The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion 9781474494793

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Key Figures and Movements
1 Ezra Pound versus T. S. Eliot on Christianity, Apocalypse and Myth, 1934–1945
2 Virginia Woolf and Christianity
3 H.D. and Spirituality
4 D. H. Lawrence’s Dark God
5 Harlem’s Bible Stories: Christianity and the New Negro Movement
6 The Jewish East End and Modernism
Part II: Secularity, Disenchantment, Re-enchantment
7 Troubled: Reverse Theodicy in Ward, Eliot and Baldwin
8 Modernism, Secular Hope and the Posthumous Trace
9 C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards and ‘Word Magic’: Rethinking the Relation of Language to Myth
10 Jean Toomer and the Face of the Real: Between Sacred Presence and Disenchanting Violence
11 Modernism and Political Theology
Part III: Religious Forms
12 Virginia Woolf’s Agnostic, Visionary Mysticism: Approaching and Retreating from the Sacred
13 Modernism, Abstraction and Spirituality: Barbara Hepworth and Hilma af Klint
14 Modernism and the Hymn
15 William James, Mysticism and the Modernist Epiphany
Part IV: Myth, Folklore and Magic
16 Modernist Mythopoeia
17 Yeats’s Sacred Grove
18 The Modernist Grail Quest
19 The Burial of the Dead in Mann’s The Magic Mountain
Part V: Modern Esotericism, Pantheism and Spiritualism
20 The Modernist Afterlives of Theosophy
21 Rebecca West, Modern Spiritualism and the Problem of Other Minds
22 ‘What God hath joined, let no pragmatist put asunder’: May Sinclair’s Philosophical Idealism as Surrogate Religion
Part VI: Religious Space, Time and Ritual Practice
23 Sacred Ground: Orthodoxy, Poetry and Religious Change
24 Liminal Spaces and Spiritual Practice in Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison
25 Finnegans Wake, Modernist Time Machines and Re-enchanted Time
Part VII: Global Transitions and Exchange
26 Global Seekers in The Quest: A Case Study of an Occult Periodical’s Worldly Religion
27 ‘A Miserable Attenuation’: T. S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore and Irving Babbitt
28 ‘Part heathen, part Christian’: Recording Transitions and Amalgamations of Belief Systems in Constantine Cavafy’s Poetry
Part VIII: Queer[y]ing Religion
29 ‘It was really rather fine to be suffering’: Radclyffe Hall at the Queer Intersection of Masochism and Martyrdom
30 The Byzantine Modernism of Djuna Barnes
31 ‘Mixed sex cases among goats’: The Modernist Sublime
Contributor Biographies
Index

Citation preview

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion

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Recent volumes in the series The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts Edited by Roxana Preda The Edinburgh Companion to Elizabeth Bishop Jonathan Ellis The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts David Punter The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music Delia da Sousa Correa The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts Catherine Brown and Susan Reid The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense Anna Barton and James Williams The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature Jeanne Dubino, Catherine W. Hollis, Paulina Pajak, Celise Lypka and Vara Neverow The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism Maud Ellmann, Sian White and Vicki Mahaffey The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay Mario Aquilina, Nicole B. Wallack and Bob Cowser Jnr The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies Laura Wright and Emelia Quinn The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology Alex Goody and Ian Whittington The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals Marysa Demoor, Cedric van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford Forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Juliet John and Claire Wood The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities Gavin Miller, Anna McFarlane and Donna McCormack The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts Tom Walker, Adrian Paterson and Charles Armstrong The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts Joe Bray and Hannah Moss The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900–2000 Nicola Wilson, Elizabeth Gordon Willson, Alice Staveley, Helen Southworth, Daniela La Penna, Sophie Heywood and Claire Battershill The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals Caroline Davis, David Finkelstein and David Johnson The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts Catherine Gander The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies Helen Groth and Julian Murphet The Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts Jakub Lipski and M.-C. Newbould The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures Bridget Crone and Bassam El Baroni

Please see our website for a complete list of titles in the series https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecl

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The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion

Edited by Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation, Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford, 2023 © the chapters their several authors, 2023 Chapter 30, ‘The Byzantine Modernism of Djuna Barnes’, is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence Cover image: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962), The Divine Breath, 1926–1934 ca., Archivio Fondazione Eranos, Ascona. Cover design: Jordan Shaw

Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 9478 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 9479 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 9480 9 (epub) The right of Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures viii Acknowledgementsix Introduction1 Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford Part I: Key Figures and Movements   1. Ezra Pound versus T. S. Eliot on Christianity, Apocalypse and Myth, 1934–194519 Erik Tonning   2. Virginia Woolf and Christianity Jane de Gay

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  3. H.D. and Spirituality Lara Vetter

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  4. D. H. Lawrence’s Dark God Luke Ferretter

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  5. Harlem’s Bible Stories: Christianity and the New Negro Movement Steve Pinkerton

81

  6. The Jewish East End and Modernism Alex Grafen

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Part II: Secularity, Disenchantment, Re-enchantment   7. Troubled: Reverse Theodicy in Ward, Eliot and Baldwin Douglas Mao

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  8. Modernism, Secular Hope and the Posthumous Trace David Sherman

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  9. C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards and ‘Word Magic’: Rethinking the Relation of Language to Myth Leigh Wilson

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vi contents 10. Jean Toomer and the Face of the Real: Between Sacred Presence and Disenchanting Violence Matthew Mutter 11. Modernism and Political Theology Charles Andrews

166 180

Part III: Religious Forms 12. Virginia Woolf’s Agnostic, Visionary Mysticism: Approaching and Retreating from the Sacred Gabrielle McIntire

197

13. Modernism, Abstraction and Spirituality: Barbara Hepworth and Hilma af Klint Lorraine Sim

213

14. Modernism and the Hymn Sean Pryor

233

15. William James, Mysticism and the Modernist Epiphany Graham H. Jensen

250

Part IV: Myth, Folklore and Magic 16. Modernist Mythopoeia Scott Freer

267

17. Yeats’s Sacred Grove Seán Hewitt

285

18. The Modernist Grail Quest Andrew Radford

299

19. The Burial of the Dead in Mann’s The Magic Mountain315 Pericles Lewis Part V: Modern Esotericism, Pantheism and Spiritualism 20. The Modernist Afterlives of Theosophy Allan Kilner-Johnson

329

21. Rebecca West, Modern Spiritualism and the Problem of Other Minds Jennifer Spitzer

343

22. ‘What God hath joined, let no pragmatist put asunder’: May Sinclair’s Philosophical Idealism as Surrogate Religion Rebecca Bowler

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Part VI: Religious Space, Time and Ritual Practice 23. Sacred Ground: Orthodoxy, Poetry and Religious Change Jamie Callison

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contents

24. Liminal Spaces and Spiritual Practice in Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison Elizabeth Anderson 25. Finnegans Wake, Modernist Time Machines and Re-enchanted Time Gregory Erickson

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389 404

Part VII: Global Transitions and Exchange 26. Global Seekers in The Quest: A Case Study of an Occult Periodical’s Worldly Religion Mimi Winick

425

27. ‘A Miserable Attenuation’: T. S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore and Irving Babbitt Mafruha Mohua

441

28. ‘Part heathen, part Christian’: Recording Transitions and Amalgamations of Belief Systems in Constantine Cavafy’s Poetry Sanja Bahun

457

Part VIII: Queer[y]ing Religion 29. ‘It was really rather fine to be suffering’: Radclyffe Hall at the Queer Intersection of Masochism and Martyrdom Jennifer Mitchell

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30. The Byzantine Modernism of Djuna Barnes Christos Hadjiyiannis

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31. ‘Mixed sex cases among goats’: The Modernist Sublime Matte Robinson and Lisa Banks

509

Contributor Biographies

523

Index530

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Figures

Figure 5.1 The conclusion of Cullen’s ‘Heritage’ as it appears in The New Negro.87 Figure 5.2 Richard Bruce Nugent, Lucifer, 1930. Watercolour on cardstock, 11 x 8½ in. Art and Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 91 Figure 5.3 Nugent, Mary Madonna, 1930. Watercolour on cardstock, 11 x 8½ in. Art and Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 92 Figure 5.4 Nugent, Judas and Jesus, 1947. Ink and transparent dye on paper, 15 x 11 in. Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York. 93 Figure 5.5 Nugent, Hagar, 1930. Watercolour on cardstock, 11 x 8½ in. Art and Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 95 Figure 5.6 Nugent, Salome Dancing, c. 1925–30. Ink over graphite on paper, 14½ x 10¾ in. Brooklyn Museum, New York. 96 Figure 13.1 Three Forms, 1935, Barbara Hepworth, © Bowness, Hepworth Estate. Photo: Tate Gallery. 220 Figure 13.2 Two Forms, 1934, Barbara Hepworth, © Bowness, Hepworth Estate. Source: Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings (1952). Photo: provided by author. 221 Figure 13.3 Forms in Echelon, 1938, Barbara Hepworth, © Bowness, Hepworth Estate. Photo: Tate Gallery. 223 Figure 13.4 Hilma af Klint, Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood, 1907. Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas, 315 x 235 cm. Courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm. Photo: Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. 227 Figure 13.5 Hilma af Klint, Group X, No. 2, Altarpiece, 1915. Oil and metal leaf on canvas, 238 x 179 cm. Courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm. Photo: Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. 228 Figure 26.1 Subscription card for The Quest, from issue 2.3 (1911), in The National Library of Wales. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales. 422 Figure 26.2 Flyer advertising ‘Winter Meetings’ from The Quest 4.2 (1913), in The National Library of Wales. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales. 424

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Acknowledgements

F

irst of all, we thank the editorial staff at Edinburgh University Press for supporting this collection, especially Jackie Jones and Susannah Butler, who showed such patience, enthusiasm and good cheer in the midst of a global pandemic. Second, we would like to give special thanks to Charlie Pullen, our Editorial Assistant, who has been meticulous in preparing an unwieldy final manuscript for publication. Third, but most importantly, we want to acknowledge our contributors who could not have imagined the circumstances in which they would be working when they agreed to write for this collection. It has been our privilege to work with such a dedicated, generous and unfailingly brilliant group of researchers. Queen Mary University of London generously provided funding to support the last stages of the project. The editors wish to thank John Curran, editor of Renascence: Essays on Literature and Ethics, Spirituality and Religion, for permission to reprint the essay by Pericles Lewis on ‘The Burial of the Dead in Mann’s The Magic Mountain’, Renascence 73, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 43–56. We are indebted to the Fondazione Eranos, Ascona, for granting the permission to use the image by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962), The Divine Breath, 1926–1934 ca. © Eranos Foundation Archive, Ascona.

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Introduction Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford

T

his Companion approaches cultural modernism’s abiding interest in myth and religion with a view to reframing and diversifying the research field’s current concerns, parameters and objects of scrutiny. Our contributors variously examine the aesthetic, publishing, technological and philosophical trends that shaped debates about modes of individual and communal spiritual experience from the 1890s to the 1940s and beyond. We prioritise the variability and specificity of modernist spiritualities, as well as the shifting standpoints that modernist figures have occupied in relation to theological creeds, imagery, practices and organisations. The Companion contributes to what we see as a welcome and timely trend in studies of the cultural, philosophical and aesthetic category of modernism – one that directs scholarly attention to how primary authors were, to differing degrees, ‘god-haunted’, exploring the ‘gap in being’ between the immanent and a transcendent actuality.1 By guiding the critical conversation into more inventive channels, the essays address modernist religion/s as a continuing event, a condition of possibility, a fund of creative ‘provocation and inspiration’ that ‘refuses consistency and homogenization’.2 Modernist studies has been comparatively slow to account for religion as a constitutive part of the ‘modernity’ to which its key texts refer. Or, to put this another way, the modernity with which modernism is imbricated has often been assumed to be a secular modernity, an age in which religion is an option but by no means a given and, in many circumstances, a difficult option to embrace.3 This is not to say that earlier studies have ignored the significance of myth and religion to writers such as T. S. Eliot or H.D. or that they have overlooked the presence of religious texts and practices in modernism altogether. But many of these accounts have left unchallenged the supposed paradox that a secular age should produce a literature in which religion and spirituality feature prominently, a paradox made more acute if modernism is treated in its ‘strong’ form as an experimental literature representative of its times.4 In some instances modernist religions are presented as the idiosyncratic concerns of individuals or of loose groups of writers who set themselves explicitly against modernity understood to be a spiritual and/or cultural vacuum. Adam Schwartz’s The Third  1 

J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Penguin, 2003), 184. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism’, Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3 (2001): 493–513.  3  Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3.  4  We take the distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ modernism from Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘Weak Theory, Weak Modernism’, Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (2018): 437–59.  2 

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Spring (2005) suggests the turn to Catholicism in G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson and David Jones is part of an express protest against modernity and, though Catholicism is not by any means singularly or inevitably anti-modern, the argument fits these particular writers.5 Other studies, especially those focused on occult or esoteric sources, have claimed modernist spirituality for a form of alt-modernity that breaks, not with faith as such, but with ‘official’ religions seen to buttress Victorian values and institutions. Susan Stanford Friedman’s groundbreaking work on H.D. in Psyche Reborn (1981) and Helen Sword’s Ghostwriting Modernism (2002) both highlight the importance of esoteric traditions and literatures for writers looking to challenge the ‘masculine monotheism of the mainstream’.6 Leon Surette’s The Birth of Modernism (1993) rewrites modernism’s origin story to highlight the influence of occult sources and belief systems. Surette’s preface describes how he came to his own realisation that a purely ‘secular and aesthetic reading of modernist discourse’, one which treated Ezra Pound’s occult and visionary interests as ‘factitious and rhetorical’, was inadequate. Writing consciously in the wake of postmodernism and the challenge to modernist claims of universality and ‘positive, context-free’ knowledge, Surette urges a serious consideration of the occult influence on modernism.7 Given that the study of myth and religion in modernism is not, strictly speaking, a new or even recent development, claims that there has been a ‘turn to religion’ or that scholars have neglected this topic demand some scrutiny.8 We do not suggest such claims are mistaken and this volume is itself intended to reflect on, and help fill, a gap in the literature on this topic. Our sense instead is that the relationship between modernism, religion and spirituality has been brought into sharper and different definition by changes in the understanding of modernism primarily over the first decades of the twenty-first century. These changes are often signalled by reference to ‘the new modernist studies’, first named as such in influential essays by Susan Stanford Friedman, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz in the early 2000s.9 This has not been the only context in which modernism has been rethought, but its influence on the reception and treatment of the majority of writers included in this volume has been considerable. Notably the new modernist studies has built on and given increased legitimacy to the kinds of approaches seen in Friedman and Surette: encouraging research into the intellectual and material contexts for cultural production; refusing to discriminate

5 

See Adam Schwartz, The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson and David Jones (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005); Jamie Callison, Paul S. Fiddes, Anna Johnson and Erik Tonning, eds, David Jones: A Christian Modernist? (Boston: Brill, 2017). 6  Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 178; Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 7  Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), ix, 3. 8  See, for example, Craig Woelfel and Jayme Stayer, ‘Introduction: Modernism and the Turn to Religion’, Renascence 73, no. 1 (2021): 3–11. Susan Stanford Friedman argues that there have been few attempts at a ‘broad characterization of the place of religion in modernist writers’ in ‘Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison’, in The New Modernist Studies, ed. Douglas Mao (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 89. 9  The origins of new modernist studies are usually traced to the formation of the Modernist Studies Association and the journal Modernism/modernity in 1998. Friedman, ‘Definitional Excursions’; Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, ‘The Changing Profession: The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123 (2008): 737–48.

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introduction

3

between high and low or reputable and disreputable sources; and bringing middlebrow or bestselling authors such as Radclyffe Hall and H. G. Wells into the frame of reference. Disclaimers such as those found in Surette’s preface are no longer needed because popular and/or subsequently discredited materials are no longer ‘embarrassing’ subjects for the scholar. At the same time, however, increased scrutiny of modernism as a category as well as modernity as its lowest common denominator has brought scholars more directly up against the paradox of a religious modernism. How and why does a literature supposedly expressive of secular modernity cleave so thoroughly to beliefs, values, attitudes and sensibilities seemingly more appropriate to an age of faith? In studies of modernism and religion published in the last few decades, the answer has often involved rethinking the meaning of the secular and secularisation in ways that draw on changing paradigms in other disciplines. An early example is Gregory Erickson’s The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (2007) in which Erickson observes that God has made ‘what many would consider a surprising comeback’ to academic theory and philosophy and asks what kind of modernist criticism this might inform.10 Others have drawn on developments in the political and social sciences and especially on revised theories of the secular. In his hugely influential Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010), Pericles Lewis takes his cue from Callum G. Brown’s observation that ‘Secularization theory is now a narrative in crisis’. Lewis’s book explores the ‘limits of the secularization’ thesis as it applies (or not) to modernism, observing the way that novelists looked to religion and philosophy to offer new explanations for numinous or rarefied phenomena and experience.11 Subsequent books and articles have reached different conclusions from similar foundations. Matthew Mutter’s Restless Secularism (2017) moves away from the psychological and functional explanations for religion seen in Lewis to explore how modernism responds to the competing pressures of religious and secular imaginaries. Steve Pinkerton’s Blasphemous Modernism (2017) and Michael Lackey’s The Modernist God State (2012) both challenge the idea that religion is a spent force in the West. The writers and texts featured in their books seek variously to resist and/or appropriate the still-considerable power of Christianity for their own ends. Lara Vetter’s Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer (2010) shows how, far from mutually exclusive, science and religion were seen by some to be equally valid means of approach to new realities. Alongside these multiple author studies there have been reconsiderations of the religious and spiritual writing of many of the individuals featured in earlier studies including D. H. Lawrence (Luke Ferretter), H.D. (Elizabeth Anderson), James Joyce (Gregory Erickson), Djuna Barnes (Zhao Ng) and Mary Butts (Andrew Radford). Modernism receives different weight and emphasis in these books but, in all of them, religion is an important – if often troublesome, to use Douglas Mao’s term – part of modern/ist experience and thought. As Paul K. Saint-Amour explains in an essay reflecting on how modernist studies has changed in recent years, a weakening in the central concept has resulted in

10 

Gregory Erickson, The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2. Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 24, 21.

11 

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a much stronger field which is now more ‘populous, varied, generative, self-transforming’ than at any other time in the past.12 Several new book series testify to the greater role played by myth and religion in this transformed field. The Bloomsbury series ‘Historicizing Modernism’ and ‘Modernist Archives’ both demonstrate how religion and un/belief feature as vital facets of cultural modernism.13 Roger Griffin’s Modernism and. . . series counters Saint-Amour in offering a strong, or in Griffin’s words ‘maximalist’, understanding of modernism in which religion and spirituality play a key role from the outset. The series builds on Griffin’s work on European fascism as well as classic studies in European modernism such as Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982) and Modris Ekstiens’s Rites of Spring (1989). Griffin’s key premise, as explained in his series editor’s preface, is that aesthetic modernism is a creative attempt to transcend or to offer a solution to ‘the spiritual malaise or decadence of modernity’. ‘Maximalist’ modernists such as Nietzsche, Wagner, Kandinsky, Gropius, Picasso and Woolf saw their art as ‘laboratories of visionary thought’; their motivation was the regeneration of art, politics or, most radically, of society as a whole: ‘Such modernists consciously sought to restore a sense of higher purpose, transcendence and Zauber (magic) to a spiritually starved modern humanity condemned by “progress” to live in a permanent state of existential exile, of liminoid transition, now that the forces of the divine seem to have withdrawn.’14 The books in this series do not always centre on Europe, though the European experience of the First World War and the crisis that followed in its wake is central to Griffin’s conception of modernism. John Bramble’s Modernism and the Occult (2015) traces the global, often colonial, pathways taken by Eastern philosophies and esotericisms and the exoticism with which they are often imbued in the West. The emphasis on modernity in modernist studies has been remarkably consistent even as the research area has grown from the internationalism of England, North America, France and Germany to an expansive fascination with the literatures, languages and religious rituals of Eastern and Central Europe, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, South-East Asia and the Caribbean. As the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012) and Global Modernists on Modernism (2020) attest, this ambitious ‘scaling up’ by modernist scholars is marked by a readiness to embrace and refine the tactics of research in the postcolonial and world literatures. Experts have been extremely wary of the concept ‘global’, one not only tainted with associations of transgenerational imperialism (as too is modernity), but one that simplifies the sacral modernisms of different countries, ignoring their particularities and their points of contact.15

12 

Saint-Amour, ‘Weak Theory’, 441. See, for example, Iain Bailey, Samuel Beckett and the Bible (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Thomas Berenato, Anne Price-Owen and Kathleen Henderson Staudt, eds, David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison, eds, David Jones’s ‘The Grail Mass’ and Other Works (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Jonas Kurlberg, Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism: T. S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim and the Moot (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Chrissie Van Mierlo, James Joyce and Catholicism: The Apostate’s Wake (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 14  Roger Griffin, ‘Series Editor’s Preface’, in Modernism and Christianity by Erik Tonning (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), x. Some examples of relevant contributions to the series include Bramble, Ohana, Tonning and Weller. 15  For more on the use of modernity in global modernisms despite its ‘racist and Eurocentric histories’ see Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross, ‘Global Modernism: An Introduction and Ten Theses’, in Global Modernists on Modernism, ed. Moody and Ross (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 5. 13 

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introduction

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However, most agree on the need to devise alternative maps of modernity and modernism, using perhaps Susan Stanford Friedman’s concept of ‘polycentricity’ or Laura Doyle’s ‘criss-crossing empires’ instead of outdated Eurocentric schemas of metropolitan epi/centre and colonial margin.16 Much more can be said on cultural modernism’s links to a confluence of multidirectional and unbalanced worldwide power trends and relations, or how the atrophied imperial drives of empires such as Ottoman Turkey, Russia, Japan or China resonated aesthetically in verbal and visual texts from this period.17 This Companion makes some small inroads into this area, aiming throughout to stay attentive to the many ways that religion/s play into the field of unequal and uneven relations within and between nation-states, peoples and communities. As Linda Woodhead points out, once we try to account for religious change across an expanded field, easy assumptions about what constitutes modernity, and modernism as its aesthetic correlative, quickly come to seem inadequate: ‘Once one begins to take a religious and hence a global perspective, easy generalizations about modernity begin to fail, and the common (Western) assumption that all cultures and societies inevitably progress through uniform stages of development from the premodern to the modern (so repeating the experience of the West) becomes harder to defend.’18

Keynotes This Companion prioritises a range of religious tropes, genres, venues, movements and media that the fresh conceptual tools and extended canon and timelines of a revitalised modernist studies have still not adequately reckoned with. First, many of our contributors throw into sharper relief the notion of a public religious experience, not just a ‘metaphysics or theology [. . .] refracted through’ a privatised ‘sensibility’.19 In the decades we cover here religion emerges as what Rebecca West describes as the ‘creative spirit informing the world’ – a vastly complex and prominent facet of political and civic discourse.20 Too often, we argue, the modernist preoccupation with spirituality – broadly formulated to incorporate historical and established belief frameworks as well as alternative engagements with the numinous such as occultism or theosophy – has been erroneously construed as a retrograde cultural and aesthetic politics. In the chapters that follow, religion is aligned with a wide spectrum of political projects and opinions, frequently featuring as a source of cultural renewal or a means of imagining a better future, though it would be impossible to generalise as to what that might look like. We follow Griffin in recognising that ‘modernist impulses’ – by which he means the urge to regeneration in the arts as well as economics and politics – ‘do not necessarily

16 

Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 511, 690. 17  See Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: University of Columbia Press, 2015), 174–5, 62–5. 18  Linda Woodhead, ‘Modern Contexts of Religion’, in Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Christopher Partridge, Hiroko Karwanami and Linda Woodhead, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–12 (4). 19  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 491. 20  Rebecca West, ‘My Religion’, My Religion. Arnold Bennett, Hugh Walpole, et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1926), 22.

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have to take the form of secular utopianism, but may readily assume religious (some would say “post-secular”) forms’.21 Second, we place intellectual pressure on the role of religion and mythology in the modern/ist world. We assess the critical background to the study of modernist mythopoeia but also how myth is much more than a question of poetic form and function. It seeps into value systems, ecological concerns and debates about ethical accountability; it shapes highly politicised and in some cases totalitarian reactions to acute social turmoil. At the core of fascist ideology, as Griffin points out, were myths of ‘imminent rebirth from decadence’ transferred to the ‘body’ of the nation-state itself.22 Third, this more nuanced discussion of myth and its role in a rapidly burgeoning spiritual marketplace prompts closer scrutiny of the transnational flows that have overturned the parochial secularisation thesis of Anglo-American aesthetic modernism. Our contributors are alert to the conceptual challenges implicit in accounting for the very different status and nature of religious institutions, infrastructures and communities across this enlarged historical and geopolitical canvas. Several Companion essays focus on African American writers and their engagement with specifically black Christian cultures as well as with international religious movements which mirror current debates in world literature. Other essays retrace links between European and colonial writers and group formations to show how ideas or cultural objects were exchanged, as well as the material means – publication venues, literary salons, lecture tours and exhibitions – by which they ‘travelled’.23 Fourth, a crucial facet of our project considers how modernists’ attempts to represent spiritual affect permit fresh insight into gendered sexualities and queerness, as well as the role of numinous perceptions, concepts and conditions in contemporary feminisms and environmentalisms. As Saba Mahmood points out in her influential account of the women’s mosque movement, religious participation suggests forms of agency that cannot and should not be reduced to the submission/resistance dichotomy of liberal, secular feminism.24 Our final keynote relates to the whole question of transitions and how we periodise a ‘long modernism’ as opposed to epochal shifts.25 In the Companion our stress on modernism not as a historically delimited occurrence but as an ambient and continually morphing creative enterprise accommodates Robert Elsmere, Bram Stoker and Thomas Hardy at one end, as well as James Baldwin and Keri Hulme at the other. How such figures and texts represent belief as a vibrant, immanent or fluctuating state in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries also has relevance to how we address metaphysical questions – such as the search for modes of connection and community, both within and without the precincts of ecclesiastical institutions – in the early twenty-first.26

21 

Griffin, ‘Series Editor’s Preface’, xiii. See Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 216. 23  For more on this, see Fabio A. Durão and Dominic Williams, eds, Modernist Group Dynamics: The Politics and Poetics of Friendship (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). 24  Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 25  On ‘what a long modernism may look like’ see Amy Hungerford, ‘On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary’, American Literary History 20, nos 1–2 (2008): 410–19; David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 26  See Neil Levi, ‘The Persistence of the Old Regime: Late Modernist Form in the Postmodern Period’, in Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, ed. Stephen Ross (London: Routledge, 2008), 117–26. 22 

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What this Companion reveals above all is the error of categorising modernist writers, musicians, artists, cultural brokers and impresarios as either secular or religious. Instead, our essays strive for a non-doctrinaire approach that moves beyond dichotomies such as belief/unbelief, faith/reason, sacred/profane and orthodoxy/heterodoxy. It is better, as Craig Bradshaw Woelfel counsels, to comprehend modernist cultural production as a radically ‘liminal site of cross-pressured religious engagement, a space used to critique, simultaneously, traditional or orthodox religious belief and, simultaneously, entirely immanent or rational accounts of life, knowledge, and experience’.27 This notion reveals facets of lived religion and ritual practice that do not fit neatly into glib narratives of a ‘clean break’ between more mainstream, established modes of public worship and alternative or dissident spiritual pursuits. Alongside this shift of emphasis, the Companion seeks to extend the usual scope of studies of this kind to marginalised writers and groups, as well as to those dismissed as middlebrow or period talents whose work, while less intellectually and stylistically radical than ‘high’ modernist texts, was often intriguingly ambivalent about religion (May Sinclair, Rebecca West and H. G. Wells). We situate figures whose work remains relatively under-studied alongside, and in lively debate with, those who have been and continue to be the most prominent players in university syllabi, published monographs and anthologies. In so doing we ask what versions of modernism commentators have overlooked thus far, and how this neglect – or even erasure – has fostered an overly narrow or partial view of a period that needs to be corrected. Our contributors reappraise the role of orthodox ideologies, celestial and mythological realms, and other aesthetic ‘manifestations of the New Spirit’28 in modernist cultures not as a niche, obscure interest but as a locus for examining a wide range of subjectivities and communities in generative ways.

Contents The Companion is organised thematically. The first part is titled ‘Key Figures and Movements’. Here our contributors examine authors whose literary and critical work has been crucial to studies of modernism and religion to date, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Erik Tonning), Virginia Woolf (Jane de Gay), H.D. (Lara Vetter) and D. H. Lawrence (Luke Ferretter). Not every possible candidate is represented here, but our contributors offer much-needed new perspectives on some of the main contenders. Erik Tonning, for instance, extends discussion of Eliot’s and Pound’s contrasting attitudes to apocalyptic religion into the 1930s and beyond, showing how Pound’s rejection of Eliot’s ‘European religion’ fed into his radicalisation. Lara Vetter meanwhile explores how H.D.’s spiritual quest evolved over the whole course of her career. This section also includes groups and individuals who have historically been overlooked in this context. They include the writers of the Harlem Renaissance

27 

Craig Bradshaw Woelfel, Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and the Dissociation of Belief (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), 13; Taylor, A Secular Age, 302. 28  Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Programme for Parade, 18 May 1917’, in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 213.

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(Steve Pinkerton), often misconstrued even though biblical cultures and imagery of rebirth were intrinsic to the language and temper of the cultural movement. Also represented are the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ (Alex Grafen), seen less as a coherent group than as a ‘cultural influence’ for whom Jewishness held a wide range of meanings. For the writers in these minoritised groups Christianity brings with it histories and legacies of oppression and feeds into present-day structures of racism and anti-Semitism. Our contributors explore how their subjects navigate the complex associations of the religious materials and languages they employ. The essays in Part II, ‘Secularity, Disenchantment, Re-enchantment’, follow and complicate theories of the secular (Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Peter Berger, Saba Mahmood and others), disenchantment (Max Weber, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer) and political theology (Carl A. Raschke, Georgio Agamben, Simon Critchley). Douglas Mao’s essay tracks the continuities between Mary Augusta Ward’s bestseller Robert Elsmere (1888), the locus classicus for discussions of faith and doubt in the Victorian period, and the vexed (and vexing) experience of religion seen in James Baldwin and T. S. Eliot. David Sherman argues that modernism invests significant creative energy in secular ‘world-building’, offering forms of hope outside, and as an alternative to, religious structures of thought and affect. Leigh Wilson meanwhile considers the power and persistence of magic at the core of what might appear on a cursory inspection to be modernism at its most rationalist – C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards’s experiments with Basic English. The final two essays in this section urge a reconsideration of writers often presented as indifferent or opposed to religion as a form of ‘false consciousness’, an alibi for social injustice or an obstacle to human flourishing. The first is Jean Toomer (Matthew Mutter), whose work is shown to cultivate a new sense of enchantment in the world even as it deplores forms of religiosity deemed too sentimental or insufficiently distinguished from white missionary Christianity. Mutter suggests that ignoring the religious Toomer in favour of the political Toomer is an error resulting from seeing these two facets of his work as irreconcilable. Politics and more specifically political theology are also key to Charles Andrews’s rereading of D. H. Lawrence and Sylvia Townsend Warner. While both were hostile to Christianity, they recognised its ongoing role in contemporary nationalisms and buttressing state power and offered their own theopolitical imaginings to counter the official versions. Part III of the Companion – ‘Religious Forms’ – revisits and refines Pericles Lewis’s influential thesis that modernist cultural production transforms and sublimates questions of religion into questions of form.29 An intensified concern with technical questions, and a conscious stress on form as expertise, anchors modes used to express and harness the numinous (ceremony, iconography, mythology, prayer) in the radical stylistic innovations and speculations of modernist texts. Gabrielle McIntire addresses how Virginia Woolf’s prose, which would seem to suggest a culture and milieu of modern secularity, is in fact saturated with tropes, themes and metaphors of seeking, rapture and ecstatic communion. The very devices which set apart Woolf as modernist (multi-layered perspectivism, fragmentation, ironic narrative cadence, self-referentiality and riddling ambiguity), instead of debunking the transcendent realm, enact and reflect a piercing awareness of

29 

Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, 9–10.

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its sensuous immediacy.30 Lorraine Sim, focusing on the writings and sculpture of the British artist Barbara Hepworth, with comparison to the work of Swedish painter and spiritualist Hilma af Klint, considers how abstraction provides new terms for exploring and expressing spirituality in the modernist period. Sean Pryor analyses the resilience, persistence and adaptability of what might have appeared to some a strangely archaic and anachronistic mode – the hymn. Pryor asks why so many modernists, and their contemporaries, scrutinised and reimagined hymns. Was it for primarily satirical purposes, or part of a serious campaign to encode metaphysical energy into literary form? The essay resonates with Regina Schwartz’s notion of ‘efficacy’ in Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism – ‘to make something happen’ as is required of a rite from a particular religious tradition.31 Graham Jensen’s essay approaches the epiphany in its numerous guises, considering its critical relevance and artistic force. The unexpected, radiant or revelatory moments of being that emerge from the midst of the humdrum (in Katherine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad, Joyce, Woolf and Proust, for example) represent religious forms at their most explicit in the canonical works of Anglo-European modernism. But Jensen’s account also makes us ponder whether the epiphany, once treated as synonymous with notions of aesthetic autonomy, can be retooled to depict a more politicised vision in various national and linguistic traditions. In Part IV, ‘Myth, Folklore and Magic’, our contributors reassess myth and mythopoeia which, following landmark research by Marc Manganaro, Michael Bell and others, was long held to be the primary means of modern/ist engagement with gods, resurrection and the afterlife.32 The essays in this section (Scott Freer, Seán Hewitt, Andrew Radford, Pericles Lewis) update earlier studies by showing how ‘the quest for spirit’ – expressed through a reworking of pagan and indigenous beliefs – gave rise to new models of belonging and non-belonging at a time of profound social ferment.33 Central to this section is a renewed concern with regionality – the shared visions or competing versions in, for instance, Mary Butts’s Taverner Novels, John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance and Arthur Machen’s The Great Return. Seán Hewitt turns to Ireland, recognising ‘the sacred grove’ as a recurrent locus of re-enchantment in Yeats’s writing, where the spiritually immanent replaces the watchwords of late Victorian scientific rationalism. For all these figures, myth and folklore afforded the means of remodelling the concept of home/land as a ‘palimpsest’ or site of sedimentary layers of numinous affect and archaeology.34 Pericles Lewis’s chapter on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain reveals a different side to the modernist

30 

See Stephanie Paulsell, Religion Around Virginia Woolf (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019), 5–6. 31  Regina Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7–8. 32  Influential studies of modernism and myth include Bell; Manganaro; Freer; and on the classical tradition in H.D., Gregory. 33  Roger Luckhurst, ‘Religion, Psychical Research, Spiritualism, and the Occult’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 429–44. 34  See Mary Butts, The Journals of Mary Butts, ed. Nathalie Blondel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 360; also Sam Wiseman, The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2017); James Wilkes, A Fractured Landscape of Modernity: Culture and Conflict in the Isle of Purbeck (London: Palgrave, 2014).

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preoccupation with myth. Lewis shows how imagery and rituals of ‘burying the dead’ operate, firstly, as a fraught reaction to the cataclysm of the Great War. More importantly, he proposes how myths of mortality, interment and the underworld provide crucial scope for crafting a new framework for the numinous, even a ‘secular sacred’. Lewis demonstrates how in Mann’s text orthodox religious consolations cannot begin to process the parlous post-war condition. Such established and hidebound narratives must be set aside in favour of re-visioning classical paradigms of katabasis. Part V of the Companion weighs the formation, goals and afterlives of modern forms of esotericism, pantheism and spiritualism. Allan Kilner-Johnson charts this issue with regard to theosophy, reinforcing Alex Owen’s vital recognition that this aspect of occulture ‘must be understood as integral to the shaping of the new at the turn of the century’.35 Jennifer Spitzer shows that Rebecca West’s investigative journalism and interwar novels are replete with references to otherworldly events, apparitions, telepathic readings, and acts of spiritual communion between the living and the dead. Rounding out this set of essays, Rebecca Bowler analyses May Sinclair’s idiosyncratic take on ‘Idealism’ as a ‘surrogate religion’. Key to this section is the long shadow cast by theosophy on cultural modernism as well as the ways in which it was retrofitted to urgent new geopolitical actualities. The final three parts of the Companion gauge the intersections between the scrutiny of modernism and religion and fresh, dynamic approaches within literary and cultural studies more broadly formulated. The emphasis in these sections is on religion as a present and vital force in the modern world and on the way that religion/s are lived by embodied and emplaced subjects who inevitably transform them through their practice. Part VI, ‘Religious Space, Time and Ritual Practice’, gathers essays which attend to material cultures and specifically how religious ritual and observance shapes and reshapes experiences of sacred sites including churches, retreat houses and places of pilgrimage. Jamie Callison presents an alternative view to the modernist fascination with ruins and with churches as empty monuments to a vanished God. Focusing on the Anglo-Catholic retreat movement, he shows how ‘orthodox’ religion adapted to a changing modern world, moving the focus and nature of worship in the direction of more inward and eventually ecumenical forms. Callison demonstrates that T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is responsive to these new emphases. Elizabeth Anderson’s essay introduces materialist and indigenous studies of religion, showing how their insights direct us to a dynamic sense of how religious environments are themselves active agents in the creation of experiences and subjectivities that often exceed those of the human. Anderson considers the nexus of liminal sites and ceremonial practices in a diverse body of texts from Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison to the New Zealand novelist Keri Hulme and Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison. Finally, Gregory Erickson shows how our experience of ‘sacred sites’ is always an experience of time past and time passing. In the

35 

Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 15. See also Leigh Wilson, Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the Occult (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Georgina Byrne, Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850–1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010); Allan KilnerJohnson, The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

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ruins of churches and in canonical texts we can see the material traces of that which has come before as well as intimations of what lies ahead. His essay reframes what aesthetic modernism was and is by demonstrating how writings by H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker and James Joyce evince modes of magical re-enchantment through time travel. Part VII focuses on the transnational circulation of ideas, beliefs and practices and the material cultures and histories that make that possible. As Kilner-Johnson shows in Part V, the heterodox sympathies and sensibilities of Helena Blavatsky and her acolytes would foster a return of Western mysticism in two notable splinter groups of the early twentieth century: G. R. S. Mead’s Quest Society and Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society. Mimi Winick’s essay discusses Mead’s editorship of an influential yet under-studied quarterly review – The Quest. Winick demonstrates how contributors to this periodical crafted a self-consciously modern and worldly notion of religion that comprised Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and other sacred lore, placing religious affect as a shared experience across the globe and as a crucial factor in worldhistorical convulsions such as the First World War. Mafruha Mohua’s chapter explores Eliot’s work in which his interpretation of Anglo-Catholicism is linked with his explication of European classicism and Hindu-Buddhist tradition. Mohua gauges the significant connection between Eliot’s dismay at the celebration of Rabindranath Tagore – who was an incisive contributor to The Quest – and his laments over the deterioration not only of classical European tradition but also of religious life in England specifically and the West generally. The final essay in this set (Sanja Bahun) urges a site-specific and transhistorical approach to a question more usually framed in terms of globalisation and its outcomes and correlatives in the cultural sphere. How and exactly where do hybrid religious identities and syncretic religious frameworks develop and what particular histories of trade, imperial conquest and cross-religious encounters do they subsume? Focusing on Constantine Cavafy’s ‘home-site’ of Alexandria, Bahun asks us to reconsider religious modernism in terms of multiple sites of polyreligion rather than universal systems such as anthroposophy ‘invented’ or ‘discovered’ in the modern era. Bahun’s essay invites us to ask: where exactly was Cavafy’s literary craft – amid what rival or nested topographies of religious modernity should we situate it? The last section of the Companion, Part VIII, is alert to the claim made by Todd Avery that, despite its deep-rooted heteronormativity, Christian moralism might present a ‘multifaceted opportunity’ for queer practices and aesthetics.36 Our contributors address the centrality of religious narratives and tropes, especially that of martyrdom, to recording queer lives and subject formation. Jennifer Mitchell’s essay looks at Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness at the intersection of queer masochism and religious martyrdom, while Matte Robinson and Lisa Banks assess the ways in which esotericism and sexuality coincide to help inform and nuance complex modernist texts. Christos Hadjiyiannis’s essay notes that Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood is replete with vivid religious symbolism and has even been construed as a highly idiosyncratic type

36 

Todd Avery, ‘Nailed: Lytton Strachey’s Jesus Camp’, in Queer Bloomsbury, ed. Brenda Holt and Madelyn Detloff (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 173. See also Emily S. Hill, ‘God’s Miserable Army: Love, Suffering, and Queer Faith in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness’, Literature and Theology 30, no. 3 (2016): 359–74; Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Rosen and Patricia Juliana Smith, Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

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of Christian parable. However, Nightwood is a seditious and socially oppositional text that gleefully subverts a Christian – or indeed any single – interpretation. Hadjiyiannis prompts us to ‘look eastwards’ when construing Nightwood, comparing it to texts synonymous with the Byzantine Empire (330 ce–1453). He concludes that Nightwood is ‘Byzantine’ in another crucial aspect too, one that resonates with Roland Betancourt’s observation of an ‘inherent queerness’ in Byzantine culture.37 The division of this Companion into parts is not meant to suggest that they are discrete, and readers are encouraged to make crosscuts between our indicative themes. Mutter’s essay on Toomer speaks to some of the same tensions seen in Pinkerton’s essay on the Harlem Renaissance; Bahun’s exploration of polyreligion in relation to Cavafy is productively read in dialogue with Kilner-Johnson’s exploration of anthroposophy; Robinson and Banks’s essay on polyamory provides a wider context for the imbrication of religion and sexuality highlighted by Vetter in the life and work of H.D. The emergence of many interwoven threads has encouraged us in our thinking that modernism and religion is an intelligible and continuous object of study, though one best thought of in terms of multiply intersecting concerns, networks and sources rather than a singular or closed subfield. We are acutely aware that, given the size of the topic and the many candidates and themes that might have been included, our Companion must necessarily be partial, both in terms of coverage and with regard to the disciplinary and institutional biases of its editors and contributors. Mirroring the new modernist studies, the volume leans heavily towards literary studies and, although several essays address the visual arts, a full consideration of religion in other modernist media including film is still awaited. The majority of writers are anglophone, with the notable exception of the multilingual writers and communities featured in the essays by Bahun and Grafen. In this context, Christianity dominates because, as several of our contributors observe, even writers that were openly hostile to the religion could not escape its influence on the cultures and languages in which they lived and wrote. Modernist thinkers, writers and artists were, we note, remarkably, and perhaps uniquely, heterogeneous in their approach to religions and mythologies and even the most ‘orthodox’ writers drew from a range of traditions. But we do not seek to equate religious pluralism or syncretism with religious neutrality or universalism. Instead, our Companion pays attention to the routes by which ideas and traditions were circulated and exchanged and the emergence of new transnational and syncretic forms where they overlapped. We are conscious above all, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, that while there may be only one religion, there are hundreds of definitions of it.38 And each attempt to express the nature, causes and consequences of religion is likely to trigger a dispute, not least because, in the words of Craig Martin: ‘“Religion” is a term with perhaps too much normative baggage, as almost all uses from the early modern period to the present are tied up with assertions of cultural superiority.’ Martin wonders, ‘Can the word be saved?’39

37 

Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 15. 38  The Appendix to James H. Leuba, A Psychological Study of Religion: Its Origin, Function, and Future (New York: Macmillan, 1912) lists and assesses nearly fifty definitions. 39  Craig Martin, A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2017), 13.

