extracts from a Manuscript Notebook, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 509–15. Orwell, George, “Inside the Whale,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 1, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 493–527. Orwell, George, Letter to Jack Common, 1938, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 1, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 329–30. Orwell, George, Letter to Julian Symons, May 10, 1948, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 421–3. Orwell, George, Letter to Leonard Moore, October 3, 1934, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 1, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 141. Orwell, George, Letter to Michael Meyer, March 12, 1949, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 480–1. Orwell, George, “New Words,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 2, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 3–12.

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250 Bibliography Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Plume, 2003). Orwell, George, “On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory,” Adelphi, April 1934, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 1, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 134–5. Orwell, George, “The Prevention of Literature,” Polemic, January 1946, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 59–72. Orwell, George, “The Reilly Plan by Lawrence Wolfe,” Tribune, January 24, 1946, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 88–92. Orwell, George, “The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by ‘Palinurus,’ ” Observer, January 14, 1945, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 318–20. Orwell, George, “War-time Diary,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 2, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968): 339–450. Orwell, George, “Wells, Hitler and the World State,” Horizon, August 1941, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 2, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 139–45. Orwell, George, “Writers and Leviathan,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 407–14. Orwell, George, “You and the Atom Bomb,” Tribune, October 19, 1945, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 6–10. Page, Norman, Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). The Papers of James Graham Ballard (Add MS 88938: 1931–2010), Archives and Manuscripts, British Library. “Penguins at the Zoo: New Pond, with Beaches of Rubber,” The Times, January 27, 1934, 7. Pentelow, Orla, “Vogue Editors through the Years,” April 10, 2017. Accessed at http://www.vogue.co.uk/gallery/past-british-vogue-editors-history. Powell, Kenneth, “An Untheatrical Knight,” Architects’ Journal 205 (1997) 26–7. Pritchard, Jack, Planning and Architecture: Essays Presented to Arthur Korn by The Architectural Association, ed. Dennis Sharp (Madison: Barrie & Rockliff, 1968). Proposed National Theatre building on the South Kensington site (Cromwell Road/ Thurloe Place), London, Nov 1937–Mar 1938 (SaG/73/2), The Godfrey Samuel Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. “A Question to Sir Oswald Mosley,” Architects’ Journal 79 (1934): 269. Rawlinson, Mark, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon P, 2000). Read, Herbert, “Gropius,” Scrutiny 4.3 (1935): 313–15.

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Bibliography  251 Read, Herbert, “Introduction,” in Unit One: The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture, ed. Herbert Read (London: Cassell, 1934), 10–16. “R.I.B.A. Centenary Conference,” Architects’ Journal 80 (November 29, 1934), 805–10. Richards, J. M., “Augustus John’s Studio,” Architectural Review 77 (February 1935): 65–8. Rosner, Victoria, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (New York: Columbia UP, 2005). Royal Institute of British Architects, “Hillfield (House A), Whipsnade Zoo Estate, Whipsnade: roof plan, site plan and section,” RIBApix, architecture.com, RIBA17942. Royal Institute of British Architects, “MARS Group Exhibition, New Burlington Galleries, London: display panels in the exit corridor,” RIBApix, architecture.com, RIBA 17095. Royal Institute of British Architects, “MARS Group Exhibition, New Burlington Galleries, London: the form and purpose platform,” RIBApix, architecture.com, RIBA 24910. Royal Institute of British Architects, Rebuilding Britain (London: National Gallery, 1943). Royal Institute of British Architects, Refugees Committee minutes and papers, 1939–1941 (RIBA/OA), Royal Institute of British Architects Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Royal Institute of British Architects, Towards a New Britain (London: The Architectural Press, 1943). Ryan, Deborah S., The Ideal Home through the 20th Century (London: Hazar, 1997). Scott-James, R. A., Modernism and Romanticism (London: John Lane, 1908). Senter, Terence A., “Moholy-Nagy: The Transitional Years,” in Albers and MoholyNagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006), 85–91. Sexton, James, “Aldous Huxley AKA Condé Nast’s ‘Staff of Experts,’ ” Aldous Huxley Annual 5 (2005): 1–10. Shand, P. Morton, “Things to Come,” Architectural Review 79 (February 1936): 88–9. Sharp, Dennis, and Sally Rendel, Connell Ward and Lucas: Modernist Architecture in England (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008). Sharp, Thomas, “The English Tradition in The Town: IV.* Back to the Town?” Architectural Review 79 (April 1936): 163–8. Shaw, George Bernard, “On Architecture,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 27 (2007): 6–10. Sherry, Vincent, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003). Smith, Zadie, White Teeth (New York: Random House, 2000). Spender, Stephen, “Brave New Rooms,” Design Quarterly 158 (1993): 2–6. Spender, Stephen, “Comment,” Horizon 3 (February 1941): 89–90. Spender, Stephen, “September Journal,” Horizon 1 (February 1940): 102–21. Spiro, Mia, Anti-Nazi Modernism (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2013).