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William James was no doubt aware of the enormity of this task in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). For him substantive definitions – those which tell us what religion means by pointing to its basic, fixed feature/s as opposed to how it has been shaped through myriad diurnal routines and practices – ‘are so many and so different from one another’ that it is ‘enough to prove that the word “religion” cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name’.40 The selection of a ‘single principle’ frequently reveals sectarian or denominational bias. James and the sociologists he influenced also knew that specifying religion in terms of one kind of belief (for example, the belief in a ‘God’) may be palatable within the context of Western Europe, which has been moulded historically by Christianity, but is woefully inadequate when gauging religion as a global happening.41 In our Companion, we understand religion as referring to a cultural institution that reveals a cluster of organised behaviours, a coherent set of ‘beliefs and practices relative to sacred things’, according to Durkheim. Such ‘beliefs and practices’, which are often transcendental, are based on either a formally chronicled doctrine or time-honoured cultural codes and activities.42 We are also aware that the terms ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ can be either crudely polarised or deployed so casually and interchangeably that they lose all specificity.43 While tangible structures (for example, a mosque, church or synagogue), a book of scripture, and the methodical performance of ceremonial rites anchor an established, formal ‘religion’, our contributors variously address ‘spirituality’ as more of a private, internalised encounter with or interpretation of the numinous. However, describing this subjective perception, calling or quest to locate divinity and plenitude – one largely unmoored from the moral prohibitions, dogma, costumes and symbols in which an organised millennia-old religion is rooted – is also problematic. The distinction between organised religion (read ‘stifling’) and individual spirituality (‘emancipatory’) can risk reproducing the ‘cultural chauvinism’ of nineteenth-century ethnography which sought to partition so-called ‘primitive’ from ‘advanced’ modes of worship.44 To distinguish religion from religiosity or spirituality in this way was also a common rhetorical move among modernist writers, many of whom saw organised religion as yet another calcified doctrine and tradition needing to be overturned in their work.45 But as our contributors

40 

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience [1902] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 12. Recent cultural sociologists, arguing that ‘religion’ cannot be accurately specified across nation-states and historical eras, elect to avoid the definitional dilemmas altogether, focusing instead on how the ‘category of religion’ is developed in various geographical localities and time periods. See, for example, Frans Wijsen and Kocku von Stuckrad, eds, Making Religion: Theory and Practice in the Discursive Study of Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Teemu Taira, ‘Making Space for Discursive Study in Religious Studies’, Religion 43, no. 1 (2013): 26–45. 41  See Chris C. Park, Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion (London: Routledge, 2003); William Herbrechtsmeier, ‘Buddhism and the Definition of Religion: One More Time’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 32, no. 1 (March 1993): 1–18. 42  Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life [1912] (New York: Free Press, 1965), 62. 43  See Martin, Critical Introduction, 1–13. 44  Karel Dobbelaere, ‘The Contextualization of Definitions of Religion’, International Review of Sociology 21, no. 1 (March 2011): 191–204; Martin, Critical Introduction, 8–25. 45  John Middleton Murry implies a distinction of this kind in his claim that ‘I am not Christian [. . .] I have been forced to the conclusion that I am religious’. John Murry as quoted by Alex Owen in ‘“The Religious Sense” in a Post-War Secular Age’, Past and Present 1 (2006): 159.

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show, this significantly misrepresents the modernising and progressive strands in organised religion and the way that religion and spirituality across a broad spectrum of human experience have informed and transformed modernist strategies and techniques in the arts. What we hope most of all to have achieved in this Companion is a decisive move beyond the paradox of a religious modernism towards new ways of thinking the role of myth and religion in the formation of a profoundly different – and galvanising – account of reality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Works Cited Anderson, Elizabeth. H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing. London: Continuum, 2013. ———. Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Apollinaire, Guillaume. ‘Programme for Parade, 18 May 1917.’ In Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou, 211–13. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Avery, Todd. ‘Nailed: Lytton Strachey’s Jesus Camp.’ In Queer Bloomsbury, edited by Brenda Holt and Madelyn Detloff, 172–88. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Bailey, Iain. Samuel Beckett and the Bible. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Bell, Michael. Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Berenato, Thomas, Anne Price-Owen and Kathleen Henderson Staudt, eds. David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Betancourt, Roland. Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Bramble, John. Modernism and the Occult. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Butts, Mary. The Journals of Mary Butts. Edited by Nathalie Blondel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Byrne, Georgina. Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850–1939. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010. Callison, Jamie, Paul S. Fiddes, Anna Johnson and Erik Tonning, eds. David Jones: A Christian Modernist? Boston: Brill, 2017. Coetzee, J. M. Elizabeth Costello. London: Penguin, 2003. Dobbelaere, Karel. ‘The Contextualization of Definitions of Religion.’ International Review of Sociology 21, no. 1 (March 2011): 191–204. Durão, Fabio A. and Dominic Williams, eds. Modernist Group Dynamics: The Politics and Poetics of Friendship. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. 1912. New York: Free Press, 1965. Erickson, Gregory. The Absence of God in Modernist Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination: Reinventing the Word. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Ferretter, Luke. The Glyph and the Gramophone: D. H. Lawrence’s Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Freer, Scott. Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Friedman, Susan Stanford. ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/ Modernism.’ Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3 (2001): 493–513. ———. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: University of Columbia Press, 2015.

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———. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. ———. ‘Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison.’ In The New Modernist Studies, edited by Douglas Mao, 88–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Gallagher, Lowell, Frederick S. Rosen and Patricia Juliana Smith. Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Goldpaugh, Thomas and Jamie Callison, eds. David Jones’s ‘The Grail Mass’ and Other Works. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Gregory, Eileen. H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. ‘Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism: A “Mazeway Resynthesis” .’ Modernism/modernity 15, no. 1 (2008): 9–24. ———. ‘Series Editor’s Preface.’ In Modernism and Christianity by Erik Tonning, ix–xviii. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Herbrechtsmeier, William. ‘Buddhism and the Definition of Religion: One More Time.’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 32, no. 1 (March 1993): 1–18. Hill, Emily S. ‘God’s Miserable Army: Love, Suffering, and Queer Faith in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.’ Literature and Theology 30, no. 3 (2016): 359–74. Hungerford, Amy. ‘On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary.’ American Literary History 20, nos 1–2 (2008): 410–19. James, David. Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. 1902. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Kilner-Johnson, Allan. The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Kurlberg, Jonas. Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism: T. S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim and the Moot. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Lackey, Michael. The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis’ Christian Reich. New York: Continuum, 2012. Leuba, James H. A Psychological Study of Religion: Its Origin, Function, and Future. New York: Macmillan, 1912. Levi, Neil. ‘The Persistence of the Old Regime: Late Modernist Form in the Postmodern Period.’ In Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, edited by Stephen Ross, 117–26. London: Routledge, 2008. Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Luckhurst, Roger. ‘Religion, Psychical Research, Spiritualism, and the Occult.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, edited by Peter Brooker et al., 429–44. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Mahmood, Saba. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Manganaro, Marc. Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca Walkowitz. ‘The Changing Profession: The New Modernist Studies.’ PMLA 123 (2008): 737–48. Martin, Craig. A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2017. Moody, Alys and Stephen J. Ross. ‘Global Modernism: An Introduction and Ten Theses.’ In Global Modernists on Modernism, edited by Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross, 1–24. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Mutter, Matthew. Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Neuman, Justin. Fiction Beyond Secularism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015.

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Ng, Zhao. Djuna Barnes and Theology: Melancholy, Body, Theodicy. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Ohana, David. Modernism and Zionism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ———. ‘“The Religious Sense” in a Post-War Secular Age.’ Past and Present 1 (2006): 159. Park, Chris C. Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion. London: Routledge, 2003. Partridge, Christopher, Hiroko Karwanami and Linda Woodhead, eds. Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2001. Paulsell, Stephanie. Religion Around Virginia Woolf. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019. Pecora, Vincent P. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pinkerton, Steve. Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Radford, Andrew. Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism: The Enchantment of Place. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Saint-Amour, Paul K. ‘Weak Theory, Weak Modernism.’ Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (2018): 437–59. Schwartz, Adam. The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson and David Jones. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005. Schwartz, Regina. Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and the Occult. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting Modernism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Taira, Teemu. ‘Making Space for Discursive Study in Religious Studies.’ Religion 43, no. 1 (2013): 26–45. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ———. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Tonning, Erik. Modernism and Christianity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Van Mierlo, Chrissie. James Joyce and Catholicism: The Apostate’s Wake. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Vetter, Lara. Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Weller, Shane. Modernism and Nihilism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. West, Rebecca. My Religion. Arnold Bennett, Hugh Walpole, et al. London: Hutchinson, 1926. Wijsen, Frans and Kocku von Stuckrad, eds. Making Religion: Theory and Practice in the Discursive Study of Religion. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Wilkes, James. A Fractured Landscape of Modernity: Culture and Conflict in the Isle of Purbeck. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Wilson, Leigh. Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the Occult. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Wiseman, Sam. The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism. Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2017. Woelfel, Craig Bradshaw. Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and the Dissociation of Belief. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. ——— and Jayme Stayer. ‘Introduction: Modernism and the Turn to Religion.’ Renascence 73, no. 1 (2021): 3–11. Wollaeger, Mark with Matt Eatough, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Part I: Key Figures and Movements

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1 Ezra Pound versus T. S. Eliot on Christianity, Apocalypse and Myth, 1934–1945 Erik Tonning [W]ith the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings presented to us both in poetry and in prose fiction to-day [. . .] tend to become less and less real. [. . .] If you do away with this struggle, and maintain that by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness and a redistribution or increase of purchasing power, combined with a devotion, on the part of an élite, to Art, the world will be as good as anyone could require, then you must expect human beings to become more and more vaporous. This is exactly what we find of the society which Mr. Pound puts in Hell, in his Draft of XXX Cantos. [. . .] If you do not distinguish between individual responsibility and circumstances in Hell, between essential Evil and social accidents, then the Heaven (if any) implied will be equally trivial and accidental. Mr. Pound’s Hell, for all its horrors, is a perfectly comfortable one for the modern mind to contemplate, and disturbing to no one’s complacency: it is a Hell for the other people, the people we read about in the newspapers, not for oneself and one’s friends. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods, 19341 We want an European religion. Christianity is verminous with semitic infections. What we really believe is the pre-Christian element which Christianity has not stamped out. The only Christian festivals having any vitality are welded to sun festivals, the spring solstice, the Corpus and St. John’s eve, registering the turn of the sun, the crying of ‘Ligo’ in Lithuania, the people rushing down into the sea in Rapallo on Easter morning, the gardens of Adonis carried to Church on the Thursday. Ezra Pound, ‘Statues of Gods’, 19392

M

odernists argued fiercely over the role of Christianity within the development of Western culture and civilisation. How was the Christian past to be understood, whether positively or negatively? What contemporary role might Christianity play in

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T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Volume 5: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934–1939, ed. Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard and Jayme Stayer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 33–4. 2  Ezra Pound, ‘Statues of Gods’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, 11 vols, prefaced and arranged by Lea Beachler, A. Walton Litz and James Longenbach (New York: Garland, 1991), item C1515, 457.

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confronting the felt crisis of a ‘decadent’ modernity? Did it hold the answer to this crisis – or did it rather impede the necessary remaking of culture, politics, humanity itself? As I pointed out in Modernism and Christianity, the economic, social and political crises of the 1930s exacerbated these questions, effectively placing ‘a whole civilisation on trial’.3 Would liberal democracy and the capitalist order collapse? Would one of the new ‘political religions’, socialism or fascism, prevail, inaugurating a post-Christian future? The socio-political crises of the 1930s also tended to intensify the apocalyptic tendencies within modernism: combining a sense of decay, decadence and evil within the contemporary world, an imminent expectation of some violent struggle of tremendous significance, and hopes for cultural and spiritual renewal or rebirth following a period of purification.4 During the 1930s and into the Second World War, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound carried on an extended debate about how this apocalyptic crisis of civilisation should be understood and resolved. But here a further distinction is needed: Eliot’s explicitly supernatural Christian faith notwithstanding, it is Pound’s fascist apocalypticism that is the more radical and extreme in its reading of the contemporary crisis. Drawing on Frances L. Flannery’s incisive typology in Understanding Apocalyptic Terrorism, I will show how Pound’s advocacy of a ‘European religion’ in the late 1930s implies an ‘active eschatology’ where the righteous can actually trigger – potentially through cleansing violence – the end of an age of Evil and corruption, and instigate a new age of transcendent goodness.5 Pound’s increasingly hardened rejection of Eliot’s Christianity as ‘verminous with semitic infections’6 thus provides an index of his radicalisation process, as he shifts from earlier attempts at collaboration or tactical alliance to outright vilification as European war approaches. Eliot’s apocalypticism, by contrast, is grounded in a dogmatic Christian framework of Original Sin, moral struggle in this life, and the ultimate horizon of Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell, but his eschatology is emphatically (in Flannery’s terms) a ‘passive’ one.7 That is, no one but the Father knows the day or the hour (Matthew 24: 36), and believers are wholly without personal influence on when the endtime will occur. They can only strive for holiness, for instance through charity, obedience and ascesis.8 Eliot thus came to see Pound’s ‘heresies’ alongside a panoply of others (including liberalism, fascism and socialism) as if from a very great distance:

3 

Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 59–60. This account draws on Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 43–69. 5  Frances L. Flannery, Understanding Apocalyptic Terrorism: Countering the Radical Mindset (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), chap. 3 (Kindle edition). While my use of Flannery in this discussion does not, of course, imply that Pound was a terrorist, I do claim that his apocalypticism by the start of the war in 1939 may be described as a violent extremist ideology in Flannery’s terms. 6  Pound, ‘Statues of Gods’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1515, 457. 7  Flannery, Understanding Apocalyptic Terrorism, chap. 3 (Kindle edition). 8  Compare Eliot, ‘Christianity and Communism’, The Listener 7 (16 March 1932), in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Volume 4: English Lion, 1930–1933, ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 422–31 (428): ‘Among other things, the Christian scheme seemed the only possible scheme which found a place for values which I must maintain or perish (and belief comes first and practice second), the belief, for instance, in holy living and holy dying, in sanctity, chastity, humility, austerity.’ 4 

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The Universal Church is to-day, it seems to me, more definitely set against the World than at any time since pagan Rome. I do not mean that our times are particularly corrupt; all times are corrupt. [. . .] The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.9 It is, finally, their contrasting approaches to the apocalyptic that determine these two writers’ deployment of myth in their work from this period. For Pound, ‘mythology is, perforce, totalitarian’,10 meaning that ‘it tries to find an expression for reality without over-simplification, and without scission’;11 or, in another key essay, it is connected with ‘the WHOLE-MAN’s right to express his totality in any art he chooses’.12 This creative, paradisal state is what Pound’s ‘European religion’ is supposed to foster and bring about. But the obverse of this is another kind of mythologising, of the ‘semitic’, or ‘Usura’, or simply ‘kikery’, as demonised Other and cosmic enemy. By contrast, Pound’s paradise is for Eliot an idol, ultimately ‘waste and void’, as in Choruses from ‘The Rock’, where a line is drawn from ancient idolatry (‘Worshipping snakes or trees, worshipping devils rather than nothing: / crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh’13) to the modern condition where ‘Man has left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god [. . .] professing first Reason / And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic’ (161). Eliot in this period is arguably still seeking a mythical method, ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’,14 but the ordering principle is no longer the Grail legend and the Fisher King,15 but explicitly Christ’s Incarnation, figured as an inbreaking of God’s radical otherness into history, and into the corrupted human self, smashing its idols and complacencies. While I have outlined an extended debate between Pound and Eliot across this period, there is also an asymmetry to note here. Eliot’s direct engagement with Pound’s ideas is largely limited to After Strange Gods and their ensuing 1934 debate

 9 

Eliot, Thoughts After Lambeth, in Complete Prose Volume 4, 240–1. Pound, ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1460, 345. 11  Pound, ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1460, 345. 12  Pound, ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1405, 178. 13  Eliot, Choruses from ‘The Rock’, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 160. References to Choruses from ‘The Rock’ are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 14  Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth: A Review of Ulysses, by James Joyce’, The Dial 75 (November 1923), in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Volume 2: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926, ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 478. 15  See Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and the Occult (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), for a thorough account of the occult influences on The Waste Land. 10 

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in the letters pages of the New English Weekly, and even here Eliot’s four terse notes16 contrast with Pound’s six more expansive missives.17 Of course, the two friends continued to correspond privately, and Eliot remained Pound’s publisher both for Faber and Faber and in The Criterion through the 1930s, but Eliot’s epistolary style is deliberately evasive and jocular, staying aloof from substantial debate and focusing on business matters, while also carefully distancing himself from Pound’s fascist advocacy.18 Pound, on the other hand, is haunted by Eliot as imagined interlocutor, and continues to position himself against Eliot’s Christianity so persistently that examining his developing responses provides an index of Pound’s radicalisation process in this period.19 I will therefore begin by characterising Pound’s apocalyptic construction of a ‘European religion’ through tracing his depiction of Eliot’s Christianity as foil to that project. Against that background, Eliot’s insistently ‘passive’ eschatology and his much more aloof and historically distanced view of Pound as just one modern heretic among many stands out all the more clearly. In his 1934 responses to Eliot’s After Strange Gods, Pound circumvents the accusation that his characters are ‘vaporous’ in the absence of Original Sin and supernatural sanction for moral choice. Instead, he offers his own genealogy of ‘European morality’: By 1934 Frazer is sufficiently digested for us to know that opposing systems of European morality go back to the opposed temperaments of those who thought copulation was good for the crops, and the opposed faction who thought it was bad for the crops (the scarcity economists of pre-history). [. . .] The Christian might at least decide whether he is for Adonis or Atys, or whether he is Mediterranean.20 Pound is invoking James Frazer’s argument in The Golden Bough that the vegetation deities of Egypt and Eastern Asia underlie some ancient Christian traditions such as kissing and burying a wax effigy of the dead Christ on Good Friday, resembling how effigies of the dead corn-gods Tammuz and Adonis were worshipped, with the priests of Attis also practising self-castration in honour of the god.21 For Pound, it is Eliot who is guilty of heresy, the ‘incorrect doctrine’ of ‘corpse-worship and the worship of Atys’:22 Eliot’s particular brand of Christianity, with its self-castrating asceticism, its life-denying stress on Original Sin, its emphasis on moral law and

16 

Eliot, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Virginian Lectures’, ‘Mr. T. S. Eliot’s Quandaries’, ‘Modern Heresies’ and ‘The Use of Poetry’. For a useful overview of their debate, see Christina C. Stough, ‘The Skirmish of Pound and Eliot in “The New English Weekly”: A Glimpse at their Later Literary Relationship’, Journal of Modern Literature 10, no. 2 (June 1983): 231–46. 17  Pound, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Mare’s Nest’, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Quandaries’, ‘Mr. T. S. Eliot’s Quandaries’, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Looseness’, ‘Ecclesiastical History (Or the work always falls on papa)’ and ‘Mr Eliot’s Solid Merit’. 18  For instance, Eliot warned Pound about becoming involved with Oswald Mosley in a letter of 12 March 1934. 19  As late as 1942, Pound was still complaining that in After Strange Gods, Eliot ‘has not come through uncontaminated by the Jewish poison’ (Pound, ‘A Visiting Card’, in Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. by William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 320); as I will demonstrate, Eliot’s specific type of Christianity becomes symbolic of this ‘contamination’ for Pound. 20  Pound, ‘Date Line’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 2nd edn [1960] (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 85. 21  For a fuller discussion see Tonning, Modernism and Christianity, 81–3; the following paragraph draws on and partly summarises this account. 22  Pound, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Looseness’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1067, 174.

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monotheism, ultimately derives from the ‘semitic’ Near East as an alien intrusion upon an authentically ‘Mediterranean’ European culture. Fundamental to that more authentic culture is the celebration of the goodness and sacredness of both sexuality and the natural growth-cycle (‘copulation’ is ‘good for the crops’23). For Pound, the ‘Eleusinian mysteries’, the ritual marriage rites honouring Demeter as goddess of harvest and fertility, became a symbol of the survival of this authentic tradition through the Christian Middle Ages (for instance in local May Day and Easter morning rituals, or in Provençal Lady worship and Amor).24 Christianity, therefore, is a mixed bag, and the Christian is faced with a choice of which ‘morality’ to adhere to. Pound goes on, in the mini-essay ‘Ecclesiastical History’, to outline the ‘Fall’ or corruption of the Church based on the gradual watering-down of its teaching on usury: ‘The Middle Ages distinguished between SHARING and USURY. In theology, as Dante knew it, the usurer is damned with the sodomite. Usury judged with sodomy as “contrary to natural increase”, contrary to the nature of live things (animal and vegetable) to multiply.’ At its Quattrocento height, then, the ‘Mediterranean’, Roman Church both condemned usury as contrary to natural increase, and sustained rites and arts rooted in the ancient worship of Demeter and Aphrodite. When the Church ‘fell’ it was due to the combination of the rise of banking and a ‘banker pope’, Leo X, levying ‘ALL possible taxes’ including indulgences to build St Peter’s, and Martin Luther being ‘clever enough to hitch his crude theology to an economic grievance’.25 Pound strongly associated the theologies of both Luther and Calvin with the resurgence of the supposedly alien ‘semitic’ influence on Christianity – and Eliot’s theology is being labelled by Pound as very much within this Protestant tradition. At the same time, Pound professes not to ‘mind’ the ‘survival of the Christian faith’ providing ‘it will clean its tonsils, get rid of its B.O. and halitosis’. Quoting a ‘fervent Roman’ friend’s condemnation of ‘the legalisation of usury via the banks and the legalisation of theft via limited liability companies’, Pound concludes that ‘there still are Christians, at least in the Roman church, to whom the faith implies ethical discrimination and direction of the will towards righteousness’.26 As Leon Surette has pointed out, there was a period in the mid 1930s where Pound actively attempted to connect C. H. Douglas’s ‘social credit’ theories, Mussolini’s fascist economics and Catholic teaching against usury: to Douglas in 1936, he wrote: ‘The CHURCH can back up our MORALS/ anything we do inside the VOCABULARY of the Church can be APPROVED; Get that?’27 The connecting idea was that credit and prices should be placed under the control of the state, and private banks should no longer be allowed to charge interest on credit. This would ensure the circulation (as opposed to hoarding) of money, and a fair distribution of purchasing power, supposedly curing both unemployment and poverty. From the Archbishop Pietro Pisani, he received a ‘rattling good

23 

Pound, ‘Date Line’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 85. See Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), for a comprehensive discussion. 25  Pound, ‘Ecclesiastical History’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1083, 186. 26  Pound, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Looseness’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1067, 174. 27  Letter from Ezra Pound to C. H. Douglas, 25 February 1936; quoted in Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 272. 24 

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book’ on the medieval doctrine of the ‘just price’,28 and to the Catholic popular writer on economics Christopher Hollis, he issued a rousing invitation: The CHURCH IS RIGHT re/econ. Not only from catholic point of view, but by my pagan, Confucian, Jeffersonian standards. [. . .] The CHURCH, Gesell and Douglas are MUCH nearer each other than 95% of ANY of their followers suspect. The[re] IS an economic truth, an economic scienza, it is PROFOUNDLY MORAL. [. . .] The Vatican cant break into local elections/ BUT both Gesell and Douglas are atttacks on USURA. And the Church is bound to bless them on that account. ONCE the Church is SEEN to be profoundly right on money and credit, the way is open to the FIRST serious attempt to bring the Church back into leadership of occidental thought.29 In fact, Pound carried on a ferocious campaign-by-correspondence to recruit Christians to the fascist cause between 1936 and 1939. Despite Pound’s scepticism of Eliot’s type of Christianity as mere ‘Atys worship’, he would also have been well aware of his friend’s long-standing support of the reactionary Catholic Monarchist Action française group,30 as well as his more recent public support of a ‘scheme of National Credit’.31 Not least because of his influential position in English letters, Eliot therefore remained a clear target for conversion. As part of this campaign, he enlisted the young Henry Swabey, then fresh from his Durham theology BA and later to take Anglican orders, to research ‘Ecclesiastical money in England’, based, of course, around the question of ‘when did usury cease to be mortal sin?’.32 Specifically, Swabey was set to work on an article for The Criterion focusing on Eliot’s old hero Lancelot Andrewes’s failed bid to become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1610. Supposedly undermined due to his anti-usury stance and rejected in favour of a ‘Calvinist’ in cahoots with ‘money power’, had Andrewes been elected ‘the watery cowardice of the yes-men of High Finance would have been opposed by the aquaforte of Catholic truth’.33 In a 6 April 1936 letter promoting Swabey’s efforts, Pound made clear the programme he thought Eliot should pursue vis-à-vis the Church of England: why can’t you step on the gas/ on following lines J accuse. Church of England damn weel AFRAID to think [. . .] Church afraid to face Lancelot Andrews/ who was contra usura Rot IN the spiritual centre of country, produces shit through all the corpus of the state and nation.34 However, Eliot persistently refused to be drawn into the fascist ambit by such ungentle persuasions. He generally feared that the authority of the fascist state would usurp 28 

Pound, letter to Odon Por, May 1936, quoted in Surette, Pound in Purgatory, 273. Pound, letter to Christopher Hollis, 25 February 1936. Yale Beinecke archive. 30  See Kenneth Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), for a full history of this influence on Eliot. 31  This letter to The Times from 5 April 1934 (titled ‘The Money System’) is reproduced in Eliot, Complete Prose Volume 5, 759. 32  Pound, letter to Henry Swabey, 3 March 1935. Yale Beinecke archive. 33  Henry Swabey, ‘The English Church and Money’, The Criterion 16 (July 1937), 636. 34  Pound, letter to T. S. Eliot, 6 April 1936. Yale Beinecke archive. 29 

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that of the Church, but he was also disdainful of Oswald Mosley and his hooligan Blackshirts. By 1939, responding in the Blackshirt journal British Union Quarterly to Eliot’s swipe against the ‘local version’ of fascism in his last Criterion editorial, Pound was clearly fed up, lambasting Eliot’s ‘theological verbiage’ as a ‘lot of dead cod about a dead God’. In itself, says Pound, the ‘desire to get the “theology right” is a commendable desire to relate ALL parts and components of one’s thought to a CENTRAL CONCEPT’; if only Eliot ‘had the vigour to consider what part of totalitarian thought the local version took for granted’:35 In so far as Mr. Eliot’s letch after God, or his groping towards right theology is a desire for a central concept, it is constructive and vital, it is a move towards the totalitarian. He is another poor boy with his nose to the cookshop window, not penniless, but perfectly provided with pence would he but use them. If he hasn’t yet found this out, let him discover that there once was a man named Frobenius.36 The name Leo Frobenius is lobbed in here seemingly from nowhere, but Pound had been pushing the German ethnographer’s theories on Eliot for nearly a decade. By the late 1930s, Pound’s ‘totalitarian’ thinking would increasingly revolve around the idea of a radically purified European religion, or, in a key term adapted from Frobenius, a European ‘Paideuma’. In the lead-up to war in 1939, Pound began to reject any compromise or alliance with anything that he considered ‘verminous with semitic infection’, both within Christianity and in general. Instead, a great cleansing followed by the rebirth of a ‘decent Europe’37 would be needed. Pound’s adaptation of Frobenius’ theories, and his contact with the German regime through his correspondence with the Frobenius Institute, contributed to his alignment with Nazi Germany and the Axis powers in what he saw as a righteous war against ‘loan capital’.38 Therefore, to understand Pound’s radicalisation towards a violently extremist apocalyptic duality – a cosmic, absolute war between European religion and semitic infection – we need to understand what ‘Frobenius’ came to mean for him. Frobenius’ term ‘Paideuma’ is a description of culture as a living, independent organism, fundamentally shaping individuals and their development. Each Paideuma is conditioned by the climate and geography of its culture-area. But as such it also achieves a distinctive kind of spiritual grasp of one aspect of reality, an intuitive, numinous ‘Ergriffenheit’, or ‘being-seized’ by these material conditions of life.39 For example, Frobenius taxonomises ancient African cultures in terms of the ‘Höhlengefühl’ (cave mentality) of desert-based 35 

Pound, ‘The “Criterion” Passes’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1504, 430–3. Pound, ‘The “Criterion” Passes’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1504, 434. 37  See Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), chapter 3, and especially 42. 38  Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 52. Feldman points out that Pound would have first encountered Hitler’s condemnation of ‘Leihkapital’ from Mein Kampf in Wyndham Lewis’s 1931 Hitler; Pound continued to use the phrase in his wartime propaganda broadcasts. 39  See Douglas C. Fox, ‘Frobenius’ Paideuma as a Philosophy of Culture’, New English Weekly, September 3rd–October 25th 1936, offprint by Bonner & Co., Ltd (London, 1936), for a summary. Fox was Pound’s main correspondent within the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt, and they discuss this article in their letters. The account of Pound and Frobenius here draws on Erik Tonning, ‘European Paideuma: Ezra Pound’s Mediterranean Modernism’, in Multiple Mediterranean: Myths, Utopias and Real-Life Experiences, ed. Brit Helene Lyngstad, Sissel Lie and Geir Uvsløkk (Rome and Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2018), 52–3. 36 

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hunter-gatherers versus the ‘Weitengefühl’ (wide-spaces mentality) of the early peasant peoples of the steppes and jungles. Of these, however, the latter type of culture-formation is considered superior and ‘Germanic’, whereas for Frobenius ‘the Jew, as a soul originating from the Orient, constantly lives with Höhlengefühl and confronts the Weitengefühl with incomprehension’.40 Here, then, we find one basis for Pound’s contrast between a ‘Europeanness’ whose mythos is grounded in the fertile lands and peasant cultures of the Mediterranean basin, versus a semitic ‘mythology elucubrated to explain the thoroughly undesirable climate of Arabia Petraea’.41 Furthermore, in Pound’s appropriation a ‘Paideuma’ is not merely a descriptive and historical term, but ‘the active element in the era, the complex of ideas which is in a given time germinal. Reaching into the next epoch, but conditioning actively all the thought and action of its own time.’42 That is to say, it points forward to the birth of an entirely new era. In the essay ‘European Paideuma’, written in August 1939 and intended for publication in the Nazi propaganda magazine ‘Germany and You’, we find some by-nowfamiliar distinctions: The Xtian Church was of very mixed elements. The valid elements European. The Church went out of business about AD 1500 semitized from two forces, one usury, and the other the revival of jewish Texts (old testament). The only vigorous feasts of the Church are grafted onto European roots, the sun, the grain, the harvest, and Aphrodite.43 Opposed to these ‘valid’ European elements is – again echoing the New English Weekly debate with Eliot – ‘corpse-worship, anti-fecundity, ghost-worship’. In this area, what is needed is ‘great alertness and unsleeping suspicion of every belief, every idea, every ceremonial gesture or every form-characteristic’.44 Indeed, what is distinctive in the ‘European Paideuma’ essay is a new drive towards purgation and purification: I think it wd. be useful for someone in the Forschungsinstitut to gather into a 200 page volume a brief list of the distinctly EUROPEAN belief encountered in the total mass of Frobenius’ writings. Better, of course if there cd/ be an english translation. That wd/ be one book. Another volume cd/ be usefully composed in analysis of the falsification and distortion of European belief.45 Just how far Pound was willing to go in this drive towards purgation becomes fully evident in his correspondence with the editors of ‘Germany and You’, to whom he was still offering his essay for publication in the second month of the war: 40 

Janheiz Jahn, ‘Leo Frobenius: The Demonic Child’, Occasional Publication, African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, 1974, 14. 41  Pound, ‘Date Line’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 85. 42  Pound, ‘For a New Paideuma’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, C1431, 289. 43  Pound, ‘European Paideuma’, quoted in Tonning, ‘Ezra Pound’s Mediterranean Modernism’, 51. The essay remained unpublished in Pound’s lifetime. The version quoted here is in the Harry Ransom Center, Texas archives, and retains Pound’s original spelling and outline. 44  Pound, ‘European Paideuma’, quoted in Tonning, ‘Ezra Pound’s Mediterranean Modernism’, 51. 45  Pound, ‘European Paideuma’, quoted in Tonning, ‘Ezra Pound’s Mediterranean Modernism’, 51.

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It is a war of jew press and mercantilism against Hitler and especially against the Führer BECAUSE of his attack on Leihkapital. [. . .] No one wants Germany destroyed. That is no one save the semites and antiEuropeans. I am, naturally, excluded from most of the English AND American press, but shall keep on hammering the point that Germany is necessary to EUROPE.46 In a later letter, Pound even suggests that Hitler may ultimately be a more prophetic figure than Frobenius himself in terms of his will to actually achieve cultural transformation and rebirth: ‘So far as I can make out Frobenius fatalism may not have been quite up to the VOLITIONIST mark of the Hitler Reich but all the machinery is there, and is perfectly adaptable to Hitler’s philosophy.’47 Having reviewed Pound’s radicalisation process through the 1930s, its apocalyptic structure should now be quite evident.48 In fact, the fit with Flannery’s useful typology in Understanding Apocalyptic Terrorism is striking.49 Basic to all apocalypticism on Flannery’s reading is access to a secret knowledge: the world is influenced by evil, the righteous are oppressed, but a higher future world will arrive, and a special time is coming when the gap between the mundane and the transcendent world will be closed. In more radical apocalyptic groups, we find a sense of ongoing revelations in the present from prophetic interpreters authorised to read the signs of the times. So far, so Poundian: his secret knowledge of the history of usury in the West and its oppression of the true European religion led him to seize on fascism as the key to the redemption of Europe. Pound himself is the chief prophet able to interpret the times, along with Mussolini and Hitler. As already mentioned, radical apocalypticism also involves an ‘active eschatology’: the idea that the righteous person can and must intervene to usher in the new stage of the coming Good world by eliminating Evil and corruption on earth. The believer’s own actions are invested with a cosmic significance that elevates their own importance to global or even universal proportions. Their actions thus lie outside the scope of ordinary human judgement; since the fate of the world is at stake, extreme measures may be justified to end the current corrupt system; and this may be figured as taking on a heavy, but necessary, moral responsibility. There is in fact ample evidence that Pound suffered from such delusions of grandeur.50 Finally, a key aspect on the path from extremist beliefs to actual violence for Flannery is the process of Othering, where evil is concretised and identified: it becomes an embodied, encountered experience. This enemy is also stigmatised as a cosmic or mythical evil,

46 

Pound, letter to Fred. Stangen, 25 October 1939, quoted in Tonning, ‘Ezra Pound’s Mediterranean Modernism’, 54. 47  Pound, letter to Rolf Hoffmann, 10 May 1941, quoted in Tonning, ‘Ezra Pound’s Mediterranean Modernism’, 55. 48  See Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, especially the Preface, for the argument that Pound adhered to fascism as a ‘political religion’ in Emilio Gentile’s sense. What my argument adds to this is that Pound’s apocalyptic faith, while idiosyncratic and not always straightforwardly identifiable with mainstream fascist positions, is nonetheless in its own terms an ideology with considerable potential for violent extremism. 49  This paragraph summarises Flannery, Understanding Apocalyptic Terrorism, chap. 3 (Kindle edition). 50  See for instance Karen Leick, ‘Madness, Paranoia, and Ezra Pound’s FBI File’, in Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920–1950, ed. Claire A. Culleton and Karen Leick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 105–25.

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and metaphorically dehumanised: they are a virus, a cancer, a pest, vermin or mere animals. Revenge against them is seen as a form of redemptive act, and violence may seem to serve a higher purpose. Of course, we have seen several examples already of Othering, dehumanising language towards the ‘verminous’ Jews, but it is worth noting as well that Pound did also incite actual violence, hoping ‘to cut the liver and lights out of thirty or 40 big jews who makes wars and cause famines’ and dreaming of a future when ‘these finance buggars will be killed off on sight like vipers’.51 Applying Flannery’s typology to Pound’s active, radical apocalypticism also provides an illuminating set of contrasts with Eliot’s ‘passive eschatology’. As mentioned before, this involves the lack of any knowledge by the believer as to when the endtime will occur; for Eliot, that implied a primary focus on asceticism, self-examination and a difficult striving for personal holiness, combined with a bird’s eye view of Christian ‘civilisation’ through history as something that must be perpetually repaired and rebuilt, in distant anticipation of Christ’s Second Coming. Eliot’s favoured prophetic figure is the martyrsaint Thomas Becket, who proclaims, ‘We do not know very much of the future / Except that from generation to generation / The same things happen again and again’.52 There is no sense here that the contemporary moment in history is of unique, burning significance to shaping a New Era.53 Rather the moment of eschatological choice always, through the ages, confronts the believer in the same way: ‘Even now, in sordid particulars / The eternal design may appear’ (265). The potential for cooperating with God’s eternal design is always present, even if humankind is desperate to avoid it: ‘Leave us to perish in quiet,’ the Chorus says. ‘We do not wish anything to happen’ (243). They are the ‘type of the common man [. . .] Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God’ (282), and the whole drama of Murder in the Cathedral – as in all of Eliot’s work in this period – is to shake this complacency. Nonetheless, the martyr-saint does not arrogate to himself a role as God’s chosen spokesman and interpreter, but rather empties himself to prepare the way for God’s action: ‘the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr’ (261). Eliot’s Becket learns humility precisely through rejecting this last temptation of ‘glory after death’: ‘The last temptation is the greatest treason / To do the right deed for the wrong reason’ (254, 258). This note of restless, perpetual examination of the purity and integrity of one’s own motives is what Eliot means by ‘intense moral struggle’ in light of Original Sin.54 Hell remains a real and pressing threat to oneself: not simply somewhere to consign the enemy Other. Unlike Pound’s insistent foisting of the secret meaning of history

51 

Pound, letter to James Laughlin, 9 June 1940, quoted in the online Cantos Project, http://ezrapoundcantos.org/index.php/canto-lii?start=1 (accessed 18 April 2022). Pound also made this point in his public propaganda in a radio speech of 30 April 1942, where he suggested that a pogrom of the wealthiest and most influential Jews would be worth considering. 52  Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, in Complete Poems and Plays, 247. References to Murder in the Cathedral are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 53  By contrast, Pound often depicts the extreme apocalyptic urgency of the global crisis in terms of disease, e.g. ‘poverty and the syphilis of the mind called the Finance-Capitalist system kill more men annually than typhoid or tuberculosis. I would not stop to discuss blue china in the midst of a cholera epidemic, and, in the present circumstances, I consider certain kinds of aesthetic discussion on a par with such a course’ (Pound, ‘Mr. T. S. Eliot’s Quandaries’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1062, 170). 54  Eliot, After Strange Gods, 33.

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on the readers of his Cantos, Eliot’s poetic persona in the Four Quartets constantly questions whether he can ever be counted among the righteous: ‘And last, the rending pain of re-enactment / Of all that you have done, and been; the shame / Of motives late revealed, and the awareness / Of things ill done and done to others’ harm / Which once you took for exercise of virtue.’55 Eschatological hope is ultimate and distant, as in Julian of Norwich’s ‘Sin is behovely, but / All shall be well’ (195). It only becomes accessible through purifying sacrifice and supplicatory prayer: ‘And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well / By the purification of the motive / In the ground of our beseeching’ (196). History is not a struggle of clear, identifiable villains and heroes, but rather ‘a pattern / Of timeless moments’, where the eternal design may only be glimpsed through ‘detachment / From self and from things and from persons’: thus, ‘History may be servitude / History may be freedom’ (197, 195). A key symbolic figure in ‘Little Gidding’ is the ‘broken king’ Charles I visiting the religious community there after his defeat at the battle of Naseby in 1646. Like Becket’s, Charles’s political cause is utterly lost: but for Eliot, he was another martyr, ‘A symbol perfected in death’ (196).56 Eliot’s poetic speaker, searching for a pattern in sordid particulars, turns away from the road, ‘behind the pig-sty to the dull facade / And the tombstone’, and goes to kneel in the chapel ‘Where prayer has been valid’ (191–2). Like Charles, he must learn that ‘what you thought you came for / Is only a shell, a husk of meaning’, and ‘the purpose is beyond the end you figured / And is altered in fulfilment’ (192). It is worth noting here that Eliot’s emphasis on passive suffering within history would, for Flannery, be in line with the original ‘call to pacifism’ of the Book of Revelation itself, which exhorts ‘endurance of oppression and having faith that God will act to transform the world. This is the only form of resistance it envisions against a global imperialistic, militaristic and economic Empire. The righteous are to follow the example of Christ on the Roman cross, an innocent Lamb who is slaughtered.’57 In ‘Little Gidding’, the German bombs confronted by Eliot as an air-raid warden during the Blitz turn into an image of Pentecostal (and Purgatorial) fire: The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair     Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –     To be redeemed from fire by fire. (196) This trial-by-fire both in history and in the soul must be willingly embraced and endured as part of God’s design: ‘Who then devised the torment? Love’ (196). Pentecost itself is an eschatological season of the in-between, where Christ departs to send the Paraclete, and the Church is founded in anticipation of His ultimate return: ‘the end of all our 55 

Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, in Complete Poems and Plays, 194–5. References to ‘Little Gidding’ are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 56  See Barry Spurr, ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T. S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2010), 123–4 on Eliot’s devotion to the cult of Charles the Royal Martyr. 57  Flannery, Understanding Apocalyptic Terrorism, 28–9 (Kindle edition).

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exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time’ (197). Heaven is finally a state of the soul, not of civilisation: ‘A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)’ (198). This does not relieve the Christian of the obligation to ‘renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide’,58 but the point of that renewal would be to practically maximise the chances of saving individual souls. In The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot imagines that in such a civilisation public actions and laws will be justified on a Christian framework, and that the cultural and educational atmosphere will be naturally, and partly unconsciously, permeated with Christian ideals. By this linking of religious and social life ‘the difficulty of behaving as Christians should not impose an intolerable strain’.59 But this society would also have a degree of pluralism both in its public servants and in its faith communities: there will be some ‘who may be indifferent or disbelieving; there will be room for a proportion of other persons professing other faiths than Christianity’ (702). Eliot explicitly distances himself from the idea of a radically purified or perfected society: It is very easy for speculation on a possible Christian order in the future to tend to come to rest in a kind of apocalyptic vision of a golden age of virtue. But we have to remember that the Kingdom of Christ on earth will never be realised, and also that it is always being realised; we must remember that whatever reform or revolution we carry out, the result will always be a sordid travesty of what human society should be – though the world is never left wholly without glory. In such a society as I imagine, as in any that is not petrified, there will be innumerable seeds of decay. (714) Facing the specific crisis of the 1930s, with its totalitarian regimes driven precisely by visions of a this-worldly apocalyptic golden age, Eliot reminded Christians not to make the same mistake: ‘To identify any particular form of government with Christianity is a dangerous error: for it confounds the permanent with the transitory, the absolute with the contingent’ (713). That is not to say that the contemporary crisis was not also an opportunity: in using the totalitarian regimes as a mirror, ‘Christian’ Britain could be made to re-examine its own fundamental commitments. Germany’s new paganism may be much closer to home than imagined: ‘this “German national religion” is comforting in that it persuades us that we have a Christian civilisation; it helps us to disguise the fact that our aims, like Germany’s, are materialistic’ (692). Again, Eliot’s characteristic note is self-examination: removing the beam from one’s own eye, shaking off complacencies, and smashing one’s own disguised idols will count for more in preparing the ground for God’s action within history than uncomplicated denunciations of the enemy. Against this background, a final set of contrasts between these two writers takes shape. Where Pound’s deployment of myth is explicitly in support of a totalitarian, apocalyptic, neo-pagan New Era, Eliot’s is designed to smash the idols of the modern mind in order to allow God’s eternal design, the ‘pattern of timeless moments’ centred on Christ’s Incarnation, to emerge. Paradoxically, Pound conceived his defence of a ‘totalitarian’ experience of myth as anti-dogmatic. A persistent line of argument throughout his career was that ‘Concerning 58 

Eliot, Thoughts After Lambeth, in Complete Prose Volume 4, 240–1. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, in Complete Prose Volume 5, 683–747 (697). References to The Idea of a Christian Society are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses.

59 

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the intimate essence of the universe we are utterly ignorant’60 (cf. ‘the UNKNOWABILITY of the real central whatever’61), and while our consciousness is capable of intuitive and partial contact with this mystery, ‘Dogma is bluff based upon ignorance’62 (or, ‘when logic attempts to deduce particular shoulds and should nots from the UNKNOWABLE it generally paralyses all thought and all action’63). Mythology is ‘totalitarian’ because it is the only appropriate vehicle for grasping this unknowable totality, or intimate essence of the universe, without murdering to dissect: ‘it tries to find an expression for reality without over-simplification, and without scission, you can examine a living animal, but at a certain point dissection is compatible only with death.’64 On the other hand, as I have previously argued, ‘here we find the roots of Pound’s own dogmatic strain, evident throughout his career: the obstacles to the vision and the mysteries, and to “constructive” activity in history and society, are to be attacked, condemned, blasted, lacerated, cut away like a cancer.’65 By the time of the ‘European Paideuma’ essay, the Hebrew scriptures and their monotheism had been singled out as the ultimate culprit: Again I assert that there is one disease which one can stigmatize as utterly unEuropean. The European does NOT get hold of an idiotic text, proclaim it infallible or authoritative and then proceed to explain it, to give it meanings extraneous to its verbal formulation, and worship it. This plague and infection is from the near east.66 Mythical material is instead to be treated symbolically: to recall an earlier formula of Pound’s, myths are ‘explications of mood’, the record of a primary, intense, ‘delightful psychic experience’ of the unknowable, which is not merely subjective but has a ‘permanent basis in humanity’.67 This privileged way of grasping reality – ‘European’, but also Confucian – involves a realisation that the ‘nature of things is good’, and the ‘way is the process of nature’ and is ‘one’.68 But this in turn privileges specific kinds of mythical content and religious experience over others: Paganism included a certain attitude toward; a certain understanding of, coitus, which is the mysterium. The other rites are the festivals of fecundity of the grain and the sun festivals, without revival of which religion cannot return to the hearts of the people.69 As usual, there is a stark contrast implied here: Moral degradation and decay set in with banker popes and the revival of semitic texts as a basis of metaphor, of mythology.70

60 

Pound, ‘Axiomata’, in Selected Prose, 49. Pound, ‘The “Criterion” Passes’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1504, 430. 62  Pound, ‘Axiomata’, in Selected Prose, 49. 63  Pound, ‘The “Criterion” Passes’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1504, 430. 64  Pound, ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1460, 345. 65  Tonning, Modernism and Christianity, 76. 66  Pound, ‘European Paideuma’, quoted in Tonning, ‘Ezra Pound’s Mediterranean Modernism’, 53. 67  Pound, ‘Psychology and Troubadours’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C55, 89–90. 68  Pound, ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1460, 345. 69  Pound, ‘Religio / Ecclesia’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1523, 470. 70  Pound, ‘Religio / Ecclesia’, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, item C1523, 470. 61 

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Pound’s paradisiac understanding of mythology as offering access to the divine depends, then, on its demonic obverse, the mythical beast ‘Usura’, which destroys both crops and coitus, producing ‘bread dry as paper / with no mountain wheat, no strong flour’, and lying ‘between the young bride and her bridegroom / CONTRA NATURAM’.71 Eliot for his part was well aware of the connection between an ‘undogmatic’ appeal to intuitive religious experience, on the one hand, and neo-paganism and totalitarian nationalism on the other. A footnote in The Idea of a Christian Society provides a revealing critique of Wilhelm Hauer’s defence (from 1937) of Germany’s ‘new religion’ (720–1). For Hauer, each age must mould its own religious forms in response to an immediate relation with God, based on the individual’s ultimate oneness with the eternal Ground of the world. Christianity’s claims to revealed truth and insistence on Christ’s unique saving role are set aside in favour of ‘personal experience’ and ‘Life’. Yet in the next breath a distinct alternative salvation history is invoked, the belief ‘that God has laid a great task on our nation, and that he has therefore revealed himself specially in its history’ (721). Eliot comments sardonically that ‘such phrases have a not altogether unfamiliar ring. Hauer believes also in something very popular in this country, the religion of the blue sky, the grass and flowers’ (721). Hauer is ‘the end product of German Liberal Protestantism, a nationalistic Unitarian. Translated into English terms, he might be made to appear simply as a patriotic Modernist’ (here meaning liberal churchmanship: anti-dogmatic and stressing subjective religious experience) (721). Eliot’s linkage of liberalism, nationalism and fascism/Nazism as aspects of the same modern heresy is characteristic, and so is his turning the issue back upon his English readers in order to confront them with their own hidden idolatries: ‘So, if the German Religion is also your religion, the sooner you realise the fact the better’ (721). Eliot’s most explicit mapping of the continuities between ancient and modern idolatries is to be found in the seventh of the Choruses from ‘The Rock’. It opens by ventriloquising the authoritative, approved language of the biblical creation-myth itself: ‘In the beginning GOD created the world. Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep.’ Absence from God takes many forms, ‘for man is a vain thing, and man without GOD is a seed upon the wind’ (160). It has been expressed in a multitude of obscure rites through the ages: Worshipping snakes or trees, worshipping devils rather than nothing: crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh (160) Or again, Prayer wheels, worship of the dead, denial of this world, affirmations of rites with forgotten meanings (160) But in the modern world, it has taken a new and distinctive form: Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic (161)

71 

Pound, ‘Canto LXV’, in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), 229–30.

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These teeming mythologies are all, however, generated by the same vanity of drifting from God, and the only cure is Incarnation, the inbreaking of God himself into history: Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time, A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time A moment in time but time was made through that moment (160) Yet the point for Eliot is not simply to shatter idols, but to discern the partial truths that these man-made mythologies might also point towards, through the lens of Incarnation: ‘It is characteristic of the more interesting heretics [. . .] that they have an exceptionally acute perception or profound insight, of some part of the truth; an insight more important often than the inferences of those who are aware of more but less acutely aware of anything.’72 Despite their irreconcilable religious, apocalyptic and political visions, Eliot remained alert to the acuteness of some of Pound’s perceptions, just as Pound was perpetually sparring with Eliot. For both writers, finally, the other’s heresies generated provocation, thought and refinement of their own positions. Thus, even in this idol-smashing section of ‘The Rock’, which was completed alongside the New English Weekly debate in 1934, we find what is surely a conscious appropriation of Pound’s critique of ‘Ecclesiastical History’ into Eliot’s own mythological framework: Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep. Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church? When the Church is no longer regarded, not even opposed, and men have forgotten All gods except Usury, Lust and Power (161)

Works Cited Unpublished Material Letter to Christopher Hollis, 25 February 1936; letter to Henry Swabey, 3 March 1935; and letter to T. S. Eliot, 6 April 1936, by Ezra Pound copyright © 2022 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Published Material Asher, Kenneth. T. S. Eliot and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. ———. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Volume 2: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926. Edited by Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. ———. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Volume 4: English Lion, 1930–1933. Edited by Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. ———. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Volume 5: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934–1939. Edited by Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard and Jayme Stayer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

72 

Eliot, After Strange Gods, 23.

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Feldman, Matthew. Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Flannery, Frances L. Understanding Apocalyptic Terrorism: Countering the Radical Mindset. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Kindle edition. Fox, Douglas C. ‘Frobenius’ Paideuma as a Philosophy of Culture.’ New English Weekly, September 3rd–October 25th 1936. Offprint by Bonner & Co., Ltd, London, 1936. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Jahn, Janheiz. ‘Leo Frobenius: The Demonic Child.’ Occasional Publication, African and AfroAmerican Studies and Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, 1974, 14–15. Leick, Karen. ‘Madness, Paranoia, and Ezra Pound’s FBI File.’ In Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920–1950, edited by Claire A. Culleton and Karen Leick, 105–25. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1996. ———. Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals. Prefaced and arranged by Lea Beachler, A. Walton Litz and James Longenbach. 11 vols. New York: Garland, 1991. ———. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 2nd edn. 1960. London: Faber and Faber, 1968. ———. Selected Prose, 1909–1965. Edited by William Cookson. London: Faber and Faber, 1973. Spurr, Barry. ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T. S. Eliot and Christianity. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2010. Stough, Christina C. ‘The Skirmish of Pound and Eliot in “The New English Weekly”: A Glimpse at their Later Literary Relationship.’ Journal of Modern Literature 10, no. 2 (June 1983): 231–46. Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and the Occult. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. ———. A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. ———. Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Swabey, Henry. ‘The English Church and Money.’ The Criterion 16 (July 1937): 619–37. Tonning, Erik. ‘European Paideuma: Ezra Pound’s Mediterranean Modernism.’ In Multiple Mediterranean: Myths, Utopias and Real-Life Experiences, edited by Brit Helene Lyngstad, Sissel Lie and Geir Uvsløkk, 47–57. Rome and Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2018. ———. Modernism and Christianity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

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2 Virginia Woolf and Christianity Jane de Gay

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or many decades, Virginia Woolf was regarded as an atheist who was hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular. After all, she declared T. S. Eliot ‘dead to us all’ on becoming an Anglo-Catholic, adding that ‘there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God’;1 she shouted ‘I hate religion!’ at Ethel Smyth after hearing her Mass in D;2 and in her late memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’, she stated that ‘certainly and emphatically there is no God’.3 Yet, these statements can all be counterbalanced with others: her admiration of Beatrice Webb for having ‘causes in her life: prayer, principle’;4 her curiosity about Ethel Smyth’s faith, ‘How I’d like to see what you see when I say Heaven!’;5 and her many speculative comments about the existence of God, even if it is to suggest that he must be cruel if he exists at all (on the General Strike: ‘What one prays for is God [. . .] to say kiss & be friends’;6 on her headaches: ‘he smashed his fist on my head. Lord, I said, I will write. Then he altogether took from me the power of adding word to word’7). Recent scholarship has moved beyond the slogans to present a more nuanced and complex view of Woolf and religion: Pericles Lewis included her among novelists who were interested in ‘re-enchantment’,8 and Stephanie Paulsell, Kathleen Heininge and the author of this chapter have suggested that Woolf may have been more curious and open-minded about religion than had been assumed.9 Paulsell points out that when Woolf’s anti-religious statements are used as ‘the only lens through which to examine Woolf’s relationship to religion, they serve to obscure her lifelong interest in it, its influence on her writing and the religious dimensions of her own literary project’.10

 1 

Virginia Woolf, Letters, ed. Nigel Nicolson, asst. ed. Joanne Trautmann Banks, 6 vols (London: Hogarth, 1975–80), vol. 3, 457, 458.  2  Woolf, Letters, vol. 5, 282.  3  Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 2nd edn, ed. and intro. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Hogarth, 1985), 72.  4  Virginia Woolf, Diary, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, asst. ed. Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (London: Hogarth, 1977–84), vol. 3, 62.  5  Woolf, Letters, vol. 5, 242.  6  Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, 78.  7  Woolf, Letters, vol. 4, 372.  8  Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modern Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).  9  Kathleen Heininge, Reflections: Virginia Woolf and her Quaker Aunt, Caroline Stephen (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016); Stephanie Paulsell, Religion Around Virginia Woolf (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019); Jane de Gay, Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). 10  Paulsell, Religion Around Virginia Woolf, 2.

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Kristina Groover, introducing a collection of ten essays on Woolf’s spirituality, writes that her ‘sometimes withering critique of religion belies what might well be called a religious sensibility in her work’, noting her ‘persistent use of religious language, her representation of deeply mysterious human experiences, and her recurrent questions about life’s meaning’.11 The statements also belie the extent of Woolf’s knowledge about Christianity. Woolf knew the Bible: she studied the Greek New Testament with her tutor Janet Case; she and Leonard Woolf owned seventeen copies of the Bible or books of the Bible and quoted from it in their works; she even described the King James version as ‘a translation of singular beauty’.12 Woolf’s diaries show that she visited churches and cathedrals in Britain and continental Europe, and that she admired Christian art. Woolf’s criticisms of Christianity show that she was interested in challenging the faith of her contemporaries, and her scholarship in Three Guineas shows that she was highly informed about the Church of England and its social and political role. This chapter will show that Woolf’s curious and critical engagement with Christianity was important to her feminist thinking, that it helped shape her modernist aesthetic in significant ways, and that it provided impetus for her thinking about divinity. In order to achieve a nuanced understanding of Woolf’s relationship with Christianity and to understand why she expressed such discrepant views, we need to recognise the diversity of Christian belief and practice in Britain in the early twentieth century. Although the era saw a drift towards secularisation, this process competed with the rise of a variety of different and increasingly distinctive expressions of Christianity. Woolf had experience of a range of these – Evangelical Anglicanism, Quakerism, AngloCatholicism, Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy – and, as we will see, her views on them were correspondingly diverse. Woolf’s foundational experience was the Evangelical Anglicanism of her wider family, a tradition that emphasised word and preaching over sacrament and ritual. Although Woolf’s parents Leslie and Julia Stephen were agnostic, her family had deep roots in religion: Leslie Stephen was descended from generations of clergy (and had briefly been ordained himself), and his ancestors had been instrumental in pioneering the Evangelical revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a movement that asserted biblical truth, emphasised vocation and the work ethic, and championed separate spheres. It claimed salvation and damnation as realities, as the reward for adhering to these tenets or the punishment for failing to observe them. Woolf’s Clapham Sect ancestors included the Stephens who were prominent in the campaign against slavery, and the Venns who were missionaries closely involved in the founding of the Church Missionary Society. The missionary zeal continued into Woolf’s own generation with her cousins Rosamond Stephen in Ireland and Dorothea Stephen in India. Dorothea attempted to convert Woolf: she gave her volumes of her religious poetry and thought nothing of telling Woolf and her siblings that their souls were ‘atrophied’ while their father was dying.13

11 

Kristina K. Groover, introduction to Groover (ed.), Religion, Secularism and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 2–3. 12  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. and intro. Anna Snaith [1929; 1938] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 196. 13  Woolf, Letters, vol. 1, 85.

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Evangelical Anglicanism shaped Woolf’s attitudes in fundamental ways. It gave her a grounding in biblical literacy: even her father’s agnosticism took its cue from a critique of scripture (he read Comte and realised that ‘Noah’s flood was a fiction [. . .] and that it was wrong for me to read the story as if it were a sacred truth’14); Woolf had powerful memories too of her mother reading the Bible. It gave her a work ethic and belief in vocation, and a concern about legacy or ‘what endures’ of a person after death. But it was also a vexed heritage: by her own admission, Woolf ‘inherited a streak of the puritan, of the Clapham Sect’ that caused discomfort around clothes and appearance and limited her commitment to Bloomsbury libertarianism.15 It also gave her a foil with which to argue. She persistently critiqued the separate spheres ideology and she resented conversion of any kind, as seen in her disparaging attack in Mrs Dalloway on the psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw, who aims to cure victims of shell shock by enforcing Conversion: a Goddess even now engaged – in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever, in short, the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own – is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion [. . .] feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace.16 Woolf is clear that conversion involves power and domination: it is central to the colonialist project, specifically in India, where her own cousin practised. It is also harmful in personal relationships, as Woolf also shows in Mrs Dalloway with the control that the sinister vicar Mr Whittaker wields over Doris Kilman, feeding on her lack of selfesteem to keep her in thrall. Woolf’s association between conversion and dogmatism was another reason for her suspicions around T. S. Eliot’s attitudes. Woolf resented anyone trying to convert her, which partly explains her reaction to Ethel Smyth, whom she accused of proselytising. Conversely, Woolf had Quaker influences amongst her family and friends that were generally more positive. Woolf’s aunt, Caroline Emelia Stephen, a leading figure in the Quaker movement, was a significant influence: Woolf stayed with her regularly from 1898 to 1909 at her home in The Porch in Cambridge. Although Woolf mocked her as ‘the Nun’, the pair spent hours in conversation, and Woolf read her works attentively, as Kathleen Heininge has shown.17 Caroline Emelia showed Woolf the importance of peaceful, independent living, as well as the value of a religious practice that was rooted in silence rather than the word-laden liturgy and clerical leadership of the Church of England. Indeed, Caroline Emelia gave Woolf a defence against the wider Anglican heritage of her family. As Alison Lewis notes, Woolf followed her aunt in ‘casting off the external restraints of family history and societal expectation’, while Caroline Emelia’s quest for truth ‘permeated Virginia Woolf’s writing career, as she sought out new ways

14 

Leslie Stephen, Mausoleum Book, intro. Alan Bell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 6. Woolf, Moments of Being, 78–9; Woolf, Letters, vol. 4, 200. 16  Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. and intro. Anne E. Fernald [1925] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 90. References to Mrs Dalloway are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 17  Heininge, Reflections. 15 

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of expressing the true essence of the person to whom things happened’, thereby helping to shape her modernism.18 The other important Quaker influence was Violet Dickinson, a particularly close friend from 1902 to 1911, who supported Woolf through her father’s terminal illness, and gave her shelter to recuperate from a breakdown following his death. Violet gave Woolf religious books, including a Bible. Through Violet, Woolf came to associate religion with close female friendship: something she expresses in Clarissa Dalloway’s joy at being kissed by Sally Seton and discovering ‘something infinitely precious [. . .] the revelation, the religious feeling!’ (32). In different ways, then, these two women led Woolf to develop a distinctively female-centred approach to religion. Woolf’s experience of Quakerism, as well as her knowledge of her anti-slavery heritage, helped her understand the potential of Christianity as a voice for social justice, and Caroline Emelia’s social activism influenced Woolf’s pacifism. Due to the complexity of the religious landscape of the early twentieth century, Woolf occasionally worked with church-people for social justice: for example, during the General Strike of 1926, Leonard and Virginia Woolf supported a petition by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, in support of the miners.19 Woolf’s most powerful impression of the Church of England, however, was shaped by the part it played in the establishment. Woolf articulated this most strongly in Three Guineas (1938), where she draws on detailed research to present a well-informed critique from three angles. First, she makes a detailed riposte to the chauvinism of a range of Evangelical writers, such as Thomas Gisborne and John Bowdler, whom she criticises for basing their views of women on the writings of St Paul, not Christ, and she interrogates St Paul’s teachings about women (from 1 Corinthians 11) in detail throughout the essay.20 Second, she critiques the Anglo-Catholic tendencies of the Church. Cosmo Lang, who succeeded Davidson as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1928, was the first Archbishop since the Reformation to wear a cope and a mitre and he increased the ritualistic elements of worship. Woolf uses a photograph of Lang in full regalia for her illustration of a generic archbishop, and she notes comparisons between Anglo-Catholic ritual and Fascist ceremonies: ‘Now you dress in violet; a jewelled crucifix swings on your breast; now your shoulders are covered in lace.’21 T. S. Eliot’s involvement in this movement provoked Woolf’s continuing scepticism towards his religious views: her suspicions were further raised when he founded the Moot with fellow Anglo-Catholic convert John Middleton Murry, with the aim of re-establishing the power and authority of Christianity, as Michael Lackey has shown.22 Third, Woolf draws on her extensive collection of press-clippings on the Church’s involvement in

18 

Alison M. Lewis, ‘Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834–1909) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941): A Quaker Influence on Modern English Literature’, Quaker Theology 2, no. 2 (2000), https://quakertheology.org/ caroline-emelia-stephen-virginia-woolf-quaker-influence-on-modern-english-literature (accessed 6 June 2022). 19  See de Gay, Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture, 69–70. 20  See Christine Froula, ‘St. Virginia’s Epistle to an English Gentleman; Or, Sex, Violence, and the Public Sphere in Woolf’s Three Guineas’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 13, no. 1 (1994): 27–56. 21  Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 103. 22  Michael Lackey, The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis’ Christian Reich (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).

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contemporary politics, to demonstrate its part in a patriarchal establishment and to critique the clergy as a group of professional men seeking to exclude women from their ranks or to confine them to the lowest-paid roles. Woolf found particular fuel in the Church of England’s 1936 Commission on the ordination of women, which had decided to continue to exclude women from the priesthood. Such misogyny and support for the status quo was, she argued, instrumental in leading to a culture that promoted war and threatened culture and liberty. Whilst Woolf reacted against the masculinist tendencies of the Church of England, and Anglo-Catholicism in particular, she was deeply interested in Catholicism, which she saw as more congenial to a female point of view. Woolf’s knowledge of and respect for Catholicism in English history can be seen in her early short story ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, written in August 1906, when she was closest to her two female religious influences, Caroline Emelia Stephen and Violet Dickinson, and, significantly, while she was visiting Norfolk, a county known for its recusancy. The story presents English Catholicism as an integral part of a female-centred religious history that preceded the foundation of the Anglican Church. Joan and her mother run a home and farm while their menfolk travel on business, and Woolf presents their Catholicism as a domestic faith practised by women: even the chaplain takes his cues from Joan’s mother. As Paulsell notes, this story presents a sympathetic portrait of ‘someone for whom religion was an organic part of life’,23 and Woolf has Joan explain the importance of prayer, including using shrines, asking for protection from ‘Our Lady’, and saying Mass for the dead, something that was anathema to Woolf’s Evangelical relatives. Woolf gives a lyrical account of a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Walsingham. Joan offers up her feelings about the ‘serious things in life’ in a visual prayer that has affinities with Julian of Norwich’s image of the world as ‘the size of a hazel-nut [. . .] as round as any ball’: ‘I saw them as solid globes of crystal; enclosing a round ball of coloured earth and air, in which tiny men and women laboured, as beneath the dome of the sky itself.’24 The experience becomes rapturous when Joan arrives at the shrine: [T]he endeavour to adore Her [. . .] filled my mind with an image that was so large and white that no other thought had room there. For one moment I submitted myself to her as I have never submitted to man or woman, and bruised my lips on the rough stone of her garment. White light and heat steamed on my bare head; and when the ecstasy passed the country beneath flew out like a sudden banner unfurled.25 Joan venerates the Virgin Mary, the supreme female figure in the Christian tradition; the adoration of a female object of worship is clear in these images of submission, kissing and ecstasy: a foretaste of ‘the revelation, the religious feeling!’ that Clarissa feels for

23 

Paulsell, Religion Around Virginia Woolf, 70. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. E. Spearing (London: Penguin, 1998), 7. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, in The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick (London: Grafton, 1987), 84. 25  Woolf, ‘Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, 85. 24 

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Sally in Mrs Dalloway (32). Again, Woolf makes a riposte to her Evangelical heritage and to the male-dominated church of her time. The Walsingham shrine is a particular symbol of female-centred worship: the original shrine had been built in 1061 by the Lady of the Manor, Richeldis de Faverches, in response to a vision of Mary, who asked her to build a replica in Norfolk of the house where the Annunciation had taken place. Woolf’s story is set in the 1490s, before the whole shrine was destroyed by Henry VIII as part of the Dissolution: a man destroying the work of women for the veneration of a woman. Significantly, Woolf wrote this story just a decade after another women, Charlotte Boyd, had bought the Slipper Chapel and started restoring it as a shrine, after centuries of secular use. Woolf was also intrigued by the Catholicism she encountered in mainland Europe. Witnessing the Feast of the Nativity of Mary at Siena Cathedral in 1908, she is struck by the otherness of the faith. She finds it refreshing because the rite is not a ‘military performance’ and the worshippers are not bound by ‘clerical commands’ as in Anglican services, and therefore distinct from the British establishment. Its symbolism also distinguishes it from low-church Anglicanism: Woolf is fascinated by the beauty of the occasion, with ‘gorgeous priests, ministering here, with their backs to us, from which yellow satins gold embroidered, hung in stiff squares’. Woolf admired the iconic power of Catholicism as she intuits that the sensuous appeal of the rite takes the worshippers into a spiritual realm: I supposed that all the glories of the Heavens had this tangible form for them – the more impressive because of all these mysterious weavings & symbols. They smell the flowers that grew in the holy fields; imagine the Cross risen, & the body upon it; it is all yellow stained, splendid, & remote. Are these priests – or are they not rather people who were present at the scene themselves?26 Though Woolf does not admit to any religious experience of her own, she recognises that other people may be having such an experience, honouring their ability to know ‘the glories of the Heavens’ in ‘tangible form’ and to be present at the scene of the Crucifixion. Woolf used Catholic worship in her writing to represent spiritual freedom and to symbolise the ineffable: when Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse enters a reverie that gives her temporary release from her domestic responsibilities, she pictures herself as a ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ entering a church in Rome: ‘There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability.’27 Later, at her dinner party, the voices of family and friends remind her of ‘men and boys crying out the Latin words of a service in some Roman Catholic Cathedral’ (149). The sense of ritual and the unfamiliar language take her beyond words. Woolf again uses Catholic ritual to go beyond the power of language in her essay ‘The Moment’, as words ‘explode like a scent suffusing the whole dome of the mind with its incense, flavour’.28

26 

Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909, ed. M. A. Leaska, pref. Hermione Lee, intro. David Bradshaw (London: Pimlico, 2004), 385, 386. 27  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. and intro. Margaret Drabble [1927] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 85, 86. References to To the Lighthouse are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 28  Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, 4 vols (London: Hogarth, 1966–67), vol. 2, 294.

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Woolf was similarly intrigued by Russian Orthodox Christianity for its otherness and spirituality. She does not record seeing its worship, although there were Orthodox churches in London; rather, her encounter with the faith was partly through the emigrés who came to London when Christianity was driven out of Russia following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, but more strongly through her reading and translation of Russian texts. The Hogarth Press published a number of Russian religious works, including Woolf’s translation, with S. S. Koteliansky, of Dostoevsky’s ‘Stavrogin’s Confession’ and ‘The Plan of “The Life of a Great Sinner”’ (1922) and Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees’s translation of The Life of Archpriest Avvakum by himself (1924). As we will explore shortly, Woolf wrote extensively on the importance of the ‘saintliness’ of Russian literature as an impetus for modernism because of its attention to the spiritual.29 We will now examine a selection of Woolf’s writings to explore how her engagement with diverse Christian traditions impacted on her modernist aesthetic, and how her critical investigation of the tenets of Evangelical thought – the Bible, salvation and vocation – alongside insights gleaned from other Christian traditions helped shape her views on spirituality. We will firstly consider a series of essays in which Woolf formulates her modernist vision of fiction and sets out her views on writing as vocation: ‘Modern Fiction’, ‘On Being Ill’, A Room of One’s Own and ‘A Sketch of the Past’. We will then explore how Woolf’s experimental use of biblical intertexts in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse helped her challenge orthodoxies while nonetheless affirming the spiritual value of human life. ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf’s manifesto for literary modernism, has avowedly spiritual concerns, for she argues that fiction should reject the ‘materialist’ discourse of Edwardian writing and attempt to capture ‘life or spirit, truth or reality’. Woolf’s rhetoric here draws on the contrast between deathly flesh and life-giving spirit set out particularly in the Pauline epistles (Romans 8 and Galatians 5), which was core to the Evangelical understanding of salvation and damnation. Woolf declares Bennett, Galsworthy and Wells guilty of wasting their talents on inessentials: ‘they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.’ Woolf emphasises the deathly nature of their method when she notes that their writing has an ‘air of probability embalming the whole’ (emphasis added).30 By contrast, the novelist’s vocation is to capture life: ‘Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide.’31 Woolf presents two texts that come closer to representing life because the writers dispense with narrative conventions and seek to capture the life of the mind: James Joyce’s Ulysses and Chekhov’s short story ‘Gusev’. It is notable that both these texts include Christian funeral rites: Woolf singles out the ‘Hades’ episode of Ulysses, which depicts a Catholic funeral, and ‘Gusev’ has a burial at sea in the rites of the Orthodox Church. A further intertext, which Woolf quotes but does not identify, is a short story, ‘The Village Priest’, by Elizaveta Militsina in which an Orthodox priest conducts the last rites.

29 

Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 109. Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 105, 106. 31  Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 105. 30 

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Woolf hails James Joyce as ‘spiritual’ and, in language that recalls her description of the iconographic power of the service at Siena, she praises his techniques for ‘support[ing] the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see’. ‘Hades’ promises this, she suggests, because of ‘its brilliancy, its sordidity, its incoherence, its sudden lightning flashes of significance’. ‘Hades’ records the musings of Leopold Bloom and his companions, refocusing the attention away from the details of the present day. However, Woolf argues, the stream-of-consciousness method limits the focus to Bloom’s mind and, by implication, Joyce’s own, and therefore ultimately fails because it is ‘centred in a self which [. . .] never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond’.32 Woolf turns to the Russian novelists as a more successful example of the form she seeks, picking out ‘Gusev’ as a story that captures the spirit by placing ‘emphasis’ on ‘unexpected places’. This story has comparable subject-matter to ‘Hades’: scraps of conversation and thoughts at a funeral in Joyce; conversations among sick soldiers, one of whom dies in ‘Gusev’. However, Woolf concentrates on a part of the story where Chekhov goes beyond what Joyce attempts: the eponymous Gusev dies and his body is thrown overboard trussed up ‘like a carrot or a radish’. From this point, Chekhov’s story unexpectedly shifts focus, first to Gusev’s body being eaten by sharks, and thence to the sky, concluding: ‘The sky was soft and lilac, pale and tender. At first beneath the lovely, glorious sky the ocean frowned, but soon the ocean also took on colour – sweet, joyful, passionate colours, almost impossible to name in human language.’33 Here, Chekhov eschews not only the minutiae of everyday life favoured by Edwardian novelists, but also the egocentric stream of consciousness that Woolf disliked in Joyce, to point to a cosmic perspective that points beyond language, that cannot be named. Woolf quotes from ‘The Village Priest’ in the final paragraph of the essay to demonstrate the profound ‘understanding of the soul and heart’ and ‘natural reverence for the human spirit’ that she admires in Russian writing.34 Published in English translation in 1918, this short story focuses on the thoughts of an Orthodox priest, Father Andrew. His son, who has just finished seminary, tells him that he does not want to join the clergy because they are too concerned with their wealth and status and they exploit their parishioners. Father Andrew listens patiently and then gives advice that parallels Woolf’s attack on the Edwardians: ‘We often direct our attention so entirely to the details of daily life that we lose sight of the larger issues.’ He points out that his son has failed to notice the peasants’ ‘reverence for the person of man; in this reverence is a sublime and almost religious feeling’ akin to their love of the saints. The quotation that Woolf uses in ‘Modern Fiction’ comes from the part of the conversation where Father Andrew advises his son that he can find vocation in any career, because true vocation leads to the ‘heart of man’: ‘Learn to make yourself akin to people. [. . .] But let this sympathy be not with the mind – for it is easy with the mind – but with the heart, with love towards them.’35

32 

Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 108. Anton Tcheckov, Plays and Stories, trans. S. S. Koteliansky (London: Dent, 1938), 342. 34  Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 109. 35  Elizaveta Militsina, ‘The Village Priest’, in The Village Priest and Other Stories from the Russian of Militsina and Saltikov, trans. B. Tollemache, intro. C. H. Wright (London: Fisher Unwin, 1918), 34. Accessed via archive.org: https://archive.org/details/villagepriestoth00milirich (accessed 18 April 2022); Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 109. 33 

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While Woolf seems to cover up the explicitly religious content of the story by omitting its title, she nonetheless highlights the spiritual impetus of Russian literature as she continues, effectively précising Father Andrew’s point: ‘In every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit constitute saintliness.’ Here Woolf gestures towards the next part of Militsina’s story, which expands upon the importance of sympathy in building a community of people and souls. Immediately after the conversation with his son, Father Andrew is summoned to the deathbed of a parishioner, but his son has shaken his confidence and he doubts whether he can bring comfort, and he feels the ineffectiveness of the church which is ‘half in darkness’, ‘lit up feebly’ by ‘tiny tapers’. His confidence is restored when he is moved to pity on being reminded of the tragic death of the parishioner’s son: he feels the presence of the Holy Spirit during the last rites and the dying man affirms that he has been comforted. The next day, at Mass, Father Andrew has a renewed sense of his love for the peasants, and becomes acutely aware of how they carry their dead loved ones with them in their prayers: ‘Father Andrew with his mind’s eye saw more and more of the dead passing through in the midst of the living.’ This leads to a wider vision of the Communion of Saints: ‘His thoughts seemed to penetrate through more than a thousand years and to revivify past events and bring them nearer: he heard the voices of prophets long dead, their lyric passion and power came down through the ages; he heard the voices of Paul, and John the Baptist, and Peter.’36 Rita Dirks has pointed out that Woolf wrote ‘Modern Fiction’ at a time when she was paying particular attention to the soul, and that she became particularly interested in the invisible connections between people living and dead that were characteristic of the Orthodox sobornost.37 Dirks notes that Woolf would develop this particularly in the connections between Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway. However, she was already reflecting this sensibility in an essay that was contemporaneous with ‘Modern Fiction’: ‘Reading’ (1919): If I looked down at my book I could see Keats and Pope behind him, and then Dryden and Sir Thomas Browne – hosts of them merging in the mass of Shakespeare, behind whom, if one peered long enough, some shapes of men in pilgrims’ dress emerged, Chaucer perhaps, and again – who was it? some uncouth poet scarcely able to syllable his words; and so they died away.38 Woolf’s gathering here is a community of writers who have influenced future generations and have attained immortality through their writing. Woolf returned to the question of how literature can comprehend the true and lasting in ‘On Being Ill’ (1926), an essay written around the time she republished ‘Modern Fiction’ in her first Common Reader collection. Here again she explores Christian

36 

Militsina, ‘Village Priest’, 51. Rita Dirks, ‘Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Dostoevsky: The Sacred Space of the Soul’, in Religion, Secularism and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf, ed. Kristina K. Groover (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 153–4. 38  Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 13. 37 

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ideas of an afterlife, but in a far more critical mode. The deathbed was a set piece of Evangelical biography, used to prove a person’s piety as soul departed for heaven. Woolf, by contrast, uses the sickbed to complicate the dichotomy between body and soul, for she emphasises that physical illness brings about a ‘spiritual change’ that exposes ‘wastes and deserts of the soul’. This is because the soul is not simply the ‘creature within’, looking out through a ‘sheet of plain glass’, but rather an entity whose view of the world is distorted (made ‘smudged or rosy’) by bodily experience and which can experience the full panoply of ‘comfort and discomfort’. She suggests that religious experience could therefore be a hallucination as pain makes a person ‘taper into mysticism, or rise [. . .] into the raptures of transcendentalism’. She is noncommittal as to what happens to the soul after death: ‘the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes’ (emphasis added). She particularly satirises Victorian accounts of heaven in a humorous sketch of mistaking the voice of the dentist on emerging from anaesthetic for ‘the greeting of the Deity stopping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us’.39 In serious illness one wants to fight for life, because ‘the universal hope – Heaven, Immortality’ seems thin.40 She dismisses a bishop’s comments about heaven in the Morning Post as mere journalism and says that families go to church out of routine. She cynically notes that no one would be so confident in the afterlife as to commit suicide to attain it. More challengingly, she notes that faith cannot protect a believer from the pain of bereavement in her account of Augustus Hare’s The Story of Two Noble Lives, a double biography of two Victorian sisters: Charlotte, Countess Canning and Louise, Marchioness of Waterford. These pious women produced religious art and devoted themselves to causes (Charlotte promoted Florence Nightingale and Louise gave aid in the Irish famine), but the closing image of the essay is not of faith but of loss, as Louise crushes a plush curtain as she ‘grasped it in her agony’ on the day of her husband’s funeral.41 In face of the inadequacy of the church to offer hope of immortality, Woolf concludes that this is a task for literature. Christian doctrine seeks to explain and define things too rigidly, whereas ‘Heaven-making must be left to the imagination of the poets’. She advises reading poetry in a devotional way, not dissimilar to lectio divina: ‘we break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind.’42 Such a practice can give access to a state that goes beyond language: ‘In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning’ so that poetry can evoke ‘a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain’.43 In this respect, then, literature is a spiritual practice and a vocation. Woolf expands upon the importance of writing as a life-giving vocation in A Room of One’s Own (1929), for she shows that having a room to oneself is essential for spiritual freedom and a peaceful state of mind for writing. Yet, she shows how the Church has put up barriers for women, be it exclusion from the Oxbridge quadrangles