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252 Bibliography Spurr, David. Architecture and Modern Literature (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2012). Stamp, Gavin, “Introduction,” Architectural Design (AD Profile 24: Britain in the Thirties) 49.10–11 (1979): 2–25. Stopp, Frederick John, Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of an Artist (London: Chapman & Hall, 1958). Stover, Leon, ed., Things to Come: A Critical Text of the 1935 London First Edition (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007). “Style Guide: Gothic Revival,” Victoria and Albert Museum. Accessed at http://www. vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/style-guide-gothic-revival/. Taunton, Matthew. Fictions of the City (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Tewdwr-Jones, Mark, “ ‘Oh, the planners did their best’: the planning films of John Betjeman,” Planning Perspectives 20 (October 2005): 389–411. Thomas, Dylan, “A City Re-Born,” in Dylan Thomas, The Complete Screenplays, ed. John Ackerman (New York: Applause, 1995), 82–95. Thomas, Dylan, writer, A City Reborn 1945. Dylan Thomas: A War Films Anthology, Production Ministry of Information, Distribution Imperial War Museum, 2007. Thomas, Dylan, “New Towns for Old,” in Dylan Thomas, The Complete Screenplays, ed. John Ackerman (New York: Applause, 1995), 10–12. Thomas, Dylan, writer, New Towns for Old 1942. Dylan Thomas: A War Films Anthology, Production Ministry of Information, Distribution Imperial War Museum, 2007. Todd, Dorothy, “Some Reflections on Recent Tendencies in American Architecture,” Architectural Review 69 (June 1931): 206–10. Torrington, Jeff, Swing Hammer Swing! (London: Minerva, 1993). University of London, “The History of Senate House.” Accessed at https://london. ac.uk/about-us/history-university-london/history-senate-house. Warburton, Nigel, Ernö Goldfinger: The Life of an Architect (London: Routledge, 2003). Waugh, Evelyn, BBC address, 28 November 1932, in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983). Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1973). Waugh, Evelyn, “A Call to the Orders,” in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 215–18. Waugh, Evelyn, “Cities of the Future,” in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 63–5. Waugh, Evelyn, Decline and Fall (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1999). Waugh, Evelyn, “An Englishman’s Home,” in The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000), 217–37. Waugh, Evelyn, “Felix Culpa?” Commonweal, July 16, 1948, in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 360–5. Waugh, Evelyn, “In Defense of Cubism,” in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 6–8.