39 

Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 4, 193–4. Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 4, 198. 41  Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 4, 203. 42  Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 4, 199. Paulsell suggests that ‘the roots of Woolf’s practice of reading’ lie with medieval disciplines like the lectio divina (Religion Around Virginia Woolf, 101). 43  Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 4, 200. 40 

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where ‘the spirit of peace dwells’ or the Evangelical endorsement of separate spheres that denied women access to meaningful work. In terms of the Protestant work ethic, such exclusion is deadly: the narrator notes how ‘the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide – a small one but dear to the possessor – perishing and with it myself, my soul – all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart’.44 This alludes to the Puritan poet Milton’s lament on being unable to fulfil his writerly vocation in ‘When I Consider How My Light Is Spent’: ‘that one Talent which is death to hide / Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent / To serve therewith my Maker’, a poem that alludes to the Parable of the Talents where a servant who has buried rather than invested the coin entrusted to him is condemned to hell (Matthew 25: 14–30).45 Woolf therefore shows that the Evangelical tradition has denied women a means of demonstrating their salvation and has caused spiritual harm by making them bitter. Woolf’s narrator is liberated to write on receiving a legacy from an aunt (as she herself had inherited money from Caroline Emelia Stephen): this ‘unveiled the sky to me’, bringing spiritual redemption by helping to remove some of the rust and corruption in the narrator’s soul.46 A Room of One’s Own also speaks of redemption of a different kind: the rescuing of past female writers from obscurity. Unlike ‘Reading’, where Woolf envisaged a vibrant, living group of past male writers, she presents past female writers as dead: ‘Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter [. . .] All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn.’ To address this, Woolf appropriates what Anna Snaith has described as a ‘distinctly messianic discourse’ to urge women writers to bring the past to life by honouring Shakespeare’s sister: ‘she lives in you and me [. . .] for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences.’ In order for her to be ‘born again’,47 women would need to read and write for themselves: a solution she also advocates in Three Guineas as a way of preventing war and preserving culture. Woolf more fully articulates her view that writing is a vocation and a spiritual practice in her late memoir, ‘A Sketch of the Past’. She describes receiving ‘shocks’ from without: fighting with her brother and realising the capacity of human beings to harm one another; hearing of a suicide and realising the power of human beings to harm themselves; then feeling satisfaction in perceiving how a flower is a whole entity with the soil around it. Woolf reasons that such shocks are followed by the desire to explain them, and in doing so, she perceives a wider pattern of ‘something real behind appearances’, and she ventures that ‘it is this shock-receiving capacity that makes me a writer’. The spiritual side of this is seen in her sense that her ‘intuition is so instinctive that it seems given to me, not made by me’. Woolf adds that this sense of something beyond herself and the material world is ‘certainly and emphatically’ not God.48 Coming at this point in Woolf’s career, this is not the bold, irreligious slogan that it has been taken to

44 

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 5, 29. John Milton, Milton’s Poems, ed. and intro. by B. A. Wright (London: Dent, 1956), 83–4. Accessed via archive. org: https://archive.org/details/poemsofmilton0000milt_i9x7/page/n7/mode/2up (accessed 6 June 2022). 46  Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 30. 47  Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 49–50, 85–6, 272n. 48  Woolf, Moments of Being, 72. 45 

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be: rather, it states in clearer terms than before the contrast between spiritual realities that cannot be pinned down and the doctrines that presume to do so. Furthermore, in honouring ‘some real thing behind appearances’, Woolf was not rejecting divinity but redefining something she had found in Christianity. To understand this more fully, we need to look at her creative engagement with the central story of Christianity, the Passion, in a set of extended allusions in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. This is comparable with other modernists who used literary allusions as structuring devices: Joyce’s use of The Odyssey in Ulysses, Eliot’s use of The Golden Bough and From Ritual to Romance in The Waste Land, and Lawrence’s use of Genesis in The Rainbow. Like ‘Modern Fiction’ and ‘On Being Ill’, Woolf’s novels pose death as a central problem: in Mrs Dalloway, this is seen in Clarissa’s heart condition that makes her acutely aware of her mortality and in Septimus’s suicide that impinges on her party; in To the Lighthouse, it is the sudden death of Mrs Ramsay at the centre of the novel. Woolf’s use of the Passion narrative in Mrs Dalloway was inspired by a Catholic festival, the Procesión del Silencio in Madrid in Holy Week 1923. As she wrote to Jacques Raverat: ‘we have been following the Crucifixion and Last Supper through the streets, and again I felt entirely sympathetic, which one couldn’t imagine doing in Piccadilly.’49 As with her other experiences of Catholic ritual, this scene was a tangible expression of something deeper that she found moving and significant. In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf plays out elements of this story in her characters to show the sanctity of human life that she appreciated in Russian writings. Allusions to Christ cluster around Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked war veteran. Septimus twice describes himself as a Christ-like figure: ‘the greatest of mankind [. . .] lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society’ (23, 87). Although it is tempting to read this as a delusion, the only character to make this accusation is the unreliable Sir William Bradshaw, who thinks that ‘these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world or the advent of God’, should ‘drink milk in bed’ (89). Rather, Septimus symbolises the problems caused by the establishment that Bradshaw supports, for the army taught him sang-froid that made him insensitive to human suffering – something he now recognises as a ‘sin’. Septimus takes the sins of society upon himself: ‘suffering, for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal suffering, that great loneliness’ (23). The Christ-like element of this is seen in an echo of the agony at Gethsemane, ‘Let this cup pass from me’ (Matthew 26: 39). Septimus is a scapegoat and a victim, but Woolf uses his life and death to show the deep-seated spiritual damage caused by the war. Septimus then becomes a Christ-figure for Clarissa. Hearing the news of his death at her party, she reflects that he has died in her place, as Christ is said to have died for the sins of the world: ‘it was her disaster – her disgrace. It was her punishment’ (166). And like Christ’s triumph over death, Septimus’s suicide helps Clarissa overcome her fear of death: ‘Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death’ (165). However, Woolf makes

49 

Woolf, Letters, vol. 3, 24.

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it clear that there is no resurrection for Septimus: it is Clarissa who experiences a new lease of life as she returns to her party. The Passion narrative in this novel shows the value of a human life, how Septimus’s death has meant something because it has had meaning for others. Woolf again alludes to the Bible to show the value of human life and relationships in To the Lighthouse. Here, the Christ-like figure is Mrs Ramsay. The dinner party she hosts at the end of the first part of the novel is her Last Supper: she comes to it with ‘a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything’ (112), as Christ ‘knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world’ (John 13: 1). She is aware that people will remember her by the dinner and that the ‘community of feeling’ that she has generated will be continued: ‘Paul and Minta would carry it on when she was dead’ (153), as Christ commanded his disciples to remember him at Communion (‘do this in remembrance of me’ (1 Corinthians 11: 24)). This party sanctifies human life and has spiritual significance. ‘Time Passes’ is an extended allusion to the Crucifixion, meditating on death in relation to Mrs Ramsay, to the First World War, to other deaths in the family and to the destruction of the family’s holiday home. The section is set to a background of ‘immense darkness’ (171), a period of ten years that seem to form one night, echoing the darkness from the sixth hour to the ninth hour at the Crucifixion (Matthew 27: 45). As the Crucifixion is a battle between good and evil, so ‘Time Passes’ shows the confrontation between the evils of the war and a spirit of ‘divine goodness’ sought by well-intentioned ‘spiritual searchers’ who hope that good will prevail. Woolf describes how ‘divine goodness had parted the curtain’ (174), as the ‘veil of the temple was rent in twain’ (Mark 15: 38); ‘the rock was rent asunder’ and ‘some glass tinkled in the cupboard as if a giant voice had shrieked so loud in its agony that tumblers stood inside a cupboard vibrated too’ (181), alluding to the earthquake that accompanies the Crucifixion, while the loud voice echoes the biblical cry of ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27: 46). Again, the Crucifixion narrative points to the spiritual evils of the war, but there is no God figure to rescue the human race. Rather, resurrection is brought about by the earthy figures of charwomen restoring the house, and it is they who pronounce Christ’s words ‘it is finished’ on completing their labours. But because this restoration is only a practical one, the novel goes on to point to the emptiness of Christian consolation by showing the pain of bereavement felt by Mr Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. As Woolf saw literature as the vehicle for engaging with the eternal, so Lily tries to use her art to reinstate Mrs Ramsay: her painting is about capturing ‘this other thing, this truth, this reality’, and unlike in Mrs Dalloway, her labours achieve a miraculous moment, for Mrs Ramsay makes a resurrection appearance, as ‘part of her perfect goodness to Lily’ to help her complete her painting (214, 272). The novel shows biblical narratives enacted in the lives of ordinary people: showing the importance of human relationships, the value a person can have for others after their death, and their continued existence in the memory of others. There is no once-and-for-all victory over sin and death; Woolf refracts the final Crucifixion words three times: Mrs McNab and Mrs Bast pronounce that ‘It was finished’; Lily thinks ‘He has landed. [. . .] It is finished’, imagining that Mr Ramsay has arrived at the lighthouse; and Lily herself, when she finishes her painting, states ‘It was done; it was finished’ (192, 280, 281). Salvation is something that individuals have to work out in their lives, not something won for them by a saviour.

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The human vision of Woolf’s retelling of the Passion narratives in these novels on the one hand continually undercuts the Christian interpretation, but on the other hand points to the holiness of human life. With this in mind, we can now revisit Woolf’s statement in ‘A Sketch of the Past’: Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.50 As with Woolf’s use of biblical allusions, divinity is not rejected in this statement but it is relocated in the human: ‘we are the thing itself.’ When we set this statement in the context of Woolf’s lifelong interest in Christianity, the spiritual dimension of her aesthetic and her understanding of her vocation as an artist, then, this is not an attack on religion, but the culmination of a long-standing exploration of spirituality and the concept of the divine.

Works Cited de Gay, Jane. Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Dirks, Rita. ‘Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Dostoevsky: The Sacred Space of the Soul.’ In Religion, Secularism and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf, edited by Kristina K. Groover, 151–66. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Froula, Christine. ‘St. Virginia’s Epistle to an English Gentleman; Or, Sex, Violence, and the Public Sphere in Woolf’s Three Guineas.’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 13, no. 1 (1994): 27–56. Groover, Kristina K., ed. Religion, Secularism and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Heininge, Kathleen. Reflections: Virginia Woolf and her Quaker Aunt, Caroline Stephen. Bern: Peter Lang, 2016. Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Translated by E. Spearing. London: Penguin, 1998. Lackey, Michael. The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis’ Christian Reich. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Lewis, Alison M. ‘Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834–1909) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941): A Quaker Influence on Modern English Literature.’ Quaker Theology 2, no. 2 (2000). https:// quakertheology.org/caroline-emelia-stephen-virginia-woolf-quaker-influence-on-modernenglish-literature (accessed 6 June 2022). Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modern Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Militsina, Elizaveta. ‘The Village Priest.’ In The Village Priest and Other Stories from the Russian of Militsina and Saltikov. Translated by B. Tollemache and introduced by C. H. Wright. London: Fisher Unwin, 1918. Accessed via archive.org: https://archive.org/details/villagepriestoth00 milirich (accessed 18 April 2022).

50 

Woolf, Moments of Being, 72.

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Milton, John. Milton’s Poems. Edited and with introduction by B. A. Wright. London: Dent, 1956. Accessed via archive.org: https://archive.org/details/poemsofmilton0000milt_i9x7/ page/n7/mode/2up (accessed 6 June 2022). Paulsell, Stephanie. Religion Around Virginia Woolf. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019. Stephen, Leslie. Mausoleum Book. Introduced by Alan Bell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Tcheckov, Anton. Plays and Stories. Translated by S. S. Koteliansky. London: Dent, 1938. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. 4 vols. London: Hogarth, 1966–67. ———. Diary. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Asst. ed. Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. London: Hogarth, 1977–84. ———. ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn.’ In The Complete Shorter Fiction. Edited by Susan Dick. London: Grafton, 1987. ———. Letters. Edited by Nigel Nicolson. Asst. ed. Joanne Trautmann Banks. 6 vols. London: Hogarth, 1975–80. ———. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 2nd edn. Edited and introduced by Jeanne Schulkind. London: Hogarth, 1985. ———. Mrs Dalloway. Edited and introduced by Anne E. Fernald. 1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. ———. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909. Edited by M. A. Leaska. Preface by Hermione Lee and introduced by David Bradshaw. London: Pimlico, 2004. ———. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Edited and introduced by Anna Snaith. 1929; 1938. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. ———. To the Lighthouse. Edited and introduced by Margaret Drabble. 1927. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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3 H.D. and Spirituality Lara Vetter

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o treat the topic of H.D. and spirituality, one must first accept that she recognised no firm line between spirituality and religion, the occult, spiritualism, the paranormal, the metaphysical and the extrasensory. The line between religion and science, too, was quite permeable. Astronomy and astrology, Freudian psychoanalysis and Tarot readings, Christian mysticism and theosophical prophecy lay side by side in her capacious understanding of the seen and unseen worlds. Aside from an acute aversion to organised religion, H.D. was extraordinarily open to any manner of thought and belief. H.D. was a voracious spiritual seeker, but not in the sense that she felt frantic about finding the metaphysical system that would satisfy her curiosity about the meaning of life or offer a comforting source of solace. Her quest was not a desperate one – though there were times, as in the early 1940s, when she was certainly more fervent in her esotericism. On the whole, she scoffed at the notion of a singular key to interpretation or comprehension. ‘My sign-posts are not yours,’ she wrote firmly in her 1919 aesthetic manifesto Notes on Thought and Vision.1 Her sources were eclectic, her beliefs expansive and accretive, and her search fuelled by a committed writer’s imagination and a lay scholar’s boundless intellectual curiosity. For six and a half decades, she read, marked and annotated, critiqued, revised and reread, never satisfied. The lived life was fodder for art, and spiritual matters were a vital part of experience. For H.D., too, sexuality fuelled creativity and inspiration, and a sexual experience was also a spiritual one. H.D.’s maternal family were Moravians, a pre-Reformation Protestant sect whose earliest members were persecuted and driven underground until the eighteenth century, when a charismatic Austrian nobleman, Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf, offered his estate to a group of Protestant migrants for the establishment of a colony in Saxony. These Moravians called themselves the Unitas Fratrum and their colony Herrnhut, a German term for the Lord’s watch and protection. Though H.D. was not fully aware of this history until she was an adult, Herrnhut was an experiment in communal living, with mystical ideas about religion and sexuality. The suspicions of neighbours eventually led to the end of Herrnhut, and this, along with a growing awareness of the horror of slavery, drove the group on missionary trips to the West Indies and North America. Zinzendorf himself founded Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1741. Two years later, H.D.’s great-great-great-grandfather, Matthias Weiss, arrived at the settlement. She was born there in 1886.

1 

H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision (London: Peter Owen, 1982), 24.

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H.D.’s cousin Francis Wolle was to describe their earliest years as ‘steeped in religion’, but, to his mind, not in a repressive sense.2 Rather, Bethlehem Moravians were close-knit, the children enveloped in a loving community. The rituals of holidays included lovefeasts of hymns, coffee and buns; beeswax candle services and the building of extravagant putzes (nativity scene models) at Christmas; Holy Weeks culminating in Easter dawn worships; and elaborate funeral processions. Every event ­– every church service – featured a chorus of talented musicians and singers. H.D.’s mother, Helen, was an artist and musician, and H.D. recalled her often at the piano, filling their home with music. Helen’s brother and her great-uncle were both renowned musicians, and H.D. herself played piano. As an adult, H.D. was not devout – she would be appalled, in 1951, that her first grandson was christened – but her interest in Christianity never abated, and her Moravian heritage was important to her.3 In the 1940s she would return to Moravianism not as a devotee but as a scholar and writer, penning both an autobiographical novel of her childhood, The Gift, and historical fiction about early Moravians, The Mystery and ‘The Death of Martin Presser’.4 The Moravianism of her long prose works was not the Moravianism of her own experience growing up at the end of the nineteenth century. In H.D.’s girlhood experience, Moravians followed traditional Christian tenets. For her prose fiction, though, she delved into the movement’s beginnings, when the practice and beliefs of its disciples were anchored in a mysticism steeped in sexual overtones. Despite the strict regulation of sexuality advocated by Count Zinzendorf, the sect placed a high value on sex as a sacrament in its theology, and on physicality and embodiment as necessary to faith.5 H.D.’s notes on hymns indicate her realisation that these early Moravians imagined the wounds of Christ as vaginal spaces, and that sex was viewed as a path to spiritual communion. She noted, too, passages in an anti-Moravian tract alleging that among Moravians ‘coition is performed by the Male Sex in Christ’s Stead’.6 For H.D. throughout her life, sexuality was richly entangled with both spirituality and art. In Notes on Thought and Vision – written on a ‘honeymoon’ trip with her partner, Bryher, to the Scilly Islands – she would aver, ‘All reasoning, normal, sane and balanced men and women need and seek at certain times of their lives, certain definite physical relationships. Men and women of temperament, musicians, scientists, artists especially, need these relationships to develop and draw forth their talents. Not to desire and make every effort to develop along these natural physical lines, cripples and dwarfs the being.’7 When H.D. was eight years old, her father took a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, and the family moved to Upper Darby, near the Flower Observatory,

2 

Francis Wolle, A Moravian Heritage (Boulder, CO: Empire Reproduction & Printing Co., 1971), 13. H.D. to George Plank, 2 April [1951]. George Plank Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut. 4  H.D., The Gift, ed. Jane Augustine (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); H.D., The Mystery, ed. Jane Augustine (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009); H.D., ‘The Death of Martin Presser’, Quarterly Review of Literature 13, nos 3–4 (1965): 241–61. 5  Craig Atwood, ‘Sleeping in the Arms of Christ: Sanctifying Sexuality in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Church’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, no. 1 (1997): 26–31, passim. 6  H.D. Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut. 7  H.D., Notes, 17. 3 

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which Doolittle ran. Having no Moravian church nearby, her family attended Quaker meetings within a mile of their farmhouse in a rural exurb of Philadelphia. As a teen, H.D. took the trolley into town to attend the prestigious Friends’ Central School, a prep school that smoothed the way into her admission at Quaker college Bryn Mawr. The quietism and introspection of the non-hierarchical Quakers must have come as quite a shock to her, having been immersed in the evangelism and clamorous music of the Moravians since birth. Indeed, the ‘complete psychic break with my little friends and life and school’ rendered the bold, tomboyish H.D. introverted and shy.8 We have a tendency – I’ve done it myself – to observe that her childhood in a Moravian community is what laid the foundation for a lifelong devotion to spirituality. But surely the family’s move from Bethlehem to Upper Darby – from the Moravian to the Quaker Church – was instrumental in awakening in an adolescent H.D. some sense that spirituality might be explored and expressed via myriad systems of thought. If one can be a Moravian one day and a Quaker the next, one’s spiritual journey need never come to a close. That the family’s closest friends in Philadelphia, the Snivelys, were Episcopals would only have deepened her curiosity about other faiths. For the most part, H.D. does not draw on Quakerism as she does Moravianism in her writings. However, by the war years she had become invested in reimagining her Christian girlhood. The Quaker Meeting House – with its ‘simplicity and sparse elegance’ – appears in her spiritualist/occultic novel Majic Ring (penned in 1943–4) and her epic Trilogy.9 As Henry Williams has observed, ‘While Moravians have been ecumenical, the Society of Friends have been more syncretistic.’10 Syncretism would prove to be the cornerstone of H.D.’s spiritual sensibilities. H.D. is best known for her poems set in ancient Greece. At Friends’ Central School, she was permitted to follow her own study of Greek history, and she went on to study the Greek language at Bryn Mawr, but her fascination with the Greeks had come even earlier in life, at the age of seven, when she first heard Nathaniel Hawthorne’s adaptations of Greek myth for children, Tanglewood Tales.11 ‘Those stories are my foundation,’ she declares.12 The Tanglewood Tales, Rosicrucian Algernon Blackwood’s The Centaur, these mythological legends swirled around her, mingled with beloved Grimm fairy tales and biblical stories, fuelling her nascent imagination. These fables of childhood were the source, according to Jane Augustine, of ‘H.D.’s first intuitions of the artist’s power’.13 At the age of fifteen, H.D. met Ezra Pound, a classmate of her brother Gilbert, and a romantic friendship commenced. Like H.D.’s mother, Ezra’s parents were zealously religious, pillars of their local Presbyterian church, where both taught Sunday school and were active in the Society of Christian Endeavour, an evangelical youth organisation. H.D. and Ezra read together a wide range of literary and religious writings, but while H.D. is often portrayed as Ezra’s muse and protégée, her knowledge of ancient

 8 

Quoted in Carol Tinker, ed., ‘A Friendship Traced: H.D. Letters to Silvia Dobson’, Conjunctions 2 (1982): 119. H.D., Majic Ring, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 24; H.D., Trilogy, ed. Aliki Barnstone (New York: New Directions, 1998). 10  Henry L. Williams, ‘H.D.’s Moravian Heritage’, H.D. Newsletter 4, no. 1 (1991): 7. 11  On H.D.’s high school studies, see Emily Mitchell Wallace, ‘Athene’s Owl’, Poesis 6 (1985): 98–123. 12  H.D., Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 1984), 186–7. 13  Jane Augustine, ‘Teaching H.D. and Spirituality’, in Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Annette Debo and Lara Vetter (New York: MLA Press, 2011), 63.  9 

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Greece and the Greek language far exceeded his at this point. Indeed, Ezra – otherwise a polyglot – found ancient Greek so difficult that he created his own plans of study in college to avoid taking it.14 It is far more likely that it was H.D. who fired Ezra’s imagination about the Aegeans. But it was not just Ezra Pound who shared this interest. Her first great love, Frances Gregg, would always be associated with the ancients. In the dawn of their relationship, the two devoured the lush, erotic syllables of decadent poems set in ancient Greece and Rome, calling to each other ‘Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow’, lines of Swinburne’s extravagantly alliterative ‘Itylus’. As Cassandra Laity has shown, H.D. departed from her male comrades by relying on Swinburne’s conceptions of androgyny and homoeroticism to craft her poetics.15 Ezra wrote a series of love poems to H.D. But, aside from a few lyrics and translations at school, H.D.’s very first poems were written to Gregg, not Pound – love poems modelled on the Idylls of Theocritus, which explored homoerotic desire, the lovesick and the whims of Aphrodite. Gregg held progressive beliefs about sexuality: she averred that ‘male and female characteristics weave and intertwine, and run the gamut of a dual expressiveness that is bewildering’.16 Like H.D., she was bisexual and eschewed monogamy. As young women, the two spent hours staring into each other’s eyes in a communion both spiritual and erotic. They shared visions. As Augustine observes of H.D.’s relationship with Gregg, This affair opened up a new dimension of religious experience to H.D.: ecstasy [. . .] She associated it with the Dionysian excesses of wine, song, and dance meant to achieve union with the deity as well as with the fertility religions of Egypt and the Middle East that celebrated sexual union as a natural force [. . .] She saw the natural world’s energies as inherently sexual and creative, reflective of the transcendent loves of goddesses and gods.17 In H.D.’s autobiographical novel Paint It To-day, she makes clear the connection between the spiritual and the sexual when she describes her first meeting with Frances. When she first sees her across a room, ‘there came as to Paul of Tarsus, light,’ she recalls, comparing Gregg to Christ and suggesting their encounter as inspiring a conversion.18 At the same time, she realises, Gregg’s eyes, though a shade of blue ‘it is said one sees in heaven’, were nonetheless ‘an unholy splendor’.19 As Suzanne Hobson has pointed out, H.D. believed that women who are sexuality- or gender-fluid are ‘predestined to have special gifts and visionary powers’.20

14 

A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Volume 1: The Young Genius, 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 15, 19. 15  Cassandra Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 471. 16  Frances Gregg, The Mystic Leeway, ed. Ben Jones (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995), 94. 17  Augustine, ‘Teaching’, 64–5. 18  H.D., Paint It To-day, ed. Cassandra Laity (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 7. 19  H.D., Paint It To-day, 9. 20  Suzanne Hobson, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 122.

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When H.D. was finally able to travel to Greece in 1920 and tour its islands, temples and amphitheatres, it was with Bryher and their mutual friend, the eminent sexologist Havelock Ellis. On that trip, H.D. had three spiritual experiences, experiences that she would spend years contemplating. The first, an instance of bilocation, occurred on board the ship to Greece. Engaging in a flirtation with an architect-archaeologist, Peter Rodeck, H.D. learned after spending an evening on deck with him that he had actually been in his cabin below the entire time. ‘It is a mystery not uncommon to folk and fairy-tales,’ she would observe decades later, ‘the mystery of the appearance of a stranger or a near-stranger, at a time and in a place where he could not possibly have been.’21 To make sense of it, she would consult French astronomer Camille Flammarion, whose book recording ample examples of such events, Death and its Mystery, proved to be helpful in validating her own experience.22 Still later she turned to the Kabbalist thinker Robert Ambelain. As Matte Robinson explains, her reading of Ambelain encouraged her to theorise bilocation or doubling in terms of the separation of the physical and astral bodies, and informed her Helen in Egypt, in which Helen is simultaneously in Troy and Egypt.23 The other two spiritual experiences were on the island of Corfu, which has a rich mythological history. The first of these was one of spirit possession. In Bryher’s presence, H.D. went into a trance and channelled a series of past personages that led her to the original moment in ancient Egypt when religion was born. Here she was undoubtedly influenced again by Flammarion, whose book Lumen was a favourite of hers; he hypothesises the ability to position oneself outside of time and watch history play out as a series of moving images, moving backward, further and further, in time.24 The second, again shared with Bryher, entailed a vision of a series of images projected on the wall of their hotel room. They were in ‘a sort of halfway state between ordinary dream and the vision of those who [. . .] we must call psychics or clairvoyants’, a series of ‘shadow’ or ‘light-pictures’, she was later to tell Sigmund Freud, when she was in analysis with him in the early 1930s.25 Freud would diagnose the vision as ‘a desire for union with [her] mother’, but H.D. characterised it as a product of the imagination, ‘merely an extension of the artist’s mind, a picture or an illustrated poem, taken out of the actual dream or daydream content and projected from within’ and as a chilling harbinger of another great war to come.26 H.D. was not only a believer. She was also an avid scholar of religion and spirituality from an early age. By the time she first set foot on Greek soil, H.D. had already published a great deal of poetry set in ancient Greece and had established herself as a formidable poet and translator. But she was not just interested in ancient Greek mythology, with its motley assembly of tempestuous, capricious deities. She researched the actual religious beliefs and practices of Greeks and pre-Hellenic peoples as well,

21 

H.D., The Sword Went Out to Sea: Synthesis of a Dream, by Delia Alton, ed. Cynthia Hogue and Julie Vandivere (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 203. 22  Camille Flammarion, Death and its Mystery (New York: Century, 1922). 23  Matte Robinson, The Astral H.D.: Occult and Religious Sources and Contexts for H.D.’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 204; H.D., Helen in Egypt (New York: New Directions, 1961). 24  Camille Flammarion, Lumen, trans. Brian Stableford (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). 25  H.D., Tribute, 41. 26  H.D., Tribute, 44, 51, 56.

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studying with great interest scholarly books by classicists who sought to disentangle Greek religion from its mythological tales. By the mid 1920s, she was knowledgeable enough to review books on Greek art, religion, myth and civilisation for H. P. Collins’s Adelphi, assessing their comprehensiveness and their awareness of current scholarship. Displaying the depth of her expertise, for instance, she critiqued the omission of ‘the tremendous influence of Minoan and Mycenaean cults upon the later religions of Greece’ and the slanted English imperial perspective in Five Stages of Greek Religion by renowned classicist Gilbert Murray.27 Well before Trilogy explores the origins of Hellenic religion, in fact, Crete in the Bronze Age was a scholarly focus of hers in the 1920s. With particular interest, H.D. read that pre-Hellenic religious systems were matriarchal, with a preponderance of female divinities.28 ‘The chief divinity was at first a steatopygous woman,’ she read in Gustave Glotz’s study of the early Aegeans. ‘The whole earth is subject to her’, the male deities mere ‘satellite[s]’.29 As another scholar put it, ‘we are in the presence of a largely Monotheistic cult, in which the female form of divinity held the supreme place,’ adding that the iconography of the mother goddess drew on the garb and accoutrements of both genders.30 The superiority of the goddess in Aegean civilisations would prove to be a catalyst for a great number of H.D.’s short poems imagining the perspectives of female deities – ‘Euridice’, ‘Circe’, ‘Demeter’, ‘Leda’, to name but a few – and for her epic poem Trilogy, which sought to restore the centrality of the forgotten goddess figure to Western civilisation.31 That a female priestess served as prophetess at Delphi, and that the oracle had originated in the cult of Gaia – before it was associated with the cult of Dionysus and then Apollo – interested her immensely. Her later poems compiled with the title The Dead Priestess Speaks explore prophecy in ancient Greece, as do her translations of Euripides’ Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion, which prominently feature augury and oracles.32 Above all, her lyric poetry of the 1910s and 1920s resonates with scholar Martin Nilsson’s observation that the early Greek landscape was suffused with religion. Everywhere nymphs flit in and out of the forest, the sea, the air.33 What appealed to her, I believe, is the everydayness of religion at a time when ‘primitive’ and ‘alien’ spiritual beliefs co-existed and flourished, when local and immigrant deities alike were ubiquitous, in every stone and every tree, every animal, every temple and cave. Whatever she ultimately thought of his ‘cosmic-telluric’ theories, H.D. sympathised with occultist H. S. Bellamy’s definition of myth as ‘poetical interpretations of actual observations’, ‘matter-of-fact reports of universal events – which have been rounded off, interpreted and idealized’, ‘primeval lore, holy lore, the “science” of unknown’, with ‘a real, material background’.34 Myth, in her verse, bridged the seen and unseen worlds.

27 

H.D., review of Five Stages of Greek Religion, by Gilbert Murray, Adelphi 3 (October 1925): 378. Martin Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 18. 29  Gustave Glotz, The Aegean Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1925), 245, 253. 30  Arthur Evans, The Earlier Religion of Greece in the Light of Cretan Discoveries (London: Macmillan, 1931), 41, 37. 31  H.D., Collected Poems, 1912–1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1986). 32  H.D., Collected Poems; H.D., Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion (New York: New Directions, 2003). 33  Nilsson, History, 118–19. 34  H. S. Bellamy, The Book of Revelation Is History, Built before the Flood (New York: Faber and Faber, 1942), 26–7. 28 

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The Eleusinian mysteries, and the concept of initiation into elevated physical and spiritual states of being and into access to greater understandings of spiritual matters, held her attention as well. Notes on Thought and Vision details just such an initiatory practice, designed to facilitate higher understanding of the world and of artistic process. Great artists, she writes, balance the three states of consciousness – body, mind, ‘over-mind’ – and the over-mind can be accessed via the mind or via the womb or ‘love centre’ of the body. Moreover, one cannot neglect the body without hampering the mind and over-mind: ‘The first step in the Eleusinian mysteries had to do with sex,’ she remarks pointedly, and ‘[t]here is plenty of pornographic literature that is interesting and amusing’.35 In Notes, moreover, art flows from the convergence of spirituality and sexuality. ‘We must be “in love” before we can understand the mysteries of vision,’ she mused, because ‘sympathy of thought’ is central to the production of art: ‘Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.’36 Drawing at once on Christianity, Taoism and pre-Hellenic Greek religion, she contends that art can be a vehicle for ecstasy. H.D. was fascinated to learn that Greek religion was not wholly aboriginal, that some of the gods and goddesses that most fascinated her – Artemis, Apollo, Demeter, Aphrodite and Persephone – had come to the Greek mainland from Crete, where Egyptian religion held sway. As Marsha Bryant and Mary Ann Eaverly have argued, ‘Influenced by modernist Egyptology as well as by her travels, H.D. came to share with [renowned Egyptologist James Henry] Breasted a belief in Egypt’s cultural primacy. And like Breasted, she would seek a monumental past that did not simply reinshrine the traditional Greco-Roman one.’37 In 1923, coinciding with the celebrated opening of the burial chamber of King Tutankhamun, H.D., Bryher and H.D.’s mother travelled to Egypt, cruising the Nile and touring the pyramids as well as the monuments and temples of Luxor. The trip had a tremendous impact on H.D., who worked to teach herself to read hieroglyphics and who read about ancient Egyptian mythology and religion, guided both by the mainstays current at the time – books by Breasted, Margaret Murray and E. A. Wallis Budge – and by more esoteric arcana, such as theories of the mystical significance of the pyramids, and Harold Cooke’s astrological reading of the Osiris myth.38 While ancient Egyptian mythology would not enter her verse until the Second World War, H.D. began writing prose about Egypt immediately after she returned home from the country. ‘Secret Name’, the third story of Palimpsest, and its sequel ‘Hesperia’ (H.D. Papers) feature a young woman who serves as assistant to a male Egyptologist – a woman perhaps not unlike Janet Buttles, who performed a similar role for her uncle and whose book on The Queens of Egypt H.D. received as a gift from Bryher; or Lady Evelyn Herbert, who regularly accompanied her father, Lord Carnarvon (the financier of the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb), on his expeditions.39 No mere secretary, H.D.’s

35 

H.D., Notes, 30. H.D., Notes, 22, 27. 37  Marsha Bryant and Mary Ann Eaverly, ‘Egypto-Modernism: James Henry Breasted, H.D., and the New Past’, Modernism/modernity 14, no. 3 (2007): 435. 38  Harold Cooke, Osiris: A Study in Myths, Mysteries and Religion (London: C. W. Daniel, 1931). 39  H.D., Palimpsest (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968); H.D. Papers; Janet R. Buttles, The Queens of Egypt (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1908). 36 

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Miss Fairwood is revealed to have gifts that far exceed those of her male superior. As he concerns himself with overseeing the excavation – the desecration – of the funerary sites, she alone appreciates the profundity of the beauty of the ruins and understands the spiritual wisdom to be gleaned from being in their presence. Like the Greeks, the ancient Egyptians esteemed their goddesses and revered the women of their society. As Buttles points out of ‘the very unusual position held [. . .] by the Egyptian woman, a position unique and unparalleled in the history of womankind’, ‘This supremacy of the woman made her the legal head of the house, gave her the precedence over all the men of her family, and even carried her to the sovereignty of the State, placing the crown upon her head, and endowing her with the natural rights of government.’40 What is more, H.D. would have read with interest Cooke’s assertion about the ‘bi-sexual’ nature of the reigning gods of ancient Egyptian and Semitic religions alike: Adam and Eve, Osiris and Isis, are both mother and father at once, a deity ‘he-she, if so simple a phrase may be pardoned, male-female or hermaphroditic’.41 The scholars H.D. read found traces of pre-Semitic religion in early Greek worship as well. In 1929, she wrote a novel set in ancient Palestine, told from a woman’s perspective. Her version of the story of Jesus differs markedly from that of D. H. Lawrence’s fictionalisation of the crucifixion, published in 1929, in which Jesus discovers spiritual truth on his own and women function as mere instruments of male sexual awakening. In Pilate’s Wife, H.D. portrays early Rome as a flailing culture without a strong religious foundation, its spiritually starved denizens adrift in a world that has lost its way.42 One such seeker, the protagonist, Veronica, wife of Pontius Pilate, is dismayed at the secrecy surrounding the male-dominated Mithraists, and dissatisfied with any number of faddish occult systems of belief. She finds resolution to her quest when she consults a fortune teller, who tells her of a cult arising around Jesus. Reading with and against the grain of Arthur Weigall’s popular The Paganism in our Christianity – a fallacious argument against comparative religion – H.D. imagines that Jesus did not die on the cross.43 In her version, Veronica orchestrates the apparent death by crucifixion, then facilitates his escape from Rome. By the time she had conceived Pilate’s Wife, it is clear that H.D. had strayed far from the Moravian church of her maternal family, even as her imagination honoured its rebellious roots. Jesus, in the works of comparative religion she imbibed, was just another male fertility god, who dies in the winter and is resurrected in the spring. In the 1920s, she read Édourd Schuré’s popular Jesus, the Last Great Initiate, which held that the initiation of Jesus followed the mysteries of Egypt and Greece, and which argued for the neglected significance of women to the Christian story. The story of Jesus, for Schuré, was the culmination of ‘the whole ancient theosophy of Indian, Egyptian and Grecian initiates’, one that ‘would accordingly furnish a religious basis for the reconciliation of Asia and Europe’.44 She finds this vision confirmed in the early 1940s, when she reads her friend John Cournos’s translation of Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s The Secret of the West. ‘Here, in Eleusis, was made the first effort to unite

40 

Buttles, Queens, 1–2. Cooke, Osiris, 53, 50. 42  H.D., Pilate’s Wife, ed. Joan A. Burke (New York: New Directions, 2000). 43  Arthur Weigall, The Paganism in our Christianity (London: Hutchinson, 1928). 44  Édourd Schuré, Jesus, the Last Great Initiate (London: Rider and Son, 1923), 146, 147. 41 

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mankind with an inner spiritual bond,’ Merezhkovsky asserts; ‘in this sense, here was laid the first basis for the future Christian universality.’45 It is also important to note that by the late 1920s, as Susan Stanford Friedman has outlined in Psyche Reborn, H.D. was beginning to explore other strains of esoteric and occultic thought, which were destined to be woven into her fluid, increasingly syncretic belief system.46 This is the period of H.D.’s passionate but short-lived love affair with Kenneth Macpherson, a bisexual artist and avant-garde filmmaker. Nearing the end of their relationship in the early 1930s, H.D. found herself at a crossroads. She struggled to find a new direction for her life and, perhaps most importantly, for her writing, and she turned to the occult and esotericism. H.D.’s initial foray into this world included engagement with astrology, fortunetelling, the Tarot and cheirosophy (palm reading). In the mid to late 1930s, in her copy of Grand Orient’s A Manual of Cartomancy, Fortune-Telling and Occult Dimension, H.D. wrote copious notes indicating that she was at work on her own fortune and on the fortunes of those in her circle.47 About herself, she jotted in the margin, ‘[l]ong and wearisome voyage’, but she also marked a passage that she was ‘gifted with a fertile imagination, which delights in strange scenes and adventures’. She became an accomplished reader of Tarot cards, with both a conventional deck and an astrological one. Tarot, her guidebooks agreed, came from ancient Egypt. She relished this link to her 1920s study of ancient religions. While she experimented with other systems of esoteric practice, astrology would become an important and long-standing pursuit, deeply embedded in her religious vision. By 1929, H.D. was actively involved with astrology, which is the through line for most of these practices. As H.D. remarked of the Tarot, ‘It’s the link up with star-symbolism that I find so fascinating.’48 Hand-drawn astrological symbols appear in the margins of a range of books on ancient civilisations that she read in preparation for writing Trilogy. The stars guided the magi to Bethlehem, constellations honoured Graeco-Roman gods, and she read with great interest about Egyptian astronomy. She regarded zodiacal signs as powerful archetypes to be mapped on to gods, fictional characters and friends alike. While she was educated enough to draw up her own charts, she also employed friends and professionals – such as her friend and lover Silvia Dobson and psychiatrist Elizabeth Ashby – to create charts for her and significant figures in her life. She corresponded with sympathetic friends like Viola Baxter Jordan about both astrology and Tarot, writing to her in 1929 that doing astrological work was like taking a drug. She was even considering composing an anonymous pamphlet about it.49 In part, what these metaphysical systems offered her was a vision of the future. For a 44-year-old writer at a turning point in her life, these forms of esotericism offered a shift in perspective that might reorient her sense of herself and the world and suggest possible

45 

Dmitri Merezhkovsky, The Secret of the West, trans. John Cournos (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), 367. Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). 47  Grand Orient, A Manual of Cartomancy, Fortune-Telling and Occult Divination (London: Rider and Son, 1909). 48  H.D. to Viola Baxter Jordan, 1 May [1941]. Viola Baxter Jordan Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 49  H.D. to Viola Baxter Jordan, 24 May [1929]. Jordan Papers. 46 