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Bibliography  253 Waugh, Evelyn, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1980). Waugh, Evelyn, “Literary Style in England and America,” Books on Trial, October 1955, in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 477–81. Waugh, Evelyn, Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future, in The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000), 469–501. Waugh, Evelyn, “Mr. Betjeman Despairs,” in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 428–30. Waugh, Evelyn, “Palinurus in Never-Neverland: Or, the Horizon Blue-Print of Chaos,” Tablet, July 27, 1946, in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 309–12. Waugh, Evelyn, “The Philistine Age of English Decoration,” in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 218–22. Waugh, Evelyn, “The Scandinavian Capitals: Contrasted Post-War Moods,” Daily Telegraph and Post, November 11, 1947, in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 339–41. Waugh, Evelyn, “Those Happy Homes,” Sunday Times, November 28, 1954, in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 465–6. Waugh, Evelyn, “Vile Bodies,” Architectural Review 84 (October 1938): 197. Waugh, Evelyn, “The War and the Younger Generation,” in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 61–3. Waugh, Evelyn, “What to Do with the Upper Classes: A Modest Proposal,” Town and Country, September 1946, in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 312–16. “The Way of an Ant: Contrasts with Human Society,” The Times, September 11, 1933, 15. Wells, H. G., The Discovery of the Future (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1913). Wells, H. G., The Shape of Things to Come, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005). Wells, H. G., writer, Things to Come. 1936. Distribution Criterion Collection, 2013. Wells, H. G., Things to Come: A Film Story Based on the Material Contained in His History of the Future “The Shape of Things to Come” (London: Cresset Press, 1935). “What is Modern Architecture?” MARS Report 3 (June 1945) (MARS/1), MARS Group Papers, Royal Institute of British Architects Archives, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Whyte, William. “The Englishness of English Architecture: Modernism and the Making of a National International Style, 1927–1957,” Journal of British Studies 48 (2009): 441–65. Williams, Raymond, The Politics of Modernism, ed. Tony Pinkney (New York: Verso, 1989). Wilson, A.N., Betjeman (London: Hutchinson, 2006).

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254 Bibliography Winter, Jay, “Minor Utopias and the British Literary Temperament, 1880–1945,” in Utopian Spaces of Modernism, ed. Rosalyn Gregory and Benjamin Kohlmann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 71–84. “Winter Work at the Zoo: A Slum Clearance Scheme: An Orderly Layout,” The Times, January 29, 1936, 7. Wollaeger, Mark, Modernism, Media and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007). Woolf, Virginia, “The Leaning Tower,” in The Moment and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1947), 105–25. Woolf, Virginia, Roger Fry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940). Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1989).

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Index Anand, Mulk Raj  201–2 anarchism  44–5, 202 Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture  29–30, 51–3, 58–9, 149–50 Armstrong, Nancy  30–3, 82–3, 105, 122–3 Art Deco  49 Arup, Ove  54–5, 176n.11, 177n.14 Auden, W.H.  2–3, 32, 37–8, 46–7, 105–6, 144–5, 209–10, 220 Ballard, J. G.  38–9, 223–38 architectural criticism by  37–8, 224–30 architectural documentation compiled by 228–30 Concrete Island 230–1 High-Rise  37–8, 231–7 “One Afternoon at Utah Beach”  228–9 Bauhaus  4–5, 20, 41–2, 46–7, 52, 68–9, 84–5, 132 see also Gropius, Walter, Lawn Road Flats (Isokon Building), and Moholy-Nagy, László Bennett, Arnold  16–17 Betjeman, John  7, 36–8, 71–2, 174–6, 189–97, 214–16 anti-planning poetry  37–8, 194–7 architectural and design criticism by 46–58 film and radio work  37–8, 189–94, 214–15 Beveridge, William  130–1, 146–7, 153–4, 163–4, 179–80, 207 Bloomsbury  8–9, 11–12, 70, 212–13 Bowen, Elizabeth  37, 131–73 arts criticism by  137–9, 150–1, 163–4, 171 Bowen’s Court  145–6, 157–8 The Death of the Heart 137–73 The Heat of the Day  37, 137–73

Bradbury, Malcolm  45–6, 239–40 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)  63–4, 176n.8, 183–4, 189–94, 214–15 Bryher 30 Carter, Edward  178–9 Cézanne, Paul  16–17 Chermayeff, Serge  30, 51, 54–5, 75–6, 99n.68, 185n.55 Churchill, Winston  149–50, 174, 176–7, 210 CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne)  46–7, 140–1 Clark, Kenneth  48–9, 154–5, 174 class system and architectural and design reform  3–7, 67–9, 99–100, 107n.109, 111, 129–30, 133–4, 153–6, 190–3, 200, 207–8, 217, 224–5, 232–5, 237–8 and national taste  5, 12–13, 23–5, 42, 51, 61–4, 69–70, 93–4, 204–5, 210–11, 212n.177, 214, 220–1 Coates, Wells  40–1, 75–6, 148–9 communism  22n.83, 35–6, 41–2, 51–4, 70, 72, 74–5, 77–8, 101–4, 106, 108, 124–5, 159–62, 172–3, 183–4, 225–6 Connolly, Cyril  2, 7n.17, 46–7, 82, 105–6, 122–3, 131–2, 141–2, 153, 155–7, 160–1, 164–5, 203, 212–15, 232n.27 Conservative Party  149–50 see also Churchill, Winston Le Corbusier  7, 16, 22n.83, 30, 54–9, 65–9, 73–4, 97–101, 103–4, 120, 127–30, 179–80, 184–5, 185n.55, 187–8, 199, 211–12, 226–7, 233–4 Corcoran, Neil  155–6, 164–5 Cubism  14, 55, 77–9, 98–104 Darling, Elizabeth  51, 58–9, 148–9, 152–3 Davis, Thomas S.  144–5, 151, 181

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256 Index documentary  77–8, 87–8, 121, 130–7, 174–5, 180–2, 184–5, 187, 189–94, 208–9, 228–9, 232–3, 236 see also film Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.)  30 Drew, Jane  30n.113, 83–6, 130–1, 192–3 dystopian literature and environmental conditioning  32–3, 82–4, 116n.144, 196–7, 217–18, 221–2, 231–4, 236–7 and imagined future  32–3, 35–8, 122–3, 175–6, 194–6, 198–9, 205–9, 216–17, 230–1, 235, 237 and nonfiction  82, 105–6, 119–20, 175–6, 205–6, 208–9 response to architectural uniformity and utopianism  32–3, 35–8, 82–4, 175–6, 194–7, 205–8, 217–24, 233–7 social and architectural structures in  32, 82–4, 196, 205–8, 218–24, 231–7 see also totalitarianism Eliot, T. S.  4n.8, 20–1, 48–50, 75–6, 224 Esty, Jed  141 Etchells, Frederick  20–1, 46–7, 55–8, 71–2, 75–6, 179–80 exhibitions  11–12, 60–1, 77–8, 87, 91, 146–7, 185n.55 Art in Industry  72–3, 110–11 Festival of Britain  225 Ideal Home Exhibition  10–12, 129–30, 164n.179 New Architecture (MARS Group)  54–5, 129–30 Post-Impressionist exhibition (first and second)  10–12, 16–18 Rebuilding Britain  130–1, 146–7, 153–5, 159–60 see also MARS Group and Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) fascism  4–5, 51–2, 75, 101–2, 106, 144–5, 149–50, 158, 164–8, 210–12, 225–6, 229, 238–9 film  66, 174–5, 180–1, 184–94, 208–9, 236 see also documentary Flaubert, Gustave  17, 157–8 Forster, E.M.  132, 182n.38 Fry, Maxwell  75–6, 83–6, 127–8, 130n.3, 140–1, 146–8, 168–70, 176–7, 180, 192–3 Fry, Roger  8–27, 55, 85n.14, 92–5