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scenarios and futures of which she had not conceived. In turn, this reorientation might stretch the bounds of her imagination. ‘The mind perceives things in a different way when it is put in the presence of objective images, on which it exercises its wit in order to discern what they signify,’ Oswald Wirth declares in her marked copy of Introduction à l’étude du Tarot.50 Whatever their appeal, these predictive systems of thought also promised deeper psychological insight, which was increasingly important to her in the 1930s, when she consulted Freud. Indeed, psychological insight seems to have been the primary goal. ‘[F]oretelling the future lies outside the province of active divination,’ Wirth warns the novice Tarot reader. ‘What is said is best confined to the present.’51 Of course, H.D. was by no means the only modernist to take an interest in the occult and Eastern mysticism. She returned again and again, for instance, to The Gods of Northern Buddhism,52 which Bryher gifted her during the Second World War. She read it repeatedly throughout the 1950s.53 But like her modernist comrades, she derived most of her ideas about the ‘East’ from theosophical and occult treatises by Western authors. While she found the philosophical and spiritual teachings of the East of great interest, she ultimately shied away from embracing its denial of the sensual, material body. As Elizabeth Anderson has observed, ‘In her texts alterity and mystery are located in the intersection of language, the sacred and the material.’54 The reclamation of the physical, sensual body inherent in Zinzendorf’s mystical strain of thought is undoubtedly one of the reasons she returned to the sect in later life. H.D. was also, of course, not the only modernist to integrate the insights of comparative religion into her writings, for so many of her modernist compatriots eagerly consumed Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. She was undoubtedly curious about other belief systems at a young age. When she was just thirteen, her uncle Clifford Howard scandalised his Moravian family with his Sex Worship or an Exposition of the Phallic Origin of Religion,55 which argued that sex and procreation were at the centre of every world religion. A few years later, she and Pound began absorbing the lessons of Yogi Ramacharaka, whose description of stages of enlightenment would resonate with her when she studied the Eleusinian mysteries in the 1910s and 1920s, and again in the 1950s when she turned to Kabbalistic systems of thought.56 But the idea of an ur-religion underlying the seemingly infinite variations of belief system found in each civilisation and era in human history comes to dominate her thinking by the onset of the Second World War. Though she referred, in 1941, to ‘the supernatural’ as mere ‘anodine’, an ‘escape from constant food problems, the talk

50 

Oswald Wirth, Introduction à l’étude du Tarot (Paris: Symbolisme, 1931), 14. Wirth, Introduction, 51. 52  Alice Getty, The Gods of Northern Buddhism: Their History, Iconography and Progressive Evolution through the Northern Buddhist Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928). 53  H.D., Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, Thorn Thicket: A Tribute to Erich Heydt, ed. Nephie J. Christodoulides (Victoria, BC: ELS, 2012), 125. 54  Elizabeth Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1. 55  Clifford Howard, Sex Worship or an Exposition of the Phallic Origin of Religion (Washington, DC: Clifford Howard, 1897). 56  H.D., Hirslanden Notebooks, ed. Matte Robinson and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos (Victoria, BC: ELS, 2015), 26. 51 

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of invasion, the possible recurrence of the Blitzes and so on and so on’, she nonetheless pursued it in myriad forms throughout the late 1930s and early to mid 1940s, when her reading of occult texts accelerates, and when all of her study and practice begins to coalesce.57 It finds its culmination in her epic Trilogy – excerpts of which were published alongside the work of the New Apocalypse school of poetry.58 It is not an exaggeration to say that Trilogy shows traces of all elements of H.D.’s spiritual interests for the previous four decades. It synthesises Eastern and Western thought, integrates orthodox religion into occult and astrological notions of existence, excavates ancient Greek ruins to uncover its pre-Semitic and Egyptian origins, and dramatically revises the story of Christ by putting Mary and feminine deity at its centre. In her compelling reading of the poem, Anderson discusses this synthesis in terms of H.D.’s capacious Hermeticism, a sect whose adherents seek ancient wisdom, practise alchemy, and perceive the divine as infusing all of the material world. As it became clear that the Second World War was imminent, H.D. immersed herself in esoteric accounts of religion, even as she tuned in regularly to radio broadcasts about German troop movements. Bryher was working to facilitate the escape of Jews and intellectuals from Nazi-occupied countries, and H.D. was well aware of the horrors of concentration camps and the looming threat of authoritarianism. Living in London through the 1940–41 Blitz and the seemingly endless and traumatic years that followed, she sought out books offering ways to conceptualise apocalyptic times. At one point, according to her novel Majic Ring, she had a vision of meeting God. Even as she was attracted to the notion of one world religion, ‘[p]erhaps the most distinctive feature of occult writing’, Demetres Tryphonopoulos has observed, ‘is its radical syncretism’.59 As a way of understanding war, H.D. began reading Denis de Rougemont’s opus L’Amour et l’Occident in this period, a book she would claim as her ‘Bible’, and which would continue to influence her thinking for years to come.60 On apocalypse, tomes by W. B. Crow she acquired attempted to reconcile astrology and Christianity, while books by H. S. Bellamy utilised discredited geological theories to hypothesise the existence of Atlantis. Bellamy theorised that Atlantis is mentioned in the Book of Revelation, and his sustained argument – crafted over the course of several books – that the Book of Genesis should follow the Book of Revelation inspired H.D.’s interruption of linear chronology in the final book of Trilogy; Lumen, too, with its speculations about standing outside of history and watching it unfold in reverse, was undoubtedly a source.61 However, on the topic of Atlantis, H.D. was probably more influenced by Merezhkovsky. Drawing on frameworks from comparative religion – but relying, like Crow and Bellamy, on a re-envisioned Christianity – Merezhkovsky suggests that the coming apocalypse of the twentieth century, predicted in the Book of Revelation, represents the completion of three grand catastrophes – the Flood of Genesis and the destruction

57 

H.D. to Viola Baxter Jordan, 5 October [1941]. Jordan Papers. Susan Acheson, ‘“Conceived at the Grave’s Edge”: The Esoteric Eschatology of H.D.’s Trilogy’, Literature and Theology 12, no. 2 (1998): 189–90. 59  Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, ‘Introduction’, in H.D., Majic Ring, xxiv. 60  Denis de Rougemont, L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1939). 61  Bellamy, Book, 124–33. 58 

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of Atlantis being the first two – necessary to the fulfilment of human destiny and the only logical outcome to humans’ thirst for war. We find in Trilogy’s final poem images suggested by his biblical exegesis of myrrh and the ‘mystery’ of the ‘alabaster box of ointment’, but H.D. was particularly drawn to Merezhkovsky’s claims about the key role of those of the ‘third sex’ in Atlantis, representatives of ‘the unity of the divine personality, destroyed in man by the sexual division’.62 In the late 1930s, she took to heart, too, the Curtiss books on theosophy and numerology – penned and self-published by Homer Curtiss and his wife, Harriette, a fellow Pennsylvanian – ‘because they simplify all the rather tangled erudite Blavatsky books’.63 Like other occultists and astrologers of the period, the Curtisses speculated that the third millennium ad would bring the end of the Piscean Age of warfare and usher in the Aquarian Age of women. ‘Women, WOMAN – this new Aquarian age we have been told is well on the way – a woman’s age, in a new sense of WOMAN,’ she enthused to May Sarton near the end of the war.64 These speculations dovetailed with astrological explanations she had read elsewhere. As Susan Acheson argues, H.D. was aware that Uranus is the planet presiding over the Aquarian Age, the planet associated with homosexuality.65 A new Atlantis, with a more fluid sense of gender and sexuality, may arise out of the ashes of world war. The harrowing Blitz of 1940–41 taught H.D. that ‘[t]he whole conception of time must be revalued’.66 The experience prompted her to theorise time as existing on two planes, ‘clock-time’ and ‘dream-time’. She discovered that in her moments of terror she could step outside of herself and be ‘in both dimensions at the same time’.67 This notion of existence on two planes may have prompted her wartime interest in spiritualism, though her first encounters with it were an experience of ‘table-tapping’ as a teen and Yeats’s Monday evening salons for emerging poets in pre-war London.68 In the early 1940s, she pursued it quite seriously. On 10 November 1941, she wandered into the International Institute for Psychic Investigation at Walton House, near her home at Lowndes Square.69 She read voraciously in their library, though with varying levels of credulity. It was at Walton House that she met a young Anglo-Indian medium, Arthur Bhaduri, who would prove to be important to the war years. Throughout much of the war, Bhaduri and his mother joined H.D. and Bryher for regular séances at H.D.’s flat, sessions that yielded images and ideas that fill Trilogy, Majic Ring and The Sword Went Out to Sea: Synthesis of a Dream. She also pursued, unsuccessfully, an invitation to the spiritualist circle of Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, a military leader who became a prominent lecturer and author of texts about spiritualism. By the end of the war, she was holding séances on her own, sessions that convinced her that dead RAF pilots were warning her of a third

62 

Merezhkovsky, Secret, 205. H.D. to Clifford Howard, 23 September [1939]. H.D. Papers. 64  H.D. to May Sarton, 6 December [1944]. May Sarton Papers, Berg Collection of British and American Literature, New York Public Library, New York. 65  Susan Acheson, ‘H.D. and the Age of Aquarius: Liturgy, Astrology and Gnosis in Trilogy’, Sagetrieb 15, nos 1–2 (1996): 136. 66  H.D., Within the Walls, ed. Annette Debo (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 107. 67  H.D., Within the Walls, 121. 68  H.D., Tribute, 185–7; H.D. to Plank, 4 May [1951]. Plank Papers. 69  Tryphonopoulos, ‘Introduction’, xxviii. 63 

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world war, an idea that haunted and, literally, sickened her. H.D. believed that the living and dead might be connected, particularly with those sharing a familial link, and thus communication between them was theoretically possible. But she later expressed doubts about spiritualist practice, reflecting that what she was really after was access to the ‘dream-life of the individual’ or ‘unconscious’ and that ‘[w]hether the dream had or had not the quality of a so-called psychic materialization, or was projected by the submerged content of the subconscious mind, is beside the point’.70 After the war, H.D. began writing historical fiction, integrating supernatural elements – spiritualism, bilocation, visions, time travel – into otherwise straightforward narratives. By the 1950s, she was engrossed in the French Martinist teachings of Robert Ambelain, a Hermetic or Rosicrucian form of Kabbalism. The mystical Martinist sect of Ambelain advocated esotericism, magic and ritual, with the goal of personal transformation. Matte Robinson has written extensively on this topic, contending that she drew from Ambelain ‘how to use the Kabbalah to synthesize her many and varied occult experiences and ideas, how to strengthen her claim to an authentic personal initiation, and how to find the proper occult role for a writer’.71 If Trilogy pulled together the various threads of her spiritual seeking within the context of a critique of Western civilisation, the last decade of her life saw an inward turn, to ‘[r]eintegration, achieving divine Knowing’ (as she marked in her copy of Martinist Jean Chaboseau’s Le Tarot).72 Her new friend Robert Duncan, a poet raised to believe in mystical forms of religion, encouraged this direction, pleased with this turn in her late verse. It’s critical to keep in mind that it was as important to H.D. to mine this material for inspiration as it was to use it to achieve some kind of personal peace. Her séances of the early 1940s had fulfilled a similar function. As Robinson notes, H.D. ‘heavily marked’ a passage in Ambelain’s text ‘explaining that poets should not consider themselves to be innovators; rather, they are accessing images from the astral plane’.73 What she found, too, in Ambelain is a gratifying synthesis of spirituality and psychoanalysis, a synthesis she had sought in the 1930s and 1940s when she plumbed predictive esoterica. References to Martinist thought fill the lines of her late verse. As she was writing ‘Sagesse’, she kept Ambelain’s La Kabbale pratique by her bedside; the ritual commemoration of the hours in that poem chimes with Ambelain’s ‘cabalistic degree’.74 Her Vale Ave75 reimagines the story of Adam, Eve and Lilith, within the context of Ambelain’s theories of bilocation. The quest of Helen, in H.D.’s epic Helen in Egypt, is reintegration, a process in which H.D. was herself consumed, both of self and of a sense of being simultaneously in and out of time, a phenomenon H.D. had first identified during the Second World War. In her memoir Compassionate Friendship, H.D. characterised the epic poem as ‘the final and complete solution of the life-long search for the answer – the companion in-time and out-of-time together’.76 ‘[S]he will not attempt to escape

70 

H.D., Sword, 104. Robinson, Astral, 2. 72  Quoted in Robinson, Astral, 22; Jean Chaboseau, Le Tarot: essai d’interprétation selon les principes de l’hermétisme (Paris: Niclaus, 1946). 73  Robinson, Astral, 72. 74  H.D., Hermetic Definition (New York: New Directions, 1972); H.D., Hirslanden, 52; H.D., Magic Mirror, 174. 75  H.D., Vale Ave (New York: New Directions, 2013). 76  H.D., Magic Mirror, 98. 71 

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“the moment” by a flight to infinity’ but rather, H.D. writes of Helen, ‘[s]he will bring the moment and infinity together “in time”’.77 Like Trilogy, Helen in Egypt gathers the threads of a number of systems of belief, fusing ‘the “love story”’ with ‘the religious or mystical search, the alchemy and the hermetism [sic] of the old grimoires, affirmed and realized together’.78 It certainly makes sense that H.D. would feel reflective at this stage in her life, as she began to sense the impact of ageing on her body and her memory. However, the turn inward was not a definitive one, nor was her thorough inspection of Ambelain’s corpus to prove the end of her spiritual journey. Even as the Martinists offered her a powerful way of meditating on her inner spiritual life, she was ever the restless follower – reading such diverse literature as tomes on magic, esoteric quasi-scientific tracts, works on ancient Greek archetypes, accounts of Catharism, studies of ESP, and even ‘UFO books’. Moreover, despite her devotion to coming to terms with the self, she maintained an interest in the outside world despite her isolation in Switzerland until the end of her life. She was as interested in Princess Elizabeth’s coronation and pioneering black Olympian Rafer Johnson as she was in angelology and Aldous Huxley’s account of his visionary experiences. She read other writers – she was particularly fond of the Beat poets – and about them.79 She read Husserl. She was still, then, absorbed with the problem of the imbrication of the public and the private spheres. Merezhkovsky’s commentary on religious sacrifice resonated deeply with H.D., and sacrifice – what Rachel Blau DuPlessis has termed ‘romantic thralldom’ – was a theme that would be central to her 1950s writings.80 In Ambelain’s idea that ‘to explore one’s own process of initiation is to know the suffering generated by love’, H.D. found a framework for understanding the underlying psychodynamics of gender and war.81 She had always been particularly taken with the story of Isis and Osiris – of Isis’ quest to retrieve and reassemble Osiris’ body parts, after his brother rent his body into pieces. Living in London during the Blitz, H.D. would have witnessed the retrieval of body parts after each night of bombing, but the story resonated, too, because it featured a powerful goddess who grieved, then healed and resurrected a fallen god. She told this story over and over again – of the women who attended to Jesus after the crucifixion in Pilate’s Wife; of Artemis’ grief over the ravaged body of Hippolytus in Hippolytus Temporizes; of the rent body of Dionysus in her translation of the Bacchae;82 of the goddesses whose recovery restores cultural memory in Trilogy; of the Tunisian queen who offers succour to a fallen crusader in By Avon River; of the young Moravian woman who cares for a magician in The Mystery; of Helen’s healing of a wrathful Achilles in Helen in Egypt.83 For H.D., the personal was political, the former at once a mirror of the latter and its cause, and this mythical cycle had significant implications for a spiritual life.

77 

H.D., Helen, 200. H.D., Magic Mirror, 99. 79  Lionel Durand, ‘Life in a Hothouse’, Newsweek, 2 May 1960, 93. 80  Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘Romantic Thralldom in H.D.’, Contemporary Literature 20, no. 2 (1979): 178–203. 81  Quoted in Robinson, Astral, 235. 82  H.D., Collected Poems. 83  H.D., By Avon River, ed. Lara Vetter (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014). 78 

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In Hermetic Definition, written a year before H.D. died, the goddess appears in her work for one last time, to ‘command’ the poet ‘write, write or die’.84 As she finishes the poem, she bids farewell to her writing. But the process – the quest – was never over for her. Though ‘there is always an end’, the poet knows that ‘Night brings the Day’.85

Works Cited Unpublished Material Copyright © 2022 by the Schaffner Family Foundation. Used by permission. H.D. to George Plank, 2 April [1951]. George Plank Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut. H.D. to Plank, 4 May [1951]. Plank Papers. H.D. Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut. H.D. to Clifford Howard, 23 September [1939]. H.D. Papers. H.D. to Viola Baxter Jordan, 1 May [1941]. Viola Baxter Jordan Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. H.D. to Viola Baxter Jordan, 24 May [1929]. Jordan Papers. H.D. to Viola Baxter Jordan, 5 October [1941]. Jordan Papers. H.D. to May Sarton, 6 December [1944]. May Sarton Papers, Berg Collection of British and American Literature, New York Public Library, New York.

Published Material Acheson, Susan. ‘“Conceived at the Grave’s Edge”: The Esoteric Eschatology of H.D.’s Trilogy.’ Literature and Theology 12, no. 2 (1998): 189–90. ———. ‘H.D. and the Age of Aquarius: Liturgy, Astrology and Gnosis in Trilogy.’ Sagetrieb 15, nos 1–2 (1996): 133–50. Anderson, Elizabeth. H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Atwood, Craig. ‘Sleeping in the Arms of Christ: Sanctifying Sexuality in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Church.’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, no. 1 (1997): 26–31. Augustine, Jane. ‘Teaching H.D. and Spirituality.’ In Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose, edited by Annette Debo and Lara Vetter, 63–9. New York: MLA Press, 2011. Bellamy, H. S. The Book of Revelation Is History, Built before the Flood. New York: Faber and Faber, 1942. Bryant, Marsha and Mary Ann Eaverly. ‘Egypto-Modernism: James Henry Breasted, H.D., and the New Past.’ Modernism/modernity 14, no. 3 (2007): 435–53. Buttles, Janet R. The Queens of Egypt. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1908. Chaboseau, Jean. Le Tarot: essai d’interprétation selon les principes de l’hermétisme. Paris: Niclaus, 1946. Cooke, Harold. Osiris: A Study in Myths, Mysteries and Religion. London: C. W. Daniel, 1931. de Rougemont, Denis. L’Amour et l’Occident. Paris: Librarie Plon, 1939.

84 

H.D., Hermetic, 7, 49. H.D., Hermetic, 55.

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DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. ‘Romantic Thralldom in H.D.’ Contemporary Literature 20, no. 2 (1979): 178–203. Durand, Lionel. ‘Life in a Hothouse.’ Newsweek, 2 May 1960, 93. Evans, Arthur. The Earlier Religion of Greece in the Light of Cretan Discoveries. London: Macmillan, 1931. Flammarion, Camille. Death and its Mystery. New York: Century, 1922. ———. Lumen. Translated by Brian Stableford. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Getty, Alice. The Gods of Northern Buddhism: Their History, Iconography and Progressive Evolution through the Northern Buddhist Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928. Glotz, Gustave. The Aegean Civilization. New York: Knopf, 1925. Grand Orient. A Manual of Cartomancy, Fortune-Telling and Occult Divination. London: Rider and Son, 1909. Gregg, Frances. The Mystic Leeway. Edited by Ben Jones. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995. H.D. By Avon River. Edited by Lara Vetter. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. ———. Collected Poems, 1912–1944. Edited by Louis L. Martz. New York: New Directions, 1986. ———. ‘The Death of Martin Presser.’ Quarterly Review of Literature 13, nos 3–4 (1965): 241–61. ———. The Gift. Edited by Jane Augustine. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. ———. Helen in Egypt. New York: New Directions, 1961. ———. Hermetic Definition. New York: New Directions, 1972. ———. Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion. New York: New Directions, 2003. ———. Hirslanden Notebooks. Edited by Matte Robinson and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos. Victoria, BC: ELS, 2015. ———. Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, Thorn Thicket: A Tribute to Erich Heydt. Edited by Nephie J. Christodoulides. Victoria, BC: ELS, 2012. ———. Majic Ring. Edited by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. ———. The Mystery. Edited by Jane Augustine. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. ———. Notes on Thought and Vision. London: Peter Owen, 1982. ———. Paint It To-day. Edited by Cassandra Laity. New York: New York University Press, 1992. ———. Palimpsest. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. ———. Pilate’s Wife. Edited by Joan A. Burke. New York: New Directions, 2000. ———. Review of Five Stages of Greek Religion, by Gilbert Murray. Adelphi 3 (October 1925): 378. ———. The Sword Went Out to Sea: Synthesis of a Dream, by Delia Alton. Edited by Cynthia Hogue and Julie Vandivere. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. ———. Tribute to Freud. New York: New Directions, 1984. ———. Trilogy. Edited by Aliki Barnstone. New York: New Directions, 1998. ———. Vale Ave. New York: New Directions, 2013. ———. Within the Walls. Edited by Annette Debo. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. Hobson, Suzanne. Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Howard, Clifford. Sex Worship or an Exposition of the Phallic Origin of Religion. Washington, DC: Clifford Howard, 1897. Laity, Cassandra. H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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Merezhkovsky, Dmitri. The Secret of the West. Translated by John Cournos. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930. Moody, A. David. Ezra Pound: Poet, Volume 1: The Young Genius, 1885–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Nilsson, Martin. A History of Greek Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925. Robinson, Matte. The Astral H.D.: Occult and Religious Sources and Contexts for H.D.’s Poetry and Prose. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Schuré, Édourd. Jesus, the Last Great Initiate. London: Rider and Son, 1923. Tinker, Carol, ed. ‘A Friendship Traced: H.D. Letters to Silvia Dobson.’ Conjunctions 2 (1982): 119. Wallace, Emily Mitchell. ‘Athene’s Owl.’ Poesis 6 (1985): 98–123. Weigall, Arthur. The Paganism in our Christianity. London: Hutchinson, 1928. Williams, Henry L. ‘H.D.’s Moravian Heritage.’ H.D. Newsletter 4, no. 1 (1991): 7. Wirth, Oswald. Introduction à l’étude du Tarot. Paris: Symbolisme, 1931. Wolle, Francis. A Moravian Heritage. Boulder, CO: Empire Reproduction & Printing Co., 1971.

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4 D. H. Lawrence’s Dark God Luke Ferretter

D

. H. Lawrence was brought up in the Congregational Church in Eastwood. His mother Lydia was a passionate, forceful character, who regularly attended chapel herself, and believed firmly that her children should also be brought up in it. Nonconformist culture at the turn of the twentieth century was such that the chapel often constituted almost all of its members’ social lives, with activities and meetings every night of the week, and for most of each Sunday. Jessie Chambers, Lawrence’s close friend throughout his youth, wrote, ‘The chapel at Eastwood became the centre of our social life.’1 In The Lost Girl, Lawrence writes of the novel’s heroine, who grows up in a fictional version of Eastwood: For social life she went to the Congregational Chapel, and to the functions connected with the chapel [. . .] She entered the choir at chapel, she attended Christian Endeavour and P. S. A., and the Literary Society on Monday evenings. Chapel provided her with a whole social activity [. . .] It is hard to overestimate the value of church or chapel – but particularly chapel – as a social institution in places like Woodhouse.2 Lydia Lawrence was ‘deeply religious’, according to Lawrence’s sister Ada, and Jessie too recalls that she and Lawrence ‘regarded our mothers as deeply religious women’.3 Lydia’s faith was perhaps not entirely orthodox, though, despite her passionate belief in the value of chapel. Jessie recalls her telling her mother that ‘she looked forward more to meeting her son Ernest in heaven than Jesus Christ Himself’.4 Jessie’s sister May recalls that, when the young Lawrence began a fight with her brothers, Mrs Lawrence urged them to hit him back, telling May’s mother, ‘I believe in retaliation. This “bear and forbear” gospel is too one-sided for me!’5 Based on an interview with the daughter of one of the chapel deacons at the time, John Worthen writes, ‘[Lydia] was not [. . .] active in the chapel; the doctrine of self-improvement she found at the Women’s Co-operative Guild at its Monday night meetings was rather more important

1 

Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 53. D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 20–1. 3  Edward Nehls, ed., D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, vol. 1 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 9; Chambers, Personal Record, 48. 4  Chambers, Personal Record, 31. 5  Nehls, Composite Biography, vol. 3 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 577. 2 

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to her’, and this seems to be true.6 The Church Minutes Book of the Eastwood Congregational Church shows that she became a member only in 1897, when Lawrence was twelve.7 That is the only time she is mentioned. The chapel has many offices and committees, and each year the Minutes Book records who leads and participates in these. In 1908, for example, there are sixty-eight names listed. Several members of Jessie Chambers’s family participate each year. But Mrs Lawrence never does. Her commitment to the moral value of a chapel upbringing for her son seems to have been stronger than her belief in the content of the Congregational Church’s Reformed faith. Lawrence and his friends give varying accounts of when exactly he finally rejected the Christian faith in which he was brought up, but the process was certainly complete by his second year at Nottingham University College, when he was twenty-two. In October 1907, he writes to the minister of the Eastwood Congregational Church, the Rev. Robert Reid, ‘Reading of Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Renan, J. M. Robertson, Blatchford and Vivian in his Churches and Modern Thought has seriously modified my religious beliefs.’8 He also mentions R. J. Campbell’s book, The New Theology (1907). Campbell was the leading Congregationalist minister in the country, the popular preacher at the City Temple in London. He describes his project in The New Theology as ‘an untrammelled return to Christian sources in the light of modern thought’, according to which ‘certain dogmatic beliefs about the Fall, the scriptural basis of revelation, the blood-atonement, the meaning of salvation, the punishment of sin, heaven and hell, are not only misleading but unethical’.9 This questioning of Reformed orthodoxy in the light of modern science and ethics caused great controversy in Congregational circles and beyond, and Lawrence writes to Reid, ‘I should like to know whether the Churches are with [Campbell] on the subjects of the Miracles, Virgin Birth, The Atonement, and finally, the Divinity of Jesus. And I would like to know [. . .] what is precisely the orthodox attitude – or say the attitude of the nonconformist Churches to such questions as Evolution, with that the Origin of Sin, and as Heaven and Hell.’10 Reid took Lawrence’s questions seriously, and preached a series of sermons a few weeks later on religion and science. Despite his conscientious attempt to respond to Lawrence’s questions, however, the latter had already firmly moved beyond the Christian faith of his youth. Three days before the first of the sermons, Lawrence writes to Reid again, explaining his thoroughly post-Christian position: It appears to me, a man gradually formulates his religion, be it what it may. A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one’s religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.11

 6 

John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 65.  7  Record of the Congregational Church Assembling at Eastwood, Notts., 28 September 1897.  8  The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 36–7.  9  R. J. Campbell, The New Theology (London: Macmillan, 1907), 4, 8. 10  Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, 37. 11  Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, 40.

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He states his belief in a ‘Cosmic God’, but not a ‘personal God’. He had believed in the ‘necessity for a sudden spiritual conversion’, had longed for it indeed, and tried intensely to effect it. Now, he tells Reid, ‘I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.’12 Formulating one’s own religion; a cosmic God; and life felt in the unconscious self – these are beliefs that Lawrence will continue to hold, in some form, for the rest of his life. In 1912, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley, the wife of his professor of Modern Languages at Nottingham University College, and eloped with her to the continent two months later. They were finally married in 1914. Their relationship transformed every aspect of Lawrence’s life, and his mature religious thought begins from his experience of this relationship. In 1913, he tells Ernest Collings, ‘My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect.’13 He writes, ‘We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.’ He expresses this more fully in the unpublished ‘Foreword to Sons and Lovers’, written at the same time. ‘The Father is the Flesh,’ he writes, and so ‘the Flesh is the Almighty’. Indeed the Father ‘should be called Mother’, at least from the perspective of a man, since it is in the flesh above all that a man meets God, or what Christian tradition has called ‘God’, and for a man ‘the woman is the Flesh’. In an authentic sexual relationship, in the flesh, in the blood, rather than in the mind, rather than in conscious and socially acceptable discourse, a man and a woman meet ‘the eternal, the unquestioned, the infinite’. For men, Lawrence writes, ‘God the Father, the Inscrutable, the Unknowable, we know in the Flesh, in Woman.’ For a man, going out like a bee into the world, the world of the Word, of the products of human consciousness, the woman with whom he is in a true relationship of the flesh ‘lies at the centre of the hive, and stands in the way of bees for God, the Father, the Almighty, the Unknowable, the Creator’.14 As he puts it in Study of Thomas Hardy the following year, ‘The act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown.’15 Lawrence expresses these beliefs most powerfully in The Rainbow, written between 1913 and 1915. The three generations of the Brangwen family in that novel all, in their own way, seek ‘the world that was beyond reality’, which is in fact ‘the centre of reality’, the ‘core of living eternity’.16 In the first generation, Tom and Lydia experience this through marriage, through an authentic opening to one another, body and soul, for which Lawrence frequently and deliberately uses biblical and theological language to express his belief that it is here, above all, that men and women encounter God. When Tom meets Lydia, it is as if ‘a new creation were fulfilled, in which he had real existence’. A ‘transfiguration’ burns between the two of them; he is a creature ‘evolving to a new birth’. As their wedding ceremony finishes, and Tom

12 

Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, 39. Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, 503. 14  D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 467, 468, 470, 471. 15  D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 53. 16  D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 29, 121, 135. 13 

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thinks of the consummation of their marriage to come that night, Lawrence writes, ‘The time of his trial and admittance, his Gethsemane and his Triumphal Entry in one, had now come.’17 As Lawrence puts it, making clear that the biblical language with which he has been familiar since childhood really has meaning when applied to a man and woman ‘leaping off into the unknown’ in each other: She was the doorway to him, he to her. At last they had thrown open the doors, each to the other, and had stood in the doorways facing each other [. . .] It was the transfiguration, the glorification, the admission [. . .] Now [God] was declared to Brangwen and to Lydia Brangwen, as they stood together. When at last they joined hands, the house was finished and the Lord took up his abode.18 In their search for the beyond, the unknown, the Brangwens journey through and beyond the Christianity taught in the local church. The church does not satisfy Anna Brangwen: ‘They talked about her soul, but somehow never managed to rouse or implicate her soul [. . .] There was something else she wanted to hear, it was something else she asked for from the Church.’ Her husband Will loves the church. When they visit Lincoln Cathedral, he ‘came to his consummation’ in the perfection of the cathedral, the beauty and the majesty of the sacred space. But Anna believes in the sky above the dome, in all that the great church does not contain. So she is most fond of the gargoyles on the outside: These sly little faces peeped out of the grand tide of the cathedral like something that knew better. They knew quite well, these little imps that retorted on man’s own illusion, that the cathedral was not absolute. They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church.19 Anna forces Will to acknowledge all that the gargoyles represent, and succeeds in making him admit that they are right. ‘Sadly and disillusioned’, Will realises that ‘the doorway’ that the cathedral had represented to him ‘was no doorway’. Until his marriage with Anna, and their struggle to become themselves through each other, ‘he had thought [his cathedrals] absolute. But now he saw them crouching under the sky [. . .] as a world within a world, a sort of side show [. . .] There was life outside the church. There was much that the church did not include.’ He still loves the church, because ‘his soul was passionate for something’. But in an act of emotional bad faith, which means that ‘the folded centres of darkness’ in him ‘would never develop and unfold’, he continues to serve the church although he no longer believes in it as a place where one truly meets God. As Lawrence puts it, ‘He was like a lover who knows he is betrayed, but who still loves, whose love is only the more tense.’20

17 

Lawrence, The Rainbow, 32, 38, 56. Lawrence, The Rainbow, 91. 19  Lawrence, The Rainbow, 146–7, 187, 189. 20  Lawrence, The Rainbow, 191, 190, 193. 18 

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Ursula, Anna and Will’s daughter, and the most modern of the Brangwens, always knows that Christianity, despite its attractions, is false. She is ‘all for the ultimate’, and in her adolescence loves Jesus as ‘a vision, not a reality’. For Ursula, ‘Jesus was another world, He was not of this world [. . .] To her, Jesus was beautifully remote, shining in the distance, like a white moon at sunset.’ At fifteen, she dreams of a physical, almost erotic relationship with him: ‘She walked in a confused heat of religious yearning. She wanted Jesus to love her deliciously, to take her sensuous offering, to give her sensuous response.’ But even at fifteen, she knows she is only dreaming, that no reality taught by the church corresponds to her dreams: ‘All the time underneath, she knew that she was playing false.’21 Anton Skrebensky, the real man with whom she realises these fantasies, allows her, when they are at their best together, an experience of the ultimate. As their sexual relationship develops, ‘She passed away as on a dark wind, far, far away into the pristine darkness of paradise, into the original immortality.’ But they do not open to each other fully or rightly – he is not the right man to lead her into the unknown. By the time she has been through the tumult of this experience, she has come to believe most passionately in darkness itself, as the place where reality, where consummation, where fullness of life, is to be found: This world in which she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp [. . .] This inner circle of light in which she lived and moved, wherein the trains rushed and the factories ground out their machine-produce [. . .] suddenly it seemed like the area under an arc-lamp [. . .] But she could see the glimmer of dark movement just out of range, she saw the eyes of the wild beast gleaming from the darkness [. . .] she felt the strange, foolish vanity of the camp, which said ‘Beyond our light and our order there is nothing’.22 Religion, morality, the sum of human knowledge – all these things constitute the ‘sinking fire of illuminating consciousness’, around which contemporary civilisation gathers, telling itself that this is all there is. But outside this tiny circle of light is what matters, the ‘vast darkness [. . .] with half-revealed shapes lurking on the edge’. These shapes seem to be ‘the familiar beasts of darkness’, but to those who have ‘given up their vanity of the light’, ‘died in their own conceit’, the ‘gleam in the eyes of the wolf and hyena’ out in the dark is in fact ‘the flash of the sword of angels, flashing at the door to come in [. . .] lordly and terrible and not to be denied’.23 Modern society tells itself that God, morality, knowledge and everything good is in the light, the tiny area of human experience lit by the arc-light of modernity. But God himself is outside this experience, out in the dark, out in the unknown, deep in the unconscious of anyone willing or able to listen to his call beneath the endless distractions and self-deceptions of modern life. The Rainbow ends with a beautiful and hopeful vision of resurrection to new life, even for the grim and ugly mining community in which the novel is set.24 Lawrence

21 

Lawrence, The Rainbow, 255, 256, 267. Lawrence, The Rainbow, 418, 405. 23  Lawrence, The Rainbow, 406. 24  Lawrence, The Rainbow, 458–9. 22 

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wrote this passage in early 1915, and he would never feel this way again. The nightmare of the war permanently darkens his thought. In Women in Love, written in 1916 and 1917, Birkin, Ursula’s lover, repeatedly and deeply wishes, even insofar as he is a religious thinker, for the death of the entire human race: If only man were swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on so marvellously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one of the mistakes of creation – like the ichthyosauri. – If only he were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the liberated days.25 In Kangaroo, written in Australia in 1922, Lawrence reflects on how to live authentically after the cataclysm of the war, and he believes this can only be done in relationship to what he calls the ‘dark God’.26 The aesthetic highlight of the novel is the long chapter ‘Nightmare’, in which Richard Lovatt Somers, the protagonist of the novel who in this respect represents Lawrence himself, reflects, perhaps for the first time at length, on his traumatic experiences in the war. The next chapter is called ‘“Revenge!” Timotheus Cries’, an allusion to Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’ (or to the aria by Handel), in which a poet sings about revenge for the dead in the recent war. It is in this chapter, in direct response to his experience of the war, that Somers begins to expound the beliefs he thinks that it is necessary to live by, both for himself and for society as a whole, after the catastrophe, the nightmare, of the war. His belief in the dark God is a religion, and a politics, for post-war Europe and the world. The war was fought, Somers feels, for the ultimately Christian ideal of love – as he puts it, ‘the idea, or ideal of Love, Self-Sacrifice, Humanity united in love, in brotherhood, in peace’. The war has killed this ideal, and men will not forgive, deep in their souls, that they were compelled to fight and die so terribly for it. Even though, in 1922, the West still pretends to serve this ideal, no one who is honest with themselves believes in it, and everyone, whether self-aware or not, is angry – crying ‘Revenge!’ for the dead, like Dryden’s Timotheus. The novel’s action is mainly discursive, consisting primarily of Somers’s dialogues and arguments with ‘Kangaroo’, a leader of returned soldiers who wants to establish Australia as a kind of theocracy, in which he would be the ‘patriarch, or pope’, and Willie Struthers the socialist leader in Sydney. Kangaroo’s religious form of authoritarian politics will not work, in Somers’s view, because it is still based on ‘the old idea’, the ultimately Christian idea of love. Struthers’s socialism is the same. It is just the final development of Christianity – ‘if the old idea had still a logical leaf to put forth, it was this last leaf of communism – before the lily-tree of humanity rooted in love died its final death’.27 Somers, on the other hand, wants to get ‘clear of humanity’, ‘clear of love’ altogether, and to ‘turn to the old dark gods, who had waited so long in the outer dark’. Somers does not believe in love, nor humanity, nor even in God, in the traditional sense of Christian philosophy or theology: ‘The ideal God is a proposition of the mental consciousness, all-too-limitedly human.’ No, for Somers, ‘There is God. But

25 

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 128. 26  D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 154. 27  Lawrence, Kangaroo, 264, 112, 265.