Goldfinger, Ernö  180, 231–2 Gothic architecture  48–9 Greene, Graham  37, 130–3, 184n.50, 188–9, 214n.191 Grigson, Geoffrey  2–3 Gropius, Walter  41–2, 46–7, 54–5, 84–5, 168–70, 180, 184–5 Hall, Radclyffe  30 Hardy, Thomas  92–3 Hepburn, Allan  145–6 Hepsworth, Barbara  2–3 humanism  73n.143, 178–9 dehumanization and architecture  66–7, 69, 76, 97–8, 194, 218, 230–1, 233–4, 237 Huxley, Aldous  36–7, 81–128 architectural and design criticism by  36–7, 92–104, 108–9, 124–8 Brave New World  1–2, 32, 36–7, 104–20, 186n.60, 198–9 Eyeless in Gaza 120–3 Huxley, Julian  36–7, 81–92, 104–24, 174, 184–5 see also zoo Hynes, Samuel  105–6 individualism and collectivism  32–3, 44–6, 52–4, 58, 72, 81–4, 109–11, 126–8, 168–70, 188–9, 200–5, 207–9, 212–14, 220–2, 233–4 and literary, art, and architectural uniformity  36–7, 44–5, 52–4, 88–9, 92–104, 107n.109, 109–20, 156–7, 168–71, 188–93, 200–3, 207–9, 212–13, 217, 220–2 and the novel  30–5, 82–4, 122–3, 170–1, 202–4, 208–9 International Style  9–10, 56–8, 68, 152–3 internationalism  53–4, 96n.54, 111, 183–4, 186–7, 198–9 League of Nations  65 United Nations and UNESCO  123–4, 178, 210–11 Isherwood, Christopher  37, 131–73, 220 Goodbye to Berlin  37, 141–73 James, Henry  16–17, 72 Jameson, Fredric  137–9, 223–4 Jencks, Charles  29–30, 152–3, 226

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Index  257 John, Augustus  18–19, 21 Joyce, James  20, 205 Kalliney, Peter  31–2 Kauffer, E. McKnight  6–7, 75–6 Kenner, Hugh  44–6 Kohlmann, Benjamin  33–4, 82 Labour Party  51, 146–50, 171, 174–7, 180, 182, 205–6, 210–11 Lasdun, Denys  239–40 Lawn Road Flats (Isokon Building)  7n.17, 84–5 Lawrence, D.H.  23–7 Léger, Fernand  185–6, 218 Levenson, Michael  8–9, 44–5 Lewis, Wyndham  36, 43, 46, 139–40 and the origins of modernism  46–56 reevaluations of modernism by 72–80 liberalism  113, 121–2, 125 see also individualism List, Herbert  4–6 Lubetkin, Berthold  54–5, 83–90, 121n.169, 130n.3, 168–70, 176–9 see also Tecton MacKay, Marina  37–8, 140–1, 175–6, 211n.172 MARS Group  37, 46–7, 54–5, 129–30, 178–9, 201–2 Matisse, Henri  17 McFarlane, James  45–6 medium architectural modernism as a linguistic phenomenon  2, 8–10, 29–30, 34–5, 40–2, 55–6, 82, 92–3, 153, 173 cross-medium criticism, collaboration, and style  2–3, 7–12, 7n.17, 14–19, 27–34, 37, 40–1, 45–7, 50, 75–9, 82, 97, 131, 137–9, 155–8, 161–2, 193, 212–13, 219–20, 226–7, 239–40 and politics  34–5, 37, 83–4, 209–10 specificity  3–4, 18, 32–4, 45–6, 104, 119–20, 125, 128, 137–41, 194–6, 204, 214–15 Mendelsohn, Erich  97–8, 185n.55, 207 Miller, Tyrus  52, 153, 167–8 Ministry of Information  37–8, 130–7, 151–2, 168–70, 178–81, 189, 207 Mitford, Nancy  210–12