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forever dark, forever unrealizable [. . .] The great living darkness which we represent by the glyph God.’28 An it, ‘the X’ as Lawrence describes it to E. M. Forster, exists, an unnameable, unknowable thing (even the word ‘thing’ is a misrepresentation), which transcends but also permeates human life.29 It is the most real of things, and our reality as human beings consists primarily in relationship to it. It is what all the religions of the world have been inarticulately gesturing towards in their talk of God or gods. ‘There is this ever-present, living darkness inexhaustible and unknowable. It is. And it is all the God and the gods.’ The Hebrew and Christian Bible says, ‘I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.’ But for Somers, the ‘one dark God, the Unknown’ is not jealous of Thor or Zeus or Bacchus or Venus – rather, ‘The great dark God outside the gate is all these gods.’30 Human beings are connected to this God deep down in their souls, their selves, their psyches. Beneath the veneer of the conscious ego, and all the philosophy, law and culture based on the ideas of the conscious ego, deep down in the passions, the instincts, the unconscious – that is where human beings are connected to the dark God, if only they have ears to hear its call. ‘Every living human soul is a well-head to this darkness of the living unutterable,’ Somers believes. Outside of the Christian, industrial, modern culture that most people, at least since the Victorian age, have come to think of as the entire universe, there is the dark God, and, as Somers puts it, he is knocking. Knocking at the gates of the human soul, deep down in the unconscious, in the blood, and the question for modern people and modern society is who will listen. ‘The wondrous Victorian Age managed to fasten the door so tight, and light up the compound so brilliantly with electric light, that really, there was no outside, it was all in.’ It is the same today, for Somers, in 1922. ‘The vast mass hear nothing, but say: “We know all about the universe. Our job is to make a real smart place of it.” So they make more aeroplanes and old-age pensions and are furious when Kaiser William interrupts them.’ But all the time, in the modern age, in 1922, just as much as at any time in human history, God is knocking at the door of the human soul, of the human unconscious. ‘Like a wireless message the new suggestion enters the soul,’ Somers says, ‘throb-throb, throb-throb-throb.’ Most people are so deafened and desensitised by the distractions of modern life to this call, to this pulse, that they hear nothing, they are aware of nothing within themselves. ‘A tiny minority of sensitive souls’ hear and listen, but even they need to interpret the pulse, the throb. The problem is that ‘there is no morse-code. There never will be. Every new code supersedes the current code.’ What is needed, for Lawrence, is a whole new language, a whole new way of thinking, and a whole new way of living: ‘There is no morse-code for interpreting the new life-prompting, the new God-urge [. . .] It needs a new term of speech invented each time. A whole new concept of the universe gradually born.’ This is what Kangaroo is intended to be, and it is what the whole of Lawrence’s work is intended to be, each text in its own different way. Such work is going to be strange, he knows – it will seem new, outlandish and barbaric. It is certain to be hated by the majority of readers and critics,

28 

Lawrence, Kangaroo, 265, 266. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 5, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 77. 30  Lawrence, Kangaroo, 266, 285. 29 

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the more so the more each given reader or critic refuses to listen to the God-urge in his or her own soul. ‘Every new word is anathema – bound to be. Jargon, rant, mystical tosh and so on. Evil, and anti-civilization. Naturally.’31 But this is what Lawrence is committed to – listening to the prompting of the dark, unknown God deep in his unconscious soul, and attempting to find a new kind of speech in which to translate and express it to his modern readers. Lawrence makes clear that Somers’s beliefs are his own in a series of articles he writes for his friend J. Middleton Murry’s newly founded Adelphi magazine in 1923 and 1924. In ‘On Being Religious’, the second of these articles, Lawrence takes the presence of God to the deep, unconscious self for granted, as simply self-evident to human experience: ‘Whatever the queer little word [God] means, it means something we can none of us ever quite get away from, or at; something connected with our deepest explosions.’ The problem for modern people is not whether God exists or not; it is, rather, how to get into contact, in touch, into relation with the living mystery that the word denotes. Lawrence begins with two articles of faith concerning religion in this essay, which he calls ‘an everlasting truth: or pair of truths’. First, ‘there is always the Great God’; second, ‘as regards man, He shifts his position in the cosmos’. Just as ‘the great stars and constellations and planets are all the time slowly, invisibly but absolutely shifting their positions, [and] even the pole star is silently stealing away from the pole [. . .] so it is with the Great God. He slowly and silently shifts His throne, inch by inch, across the Cosmos.’ God always is, but in relation to man he shifts his position, just as the universe itself does. In practice, this means that the way to God changes. In the West, it has been Christianity, but it is no longer. In other places than Europe, it has been Mithras; it has been Greek, Roman or Celtic religion. It has been Judaism, it has been Islam, it has been Hinduism, Buddhism, and it has been other authentic religious traditions and practices, with greater or smaller numbers of adherents: ‘There have been other saviours, in other lands, at other times, with other messages. And all of them Sons of God [. . .] And the Infinite God, always changing, and always the same infinite God, at the end of the different ways.’32 In the Dark Ages, following the fall of Rome, Christianity – monastic Christianity in particular – was the truest and most authentic way to God in Europe, for Lawrence, the real thoughtadventure of European men and women. ‘If I had lived in the year four hundred,’ he writes, ‘pray God I should have been a true and passionate Christian.’33 But this is the case no more: ‘I know the greatness of Christianity: it is a past greatness [. . .] I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done.’ So now we need a new way to God. Lawrence is very clear in these Adelphi articles that this is the heart of the problem of modernity – God has moved, and we no longer know how or where to find him. As he puts it in the language of the mining town of his youth, there is ‘a great strike on in heaven’. ‘For the moment, we are lost. Let us admit it. None of us knows the way to God. The Lord of time and space has passed over our horizon, and here we sit in our mundane creation, rather flabbergasted’; ‘We are in the deep muddy estuary of our era, and terrified of the emptiness of the sea beyond’.34 The only guide moderns have, 31 

Lawrence, Kangaroo, 266, 287, 296, 297. D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 187, 189, 190, 192. 33  Lawrence, Reflections, 200. 34  Lawrence, Reflections, 189, 192, 172. 32 

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Lawrence concludes, using the language both of Christian and of literary tradition, is ‘the Holy Ghost’, who is ‘within you’, and who is ‘the dark hound of Heaven, whose baying we ought to listen to, as he runs ahead into the unknown, tracking the mysterious everlasting departing of the Lord God’. The Holy Ghost, in this sense, is ‘ghostly and invisible’ – indeed, he is ‘nothing, if you like’.35 Yet ‘we hear his strange calling, the strange calling like a hound on the scent’, and it is ‘God’s own good fun’, Lawrence writes, to follow where he calls. Kangaroo was very striking for its almost total absence of a plot. ‘Chapter follows chapter, and nothing doing,’ Lawrence reflects, almost ruefully, three-quarters of the way through the novel.36 Somers develops his theology, ethics and politics of the dark God in conflict with Kangaroo’s and Struthers’s views on how to govern Australian society but, having worked out these views, all he can do is leave. Lawrence seems simply unable to imagine what putting his religious beliefs into practice in society – as he believes should be done, indeed must be done if Western society is not entirely to collapse – would be like. He tries a second time in his next novel, The Plumed Serpent, written in Mexico between 1923 and 1925. Don Ramón Carrasco, the religious reformer and leader in the novel, shares Lawrence’s beliefs in the dark God, expressing them in a wide variety of images, many drawn from Lawrence’s substantial reading in pre-Columbian religion in Mexico. Ramón believes in an unknown, living mystery, which transcends the material universe, although also permeates it, and is to be found above all in the ‘quick’, the living soul, beneath the everyday ego, of each man and woman able to get in touch with themselves. He calls it a ‘perfectly unfathomable life-mystery’, ‘a Lord who is terrible, and wonderful, and dark to me forever’, ‘the invisible God’, and ‘the Great One, whose name has never been spoken’.37 Ramón tells the Bishop of the West in Mexico that he believes in a truly catholic church. ‘Why not let the Catholic Church become really the Universal Church?’ he asks of the bishop, the church of Mohammed, and Buddha, and Quetzalcoatl, ‘and all the others’, since ‘ultimately, God is One God, but the peoples speak in varying languages, and each needs its own prophet to speak with its own tongue’.38 Ramón creates, in enormous detail, a new religion which uses the language and imagery of Aztec and Toltec religion, especially the figure of the god Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, through which contemporary Mexican men and women can get in touch with the dark God, the living mystery at the heart of the cosmos and of themselves. The aesthetic achievement of The Plumed Serpent, a flawed novel in many ways, is the detail in which Lawrence imagines this religion spreading throughout an entire community, and eventually the entire nation of Mexico. After a long and dramatic ritual in which the images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the saints are taken out of the church in Sayula (a fictional version of Chapala, where Lawrence began writing the novel) and burned, and the building is elaborately reconsecrated to Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli and the pre-Columbian pantheon, the entire town is transformed into a liturgical community. The life of the town becomes fully religious, in the sense there is no distinction between secular and sacred activities. There is nothing that 35 

Lawrence, Reflections, 191, 192. Lawrence, Kangaroo, 284. 37  D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 273, 344, 360, 125. 38  Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, 264. 36 

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is not permeated by the Quetzalcoatl religion. The church bells have been removed, and native drums replace them. At noon, the drums sound ‘for midday, when every man should glance at the sun, and stand silent with a little prayer’, which Lawrence gives in full. Similarly, there is a ‘Dawn-Verse’, chanted from the tower of the former church, to the drum, at which ‘the men who had risen stood silent, with arm uplifted’ and ‘the women covered their faces and bent their heads’. In the same way, there are ritual acknowledgements by the entire community of nine o’clock, noon and three o’clock. In each case, there are drums, and a cry from the tower. At sunset, as at dawn, the drum is accompanied by the singer from the tower chanting an entire poem, and ‘everywhere men stood with lifted faces and hands, and women covered their faces and stood with bowed heads’.39 As the novel progresses, the Quetzalcoatl religion spreads throughout the entire nation. The Catholic Church and the Knights of Cortés are ‘preparing against’ Ramón, and ‘the priests began to denounce him from the pulpits’. But Ramón is confident that his religion will prevail, reflecting that the President of Mexico, President Montes, ‘will stand for us, because he hates the Church and hates any hint of dictation from outside. He sees the possibility of a “national” church.’ General Cipriano Viedma has his soldiers physically spread the Hymns of Quetzalcoatl, written on sheets, to the major cities of the country. Quickly, ‘in every town, there was a recognized Reader of the Hymns; or two, or three, or four, or even ten Readers in one city. And readers who went round to the villages.’40 Soon, ‘the adherents of Quetzalcoatl in the capital had made the Church of San Juan Bautista [. . .] their Metropolitan House of Quetzalcoatl’, at which the Archbishop of Mexico and the President intervened, and ‘a kind of war began’ between the followers of Quetzalcoatl and conservative reactionary forces. Eventually, ‘Montes declared the old Church illegal, and caused a law to be passed, making the religion of Quetzalcoatl the national religion of the Republic.’41 Lawrence’s vision is grand and ambitious in this novel – he envisages nothing less than his religion of the dark God permeating and transforming the lives of an entire modern nation. Lawrence only seems to be able to imagine this religion working for the people of Mexico, though. He is unable to portray Kate Leslie, the main protagonist of the novel, and a modern, Western woman, even wanting to live according to the Quetzalcoatl religion, far less actually doing so. The last chapter of the novel deals with her conflict as to whether to stay in Mexico and participate in the religion, or whether to return to Ireland, to her mother and her children. In both the typescript and the galley stages of production, Lawrence substantially rewrote this chapter and rewrote it again, yet even in the final, published version, it is constitutively ambiguous. Kate simply cannot decide whether she should stay in Mexico, and be a part of her husband’s religion, or whether she should return to her old life in Ireland. Neither is wholly attractive to her. Throughout the novel, she has been critical of as well as interested in Ramón’s religion, and this criticism is at its most intense in the final chapter as she tries to orient her life with respect to the twin possibilities of the Quetzalcoatl religion and modern Western life. In a passage Lawrence rewrote once his original manuscript had been typed, the

39 

Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, 356, 358, 321. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, 247, 260. 41  Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, 419, 420. 40 

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narrator says of Kate, ‘She was aware of a duality in herself, and she suffered from it. She could not definitely commit herself, either to the old way of life, or to the new. She reacted from both. The old was a prison, and she loathed it. But in the new way she was not her own mistress at all, and her egoistic will recoiled.’ Kate simply can’t decide what to do. First, critical of the ‘male will’ at work in the Quetzalcoatl religion, she thinks ‘She would not have this thing put over her! She would break free, and show them!’, and she books a berth on a ship to Southampton. But she remains unsure of whether she will sail or not. So, still thinking ‘I must have both’, both her individuality and the passionate relationship with another and with the living cosmos cultivated by the Quetzalcoatl religion, she decides, ‘I will make my submission’ to Ramón and Cipriano. When she meets Ramón and Cipriano in the very final scene of the novel, ‘with conflicting feelings in her breast’, she begins with some mildly expressed feminist criticism of their religion (it had been much more powerfully expressed in earlier drafts of the chapter), and then states, ‘I don’t really want to go away from you.’ Ramón’s gentle reply, though, ‘only made Kate rebel again’. She tearfully asserts ‘You don’t really want me’, while thinking to herself ‘It is I who don’t altogether want them’.42 The very last line of the novel retains this complete ambiguity of Kate’s feelings toward becoming part of the Quetzalcoatl religion. ‘You won’t let me go!’ she says to Cipriano, her husband both in Mexican law and in the Quetzalcoatl religion. This could indicate either that she feels forced into staying and becoming part of the religion, or that she feels relieved that this is the case. It is constitutively ambiguous, and Lawrence intends it to be so. This last line was written only in the galley proofs stage of the production of the novel, his very last chance to rewrite. In the revised typescript, he had written, ‘“Le gueux m’a plantée là,” she said to herself in the words of an old song.’43 ‘The bastard dumped me,’ the French words mean – from a song about a young woman deceived by a womanising soldier. This ending to the novel indicated that Kate was angry that Cipriano was willing to let her leave, suggesting that it would be better for her to stay and be part of the Quetzalcoatl religion. But Lawrence could not even let himself write that. He changed the line to the ambiguous one we have just discussed. As much as Lawrence wants the religion he imagines in the novel to represent an authentic – indeed, the authentic – way to live for modern people, he cannot in the end finally do so. He can imagine Mexican men and women living this way. But he cannot imagine a European woman doing so. Despite the enormous imaginative effort Lawrence makes in The Plumed Serpent to portray the details of his religious beliefs permeating throughout society, he cannot in the end convince himself, far less his readers, that these beliefs will indeed realistically and successfully transform modern Western life in the way that he nevertheless believes that they should. Lawrence was gravely ill when he finished The Plumed Serpent, and was diagnosed with tuberculosis shortly afterwards, the disease of which he would die five years later. In the Notebook in which he wrote his last poems in Bandol, France, between October and November 1929, his religious reflections take on a poignant, existential note as the poems’ speakers prepare themselves to meet the dark God about whom Lawrence

42 

Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, 429, 431, 439, 443. D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark and Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (London: Penguin, 1995), 462.

43 

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has spent much of his life writing. In ‘The Ship of Death’, the speaker confronts, with gentleness, bravery and faith, his coming death. The poem is set in autumn, and the speaker knows that his life will soon fall into ‘oblivion’ like the falling fruit he sees around him. ‘It is time to go, to bid farewell / to one’s own self, and find an exit / from the fallen self.’44 In visiting the Etruscan tombs at Cerveteri two years earlier, Lawrence had imagined ‘the little bronze ship of death that should bear him over to the other world’ on the stone bed on which the dead prince was laid.45 The speaker of the poem asks, ‘Have you built your ship of death, O have you? / Build your ship of death, for you will need it.’ Each of us will take ‘the longest journey, to oblivion’ and, like the ancient Etruscans, we will need to prepare ourselves. We will need, in our own way, to build ‘a little ark / and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine’ for the journey to come that death constitutes.46 Even in these last months of his life, Lawrence continues deeply to respect and revere the life of the body, and the image of preparing ‘little dishes’ and ‘accoutrements’ in the ‘little ark’ one will need to travel in gives him comfort as the best way of understanding and responding to the incomprehensible journey into death. ‘The Ship of Death’ is a poem of considerable faith, and it sounds much closer to the Christian faith in death and resurrection that Lawrence moved beyond decades earlier. The last poems are marked not so much by new religious ideas as by a lower level of resistance to traditional Christian language and ideas in which to express them. Some critics emphasise Lawrence’s imaginative response to death in this poem.47 But one could equally speak of faith, as well as imagination. Indeed, in a combination of the two, Lawrence, as he has always done, works out his own beliefs, in what is now a deeply personal, existential way as he bravely confronts the reality of his coming death. He speaks of the ship of death as an ‘ark of faith’, and the faith expressed in this poem is that a ‘dawn’ is coming after the dark journey into oblivion: Ah wait, wait, for there’s the dawn, the cruel dawn of coming back to life out of oblivion.48 The speaker imagines ‘a flush of yellow’ and ‘a flush of rose’, and ‘the whole thing starts again’. Changing his metaphors in the next stanza, he goes on to say, ‘The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell / emerges strange and lovely.’ Indeed, ‘the frail soul steps out’ of the ship, and ‘into her house again’. No dogma is contained in these lines. Lawrence is not expressing a belief in resurrection or reincarnation, nor is he making any certain profession of faith in what his speaker will experience after

44 

D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 630. 45  D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 17. 46  Lawrence, Poems, vol. 1, 630, 631. 47  Sandra Gilbert, Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 2nd edn (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 295; Keith Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: Poet (Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks LLP, 2007), 134. 48  Lawrence, Poems, vol. 1, 632, 633.

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death. He just believes and imagines that the dark God, the living mystery at the heart of the living universe, is such that all will be well. ‘Maybe life is still our portion / after the bitter passage of oblivion,’ he writes in the next poem in the Notebook.49 Maybe. What the poems’ speakers are convinced of, more and more so as the poems develop throughout the Notebook, is that in the coming oblivion of death, in the dark of ceasing to be as we have been, the dark God will again and perhaps most truly be found. In ‘Forget’, Lawrence speaks of ‘God who dwells in deep oblivion’, writing, ‘Only in sheer oblivion are we with God.’ Only in oblivion may ‘the silent soul / [. . .] sink into god at last’, may the speaker of the poem ‘cease even from myself’, and so be ‘consummated’.50 Critics often describe Lawrence’s last poems as his most religious texts, but his religious thought and feeling have always been at the very heart of his work, and this is only slightly more apparent in the last poems, with their decreased resistance to traditional Christian language.51 In 1914, Lawrence told his publisher Edward Garnett, ‘Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.’52 In whatever genre he wrote – fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, even painting and music – this would never change.

Works Cited Unless otherwise specified, all references to the work of D. H. Lawrence are to the Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence, published by Cambridge University Press. Campbell, R. J. The New Theology. London: Macmillan, 1907. Chambers, Jessie. D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Gilbert, Sandra. Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 2nd edn. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Laird, Holly. Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988. Lawrence, D. H. Kangaroo. Edited by Bruce Steele. 1994. ———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Edited by James T. Boulton et al. 8 vols. 1979–2000. ———. The Lost Girl. Edited by John Worthen. 1981. ———. The Plumed Serpent. Edited by L. D. Clark. 1987. ———. The Plumed Serpent. Edited by L. D. Clark and Virginia Crosswhite Hyde. London: Penguin, 1995. ———. The Poems. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. 2 vols. 2013. ———. The Rainbow. Edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes. 1989. ———. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Edited by Michael Herbert. 1988. ———. Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays. Edited by Simonetta de Filippis. 1992.

49 

Lawrence, Poems, vol. 1, 633, 634. Lawrence, Poems, vol. 1, 639. 51  Gilbert, Acts, 315; Holly Laird, Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 222. 52  The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 165. 50 

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———. Sons and Lovers. Edited by Helen Baron and Carl Baron. 1992. ———. Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Edited by Bruce Steele. 1985. ———. Women in Love. Edited by David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. 1987. Nehls, Edward, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography. 3 vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957–9. Sagar, Keith. D. H. Lawrence: Poet. Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks LLP, 2007. Worthen, John. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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5 Harlem’s Bible Stories: Christianity and the New Negro Movement Steve Pinkerton

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iterature scholars have not always paid much attention to that ‘critical, if commonly overlooked, element’ – religion, Christianity especially – ‘in the aesthetic, institutional, and political manifestations of the New Negro Renaissance’.1 Until recently it was not uncommon for critics to describe the New Negro poets as ‘united in rejecting religion of any kind’, or to say that ‘the writers of the Harlem Renaissance did not devote much attention to religious life and institutions in their works’.2 Criticism on Langston Hughes, a writer regularly described as ‘secular to the bone’ and ‘notoriously reticent about matters of religion’, provides a particularly telling example.3 For the reality is that Hughes, a lifelong churchgoer – as Wallace Best demonstrates in his important book Langston’s Salvation (2017) – ‘maintained and cultivated a religious sensibility and sensitivity to religious systems, and he harbored a deep affection for many aspects of the church of his youth, mainly its worship’ (LS, 11). Noting that Hughes ‘wrote as much about religion as any other topic’, including at least eighty ‘explicitly religious poems’, Best regards the poet as in fact ‘one of the most percipient thinkers about religion in twentieth-century arts and letters’ (LS, 4, 6, 10). Yet Hughes was far from alone among Harlem Renaissance writers and artists in his thinking about religion and in the frequent artistic uses he made of it. Many New Negro authors deployed religious themes throughout their works, often in determinedly ‘modernist’ ways that belie the once-standard critical narrative of both modernism and modernity as inherently secular. As Michael Lackey rightly observes, ‘Black writers [. . .] have been rejecting [this] secularization hypothesis for some time.’4 And the Harlem Renaissance writers put particular pressure on that hypothesis

1 

Josef Sorett, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 24. 2  Günter H. Lenz, ‘Symbolic Space, Communal Rituals, and the Surreality of the Urban Ghetto: Harlem in Black Literature from the 1920s to the 1960s’, Callaloo 11, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 319; Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, trans. Kenneth Douglas (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 192. 3  Quoted in Wallace D. Best, Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 10. Hereafter cited parenthetically as LS. 4  Michael Lackey, ‘Zora Neale Hurston’s Herod the Great: A Study of the Theological Origins of Modernist Anti-Semitism’, Callaloo 34, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 117.

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by refusing, as Caroline Goeser argues, those ‘normative polarities between religion and the modern world that began during the Enlightenment and continued into twentieth-century scholarship in art and cultural studies’.5 Judith Weisenfeld’s New World A-Coming (2016) has uncovered the remarkably varied array of African American religious practices during the period, and how these contributed to the formation of diverse ‘religio-racial’ identities.6 As examples of these less conventional or mainstream practices, we might recall Alain Locke’s Baha’i faith and Jean Toomer’s embrace of Gurdjieffian mysticism; one critic has even argued that virtually every renaissance writer of note was secretly an esoteric occultist.7 In fact, however, it was Christianity that provided the most crucial religious sources and contexts for New Negro art and literature. (This was true even of Locke, in his role as editor of the landmark 1925 anthology The New Negro, and of Toomer, whose 1923 masterpiece Cane rehearses biblical themes throughout.) Not that many of the writers, artists and architects of the movement were themselves actively Christian; few of them were. But most of them wrestled, nonetheless, with the Christian faith in various ways, often arrogating its abiding aesthetic and emotional power into their works. The writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, for example, betray the cultural and thematic importance of Christianity for these renaissance elders.8 Elsewhere I have demonstrated how deliberately another of the movement’s architects, Alain Locke, fashioned The New Negro along scriptural lines, making his anthology a more literal ‘Bible of the Harlem Renaissance’ than that well-worn phrase has tended to signify. I’ve also argued that a younger cadre of rebellious Harlem writers – Hughes, Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and others who irreverently styled themselves the ‘Niggeratti’ – countered Locke’s biblicising strategies with often-blasphemous religious rhetorics of their own.9 As ‘Newer Negroes’ (to borrow Scott Herring’s less pungent name for the group), they aped The New Negro’s religious discourse only to lampoon it.10 But Christian themes and tropes are everywhere in

 5 

Caroline Goeser, Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 209.  6  Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 5.  7  This critic, Jon Woodson, finds ‘esoteric ciphers’ and ‘signaling device[s]’ throughout the renaissance’s canonical texts: all part of a covert esotericist effort, he argues, ‘to save the planet’ (‘The Harlem Renaissance as Esotericism: Black Oragean Modernism’, in Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: ‘There Is a Mystery’. . ., ed. Stephen Finley, Margarita Guillory and Hugh Page Jr (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 115).  8  See especially Du Bois’s Darkwater (1920) and Johnson’s God’s Trombones (1927), a collection of versified Black sermons.  9  Steve Pinkerton, ‘“New Negro” v. “Niggeratti”’: Defining and Defiling the Black Messiah’, Modernism/ modernity 20, no. 3 (September 2013): 539–55; Steve Pinkerton, Blasphemous Modernism: The 20thCentury Word Made Flesh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 79–109. Recalling Locke as a ‘pompous, dictatorial’ figure, Nugent would later explain that ‘some seven of us indicated our respect by calling ourselves “the Niggeratti”’ (Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, ed. Thomas H. Wirth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 5). Nugent always ‘made a point’ of pronouncing the word to rhyme with ratty and, like his friend Wallace Thurman, of spelling it with two ts – although most scholars have followed Langston Hughes’s ‘more pedantic’ single-t spelling in his 1940 memoir The Big Sea (Thomas H. Wirth, email to author, 18 April 2013). 10  Scott Herring, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 111.

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the Harlem Renaissance, from Countee Cullen’s The Black Christ (1929) – Thurman mocked Cullen for always having ‘a Bible nearby’ when producing his poetry – to the neo-decadent ‘Bible Stories’ written by Nugent during the late 1920s.11 Among just the poets, Wallace Best has catalogued a number of renaissance writers who penned ‘poems of faith and reverence’ (William Waring Cuney, Jonathan Henderson Brooks, Waverley Turner Carmichael), ‘racialized religious poetry’ (or ‘political poems of a religious nature’: Albert Rice, Mary Jenness, Lucian B. Watkins, Esther Popel) and ‘poems of radical critique, doubt, and frustration’: Du Bois, Cullen, Hughes (LS, 40). Hughes’s poems are distinguished by their sheer religious range, sometimes channelling the rhetorical, musical power of the Black church; other times lambasting Christianity as a tool of oppression or using Christian iconography in provocative, blasphemous ways to make radical political statements; and sometimes doing more than one of these things in the space of a single poem. In what follows I consider four paradigmatic ‘Newer Negroes’ – Hughes, Cullen, Hurston and Nugent – whose works collectively exemplify the complex negotiations of Christianity that were so common not just to the Harlem Renaissance but to interwar modernism generally. In stressing the importance of Christianity to these and other New Negro writers, I hardly mean to propose a straightforward understanding of the multifarious attitudes they adopted toward religion. On the contrary, these attitudes evince a nuanced and complex set of beliefs, practices, literary strategies and aesthetic modes. As Matthew Mutter has persuasively shown in Restless Secularism (2017), modernist writers are characterised by a ‘sustained ambivalence toward both religious and secular imaginaries. This ambivalence throws the contested imaginaries into relief by dramatising the tensions between them; indeed, the very power of their writing often depends on the articulation of such tensions. The central religious problem for modernism is not explicit belief or disbelief in God but the entire fabric of thought and feeling implicit in the religious or secular imaginaries where belief situates itself.’12 And so it is with the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Mutter thus helps us to see how the dialectical tensions that emerge so often in New Negro literature – between, for instance, pagan and Christian feeling and traditions, or between religion of any sort and a supposedly secular modernity – constitute an identifiably modernist strategy for negotiating both the attractions and the pitfalls of both the religious and the secular. How very modernist of Langston Hughes, then, that his life and works should exhibit such ‘a complicated and, at times, fraught relationship with God, with the institution of the church, and with religion more broadly, as he moved uneasily between stances of belief and unbelief, frustration, doubt, and disillusionment’ (LS, 5). Christened in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, as a child Hughes attended services every week and ‘was given daily instruction in the Bible’.13 But then, during a church revival when he was ‘going on thirteen’ – as he recounts in his 1940 memoir The Big Sea – he was ‘placed on the mourners’ bench with all the other young sinners,

11 

Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 236. Matthew Mutter, Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 19, 3. 13  David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997), 78. 12 

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who had not yet been brought to Jesus’.14 One by one the other children ‘saw’ Jesus and approached the altar to be welcomed into the fold – until Langston was left all alone on the bench. He hadn’t seen anything, much to the dismay of his pious aunt, but ‘to save further trouble’ he arose and pretended to have been saved (20). From that moment on, Hughes reports simply, ‘I didn’t believe there was a Jesus anymore’ (21). No doubt this much-read account has unduly influenced the many commentators who describe Hughes as ‘secular’ and uninterested in religion, despite his abundant literary treatments of Christian themes. Harold Bloom at least reached more interesting conclusions about Hughes’s religiosity, reading his poetry as partaking of ‘esoteric or heretical strains in American religion’.15 Readers familiar with Bloom’s writings on ‘the American Religion’ will sense where his thought is headed here. American Christianity, for Bloom, is always more American than Christian; it is indeed post-Christian, nominally Protestant but really an unconscious inheritor of ancient Gnosticism. ‘It has kept the figure of Jesus, a very solitary and personal American Jesus’, ‘not a firstcentury Jew but a nineteenth- or twentieth-century American’: a Lord and Saviour with whom the faithful share a loving personal friendship.16 Thus ‘revivalism, in America, tends to be the perpetual shock of the individual discovering yet again what she and he always have known, which is that God loves her and him on an absolutely personal and indeed intimate basis’ (17). In Bloom’s view American Religionists don’t really imagine themselves to be part of the Creation. They are older than it, apart from it, and they carry within them some part of the Creator himself. Notably, Bloom considered the Black church paradigmatic of this reigning national faith (and Mormonism as perhaps its sincerest expression). Hughes, like Emerson before him, was for Bloom a ‘natural gnostic, somehow knowing that what was best and oldest in him was no part either of nature or of history’.17 One wonders what Hughes would have made of that interpretation. Consciously, at least, the poet found his religious interests a little closer to Christ and to the churches erected in his name. ‘While Jesus was no longer an object of Hughes’s faith,’ writes Craig Prentiss, ‘Jesus remained a part of his art.’18 After his failed salvation experience at age twelve, Hughes in fact remained an ardent churchgoer, attending services regularly throughout his life. Renaissance-era Harlem was notably ‘abundant’ in churches; ‘Praising the Lord, vibrating with ecstasy, and glowing in a high of momentary deliverance were what a good Harlem Sunday was all about.’19 Hughes nonetheless distinguished himself as an especially avid attendee. Though he never officially joined a church after his AME youth, he went so often to Harlem’s St Philip’s Episcopal – an easy walk from so-called ‘Niggeratti Manor’, the Newer Negroes’ unofficial headquarters at 267 West 136th Street – ‘that they considered him a member’ (LS, 56). Decades later,

14 

Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 18–19. Harold Bloom, ed., Langston Hughes (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002), 2. 16  Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 32, 65. Bloom borrows the term ‘the American Religion’ from Sydney Ahlstrom’s A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 601. 17  Bloom, Langston Hughes, 2. 18  Craig R. Prentiss, Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 59. 19  Lewis, When Harlem, 28, 222. 15 

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in the late 1950s–1960s, he would turn his artistic attentions ‘almost exclusively to the topic of religion’, believing ‘that black religion and particularly black gospel music were the last and most viable exponents of “authentic” black culture’ (LS, 24, 25). But Hughes’s interests in, and uses of, Christian materials were hardly dormant during the 1920s heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. The Black church figures centrally, for one thing, in Hughes’s important 1926 manifesto for Black expression, ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’. For African Americans, Hughes argues (not the ‘Nordicized’ variety but ‘the majority – may the Lord be praised!’), ‘their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout.’20 As for the poetry, Hughes’s ‘explicitly religious poems’, written throughout his career, clearly ‘cluster during the mid-to-late 1920s’ (LS, 9). Some of these, such as ‘Feet o’ Jesus’ (1926) and ‘Ma Lord’ (1927), charmingly bespeak the personal, informal, loving relationship with one’s Saviour that Bloom saw as integral to the American Religion. ‘Feet o’ Jesus’ concludes, ‘O, ma little Jesus, / Please reach out yo’ hand’, while ‘Ma Lord’ suggests that God’s hand, and His intimate friendship, have for the faithful always already been extended: Ma Lord ain’t no stuck-up man Ma Lord, he ain’t proud When he goes a-walkin’ He give me his hand ‘You ma friend,’ he ’lowed.21 Hughes’s treatment of religious themes was not always so anodyne during the New Negro period, however. Take ‘Goodbye Christ’ (1932), the poem whose speaker repudiates ‘Christ Jesus Lord God Jehovah’ in favour of ‘A real guy named / Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME’ (166). Some public figures, including influential Black ministers, ‘denounced the poem soon after its publication’, but the real firestorm occurred after the Saturday Evening Post republished it, without permission, in 1940.22 (The Post had been one of Hughes’s targets in the poem, presumably for having declined to publish his ‘Good Morning Revolution’.) While ‘Goodbye Christ’ incited a furious response from American nationalists who objected to its blatantly pro-Communist message, the evangelical community was equally inflamed, stoked as they were by Aimee Semple McPherson – another of Hughes’s targets in the poem. These reactions speak to the power of ‘the American Religion’, in which the national(ist) is always bound up with the religious, such that an offence against one may well be perceived as equally an offence against the other. Nearly as incendiary was ‘Christ in Alabama’, published in Contempo in 1931. Beginning bluntly with the lines ‘Christ is a Nigger, / Beaten and black’, this short and powerful poem equates the lynching of Black men with the Crucifixion (143). A ‘holy bastard’, the poem’s

20 

Langston Hughes, ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’, in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Penguin, 1995), 94, 92. 21  Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Vintage, 1995), 78, 107. All further quotations from Hughes’s poems come from this collection. 22  Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 391.

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Christ is reconfigured as the product not of a Virgin Birth but of a rape perpetrated by the ‘White Master above’ and nailed by white supremacists to ‘the cross of the South’ (143). The poem provoked an outcry over Hughes’s perceived blasphemy as well as his transgression of racial taboos. ‘It’s bad enough to call Christ a bastard,’ declared one politician, ‘but to call Him a nigger—that’s too much!’23 Hughes deployed the Crucifixion trope to similar ends in poems such as ‘Song for a Dark Girl’ (1927), ‘Scottsboro’ (1931), ‘Lynching Song’ (1936) and ‘Song for Ourselves’ (1938), but he hardly had the market cornered. Claude McKay’s ‘The Lynching’ (1922) was an early example of the Crucifixion/lynching analogy; a poem by Melvin Tolson depicts daily life for Blacks in America as playing out atop a ‘Golgotha’ where they have had their ‘manhood crucified’; while Frank Horne reminds ‘Two Brown Boys in a Catholic Church’ that their future suffering is bound to ‘exceed’ Christ’s.24 But no renaissance writer made such sustained use of the trope as Countee Cullen, who wields it to varying effect in ‘Christ Recrucified’ (1922), ‘Colors’ (1927), ‘The Litany of the Dark People’ (1927), and especially his long poem The Black Christ (1929), which devotes thirty-three pages to underscoring the fact that ‘Calvary [. . .] Was but the first leaf in a line / Of trees on which a Man should swing’.25 Compared to the forceful economy of a poem like Hughes’s ‘Christ in Alabama’, Cullen’s The Black Christ has generally been found lacking: an ‘impressive failure’, for Darwin Turner; ‘flaccid’, for Eric Sundquist.26 More successful is ‘Heritage’ (1925), which was featured as something of a centrepiece in the New Negro anthology. There Cullen explores a subject to which he returned many times: an internal battle between his Christian faith and the race-conscious, primitivist allure of other, darker gods. Though he ‘could never fully abandon his Christian upbringing’, still Cullen ‘could not accept that the Christian God, as widely conceived in America, was truly sympathetic to the black struggle’ (LS, 50). The speaker of ‘Heritage’ thus seems to speak for Cullen himself, confessing he ‘belong[s] to Jesus Christ’ even as his Blackness bids him play ‘a double part’.27 Pulsing along with ‘the dark blood dammed within’, he hears ‘the unremitting beat’ of jungle paws ‘treading out a jungle track’ (37–8): Jesus of the twice-turned cheek, Lamb of God, although I speak With my mouth thus, in my heart Do I play a double part. Ever at Thy glowing altar Must my heart grow sick and falter, Wishing He I served were black. [. . .]

23 

Quoted in Rampersad, The Life, vol. 1, 225. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, eds, The Poetry of the Negro 1746–1949 (New York: Doubleday, 1949), 137–8, 146–7. 25  Countee Cullen, The Black Christ and Other Poems (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929), 69. 26  Darwin T. Turner, In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and their Search for Identity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 75; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 593. 27  Countee Cullen, Color (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925), 39. 24 

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Lord, I fashion dark gods, too, Daring even to give You Dark despairing features [. . .] Not yet has my heart or head In the least way realized They and I are civilized. (39–41) The poem leaves unresolved these tensions between pagan primitivism and ‘civilized’ Christianity, even if Locke sought to settle the matter by setting a kind of visual full stop at the end of ‘Heritage’ as it appeared in The New Negro: an African mask that seems to suggest the ‘dark gods’ have spiritually replaced the speaker’s acknowledged Christian faith (Figure 5.1). Cullen’s speaker is not so easily persuaded. ‘Africa?’ he asks himself, and he can only concede that the continent and its gods are as illegible to him as the Bible might be to someone less steeped in the scriptures than he: ‘a book one thumbs / Listlessly, till slumber comes’ (37). In his frequent explorations of this pagan/Christian dialectic, Cullen finds a bedfellowwith-a-difference in Harlem compatriot Zora Neale Hurston, who foregrounded a similar dialectic both in her novels – from Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) to Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and her unfinished Herod the Great – and in her non-fiction works, all of which draw deeply upon her anthropological investigations of Black spirituality in the US and beyond. Hurston, though, was

Figure 5.1.  The conclusion of Cullen’s ‘Heritage’ as it appears in The New Negro.

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untroubled by any tension between African and Christian traditions. In fact, she readily subscribed to the theory that African American Christianity carried within it a clandestine allegiance to Cullen’s ‘dark gods’. Thus in her fiction she sought repeatedly ‘to register African retentions as a powerful, formative undercurrent or syncretism that had been thoroughly absorbed in Afro-Christian practice’.28 ‘There can be little doubt’, Hurston wrote in a 1934 essay, that ‘shouting’ – a demonstrative feature of many Black church traditions – ‘is a survival of the African “possession” by the gods’.29 In a subsequent essay on ‘The Sanctified Church’, she drove the point home even more emphatically: ‘In fact, the Negro has not been Christianized as extensively as is generally believed. The great masses are still standing before their pagan altars and calling old gods by a new name’ as ‘the congregation is restored to its primitive altars under the new name of Christ’.30 Reared by a devout mother and Baptist-preacher father, Hurston was profoundly shaped by her formative years in the church. Without carrying any orthodox faith into adulthood, Hurston nonetheless ‘spoke from the pulpit every time that she wrote’; ‘Despite her conscious distance from the trappings of Christianity, Hurston never lost sight of those trappings as a useful medium for storytelling.’31 (Such readings offer a welcome, nuanced corrective to Bernard Schweizer’s reading of Hurston as a ‘misotheist’, or God-hater.32) Craig Prentiss adds that while Hurston ‘never hesitated to invoke her own ideal of God’, ‘it was clear that the God to which she subscribed bore little resemblance to the God she encountered in the Bible or the Christian church’.33 In this regard she voiced far more explicitly than Hughes ever did the tenets of a personal spirituality that bears all the crypto-Gnostic hallmarks of Bloom’s American Religion and its tacit questing after ‘the original self, a spark or breath in us that we are convinced goes back to before the Creation’.34 ‘When the consciousness we know as life ceases,’ wrote Hurston in a 1942 memoir, ‘I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim [. . .] I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.’35 Hurston’s religious background, anthropological fieldwork and insouciant, independent spirit combine in her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, to present African American religion as yoking happily the pagan and Christian traditions of Cullen’s ‘Heritage’ – as well as any perceived conflict between Spirit and flesh – into a vital, syncretic lived experience. Early on, we find a number of Black characters in rural Alabama abandoning anything so ‘civilised’ as fiddles and guitars (‘us ain’t no white folks!’) to form a ceremonial music-circle.36 The spiritual celebration that follows derives its energies from African traditions which none present could know first hand:

28 

Eric J. Sundquist, The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 66. 29  Zora Neale Hurston, Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 851. 30  Hurston, Folklore, 901–2. 31  Gary Ciuba, ‘The Worm against the Word: The Hermeneutical Challenge in Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine’, African American Review 34, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 119; Prentiss, Staging Faith, 152. 32  Bernard Schweizer, Hating God: The Untold History of Misotheism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 103–26. 33  Prentiss, Staging Faith, 151. 34  Bloom, American Religion, 22. 35  Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), 225–6. 36  Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 29.

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So they danced. They called for the instrument they had brought to America in their skins—the drum—and they played upon it [. . .] The voice of Kata-Kumba, the great drum, lifted itself within them [. . .] Furious music of the little drum whose body was still in Africa, but whose soul sung around a fire in Alabama [. . .] Ibo tune corrupted with Nango. Congo gods talking in Alabama. (29–30) Among the participants is protagonist John Pearson, an untutored but naturally gifted preacher partly modelled on Hurston’s father. In church John ‘rolled his African drum up to the altar, and called his Congo Gods by Christian names’ (89). A homiletic conjurer of ‘Pagan poesy’, he embodies a capacity for conveying the Spirit by means of the flesh (141). His congregation responds rapturously to his inspired sermons, while in his personal life he’s something of ‘a walking orgasm’, with a sexual appetite that leads him often from the bed of his long-suffering wife (50). As Hurston explained in a letter to James Weldon Johnson, ‘I have tried to present a Negro preacher who is neither funny nor an imitation Puritan ram-rod in pants. Just the human being and poet that he must be to succeed in a Negro pulpit.’37 In this way John Pearson incarnates Hurston’s view of the Black preacher-figure as she articulated it in her essays on Black religion and cultural expression: a charismatic man ‘chanting his barbaric thunder-poem before the altar’, such that ‘the supplication is forgotten in the frenzy of creation’.38 After his sudden death near the end of the novel, John’s one-time congregants mourn him in typically syncretic fashion. As the new minister ‘preached a barbaric requiem poem’, ‘the hearers wailed with a feeling of terrible loss. They beat upon the O-go-doe, the ancient drum [. . .] Their hearts turned to fire and their shinbones leaped unknowingly to the drum’ (201–2). So concludes Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Several years earlier Hurston had published another work on explicitly religious themes, a one-act play titled The First One (1927) which rewrites the apocryphal ‘curse of Ham’. In her version of the tale, Ham is indeed made to turn Black because of his perceived transgression against his father, Noah. Yet where some may see a curse, Ham himself accepts the eventuality as a rare gift, and Hurston seems to regard it in the same way. ‘Oh, remain with your flocks and fields and vineyards, to covet, to sweat, to die and know no peace,’ says Ham to his parents and siblings as he makes his merry departure at the play’s end. ‘I go to the sun.’39 Decked out in goatskin and a wreath of fresh flowers, Hurston’s Ham is an attractively vital, irreverent, bohemian sort – a kind of threadbare Black dandy – both before and after his dermic transformation. Where the others in Noah’s family toil in their fields and vineyards, Ham is given to leisure. He always arrives fashionably late to the party. He likes to ‘caper and prance’, singing, ‘I am as a young ram in the Spring / Or a young male goat [. . .] Love rises in me like the flood’ (54). In all these ways it’s easy to imagine

37 

Zora Neale Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 298. The novel’s climax comes when John, under siege from enemy forces within the church, delivers a virtuosic set piece of a sermon which Hurston took verbatim from one she’d heard delivered by the Reverend C. C. Lovelace on 2 May 1929. See John Lowe, ‘Modes of Black Masculinity in Jonah’s Gourd Vine’, in Approaches to Teaching Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ and Other Works, ed. John Lowe (New York: Modern Language Association, 2009), 103. 38  Hurston, Folklore, 902, 834. 39  Zora Neale Hurston, The First One, in Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea, ed. Charles S. Johnson (New York: National Urban League, 1927), 57.