modernism and the city  7–8, 14, 25–6 death of  224–8, 237–8 economy, labor relations, and  4–5, 23–4, 41–2, 51, 63–4, 99–100, 107n.109, 125, 154–5, 184, 186, 219, 237–8 education in  41–2, 46n.27, 88–9, 205, 221–2, 234–5 and family structures  30–3, 180, 200 formal values and political values  2, 14, 36, 72, 74–6, 79–80, 92–3, 101–2, 106–7, 117, 124–8, 146–9, 203–5, 207–8, 212–13 and gender  29–32 and government  3–4, 21–2, 34–5, 37, 51, 58, 79–80, 91–4, 107n.109, 111–12, 123–37, 159–60, 168–70, 172–3, 176–84, 186–7, 194–6, 198–208, 210–11, 217–22, 225, 227–8, 233–4, 237–40 late  8–9, 26–7, 137–41, 152–3, 162–4, 166–8, 204–5, 223–4, 239–40 and mass production  2–4, 6–7, 49–50, 65, 73–4, 107n.109, 110–11, 115, 117, 134–6, 154–5, 157–8, 186, 197–8, 202–6 and national identity  4–7, 23–6, 34–6, 53–71, 75–6, 106–7, 152–3, 159–60, 167–70, 178–82, 195–6, 201–2, 204–5, 211–12, 238–9 origins of  7–27, 44–6, 226–7 term used in architectural and design criticism  2, 40–1, 48–9, 72–5, 77–8, 94–5, 97, 100, 187 and time  7–8, 16, 20–1, 23, 42–6, 55–6, 60–1, 80, 94–5, 100–1, 103–4, 113, 115, 119–20, 153–4, 164–5, 187, 194–6, 214–15, 228–30, 235, 238–9 and violence  7, 34–5, 38–9, 45–6, 151, 174–5, 199–202, 205–11, 215, 218–39 Moholy-Nagy, László  46–7, 52, 87–8, 184–7 Moore, Henry  2–3, 7, 75–6 Morris, William  12, 67–8, 110–11 Murry, John Middleton  26n.96, 197–8 Nash, Paul  40 Nicholson, Ben  2–3 Omega Workshops  10–20, 55 Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant  5, 11–12, 96–7 see also Fry, Roger

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258 Index Orwell, George  35–8, 131–76, 197–210, 215 architectural and planning criticism by  170–1, 197–209 Coming Up for Air  37, 142–73, 198–9, 203 Nineteen Eighty-Four  32, 37–8, 159–60, 172–3, 205–10 parody  26–7, 37–8, 71–2, 173, 189–90, 192–6, 211n.172 Peckham Experiment  127–8, 148–9, 210 periodicals  9–10, 27n.97, 29–30, 46–7, 65, 185–6, 220, 239–40 Architects’ Journal  99n.68, 120, 148–50, 159–60, 188n.69, 231–2, 239–40 Architectural Review  7n.17, 9–10, 16, 23–7, 30, 32, 46–9, 65–6, 71–2, 75–6, 96n.54, 187–8 Blast  14–15, 20–1, 44–5, 71–2 Country Life  58–9, 147–8 Good Housekeeping 216 Horizon  6, 37–8, 132, 154–5, 176–7, 212–15, 220, 232n.27 House & Garden­ 92–5 Scrutiny  9–10, 41–2 Vogue  66n.116, 92–3, 96–7 Pevsner, Nikolaus  4–5, 207 Picasso, Pablo  12, 16–17, 157–8, 211–12, 218 planning  37–8, 51, 84, 107n.109, 121–8, 133–7, 174–5, 230–2, 235, 237–40 MARS Plan for London  129–30 New Towns Act  182 Political and Economic Planning Organisation (PEP)  84, 178–9 publications  7–8, 146–7, 176–8, 180, 185–6 Reilly Plan  200–2 Town and Country Planning Act  182 see also MARS Group and rebuilding and rehousing schemes postmodernism  38–9, 223–4 Pound, Ezra  18–19, 73n.143, 226–7 propaganda  151–2, 168–70, 208–9 architects, designers, planners, and writers as propagandists  40–1, 72, 74, 119, 123–6, 129–37, 158, 161–2 see also Ministry of Information Read, Herbert  2–3, 36, 40–3, 46–7, 84–5, 202–3 Rebel Art Centre  71–2

rebuilding and rehousing schemes  133–7, 141, 146–8, 178–83, 192–3, 196, 200, 218, 237–8 see also exhibitions and planning Reilly, Sir Charles  178–9, 200n.114 Richards, J.M.  51 Rosner, Victoria  28–9, 33–4 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)  56–7, 107n.109, 146–7, 176nn.8, 11, 178–80 Ruskin, John  48–9, 110–11 satire  26–7, 79–80, 122–3, 210–11, 216, 221 Shakespeare, William  16–17, 205 and mid-century dystopian fiction  113–14, 117–20, 208–9 Shaw, George Bernard  54–5, 116, 129–30 Shelley, Percy  16–17, 101–2, 124–5 Smith, Zadie  238–9 socialism  4, 51, 67–8, 90–1, 205–7, 210–13 Spence, Basil  237–8 Spender, Stephen  1–8, 35–6, 42, 132, 144–5, 220 Spurr, David  27–8 Summerson, John  9–10, 176n.8 Taunton, Matthew  29n.111, 182–3 Tecton  7n.17, 50, 75–6, 85–90, 176–7 see also Lubetkin, Berthold Things to Come 184–9 see also Wells, H.G. Thomas, Dylan  37, 130–7 Todd, Dorothy  30, 65–6, 96–7 Torrington, Jeff  237–8 totalitarianism and art and architecture  33–4, 75, 108–9, 159–60, 175–6, 198–9, 204, 207–8, 211–12, 217–22, 225–6, 229–30, 233–4 and bureaucracy  37–8, 175–6, 204, 207, 219–20 and literature  35–8, 44–5, 83–4, 115–20, 175–6, 202–4, 208–9, 214 and planning  106, 175–6, 188–9, 198–9, 203, 205–7, 210–14, 217–18, 221–2 Unit One  36, 40–1 utopianism  33–4, 55–6, 75, 81–4, 102, 104–5, 108, 179–80, 183–4, 203, 205–6, 213–14, 224–7, 235 and apocalypse  21, 24–5, 44–5, 124–5, 174–5, 183–4

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Index  259 Vorticism  13–15, 18, 77–9 see also Lewis, Wyndham Waugh, Evelyn  36–8, 46–7, 174–6, 209–22 architectural and design criticism by  36, 54–6, 58–61, 210–16 Brideshead Revisited  55, 153–4, 157–8 Decline and Fall  32–3, 36, 61–71, 105 Love Among the Ruins  37–8, 215–22 welfare state  31–2, 34–5, 130–1, 136–7, 146–7, 168–70, 190–1, 194, 201n.123, 210, 214, 217–22, 234, 237–40 see also Beveridge, William Wells, H. G.  104–5, 198–9 contribution to Things to Come 174–5, 184–9, 198–9 The Shape of Things to Come 174–5, 184, 198–9 ties to architecture and planning  84–5, 182–4 see also Things to Come Werkbund 100 West, Rebecca  182–3 White, Justin Blanco  30, 85–6 Williams, Raymond  7–8 Williams-Ellis, Clough  199 Wilson, Angus  239–40 Wollaeger, Mark  131 Woolf, Virginia  11–12, 17–18, 70, 119–20, 141–2, 178 Hogarth Press  50 Roger Fry 11–18

World War I  62–3, 151–2, 168–70 architects’ and designers’ response to  4, 18, 20–1, 29–30, 43, 55–6, 93–4, 132–3, 171, 177n.15, 178, 192–3, 224–5 in modernist literary criticism  34–6, 44–6, 54, 80, 174–5, 228–30 see also propaganda World War II  34–5, 54, 129–73, 178, 228–9 as a boon to modern architecture and planning  123–8, 147–8, 168–70, 174–5, 178–80, 183–4, 186–9, 192–3, 199–202, 205–6, 210–11, 227–8, 238–9 and collectivism  143–4, 168–70, 179–80, 203, 205–6, 232–4 and martial architecture  38–9, 176–7, 207–8, 218–19, 223–30 threat to literature and art  6, 131–2, 203–4, 208–9 see also documentary, exhibitions, film, Ministry of Information, propaganda, and rebuilding and rehousing schemes Wright, Frank Lloyd  160–1 Yeats, W. B.  50 zoo animal housing  36–7, 85–91, 121n.169, 236–7 scientists and architects  84–6, 92–3, 123n.184, 238–9 and war  174–5, 236–7 see also Huxley, Julian, Lubetkin, Berthold, and Tecton Zuckerman, Solly  174–7