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Hurston modelling her Ham after Richard Bruce Nugent, that ‘enfant terrible’ and ‘self-conscious decadent’ of the Harlem Renaissance: ‘a handsomer, more bohemian Hughes’ who ‘fashioned his personality (if not his wardrobe) after Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle, moving tieless and sockless from Gay Street to Striver’s Row like some Lost Generation version of the medieval holy man’.40 As the suave, flirtatious and most openly gay writer attached to the Harlem Renaissance, Nugent survives in numerous reminiscences as the alluring bohemian of the ‘Niggeratti’ set. The Protestant work ethic held as little appeal for Nugent as it did for The First One’s Ham. ‘He has some amusing ideas for a Negro ballet,’ wrote Langston Hughes of his new friend to Alain Locke, ‘and some clever ideas for short stories if he weren’t too lazy to write them.’41 In perhaps the fullest contemporary account we have of Nugent during the period – his portrayal as ‘Paul Arbian’ (whose surname spells out Nugent’s initials) in Wallace Thurman’s barely fictionalised satire Infants of the Spring – he’s presented as ‘a person you’ve got to see to appreciate’, ‘a most unusual Negro’ given to ‘exaggerated poses and extreme mannerisms’.42 ‘It was his habit not to wear a necktie because he knew that his neck was too well modeled to be hidden from public gaze. He wore no sox either, nor underwear, and those few clothes he did deign to affect were musty and dishevelled’ (21). Like Hurston’s capering, prancing Ham, Thurman’s Nugent ‘prance[s] merrily’ in and out of parties, and once there tends to sit cross-legged on the floor and describe his homoerotic dreams, or to hold forth on his love of Wilde and Huysmans (22, 24). The novel he’s writing is dedicated To Huysmans’ Des Esseintes and Oscar Wilde’s Oscar Wilde Ecstatic Spirits with whom I Cohabit And whose golden spores of decadent pollen I shall broadcast and fertilize (284) When not writing, which is most of the time, he amuses himself by painting ‘obscene’ pictures of ‘highly colored phalli’ (12), such as the hot-pink phallus which the reallife Nugent gave Lucifer in his Salome series of 1930 (Figure 5.2). His first line in Thurman’s novel has him asking a new ‘Nordic’ acquaintance if he’s ‘ever been seduced? [. . .] Don’t blush. You just look so pure and undefiled’ (19): an accurate portrayal, by all accounts, of Nugent’s trademark sexual forwardness, just one aspect of his determinedly decadent pose. Nugent’s commitment to decadence is well documented.43 What’s less often appreciated is how central to that aesthetic (as to that of his fin-de-siècle precursors) was his consistent, even obsessive, commitment to biblical themes in both his writing and his

40 

Lewis, When Harlem, 150, 196. Hughes, quoted in Nugent, Gay Rebel, 12. Emphasis mine. 42  Thurman, Infants, 18, 59. In his own roman-à-clef, Nugent portrays himself as ‘youthful and attractive. Like Mr. Wilde’s Dorian Gray, only not so girlish’ (Gentleman Jigger: A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Thomas H. Wirth (Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2008), 299). 43  See especially Michèle Mendelssohn’s ‘A Decadent Dream Deferred: Bruce Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance’s Queer Modernity’, in Decadence in the Age of Modernism, ed. Kate Hext and Alex Murray (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 251–75. 41 

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Figure 5.2.  Richard Bruce Nugent, Lucifer, 1930. Watercolour on cardstock, 11 x 8½ in. Art and Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. visual art. Examples of the latter include vividly stylised portraits of Hagar, Lot’s wife, John the Baptist, Salome, Lucifer, the Madonna (Figure 5.3), Mary Magdalene, David and Goliath, Jesus and Judas, and many ‘sexually suggestive drawings of monks’.44 In his best-known literary work, ‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade’, which was the most provocative piece featured in the first and only issue of the Niggeratti-helmed Fire!! (1926) – a magazine calculated to shock – Nugent interweaves the singing of a spiritual with a sex scene between the autobiographical protagonist, Alex, and his male lover, Beauty.45 The biblical story of Salome and John the Baptist likewise finds its way, via Oscar Wilde, into this highly elliptical story: ‘Alex wondered why he always thought of that passage from Wilde’s Salome . . . when he looked at Beauty’s lips . . . I would kiss your lips . . . he would like to kiss Beauty’s lips . . .’ (37). Like Wilde before him, Nugent was led by his decadent sensibilities to biblical subjects. Perhaps inevitably so, if we accept Martin Lockerd’s argument that ‘the modernist absorption of decadence involved, and could not help involving, the religious aspect of the movement’.46 Lockerd is speaking there of British writers, but the

44 

Wirth, introduction to Nugent, Gay Rebel, 60. Richard Bruce Nugent, ‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade.’ Fire!! 1, no. 1 (November 1926): 38. 46  Martin Lockerd, Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 19. 45 

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Figure 5.3.  Nugent, Mary Madonna, 1930. Watercolour on cardstock, 11 x 8½ in. Art and Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. claim applies at least as well to the Harlem modernisms of Countee Cullen, Carl Van Vechten (whose Nigger Heaven climaxes with a Huysmanian ‘Black Mass’) and the Niggeratti – none more so than Nugent – all of whom had given Locke more than one occasion to lament how far ‘the attitudes and foibles of Nordic decadence ha[d] been carried into the buds of racial expression’.47 Such attitudes were certainly observable in many of Cullen’s poems, among them ‘Nocturne’, ‘Threnody for a Brown Girl’, the irreverently eucharistic ‘Words to My Love’ (‘With wine and bread / Our feast is spread; / Let’s leave no crumb’), and the forbidden-love lament of ‘Timid Lover’, all published in Copper Sun (1927). Meanwhile the decadent effects of that volume and of The Black Christ were enhanced by the startlingly homoerotic illustrations of Charles Cullen (no relation), which frequently intermingle Christological imagery and sexual suggestion.48

47 

Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 252; Alain L. Locke, ‘Black Truth and Black Beauty: A Retrospective Review of the Literature of the Negro for 1932’, Opportunity 11, no. 1 (January 1933): 16. 48  I wish to thank Bob Volpicelli for sharing his thoughts on Cullen and decadence, both in conversation and in his forthcoming PMLA article on the subject, ‘Countee Cullen’s Harlem Decadence’.

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Where the two Cullens achieve a decadent collaboration of word and image, Nugent does the same thing in the interplay between his own literary texts and visual artworks. His 1947 portrait of Judas and Jesus (Figure 5.4), for instance – which has aptly been read as ‘suggest[ing] a cruising scene’ – serves as a belated illustration of the queer religious dynamics at work in one of his late-1920s Bible stories, ‘Tree with Kerioth-Fruit’.49 This reimagined gospel tale offers a distinctly decadent take on Jesus and his disciples. It begins with Simon admiring the nude body of a sunbathing John, who sadly has ‘never indulged in the Greek refinement’.50 Yet when John meets Jesus, both men become flushed with desire. John discovers ‘a pleasant tremor vibrating his young knees and excitement painting his face with even greater beauty’, and Jesus in turn becomes ‘excited’, even ‘embarrassed for words’ (140). (In his notes Nugent has an unnamed disciple declare himself both ‘father to and lover with this Christ’, ‘the poet Jesus whom I must ever know’.51) Soon John becomes one of the twelve men with whom Christ lives and, presumably, sleeps. Yet the real love story emerges between

Figure 5.4.  Nugent, Judas and Jesus, 1947. Ink and transparent dye on paper, 15 x 11 in. Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York.

49 

Eric V. Copage, ‘Searching for a Jesus Who Looks More Like Me’, New York Times, 10 April 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/arts/design/jesus-christ-image-easter.html (accessed 21 April 2022). 50  Nugent, Gay Rebel, 139. 51  Richard Bruce Nugent, ‘Bible Stories: Notes & Fragments’, Bruce Nugent Papers, box 24, folder 1, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven.

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Jesus and Judas, the latter ultimately demonstrating his love for Jesus precisely by carrying out the necessary betrayal. The story ends with one man on his Cross and the other hanging from an olive tree. As Christ murmurs, ‘Forgive them, they know not what they do’, Judas whispers, ‘I did but love thee’; both then meet their deaths simultaneously, as, perhaps, they had enjoyed ‘little deaths’ together in happier days (146).52 This Bible story was to be the seventh in a sequence of ten or eleven stories Nugent had planned; he wrote only five of them, or at least that’s how many survive.53 The first two of these, ‘Beyond Where the Star Stood Still’ and ‘The Now Discordant Song of Bells’, tell of the Magi and their journey toward Bethlehem. During a stopover at Herod’s palace the three Wise Men add a fourth to their party, collecting Herod’s fourteen-yearold and ‘fabulously white’ catamite, Carus, ‘the most beautiful boy of his age’.54 When the Magi arrive, Carus – his eyebrows shaved ‘and others drawn with an up-slanting line of indigo’ – is recuperating ‘from the last night’s excesses’ (119, 125). These included killing his cat Sextabius, to enjoy the exquisite pleasure of watching its death-spasms, and then overseeing a pagan ritual at whose climax ‘the dancers and priest became sexual in their ceremonies’ (125). At first sight of the ‘ebon’ Caspar, king of Ethiopia, Carus becomes helplessly ‘excited before his unaware beauty and blackness’ (126). But of course all three Magi are beautiful. Painted in bold colours and contrasts, they make a striking visual composition, one Black, one white, one ‘saffron’: a rainbow coalition that speaks as much to aesthetics and homoerotics as to matters of race (115). Balthasar, King of Sheba, is the blue-eyed and golden-haired Adonis of our trio, the whiteness of his throat and chest set off by his handsomely suntanned face. A tight yellow shirt emphasises his ‘massive chest and shoulders’, as ‘narrow orange trousers’ and ‘green leather leg wrappings . . . emphasized the beauty of his muscular calves’ (119). The others are dressed in pale yellow, cerulean blue, ‘royal bright red’; each wears bangles, anklets and other accessories gifted them by the others. In the end, although Caspar does not return Carus’s sexual desire, he does take the youth to his breast and into his heart, as Nugent conveys in the paratactic rhythms of the King James Bible: ‘And Caspar drew him to him as a babe and consoled him. And they set off for Bethlehem, where the star stood still’ (121). Another of Nugent’s Bible stories, the unpublished ‘Tunic with a Thousand Pleats’, also celebrates interracial attraction. Set on the day of the Crucifixion, the story depicts a woman named Shela and her love for Simon of Cyrene – the man, traditionally

52 

For more on this story, and on the similarly themed Cullen poem ‘Judas Iscariot’ (1925), see A. B. Christa Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 56–7, 128–9. 53  Four Bible stories appear in Nugent, Gay Rebel. Galley proofs survive for the fifth, ‘Tunic with a Thousand Pleats’ – which would have been published in a new little magazine called the Gumby Book Studio Quarterly circa 1930, had that venture not failed for lack of funding (Heather Martin, ‘Gumby Book Studio Quarterly’, in Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2005), 456). In a handwritten list of contents, Nugent outlined ten stories for the collection, ending with ‘Babylon Veil’ (which, oddly, is numbered ‘11’; the preceding series is numbered 1–9, with no ‘10’ in sight) (‘Bible Stories’, box 24, folder 1). 54  Nugent, Gay Rebel, 119. Although I cite pages for ‘Beyond Where the Star Stood Still’ and ‘The Now Discordant Song of Bells’ as published in this readily available collection, my quotations retain Nugent’s word choice and punctuation in the stories’ original published forms – aspects of which have regrettably been normalised in Gay Rebel. ‘Beyond’ appeared in Crisis 77 (December 1970): 405–8, and ‘Now Discordant’ in Wooster Review 9 (Spring 1989): 34–42.

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depicted as Black, who carries Christ’s cross up Golgotha. Shela’s friends envy Simon’s affection for her, saying, you must be proud—there is not a man so tall and strong and dark in all Jerusalem— he is almost as dark as Caesar’s Nubian slaves [. . .] —how does he make love Shela— [. . .] —he must be exquisite— —he is— [. . .] —I love to feel his hair—the curls are so tight and soft and thick—and I like to see his hand on my arm—I am so white—55 Nugent’s attention to race and skin colour is notable throughout the Bible stories – and in virtually everything he wrote – for their seemingly total inattention to the politics of race. Beautiful people, his stories imply with a charmingly naive simplicity, make all the more beautiful compositions when their colours differ and complement one another. Nugent’s brand of aestheticism is thus often conspicuously racialised and depoliticised at once. For counter-examples one must look to just a handful of his visual works, including a drawing of a lynching that obliquely suggests the Crucifixion, as well as images depicting both Salome and Hagar as Black (Figures 5.5 and 5.6).

Figure 5.5.  Nugent, Hagar, 1930. Watercolour on cardstock, 11 x 8½ in. Art and Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

55 

Richard Bruce Nugent, ‘Tunic with a Thousand Pleats’ (galley proofs), Bruce Nugent Papers, box 24, folder 9.

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Figure 5.6.  Nugent, Salome Dancing, c. 1925–30. Ink over graphite on paper, 14½ x 10¾ in. Brooklyn Museum, New York. Hagar, though, has long been popularly rendered this way. And in the same series that includes a Black Hagar, Nugent depicts both the Madonna (Figure 5.3) and John the Baptist as blond and apparently white – in implicit contrast to the Brown Madonna and Black Christ-child who grace Winold Reiss’s reverential frontispiece to Locke’s New Negro anthology. As for Lucifer, Nugent makes him fabulously pink, gold and green, his erection terminating in a campy little heart-shape (Figure 5.2). For Nugent, erotic and aesthetic impulsions trump racial ones – just as they do in his various literary and visual depictions of Jesus and Judas, David and Goliath, none of which seek to Africanise their subjects or indeed to say anything much about race at all. It’s remarkable, then, just how far apart Nugent’s biblical strategies place him from his New-Negro and Newer-Negro compatriots. For in nearly all cases where Black writers of the period chose to revisit and reimagine Christian scripture and themes – from Johnson and Du Bois to the younger voices of Cullen, Hughes, Hurston, Claude McKay, Rudolph Fisher, Melvin Tolson – they did so in ways that came purposefully loaded with cultural and ideological significance. They drew on these themes to draw stark contrasts between Christianity and vestiges of an African, pagan past; or to channel the rhetorical virtuosity of the Black preacher and the reciprocal enthusiasms of Black congregations; or to update Christian typologies in ways that render Black lynching victims as modern-day Christs; or, as Hurston did in a 1939 novel, to recast the biblical Moses as a Black conjurer, ‘the finest hoodoo man in the world’, and the Hebrews he leads out of bondage as proto-African

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Americans.56 Together with Hughes and Cullen, Hurston and Nugent put on full display the stunning diversity of Harlem Renaissance engagements with Christianity: a diversity they very much share with other American and European modernists of their era (as other contributions to this volume amply attest). Given the religious turn in modernist studies, it may be that we are finally poised to contemplate the full complexity of religion in the Harlem Renaissance without worrying that to do so would consign the movement to some dustbin of pre- or non-modernist phenomena. However belatedly, these writers’ rich and varied negotiations of religion now seem not to imperil their modernist status but, on the contrary, to confirm it.

Works Cited Ahlstrom, Sydney. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. Best, Wallace D. Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Bloom, Harold. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. ———, ed. Langston Hughes. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002. Ciuba, Gary. ‘The Worm against the Word: The Hermeneutical Challenge in Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine.’ African American Review 34, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 119–33. Copage, Eric V. ‘Searching for a Jesus Who Looks More Like Me.’ New York Times, 10 April 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/arts/design/jesus-christ-image-easter.html (accessed 21 April 2022). Cullen, Countee. The Black Christ and Other Poems. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929. ———. Color. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925. Goeser, Caroline. Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Herring, Scott. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Hill & Wang, 1993. ———. The Collected Poems. Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. New York: Vintage, 1995. ———. ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.’ In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis, 91–5. New York: Penguin, 1995. ——— and Arna Bontemps, eds. The Poetry of the Negro 1746–1949. New York: Doubleday, 1949. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996. ———. The First One. In Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea, edited by Charles S. Johnson, 53–7. New York: National Urban League, 1927. ———. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. ———. Moses, Man of the Mountain. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. ———. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. Edited by Carla Kaplan. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. Lackey, Michael. ‘Zora Neale Hurston’s Herod the Great: A Study of the Theological Origins of Modernist Anti-Semitism.’ Callaloo 34, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 101–20. 56 

Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 114.

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Lenz, Günter H. ‘Symbolic Space, Communal Rituals, and the Surreality of the Urban Ghetto: Harlem in Black Literature from the 1920s to the 1960s.’ Callaloo 11, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 309–45. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Penguin, 1997. Locke, Alain L. ‘Black Truth and Black Beauty: A Retrospective Review of the Literature of the Negro for 1932.’ Opportunity 11, no. 1 (January 1933): 14–18. Lockerd, Martin. Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Lowe, John. ‘Modes of Black Masculinity in Jonah’s Gourd Vine.’ In Approaches to Teaching Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ and Other Works, edited by John Lowe, 93–104. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009. Martin, Heather. ‘Gumby Book Studio Quarterly.’ In Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, 456. New York: Routledge, 2005. Mendelssohn, Michèle. ‘A Decadent Dream Deferred: Bruce Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance’s Queer Modernity.’ In Decadence in the Age of Modernism, edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray, 251–75. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Mutter, Matthew. Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Nugent, Richard Bruce. ‘Beyond Where the Star Stood Still.’ Crisis 77 (December 1970): 405–8. ———. ‘Bible Stories: Notes & Fragments.’ Bruce Nugent Papers, box 24, folder 1. ———. Bruce Nugent Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven. ———. Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent. Edited by Thomas H. Wirth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. ———. Gentleman Jigger: A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance. Edited by Thomas H. Wirth. Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2008. ———. ‘The Now Discordant Song of Bells.’ Wooster Review 9 (Spring 1989): 34–42. ———. ‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade.’ Fire!! 1, no. 1 (November 1926): 33–9. ———. ‘Tunic with a Thousand Pleats’ (galley proofs). Bruce Nugent Papers, box 24, folder 9. Pinkerton, Steve. Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. ———. ‘“New Negro” v. “Niggeratti”: Defining and Defiling the Black Messiah.’ Modernism/ modernity 20, no. 3 (September 2013): 539–55. Prentiss, Craig R. Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986–88. Schwarz, A. B. Christa. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Schweizer, Bernard. Hating God: The Untold History of Misotheism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Sorett, Josef. Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Sundquist, Eric J. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. ———. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Thurman, Wallace. Infants of the Spring. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992. Turner, Darwin T. In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and their Search for Identity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Van Vechten, Carl. Nigger Heaven. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

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Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Translated by Kenneth Douglas. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973. Weisenfeld, Judith. New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Wirth, Thomas H. ‘Introduction.’ In Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, edited by Thomas H. Wirth, 1–61. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Woodson, Jon. ‘The Harlem Renaissance as Esotericism: Black Oragean Modernism.’ In Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: ‘There Is a Mystery’. . ., edited by Stephen Finley, Margarita Guillory and Hugh Page Jr, 102–22. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

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6 The Jewish East End and Modernism Alex Grafen

Y

ou enter a small exhibition. On one wall, an oil painting shows a complex arrangement of articulated, angular forms in white and blue, arranged over and around a plain red shape, perhaps a truncated rectangle viewed obliquely; a brown column divides the scene into uneven halves. A comparable arrangement of dynamic forms, but of curves rather than jags, appears on the cover of a thin book, presented nearby in a glass case. Walking around it, you see that the book is opened to a short poem whose title suggests a siren sounded after dinner, which the poem proceeds to evoke through repetitions, ellipses and fragments: single words isolated on lines, pileups of present participles. Another wall holds a work in watercolour and pencil on paper. It shows two figures at a table, their eyes meeting yours. Their arms are looped and, like the table before them, they are flattened in space. The eyes of the figure with beard and hat are cartoonishly enlarged. Nearby this artwork is another glass case, with a small, plain, slightly scruffy pamphlet, opened at a poem that begins abruptly: ‘I mingle with your bones’, a mixed image of carnage and carnality that leads into a poem that, in a dense and sinuous syntax, imagines a stand-off between the speaker and God. Your exhibition guide informs you that the works here were painted or published between 1914 and 1915 by writers or artists who grew up in the Jewish East End of London in the early twentieth century.1 Wandering through this imaginary exhibition, two things may have been apparent to you. Firstly, that something interesting was going on in this place and at this point. There is evidence of a cultural phenomenon that will reward investigation. The second thing that the above works indicate is that any attempt to explain that phenomenon must take into account how different the works are from each other, which is as striking as the connections we can draw between them. Even a superficial glance at the works shows receptivity to a range of cultural influences, affecting different artists and writers to different degrees. It should be clear from the beginning, then, that we are not looking at a coherent or organised literary-artistic movement in the Jewish East End. This negative statement is the crucial starting point for understanding the cultural formation that developed there. It is one that may also come as a surprise to those who have heard of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ or ‘Whitechapel Group’. Before I enter an analysis of the place of the Jewish East

1 

The guide would also give the following identifications for the works: David Bomberg, The Mud Bath (1914); John Rodker, Poems (1914); Mark Gertler, Rabbi and Rabbitzin (1914); Isaac Rosenberg, Youth (1915).

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End in the history of twentieth-century cultural production in London, it will be helpful to touch on this label, its origins and what it has come to mean. It has been said frequently, but without compelling evidence, that the writer Joseph Leftwich coined the term ‘Whitechapel Boys’.2 Leftwich’s main cultural legacy is probably his anthologies of Yiddish literature translated into English, but his work in literature and journalism was extensive. He wrote a biography of Israel Zangwill and translated some of the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker’s memoirs into English. His main value to critics of British art and anglophone literature has been the diary he kept in 1911. The diary provides a picture of time, place and milieu in early twentieth-century Whitechapel, with glimpses of the painters David Bomberg and Mark Gertler as well as less well-known artists and writers such as Morris Goldstein and Lazarus Aaronson. It also describes closer friendships with the writers John Rodker and Stephen Winsten (né Samuel Weinstein) and the poet Isaac Rosenberg. Where critics’ definitions of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ are given, they tend to converge on the idea of a group of talented young artists and writers, the children of immigrants from the Russian Empire who grew up together in Whitechapel at around the same time. Bomberg, Gertler, Rodker and Rosenberg’s names come up frequently in connection with the label. Leftwich and Winsten appear less often but with some consistency. Various other names, mostly visual artists, appear more sporadically. It is understandable that Leftwich has been assumed to be the figure behind the term, given its overlaps with his account. The most likely source of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’, however, is Joseph Cohen’s biography of Rosenberg, Journey to the Trenches (1975), which uses the term to describe several groupings.3 Firstly, that of the close if temperamental group of friends, Leftwich, Rodker and Winsten, which, in Leftwich’s later account, changed from ‘a three musketeers group’ into ‘a quartette’ after they met Rosenberg in 1911.4 Secondly, several Jewish students from Whitechapel who attended the Slade School of Fine Art during one of its ‘triumphal flows’: Bomberg, Gertler and Rosenberg.5 Cohen does not include other students who fell into this category, like Goldstein and Clare Winsten (née Clara Birnberg). Thirdly, Cohen uses the term in a more straightforwardly descriptive sense although, in context, it still has a resonance beyond its purely literal meaning, carrying associations of poverty and resilience. These three uses of the term by Cohen overlap in the figure of Rosenberg but they map on to one another imperfectly. The confusion comes not only from the use of the same term with different meanings in one book, but also from their clustering under a single index heading. From the index, we could easily infer that Leftwich

2 

Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall, ‘The Whitechapel Boys’, Jewish Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2004): 29–34; William D. Rubinstein, Michael A. Jolles and Hilary L. Rubinstein, eds, The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 455; William Baker, ‘Leftwich, Joseph (1892–1983), Writer, Editor, and Translator’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/60250. 3  For a more detailed account of the history of the label’s use, see Alex Grafen, ‘The Whitechapel Renaissance and its Legacies: Rosenberg to Rodker’ (doctoral thesis, University College London, 2020), 43–63. 4  Joseph Leftwich to Joan Rodker, 17 January 1972. Joan Rodker Papers, box 2, folder 5, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 5  Paul Nash, Outline, an Autobiography and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), 90.

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and Gertler belonged to a coherent and self-conscious peer group, but it is not an argument that Cohen makes and not one for which there is persuasive evidence. The only reference that Leftwich makes to Gertler in his 1911 diary is to mention having been recently introduced to him by Goldstein. Leftwich mentions this in passing since he has visited the family’s house in Spital Square, hoping to get work from Gertler’s father, a furrier.6 The meaning of ‘Whitechapel Boys’ has not so much crystallised since Cohen’s fluid use of the term, but rather moved simultaneously in a direction of over- and underdetermination. On the one hand, figures as various as the Australian Horace Brodzky and the American Jacob Epstein have been grouped under it. At the same time, as Rebecca Beasley has observed, ‘[d]iscussion of the Whitechapel Group’s collective identity has concentrated almost exclusively on its Jewish ethnicity’.7 While place of residence, age, career, success, style and mutual recognition have been treated with a certain flexibility in allotting membership, and additions and variations on the name have been introduced to allow some extension beyond the gender-exclusivity of ‘Boys’, Jewishness has remained the most decisive criterion, even while it has grouped artists and writers whose relationship to Jewishness ranged from enthusiasm to ambivalence and, in some cases, rejection.8 Where Leftwich did talk of a network, it was always in terms of a diffuse and contingent formation, to be distinguished from the more coherent small groups. Leftwich acknowledged that ‘a few members of other groups sometimes overlapped and became half-attached to us’, but it is clear that, for Leftwich, the meaningful grouping was the ‘quartette’ with which he continued to identify himself long after the other members had died or forgotten about it.9 The limitations of ‘Whitechapel Boys’ as a term are considerable, but it represents a critical project of real significance, one that might reshape our understanding of the acculturation of Jewish immigrants to Britain and the roles played by migration, Jewishness and the East End in early twentieth-century culture. Whitechapel, and the Jewish East End of which it formed the heart, serve as meaningful units of analysis: they shaped those who lived and grew up there in a way that requires both explanation and critical engagement. For this reason, I have proposed that thinking in terms of a ‘Whitechapel Renaissance’ might prove more useful than ‘Boys’ or ‘Group’ for understanding what happened here, since it foregrounds that larger context over a constellation that may

6 

Joseph Leftwich, ‘Facsimile of Diary’, 1911–12, entry for 17 May. Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives. 7  Rebecca Beasley, Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 136; see also Dominika Buchowska, ‘Whitechapel Boys and the British Avant-Garde: In Search of the Polish Connection’, in Art of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in 20th–21st Centuries and Polish–British & Irish Art Relations, ed. by Małgorzata Geron, Jerzy Malinowski and Jan Wiktor Sienkiewicz (Toruń and Warsaw: Nicolaus Copernicus University Press/Polish Institute of World Art Studies, 2015), 51–9. 8  In Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), Michael L. Satlow suggests three ‘maps’ on which Judaism can be plotted: firstly, the identification of individuals and communities as Jewish; secondly, these communities’ canonical texts; thirdly, religious practices. In its discussion of Jewishness, this chapter focuses on the first, touching on the second and third only briefly. This reflects the focus of my own research rather than a judgement on their relative significance. Satlow, Creating Judaism, 8–9. 9  Joseph Leftwich, ‘Isaac Rosenberg’, Jewish Chronicle, 6 March 1936, i.

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prove to be a will-o’-the-wisp. But the more persuasive accounts of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ or the ‘Whitechapel Group’ have also turned to the Jewish East End as an environment, to its confluence of political and social forces; they have turned to the institutions that operated there, the sort of options that this context opened up or barred, and how those possibilities shaped cultural production.10 The four most famous names associated with the grouping have gained their reputation through identification with other critical or social units, sometimes on questionable grounds: Bomberg with the Vorticists; Gertler with the Bloomsbury Group; Rodker with a Modernism centred on the ‘Men of 1914’; and Rosenberg with the War Poets. They often occupy supportive or minor roles in these groupings, which might otherwise appear overly homogeneous in class and ethnicity. Looking at them in connection to one another need not entirely displace considering them in relation to these other groupings, but whatever term one uses to group them – ‘Boys’, ‘Group’ or ‘Renaissance’ – there is a shared assumption that changing the perspective from these standard groupings will prove generative. Part of the basis of that assumption is a sense of the distinctive character of the Jewish East End in relation to other parts of London, such that directing our attention to the social context of these figures’ youth will yield insights into their artistic development. To judge the strength of this argument, we must now gain a better understanding of Whitechapel and the Jewish East End in the early twentieth century. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, several waves of immigration reached London from the Pale of Settlement, the western part of the Russian Empire in which Jews were allowed permanent residence. Not all the Jews who came to Britain lived in London. There were substantial communities in other cities, most notably Manchester and Leeds.11 However, London exerted an appeal to those desperate for work. So we see, for example, Rosenberg’s family moving from Victoria Square, Bristol, to London’s Cable Street when Isaac was a child, and Rodker and Bomberg’s families moving from Manchester and Birmingham to end up in streets not far away from the Rosenbergs. Why did their families leave the Russian Empire? The pogroms which prompted international indignation remain the most striking demonstration of the threat to Jewish security. They increased in frequency and violence after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. They were not, however, the only or perhaps even the most significant factor. David Feldman has emphasised more extenuated trends that undercut Jews’ economic independence in the Pale, such as ‘demographic growth, the beginnings of state-managed industrialisation, and government restrictions’.12 Susan L. Tananbaum has also noted fears of ‘military conscription and its attendant efforts at conversion’.13 The significance of this last can be seen in a memoir by Arnold Harris, a child of Jewish immigrants, who

10 

Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall, eds, Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle (London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2008); Beasley, Russomania, 135–57; see also Evi Heinz, ‘John Rodker on Theatre: Rethinking the Modernist Stage from London’s Jewish East End’, Open Library of Humanities 6, no. 1 (2020): 3; Ian Patterson, ‘Cultural Critique and Canon Formation, 1910–1937: A Study in Modernism and Cultural Memory’ (doctoral thesis, King’s College, Cambridge, 1996). 11  Lloyd Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–1914, 2nd edn (London: Simon Publications, 1973), 214–15. 12  David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 148. 13  Susan L. Tananbaum, Jewish Immigrants in London, 1880–1939 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), 22.

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grew up in Whitechapel and later became a teacher. In the memoir, he draws a direct parallel between his father’s flight from Russia to escape military conscription and his own use of family networks to avoid conscription in the First World War.14 For a while, at least, Britain maintained a reputation as an outpost of liberalism and safety for Jews. Its Jewish community was not large but its accomplishments were impressive. Selig Brodetsky, the mathematical wunderkind turned Zionist activist, was brought to Britain as a child from Olviopol in modern-day Ukraine in 1893. He recalled the legendary status that Benjamin Disraeli and the financier and philanthropist Moses Montefiore held among Jews there.15 Britain’s liberal reputation was tarnished by the Aliens Act of 1905, ‘the first example of peacetime legislation that explicitly limited entry into the United Kingdom’.16 The Act emerged as the result both of organised antialien activism in the East End and of a divided and unpopular Conservative Party that saw the Act as a way of making the party appear responsive to working-class interests without threatening property rights.17 In practice, the Act merely took up the work of relocating and rejecting immigrants that was already being carried out voluntarily by Anglo-Jewish organisations nervous about the political fallout from large-scale Jewish immigration.18 The Act’s message to potential immigrants, however, was clear. Even before the Aliens Act, the attractions of Britain were less than those of the United States, where Jewish immigration was consequently much greater. For some, like the jeweller and Yiddish poet Moyshe Oyved, Britain was the consolation prize for a frustrated transmigration.19 In the United States, New York was the centre of Jewish immigration and the Lower East Side offers a mirror to some elements of the cultural history of London’s Jewish East End; in both, second-generation Jewish immigrants made significant inroads in the arts, including the avant-garde. Writing from Rapallo to the young poet Louis Zukofsky regarding the latter’s essay on Charles Reznikoff, Ezra Pound entertained the idea that the ‘next wave of literature is jewish [sic] (obviously) [Joyce’s Leopold] Bloom casting shadow before’.20 The differences are equally instructive: the larger scale of the Jewish immigrant community in New York meant that specifically Jewish cultural initiatives had a larger potential audience and membership; the philanthropy focused on Jewish immigrants was more centralised and less wary of Yiddish.21

14 

Arnold Harris, ‘The Story of Childhood and Other Episodes: Yurbrick (Lithuania) London and Dublin, 1894–1918’, unpublished memoir, c. 1965–79, 193; see also Mark Levene, ‘Going against the Grain: Two Jewish Memoirs of War and Anti-War, 1914–18’, Jewish Culture and History 2, no. 2 (1999): 66–95. 15  Selig Brodetsky, Memoirs: From Ghetto to Israel (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), 19. 16  Daniel Renshaw, ‘Prejudice and Paranoia: A Comparative Study of Antisemitism and Sinophobia in Turnof-the-Century Britain’, Patterns of Prejudice 50, no. 1 (2016): 60; see also David Glover, Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England: A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 17  Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 281–9. 18  Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 49. 19  Moyshe Oyved [Edward Good], Visions and Jewels, trans. Hannah Berman (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 40. 20  Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 26. 21  Irving Howe, ‘“Americanizing” the Greenhorns’, in Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, 1900–1945, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt and Susan Chevlowe (New York and Bloomington: Jewish Museum/Indiana University Press, 1991), 14, 17. The classic text on the Jewish immigrant experience in the United States is Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976).

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At the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of Russians and Russian Poles in Britain lived in the parishes of Whitechapel, St George in the East and Mile End Old Town and the majority of those Russians and Russian Poles were Jewish immigrants.22 These densely populated parishes formed the heart of the Jewish East End, an area that observers rapidly learned to distinguish from its environs. There were various ways the difference was felt. Perhaps most striking was language. Yiddish was the language uniting the polyglot immigrants: the language heard in the streets; the language one saw in newspapers and shop signs. The last of these particularly impressed one Jewish arrival in Whitechapel, who had not seen so many Yiddish signs in either Odessa or Paris.23 There were other indicators. A social investigator believed that he detected a characteristic detritus of ‘orange peel, bread, vegetables and paper’ in the streets of the Jewish East End; the readers of one guidebook were told to identify the area through its odour of ‘fried fish [and] garlic’.24 For some, these characteristics were remarkably familiar; for others, they were fascinatingly strange. Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Asch, Yiddish writers from the Russian Empire, are said to have likened Whitechapel to a shtetl in the Russian Pale when they visited London in 1906, though it is not clear that they meant this fondly.25 For others, the exoticism of such a transplant combined with the broader reputation of the East End as Jack London’s ‘abyss’ to conjure an allure. It is probably to this allure that we owe the stories of patrons of the arts like Lady Ottoline Morrell and Edward Marsh visiting Gertler in his studio on Elder Street, and of Wyndham Lewis surprising Bomberg at home in the middle of the night.26 Of course, the sense of difference did not always prompt such enthusiasm. The Conservative MP William Evans-Gordon spoke of the dangers of ‘the transformation of a large portion of the East End into a foreign colony’, and of how the ‘Ghetto habit’ of those in the Jewish East End drove them to reproduce the dense crowding that had once been enforced upon them.27 The term ‘ghetto’ is particularly worth noting. Daniel B. Schwartz has observed that ‘[t]he idea of the congested, yet legally voluntary Jewish urban enclave as a “ghetto” was originally a literary conceit’, and London’s Jewish East End was the original example of this conceit, as fostered by Israel Zangwill in his novel Children of the Ghetto (1892).28 While the term may seem merely misleading, Lloyd Gartner has emphasised the ‘self-contained’ nature of social life in the Jewish East End; similarly, Feldman has shown how new immigrants were caught in an economic nexus with local Jewish landlords and small capitalists that led to exacerbated tensions with non-Jewish locals.29 This nexus provides a more mundane, if also more persuasive, explanation of overcrowding than that offered by Zangwill or Evans-Gordon. If the picture

22 

Tananbaum, Jewish Immigrants in London, 27. Leo Koenig, ‘My London’, trans. Jacob Sonntag, Jewish Quarterly 4, no. 1 (1956): 19. 24  Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 166; Nils Roemer, ‘London and the East End as Spectacles of Urban Tourism’, The Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 420. 25  Joseph Leftwich, ‘“Jewish” London Fifty Years Ago’, in 1915–1965: Fifty Years’ Achievement in the Arts, Commemorative Volume to Mark the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Foundation of the Ben Uri Art Society, ed. Jacob Sonntag (London: Ben Uri Art Society, 1966), 12. 26  Sarah MacDougall, Mark Gertler (London: John Murray, 2002), 89, 96–7; Richard Cork, David Bomberg (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 43. 27  William Evans-Gordon, The Alien Immigrant (London: Heinemann, 1903), 13, 8. 28  Daniel B. Schwartz, Ghetto: The History of a Word (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 113. 29  Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 142; Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 184. 23 

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it presents still appears parochial, we must remember that much of the population had family abroad. The author Emanuel Litvinoff recalled how ‘people spoke of Warsaw, Kishinev, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa as if they were neighbouring suburbs’.30 Not only, as Ben Gidley has shown, did this affect locals’ responses to world politics; it could also structure local relationships.31 Harris recalled the significance of landslayt relationships – that is, relationships based on a shared place of origin in the Russian Empire – to expanding his family’s social world in London.32 These bonds seemed to matter less for the children. Yiddish, which served for the first generation as a medium that unified them while dividing them from Anglo-Jewry, was increasingly replaced by English as the language of communication among children outside their homes. When the young Sonia Husid came to London in 1930 from Sokyriany in modern-day Ukraine, she found that her Yiddish cut her off from her own generation and grouped her mostly with the old.33 The arrival of these immigrants dramatically altered the demographic profile of Jews in England. Not only did the number of Jews in Britain greatly increase, growing from around 60,000 to 360,000 between 1880 and 1939, but a population that had previously been disproportionately middle class now shifted towards the working class.34 New tensions around religion and politics developed. For many dependent on the seasonal flux of tailoring, the most important trade in the Jewish East End, extreme poverty was a recurrent threat.35 The gaps in state provision were plugged (however imperfectly) by philanthropy. The generation growing up in the early twentieth century were beneficiaries of several such projects, driven by Christian and Anglo-Jewish individuals and organisations. Those like the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter responded to the needs of hunger and clothing; others were dedicated to cultural improvement, often linked to an aim of anglicisation.36 Schools were naturally at the heart of this attempt, but there were other provisions, which assumed particular significance where, as in the case of Leftwich, formal education ended at the age of fourteen. Leftwich’s 1911 diary describes attending lectures and concerts at Toynbee Hall, established by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett, who also established the Whitechapel Gallery. Leftwich also frequented Bancroft Road Library and Whitechapel Library, the latter endowed by the newspaper-owner John Passmore Edwards and since celebrated as the ‘University of the Ghetto’.37 It was in public libraries that Leftwich read Carlyle, Chesterton, Hardy, Ibsen and Swinburne. Perhaps even more importantly, the libraries and halls provided Leftwich’s generation with meeting-places and an alternative to the cramped conditions of their homes. For the same reason, night walks play a large role in Leftwich’s diary: he and his friends would weave through the streets of the Jewish East End deep in talk, occasionally venturing as far as the Embankment or Epping Forest. 30 

Emanuel Litvinoff, Journey through a Small Planet (London: Penguin, 2008), 30. Ben Gidley, ‘The Ghosts of Kishinev in the East End: Responses to a Pogrom in the Jewish London of 1903’, in ‘The Jew’ in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa, ed. Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 98–112. 32  Harris, ‘The Story of Childhood and Other Episodes’, 54. 33  N. M. Seedo, In the Beginning Was Fear (London: Narod Press, 1964), 294. 34  Tananbaum, Jewish Immigrants in London, 22. The immigrants’ employment in London did not necessarily reflect that which they had held in their place of origin; see Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 164. 35  Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 64. 36  For an overview of Anglo-Jewish institutions, see Eugene C. Black, The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1880–1920 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 37  Rachel Lichtenstein, On Brick Lane (London: Penguin, 2008), 32. 31 

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Among the philanthropic initiatives, the Jewish Education Aid Society rewards attention particularly for scholars considering the arts. Founded in 1898 as the Jewish Education Aid Committee before being renamed in 1907, the JEAS has been credited by Lisa Tickner as ‘the only charity to play a significant role in the social history of art in the pre-war period’.38 The initiative was started by the Maccabeans, a group that had grown out of the Wanderers of Kilburn. The Wanderers had been an intimate and informal circle around the scholar Solomon Schechter (1847–1915) which had hoped ‘to revive the ardent Jewish spirit which was dormant in England after the achievement of political and civil equality’.39 By comparison, the Maccabeans resembled a formal club, consisting of ‘Jews in the literary and learned professions and the arts, to the exclusion of those engaged in commerce’.40 The editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Asher Myers, the journalist and diplomat Lucien Wolf, and Israel Zangwill were members of both groups. The purpose of the JEAC and, later, the JEAS was ‘to afford poor Jewish children possessed of exceptional talent an opportunity of developing them by providing the means of pursuing those studies for which they might be peculiarly fitted’.41 While the majority of the recipients were initially promising musicians, the JEAS provided loans to Bomberg, Gertler, Goldstein and Rosenberg to attend the Slade.42 It funded the painter Jacob Kramer for three terms at the Slade, and also provided Epstein with loans, which, like many others, he failed to repay. As well as money, the JEAS provided an avenue of contact with members of established Anglo-Jewish society, contact which Micheline Stevens has observed in some cases translated into a sustained relationship of patronage.43 The JEAS loan brought these artists into the Slade, an institution whose artists, to varying degrees, rejected and competed with Royal Academy standards and were receptive to French influence. While this was no guarantee that the students would become members of an artistic vanguard, it at least encouraged an opposition to the most reactionary force in British art. The artists tended to exhibit a mixture of receptivity and resistance to the recent developments in French art. Bomberg and Gertler made visits to Paris and, though neither met him, the work of Paul Cézanne was a powerful and durable influence on the work of both men. There was also a measure of distrust. In a 1912 letter, Gertler described his disgust with discussions of ‘Ancient art, Modern Art, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Cubists, Spottists, Futurists, Cave-dwelling, Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant, Etchells, Roger Fry’ and his relief on returning home to his mother, Golda, ‘the only modern artist’.44 However, as Emma Chambers has observed, the Primitivism that shaped Gertler’s portraits of his mother aligned him with the groups from which he sets himself apart in the letter.45 Gertler

38 

Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 149. 39  Norman Bentwich, ‘The Wanderers and Other Jewish Scholars of my Youth’, Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England) 20 (1959–61): 53. 40  Bentwich, ‘The Wanderers’, 56. 41  JEAC report to subscribers from 1898, quoted in Micheline Stevens, ‘A Biographical Study of the Early Beneficiaries: The Jewish Education Aid Society’ (doctoral thesis, University of Southampton, 2016), 34. 42  Stevens, ‘Biographical Study’, 67. 43  Stevens, ‘Biographical Study’, 30. 44  Mark Gertler, Selected Letters, ed. Noel Carrington (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965), 47. 45  Emma Chambers, ‘Jewish Artists and Jewish Art’, in Migrations: Journeys into British Art, ed. Lizzie Carey-Thomas (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), 55.

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was not unique in this respect and the influences of French art were felt even by those who claimed to ignore it. In the bright competing colours of Clare Winsten’s portrait of Joseph Leftwich, we can see the influence of André Derain, even though Winsten would claim that she had ‘always avoided being influenced by others’.46 Culture was not simply a gift distributed by a handful of philanthropists. The concentrated working-class population and hard conditions of the Jewish East End made it fertile ground for radical political movements. Patronising efforts at uplifting Jewish immigrants were by no means ineffective, but they ran the risk of inspiring resistance, and the communist, anarchist and Zionist organisers of the East End were all ready to make use of that resistance. The anarchists under Rocker were particularly notable for their focus on world literature, but they were by no means alone.47 The Young Socialist League played a key role for Leftwich, Stephen Winsten and Rodker, even as they quarrelled over its purpose or doubted its aims. Its internal politics take up many pages of the 1911 Leftwich diary: he and his friends shaped the local branch and were shaped by it. Its legacy can be seen clearly in Rodker’s later observation that A long time before the war however, as a boy, I was a member of the Young Socialist League, and it is worth noting that most of the lads in the same branch, refused, when the time came, to take up arms. We called it a Capitalist War, a War of Aggression, whatever that may have meant.48 This generation also organised itself into other formations, some of them with Jewishness as their focus. The most well-known of these is perhaps also the most misleading: the 1914 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of ‘Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements’. The exhibition included a ‘Jewish Section’, curated by Bomberg and Epstein. Tickner has seen the Jewish Section as evidence of an ‘embryonic East End avant-garde’.49 Juliet Steyn has interpreted it as enabling a perceived division of modernism: on the one hand, a subversive, Jewish and foreign strain of modernism; on the other, a ‘superior modernism’ purged of these elements.50 The decision to include a Jewish Section was unusual, and it may speak to the gallery’s sense of its own history and role in the Jewish East End. In 1906 it had held an exhibition of Jewish Arts and Antiquities. The list of names included in the Jewish Section, encompassing artists resident in Montparnasse as well as Whitechapel, conservative as well as avant-garde, suggests curation characterised by contingency rather than the coherent movement of a group. It does, however, parallel certain other formations at this time. The Ben Uri Art Society was founded in 1915 in Whitechapel by the decorative artist Lazar Berson, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania via Paris.51 Berson proposed ‘to establish a Jewish art

46 

Clare Winsten, ‘Memoirs’, Whitechapel Gallery Archive, 97. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 136. 48  John Rodker, ‘Twenty Years After’, in We Did Not Fight: 1914–1918, Experiences of War Resisters, ed. Julian Bell (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1935), 283. 49  Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects, 146. 50  Juliet Steyn, ‘Inside-out: Assumptions of “English” Modernism in the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1914’, in Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America, ed. Marcia Pointon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 228. 51  David Mazower, ‘Lazar Berson and the Origins of the Ben Uri Art Society’, in The Ben Uri Story from Art Society to Museum and the Influence of Anglo-Jewish Artists on the Modern British Movement, ed. Gillian Rathbone (London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2001), 37–58. 47 

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collection in London’, and the Society sought to collect ‘pictures and paintings of both the older and younger Jewish artists, irrespective of school, or tendency, or period’.52 Other figures involved at various points with the Ben Uri included Moyshe Oyved and the critic Leo Koenig.53 The Society purchased four paintings by Bomberg in 1920 and, around the same time, Stephen Winsten took up a role as the Society’s secretary.54 Bomberg and Winsten also contributed work to Koenig’s Yiddish little magazine Renesans, which Leftwich served as secretary, and which the Ben Uri Society briefly patronised.55 Also in 1915, Leftwich and the painter Alfred Wolmark established the short-lived Jewish Association of Arts and Sciences, perhaps modelled on the earlier Maccabeans. Leftwich wrote to Rosenberg, nominating him for a position. However, Rosenberg’s reply, written from a hospital for venereal disease in France, was unenthusiastic, observing that such membership could not do him much good where he was.56 Around the same time, he was seeking to be transferred to the battalions of the Royal Fusiliers composed of Jewish volunteers, known as the ‘Jewish Legion’ or ‘Judeans’, and based in Palestine, Egypt and Britain. Rosenberg explained that ‘Jacob Epstein whom I know is with the Judaens [sic], and several other friends of mine. They also run a magazine.’57 It was not that Rosenberg was opposed in principle to organisation based around Jewishness, but that his priority was personal safety. Removal from the Western Front afforded by a transfer to the Judeans meant much more than membership of Leftwich’s nascent organisation. Of particular interest as a site for the ‘embryonic East End avant-garde’ described by Tickner is the flat at 1 Osborn Street known as the ‘Slot-Meter’.58 Despite protestations from Bomberg and William Roberts, Sonia Cohen and John Rodker moved in together without marrying. The couple decorated the flat with works by Wyndham Lewis and hung a broadsheet of a poem by Harold Monro above their mantelpiece.59 In the evenings, the flat would be full of young people, apparently mostly men, involved in discussion of psychology, art and literature. Cohen and Rodker were attendees of the meetings organised for readers of Dora Marsden’s The New Freewoman. Celtic Twilight, Margaret Morris, Marinetti and Nietzsche also dot Cohen’s recollections of this period. Harris recalled joining these ‘avant garde young intellectuals’ in the flat on one occasion; on another, seeing them visit the Cubist and Futurist exhibition at

52 

Judah Beach, ‘Ben Uri – Its History and Activities’, in Catalogue and Survey of Activities (London: Ben Uri Art Society, 1930), 14. 53  Transliterations of these names vary. Oyved’s memoirs were published in English as by ‘Mosheh Oved’; he traded under the name ‘Edward Good’. ‘Koenig’ was the spelling the writer favoured when appearing in English, but he is sometimes referred to as ‘Leo Kenig’. 54  Beach, ‘Ben Uri – Its History and Activities’, 14; Lily Ford, ‘Dreams of Art in the Jewish East End: The Early History of the Ben Uri 1915–1930’, unpublished article, July 2015, 36. 55  For more information on Koenig and Renesans, see Alex Grafen and William Pimlott, ‘Jewish Art and Yiddish Art History: Leo Koenig’s Renesans’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 40, no. 1 (2022): 2–37. 56  Isaac Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Vivien Noakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 355, 436–7. 57  Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenberg, 360. 58  For a more detailed account, see Alex Grafen, ‘The Slot-Meter and the East End Avant-Garde’, in Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration, ed. Charlotte Grant and Alistair Robinson (London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming). 59  Sonia Rodker (née Cohen), The End Has Various Places (privately published, 2018), 144.

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the Whitechapel Art Gallery as a group.60 It is notable that Jewish identity does not emerge from Cohen’s memoir as an important organising feature of the Slot-Meter evenings, although a good number of the attendees were Jewish. Roberts, who was born in Hackney and attended the Slade on a London County Council scholarship, was not Jewish but a key figure of these meetings, remembered for eating fish and chips in newspaper soaked in vinegar. On the other hand, Gertler only attended once; Cohen suggests that he was put off by an atmosphere insufficiently ‘genteel’ for somebody who was being shaped into a ‘drawing room lion’ by society hostesses.61 The consideration of the Slot-Meter points to two questions: firstly, the extent to which an identification with Jewishness affected how likely somebody was to become a writer or painter; secondly, whether it affected how likely they were to become aligned with the avant-garde. The traditional belief in a Jewish rejection of the visual arts, one thought to stem from the commandment against making graven images, owes more to modern discourses of art than to the history of Jewish art.62 An instructive moment can be found in an interview given by Bomberg to the Jewish Chronicle in 1914. In it, he described Futurism as being ‘in accordance with Jewish law, for its art resembles nothing in heaven above, the earth beneath nor the waters under the earth’.63 Bomberg’s response suggests that the injunction was, for him, primarily a source of humour. At the same time, his biblical quotation hints at the way in which Jewish scripture remained a valuable cultural resource, especially at the points it overlapped with Christian holy texts. There were still limits, of course. According to a letter written by Edward Marsh to Rupert Brooke, Gertler was abandoned by several Jewish models after they discovered they were modelling for a painting of Christ among the Doctors.64 In the early twentieth century, there were several famous Anglo-Jewish artists, including Solomon Joseph Solomon and William Rothenstein, who could have made painting look like a viable career. And while it is hard to determine whether a higher level of religiosity might have discouraged nascent artists or their families, we can look to the work of the JEAS as evidence that Anglo-Jewish philanthropy saw nothing discreditable in art itself. At the same time, the experiences of its beneficiaries indicate hidden strictures and concerns. Bomberg, the most oppositional in manner and in his early art, went quickly from winning Slade prizes to being urged to leave the school. Rosenberg had to persuade a private patron that he had not developed ‘poses and mannerisms’ or slipped into an unhealthy style of work.65 The extent to which the avant-garde demands a unification of life and art could also divide its members from conservative alliances that included religious observation, as the example of Rodker and Cohen’s cohabitation suggests. As Rosenberg remarked, in a spirit of

60 

Harris, ‘The Story of Childhood and Other Episodes’, 42. Rodker (née Cohen), The End Has Various Places, 147–8. 62  Kalman P. Bland, ‘Anti-Semitism and Aniconism: The Germanophone Requiem for Jewish Visual Art’, in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine M. Soussloff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 41–66. 63  David Bomberg, ‘A Jewish Futurist: Chat with Mr. David Bomberg’, Jewish Chronicle, 8 May 1914. 64  John Woodeson, Mark Gertler: Biography of a Painter, 1891–1939 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972), 127. 65  Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenberg, 246. 61 

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self-castigation, ‘Art is not a plaything.’66 However, it did require giving time and serious attention to objects of pleasure. The wanderings through the streets, the discussions at the Young Socialist League would have appeared idle to the young Selig Brodetsky, distractions from the mathematical problems and religious study that occupied his time and made him a despised name among children in other households who found themselves expected to live up to his example.67 Yet such idleness was the means for intellectual development in which culture and politics were interwoven. The stakes were different for painting and poetry: the former involved a greater investment in materials and space; it also offered the chance of greater financial returns. In 1912, Rosenberg planned to work on portraiture as ‘the most paying’ option in painting, though he preferred ‘imaginative work’.68 Both Bomberg and Gertler would later also turn towards portraiture in the hope of making money, even while struggling with how to square that with their artistic commitments. Poetry did not offer the same opportunities but, within Whitechapel, the advantages of literacy were considerable. Leftwich, struggling for work, was relieved to find a position sorting waste rubber, which he secured because he could also carry out his employer’s correspondence.69 Stephen Winsten’s work as a teacher and Rodker’s as a government clerk, though similarly unglamorous, was preferable to manual labour. All three would also write reviews and contribute poetry to periodicals, but it is notable that Rodker, who gave himself most over to the avant-garde, should also be the one who struggled most with money throughout his life. Class and economic necessity are more obvious factors in determining decisions around artistic direction than Jewishness, but that does not mean that Jewishness could not structure and shape the work produced, across various media and aesthetic priorities. What is striking is the unevenness with which Jewishness as a preoccupation occurs, even within an artist or writer’s career. But this is not necessarily surprising unless we interpret Jewishness as an essential attribute of the artist or writer, and assume their art to be expressive of that artist or writer’s self. It might be more helpful to consider Jewishness using the metaphor of a resource, one that could at different points seem attractive, compelling, troubling or irrelevant to a Jewish artist. The feeling towards this resource might result in the use of Jewish subjects in their work or involvement in networks within which Jews played a significant role. Or it might work the other way round, with the discovery of a theme or ready audience laying the grounds for the writer or artist’s reappraisal of Jewishness. The idea of Jewishness as providing a resource on which the artist or writer could trade emerges clearly in the later work of Rosenberg. In a 1917 letter to Ruth Löwy, Rosenberg wrote that the poet Gordon Bottomley, with whom he had struck up a correspondence, had ‘urged [Rosenberg] to write Jewish Plays’. He added, ‘I am quite sure if I do I will be boycotted and excommunicated, that is, assuming my work is understood.’70 Rosenberg’s tone is the bantering, facetious one characteristic of his letters, so we should be careful not to swallow the hyperbole uncritically. Any concern in this

66 

Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenberg, 246. Brodetsky, Memoirs: From Ghetto to Israel, 42, 48. 68  Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenberg, 237. 69  Leftwich, ‘Facsimile of Diary’, entry for 30 May. 70  Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenberg, 329. 67 

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direction did not stop Rosenberg from writing several works that seem to follow from Bottomley’s encouragement. However, it is worth noting the ambiguity – is Rosenberg to be ‘boycotted and excommunicated’ by a Christian or Jewish readership? The key ‘Jewish Play’ written by Rosenberg is the verse drama Moses, the form of which is strongly indebted to the verse dramas of Bottomley and Lascelles Abercrombie. Rosenberg was concerned that this drama was ‘a hard pill to swallow’ and perhaps for this reason gave various glosses on it in his letters.71 To Bottomley, he wrote that ‘I have made ambition the dominant point in [Moses’s] character which I’ve considered is very unfriendly to my ancestor. I did mean to contrast him with a Christ like man, which I may yet do.’72 Clearly Rosenberg’s intention is not so simple as Jewish affirmation or Christian typology, and it is tempting to trace Max Stirner’s philosophy of egoism in Moses’s thrill in making others submit to his will, to ‘shape one impulse through the contraries / Of vain ambitious men’.73 Like Abercrombie’s Judith or Bottomley’s Goneril, Rosenberg’s Moses exerts an uncomfortable appeal, combining mastery and violence.74 For Rosenberg, Moses can serve as a symbol of menacing atavistic vitality, but in his following verse dramas, ‘The Amulet’ and ‘The Unicorn’, a similar role is played by exoticised Black characters. A Jewish character was just one vehicle through which this dynamic could be explored, which is not to say that the vehicle might not profoundly shape the meaning it carried. Artists’ and writers’ engagement with Jewishness was only one side of the question. We must also consider how the perception of their ethnicity shaped the reception of their works. The meaning could vary greatly. As migrants and as an urban community, East End Jews could symbolise modernity. The typological lens which saw Judaism as the crude basis from which Christianity had been built combined with a perception of the Jewish villages of the Russian Empire as a relic of the past. Similarly, Jews could be imagined as an impoverished force draining the empire from below or as the plutocrats organising its downfall from above. The late Victorian and early Edwardian figure of ‘the Jew’ was characterised by such contradiction and overdetermination; to observe this is the beginning rather than the end of analysis of how perception of Jews and Jewishness shaped literature.75 Historical juncture, personal relationships and the contingencies informing a specific text could all influence how people wrote about Jewish writers and artists. Whereas in Mendel, Gilbert Cannan’s roman-à-clef based on Gertler, the author toys with the idea of his hero as a reforming influence on the stagnant cultural life of London, Cannan’s later work would denounce the deleterious effects of ‘the Jewish financial system’.76 Enthusiastic philosemitism was rarely too far away from conspiratorial antisemitism, but we might also draw a comparison with Rosenberg’s Moses: Jewishness could serve as a flexible characteristic that might be adapted and motivated for various ends or simply

71 

Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenberg, 329. Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenberg, 338. 73  Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenberg, 168. 74  Lascelles Abercrombie, Emblems of Love, Designed in Several Discourses (London and New York: John Lane, 1912); Gordon Bottomley, King Lear’s Wife and Other Plays (London: Constable, 1925). 75  Bar-Yosef and Valman, ‘Introduction: Between the East End and East Africa: Rethinking Images of “the Jew” in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture’, in ‘The Jew’ in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 3. 76  Gilbert Cannan, The Anatomy of Society (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921), 74. 72 

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ignored if it did not fit the point an author wished to make. By contrast with Cannan and Lawrence’s variations on Gertler in their novels, Aldous Huxley’s Gertler-avatar, the painter Gombauld in Crome Yellow (1921), is not described as Jewish but rather as being ‘of Provençal descent’.77 The writers and artists of the Whitechapel Renaissance could not engage with the various literary milieux of London without becoming subject to a variform web of expectations and prejudices linked to class and ethnicity. Before concluding, it is worth briefly considering cultural production in Jewish languages, an arena which could offer an alternative to these milieux. While Hebrew, as a literary, religious and political language in Britain, deserves attention, I will focus here on Yiddish, which has become emblematic of the lost world of the Jewish East End. For some scholars, the keynote of Yiddish culture in Britain has been its transience. As William Pimlott has observed, however, our understanding of that transience can be enriched.78 Rather than seeing the Socialist poet Morris Winchevsky’s departure for New York from London as signalling the decline of London, we can see it as reaffirming its place as part of a worldwide archipelago of Yiddish centres.79 Husid recalled how the Yiddish art critic Leo Koenig, who moved to London in 1914 and lived for many years in Notting Hill before moving to Israel in 1952, wrote ‘essays on art and literature [that] were published in the big Jewish dailies of America, Poland and Israel, while he most condescendingly obliged the editors of the Jewish dailies in London with an essay every week’.80 Even if we keep our eyes firmly on Britain, there is much to be gained for Yiddish studies and for the study of British literature by considering it in detail. We can find crossovers and overlaps between the worlds of Yiddish and anglophone literary culture, from the polyglot press of Israel Narodiczky to the range of translations into and out of Yiddish, and reviews across languages.81 As the twentieth century advanced, they seem to appear more in the character of occasional bridges over a growing division, rather than signs of a fuller synthesis. The effect can be seen in how poets are remembered. Rosenberg’s poetry has enjoyed a legacy, both among those looking for a way to integrate English Romanticism into a Poundian poetics, and among those seeking to build an Anglo-Jewish poetic tradition.82 Avrom Stencl, a key

77 

Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1921), 22. William Pimlott, ‘Yiddish in Britain: Immigration, Culture and Politics, 1896–1910’ (University College London, 2022), 34. 79  For more on Winchevsky, see Vivi Lachs, Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884–1914 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018). 80  Seedo, In the Beginning Was Fear, 299. 81  Moshe Sanders, Jewish Books in Whitechapel: A Bibliography of Narodiczky’s Press, ed. Marion Aptroot (London: Duckworth, 1991). 82  For an example of the first, see the lecture on Rosenberg published in Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); see also Charles Tomlinson, Isaac Rosenberg of Bristol (Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 1982). Jon Silkin is an example of the latter tendency; see Silkin, ‘The Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg’, in Isaac Rosenberg, 1890–1918: A Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at Leeds University May–June 1959, Together with the Text of Unpublished Material, ed. Jon Silkin and Maurice de Sausmarez (Leeds: University of Leeds/ Partridge Press, 1959), 1–3. For discussion of Rosenberg’s legacy among poets, see Tara Christie, ‘“For Isaac Rosenberg”: Geoffrey Hill, Michael Longley and Cathal Ó Searcaigh’, in The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. Tim Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 542–63, and Grafen, ‘The Whitechapel Renaissance and its Legacies’, 333–46. 78 

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figure in Yiddish poetry and publishing in London, has until recently been accessed mostly in the form of legends: the man who escaped to Britain in a coffin; the spectral figure hawking copies of his Yiddish periodical in the streets of Whitechapel.83 While Rosenberg’s memory is shaped by his early death, Stencl’s is encompassed by a sense of outliving his tenure. Between them, we can trace the elegiac note that characterises most accounts of the Jewish East End: a romantic past that must know its place. The decline of Yiddish forms part of the narrative of anglicisation and provides fuel for the nostalgia of the Jewish East End that affirms distance even while ostensibly seeking to overcome it.84 But we must be careful not to elide Yiddish with the secular literary culture in the language. The 2011 census identified just under 4,000 people who listed Yiddish as their main language in Britain. The Hasidic Jewish community based in the London borough of Hackney represents the majority of these speakers. Without diminishing the profound traumatic effect of the Second World War and the Holocaust on Jews, Jewish culture and Yiddish culture in particular, we can see that the continued life of this community stands in counterpoint to fixed ideas of anglicisation and the disappearance of Yiddish in Britain.85 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an increase in the number of British Jews and so in the variety of religious and cultural priorities. At the same time, it saw the further development of divisions among them. While most of the figures of the Whitechapel Renaissance were beneficiaries of a more secularised society, theirs is not the only story to be told about Anglo-Jewry or the Jewish East End. To Harris, Black Lion Yard meant visits to buy milk or get treated for toothache; to another memoirist, Selig Oberman, it was the site of the Hasidic shtibl where he prayed for many years.86 The same geography could have profoundly different cultural meanings, even where its inhabitants were perceived from the outside as one. Jewishness in England was itself too richly varied to be reduced to a single narrative. The literature and art made by this generation reveal those divergences as well, and the insufficiency of any easy myth-making. To conclude, we can assess the influence of Jewishness on the artists and writers who emerged from the Jewish East End in various ways. There was a specificity to the environment of the Jewish East End: its politics, its educational institutions and its living conditions all shaped the early lives of those who grew up there. That Jewishness is not a subject or style that can be mapped with any consistency across the artwork of this generation is significant but not decisive. Not only could the exact significance of Jewishness be different for different figures, but the metaphor of a resource allows us to see how its value to artists and writers might change, with fluctuations which could

83 

There are some significant exceptions, including Heather Valencia’s introduction to Stencl, All My Young Years: Yiddish Poetry from Weimar Germany, trans. Haike Beruriah Wiegand and Stephen Watts (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2007). 84  Devorah Baum, ‘Life Writing and the East End’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction, ed. David Brauner and Axel Stähler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 221–36; Tony Kushner, ‘The End of the “Anglo-Jewish Progress Show”: Representations of the Jewish East End, 1887–1987’, Immigrants & Minorities 10, nos 1–2 (1991): 78–105. 85  Bruce Mitchell, Language Politics and Language Survival: Yiddish among the Haredim in Post-War Britain (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), xvi–xvii. 86  Harris, ‘The Story of Childhood and Other Episodes’, 79–80; Selig Oberman, In Mayne Teg: Zikhroynes (London: Narod Press, 1947).

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owe as much to external vicissitudes as to private wrestlings with identity and religion. At times, it offered a subject of interest; at times the potential for a useful coalition. At other points, it might recede into the background. To judge the full range of roles played by Jewishness as motivator and theme in British literature will require not only an expansive sense of what ‘modernism’ might mean, but a willingness to look beyond the anglophone portion of literature produced in Britain.

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Mitchell, Bruce. Language Politics and Language Survival: Yiddish among the Haredim in Post-War Britain. Leuven: Peeters, 2006. Nash, Paul. Outline, an Autobiography and Other Writings. London: Faber and Faber, 1949. Oberman, Selig. In Mayne Teg: Zikhroynes. London: Narod Press, 1947. Oyved, Moyshe [Edward Good]. Visions and Jewels. Translated by Hannah Berman. London: Faber and Faber, 1952. Patterson, Ian. ‘Cultural Critique and Canon Formation, 1910–1937: A Study in Modernism and Cultural Memory.’ Doctoral thesis, King’s College, Cambridge, 1996. Pimlott, William. ‘Yiddish in Britain: Immigration, Culture and Politics, 1896–1910.’ University College London, 2022. Pound, Ezra and Louis Zukofsky. Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. Edited by Barry Ahearn. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. Renshaw, Daniel. ‘Prejudice and Paranoia: A Comparative Study of Antisemitism and Sinophobia in Turn-of-the-Century Britain.’ Patterns of Prejudice 50, no. 1 (2016): 38–60. Rodker, John. ‘Twenty Years After.’ In We Did Not Fight: 1914–1918, Experiences of War Resisters, edited by Julian Bell, 283–91. London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1935. Rodker (née Cohen), Sonia. The End Has Various Places. Privately published, 2018. Roemer, Nils. ‘London and the East End as Spectacles of Urban Tourism.’ The Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 416–34. Rosenberg, Isaac. Isaac Rosenberg. Edited by Vivien Noakes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Rubinstein, William D., Michael A. Jolles and Hilary L. Rubinstein, eds. The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Sanders, Moshe. Jewish Books in Whitechapel: A Bibliography of Narodiczky’s Press. Edited by Marion Aptroot. London: Duckworth, 1991. Satlow, Michael L. Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Schwartz, Daniel B. Ghetto: The History of a Word. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Seedo, N. M. In the Beginning Was Fear. London: Narod Press, 1964. Silkin, Jon. ‘The Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg.’ In Isaac Rosenberg, 1890–1918: A Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at Leeds University May–June 1959, Together with the Text of Unpublished Material, edited by Jon Silkin and Maurice de Sausmarez, 1–3. Leeds: University of Leeds/Partridge Press, 1959. Stencl, A. N. All My Young Years: Yiddish Poetry from Weimar Germany. Translated by Haike Beruriah Wiegand and Stephen Watts. Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2007. Stevens, Micheline. ‘A Biographical Study of the Early Beneficiaries: The Jewish Education Aid Society.’ Doctoral thesis, University of Southampton, 2016. Steyn, Juliet. ‘Inside-out: Assumptions of “English” Modernism in the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1914.’ In Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America, edited by Marcia Pointon, 212–30. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Tananbaum, Susan L. Jewish Immigrants in London, 1880–1939. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014. Tickner, Lisa. Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Tomlinson, Charles. Isaac Rosenberg of Bristol. Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 1982. Winsten, Clare. ‘Memoirs’, n.d. Whitechapel Gallery Archive. Woodeson, John. Mark Gertler: Biography of a Painter, 1891–1939. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972.

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Part II: Secularity, Disenchantment, Re-enchantment

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7 Troubled: Reverse Theodicy in Ward, Eliot and Baldwin Douglas Mao

Modernism and Trouble of Mind

I

f you’re in search of a word whose ordinary use encodes the sorts of complexities in subject-object relations that modernism probed with fervour, you could do worse than light on troubled. When applied to a person as a modifier itself unmodified, troubled expresses anxiety, anguish, internal unsettlement: ‘She’s a troubled soul’; ‘They’ve always been troubled’. In conjunction with the preposition by, on the other hand, troubled indicates a negative judgement applied by the observing subject to someone or something else: ‘I’m troubled by your behaviour’; ‘We’re troubled by the safety record of this factory’. On the one hand, the troubled subject; on the other, trouble about the object. The feeling promised by the construction troubled by can be merely rhetorical, as when a disciplinarian tells the reprobate about to be punished ‘I’m troubled by your behaviour’ without experiencing much consternation herself. But troubled by doesn’t always point to a privileged stance of distance and control; it can also be an expression of real torment generated in the observer by what’s observed. That I’m troubled by your situation may in fact render me troubled if the anxiety goes deep enough. A little reflection reveals that troubled and troubled by can in truth relate to each other in at least three different ways. First, there’s the case in which trouble in the subject mirrors or parallels trouble in the object. Louisa Gradgrind of Hard Times is a troubled person, and the reader is invited to consider how her subjective disaffection comments on the conditions of Coketown, where she lives. Second, there’s the case already mentioned, in which trouble about the object leads the subject to feel troubled. In North and South, to take a second example from a Victorian novel, Margaret Hale’s relative composure is unsettled when she confronts labour conditions in the industrial north. Third, there’s a relation that’s something like the reverse of the one just named, in which someone who’s troubled for whatever personal reasons either projects her troubles on to the world or finds relief from them in working to remedy the troubles of others. This last is a move common to Emma Woodhouse, Hester Prynne and Dorothea Brooke, though it appears at different points in these characters’ narrative arcs. This third kind of relation between troubled and troubled by is of particular consequence because, viewed in a certain light, it casts doubt on the possibility of authentic altruism. Could it be that being troubled by others’ conditions will on inspection always prove a projection of, diversion from, or attempted remedy for one’s own troubles? That

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anyone who devotes herself to the care of others is in fact working out some internal conflict? That impulses to do good are always vulnerable to demystification as psychological symptoms? So might the cynic, or the proponent of rational choice theory, needlingly ask. Perhaps no fiction of the twentieth century wields psychologising in this vein quite so unnervingly as Doris Lessing’s 1985 novel The Good Terrorist, which suggests that its protagonist throws herself into the work of making a liveable squat for revolutionaries not out of real political zeal but because, for complicated reasons rooted in her earlier family life, she finds her only comfortable role to be that of domestic organiser. The several examples just given all precede or follow what’s generally thought of as modernism’s major temporal span. But the relation between the troubled soul and external situations by which one might be troubled has, arguably, a particular importance for modernist writing and its interpretation. Consider the following two rather well-known polemics. First, from György Lukács’s famous screed of 1955, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’: With Musil—and with many other modernist writers—psychopathology became the goal, the terminus ad quem, of their artistic intention. But [. . .] [t]he protest expressed by this flight into psychopathology is an abstract gesture; its rejection of reality is wholesale and summary, containing no concrete criticism. [. . .] In any protest against particular social conditions, these conditions themselves must have the central place. The bourgeois protest against feudal society, the proletarian against bourgeois society, made their point of departure a criticism of the old order. In both cases the protest [. . .] was based on a concrete terminus ad quem: the establishment of a new order. [. . .] How different the protest of writers like Musil! The terminus a quo (the corrupt society of our time) is inevitably the main source of energy, since the terminus ad quem (the escape into psychopathology) is a mere abstraction. The rejection of told reality is purely subjective. [. . .] [T]he protest is an empty gesture, expressing nausea, or discomfort, or longing.1 Second, this passage from Chinua Achebe’s 1977 essay, ‘An Image of Africa’: Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives. A Conrad student told me in Scotland last year that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz. Which is partly the point: Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Of course, there is a preposterous and perverse kind of arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind. But that is not even

1 

Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin, 1963), 29–30.

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the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.2 These critiques certainly don’t emerge from the same place, nor do they have the same goals. But they share an objection to a certain privileging of the troubled soul that turns the troubled world into a set of ‘props’, in Achebe’s construction. Both indict a fetishising of inner agony in which the social relations that embed the subject are treated as a mere scene for the subject’s crack-up, in which others are demoted to the role of extras in the drama of the tormented consciousness. To be sure, Lukács and Achebe seem worried less that troubled and troubled by might relate to each other in some morally dubious way than that there may be no link at all between the two in the representations they critique. Yet it’s not hard to see how their concerns resonate with the notion that anyone worried about others is really working out their own problems, that troubled by is just a sort of screen for troubled. Lukács’s and Achebe’s critiques pre-date modernist studies so named, of course, but they maintain a power to discompose students of modernism today because they point to a fault of which modernist art has long stood accused: a lack of social conscience or political vision inseparable from its prioritising of other matters such as formal experiment or, as here, the representation of interiority. Although scholars of modernism have devoted a good deal of care to combating this accusation in recent decades, their success has been far from complete, as a look at offhand references to modernism online and in print, or a conversation with a scholar working in another subfield, can too readily attest. It may be that such charges have an even greater power to sting at present, moreover, because they assert that modernism fails in precisely the way the discipline of literary studies least wants texts to fail. For half a century now, literary scholars have devoted themselves to demonstrating that the texts they care about do have a social conscience or a political vision of some kind. Few are those who would adduce as a virtue a given work’s lofty removal from the fray of actual existence. And this is not just an intra-academic matter, since many non-academic readers too believe that political meaninglessness compromises a text’s claim on readerly attention. Examined with an eye to Lukács’s and Achebe’s critiques, then, the question of how troubled and troubled by relate to each other in modernist writing might prove to bear significantly on the meaning of modernism for present-day audiences. This essay does not pursue this possibility comprehensively, does not offer a broad survey of modernist involvements with troubled and troubled by. But it does consider the interplay of these two states of feeling in some broadly modernist representations of one kind of experience: religious experience, including conversion, doubt and apostasy. The next section of this chapter will examine a triad of English-language authors who explore the workings of the troubled-troubled by relation in a religious frame. The third and last will suggest some implications of those explorations.

2 

Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa’, The Massachusetts Review 18, no. 4 (1977): 788.

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Three Instances The three writers to whom we’ll now turn – Mary Augusta Ward (who wrote as Mrs Humphry Ward), T. S. Eliot and James Baldwin – were active in different phases within the larger epoch of modernism, its immediate predecessors and its immediate successors. They also grew up in different social circumstances and inhabited different identity categories. All three, however, engaged seriously and at length with Christian belief and practices, and all three suggest how a turn to problems in the world of society and politics could be enlisted to address spiritual crisis within the modern subject. We can begin with Ward. In 1888, that writer published Robert Elsmere, which tells the story of an Oxford-educated rector who comes under the influence of nineteenthcentury historiographies of religion – the ‘higher criticism’ – and ceases to believe in the singular truth of Christianity. Long in its telling and unabashedly a novel of ideas, Elsmere nonetheless became a bestseller. And we might speculate that one element that drew readers was its moving depiction not just of its eponymous hero’s struggle with doubt but also of how that struggle affects those around him – above all his wife, Catherine, who is initially shattered by his apostasy and ultimately remains true to her original faith. A number of Elsmere’s most memorable formulations of his change of view indeed appear in dialogues with Catherine, as when, just after his determined rejection of the old religion, he explains, Christianity seems to me something small and local. Behind it, around it—including it—I see the great drama of the world, sweeping on—led by God—from change to change, from act to act. It is not that Christianity is false, but that it is only an imperfect reflection of a part of truth. Truth has never been, can never be, contained in any one creed or system!3 After his apostasy, Elsmere resigns his post in the Church and sets off to London’s East End to work among the poor. In time, he establishes there what he frankly calls a new religion, one that devotes itself to the moral example of Jesus but rejects miracles and the literal truth of the Incarnation and the Resurrection. This unapologetically ‘modern’ institution he names, after careful consideration, ‘The New Brotherhood of Christ’. Perhaps not surprisingly, Elsmere uses the language of trouble in describing his crisis of doubt and its repercussions. To one of the mentors whose researches draw him away from his former faith, he writes, ‘your book and your letters have been to me a great source of trouble of mind’ (375). At the height of his agony, he begins his plea for help from another mentor (whom Ward based on one of the novel’s dedicatees, the philosopher T. H. Green) with, ‘I have come—very selfishly—to ask your advice; to throw a trouble upon you’ (393). Earlier in the fraught conversation with Catherine just quoted, he asks whether she has guessed what his ‘trouble’ is. She replies that she has discerned how he’s ‘depressed—troubled—about religion’, and he goes on to recount how ‘the trouble grew’ (403).

3 

Mary Augusta Ward, Robert Elsmere (Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2018), 407. Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text.

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Framed in terms of troubled and troubled by, Eliot’s career reads a bit like Elsmere’s shaken up, its pieces chronologically and philosophically rearranged. In his early poetry, Eliot anatomises with terrifying precision the subject of contemporary neurosis; his poems of the 1910s move to capture, as Robert Elsmere had thirty years earlier, a kind of mental trouble that if not exactly emergent at the time of writing was widely believed to be of recent vintage, a touchstone of modern life. As is well known, this occupation of the poems was not dissociated from Eliot’s own troubles of mind. Those led him, in 1921, to the care of the Swiss physician Roger Vittoz, whose book, Treatment of Neurasthenia by Teaching of Brain Control, perhaps reverberates in the last of the thunder’s three commands in The Waste Land (‘Give, sympathize, control’). The Waste Land itself famously presents a cartography of social malaises that seems to double as a fissured soul’s effort to cohere, the poem’s components themselves being the ‘fragments’ that the poetic speaker has ‘shored against [his] ruins’.4 In the years that immediately followed, Eliot worked out his troubles at least partly by means of a turn from Unitarianism to Anglicanism that culminated in his conversion of 1927. In subsequent decades, he would gain international notoriety as a diagnostician of modern society’s ills from a Christian point of view. If Elsmere passes out of his troubling by doubt into a version of religion that’s resolutely progressive, then, Eliot seems to resolve his troubles of mind by means of a Christianity antithetical to Elsmere’s liberal vision and in which nothing loomed so large as the truth of the Incarnation. (From his introduction to the 1937 collection Revelation: ‘I take for granted [. . .] that the fullness of Christian revelation resides in the essential fact of the Incarnation, in relation to which all Christian revelation is to be understood.’5) Eliot’s trajectory really does, in this sense, read as the inverse of Elsmere’s. Yet both end by devoting their energies to a form of religion that’s outward-facing, troubled by the condition of the world and far from complacent about the sanctity of the converted self. Eliot zealously threw himself into work benefiting an Anglican Church he was also not shy about criticising on doctrinal and practical points, and the secular structures and conditions he more thoroughly critiqued were vast indeed. In a representative passage from The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), he writes, ‘I am not at this moment concerned with the means for bringing a Christian Society into existence; I am not even primarily concerned with making it appear desirable; but I am very much concerned with making clear its difference from the kind of society in which we are now living.’6 It may be surprising to discover that the word troubled is nearly absent from Eliot’s major poetry. Yet its two appearances in his early poems are revealing. The first comes in the final line of ‘La Figlia che Piange’ (1916), whose very aim can seem to be to sow confusion about the boundaries between observed object and observing subject – in this case, between a lover (as it seems) and a poetic speaker who witnesses a scene between lover and beloved. Are the lover and the speaker-observer the same person? Are they somehow one and not one? Eliot’s deployment of troubled in the poem’s closing couplet overlays this ambiguity with another subject-object confusion: ‘And

4 

T. S. Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 71. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 5 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 472. 6  T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (San Diego: Harcourt, 1977), 6. 5 

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I wonder how they should have been together! / I should have lost a gesture and a pose / Sometimes these cogitations still amaze / The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.’7 Presumably, the speaker is troubled at midnight and projecting his feelings on the time. But the lines say literally that the midnight stands amazed at the speaker’s cogitations, giving us an object surprisingly troubled by a subject. The other appearance of troubled in Eliot’s poems up to 1921 comes in part II of The Waste Land: In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours;8 It would be hard to conceive of a more exemplary stirring up of subject-object confusion than the one produced by the enjambment at the close of the third line. Were the sentence to end there, as it grammatically could, it would state that the perfumes are troubled; continuing as it does, it reveals that the perfumes are doing the troubling, indeed confusing and drowning someone’s ‘sense’. But the enjambment is enough to trouble the boundary between the source of the trouble and the object of the troubling – that object being, of course, the subject whose sense is in question. And as if this were insufficient, the confusion is then heightened by homonymy in the last line. Behind the drowning of sense in odours we can hear the drowning of scents in odours, which suggests the perfume succumbing to itself, or a subject whose absorptive sense may not preclude an exuding of scents. In this respect, the lines read as a kind of emblem for The Waste Land as a whole, which reiterates insistently how the person or voice who would like to maintain a posture of coolly detached observation (troubled by) may in fact be given over to derangement and distress (troubled). A few lines later in Waste Land II, the perfumes’ presumptive owner raves at her (presumably) male interlocutor: ‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / I never know what you are thinking.’9 But if that addressee is troubled by her outburst, he raves no less madly in his own head: ‘I think we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones.’10 (The pair’s predicament thus repeats, along the same gender lines, the situation of Eliot’s chilling 1915 poem ‘Hysteria’.) One could even claim that the main theme of The Waste Land is the porousness of the boundary between troubled and troubled by: ‘Shall I at least set my lands in order? [. . .] These fragments I have shored against my ruins / [. . .] Hieronymo’s mad againe.’11 For Baldwin, the intertwining of troubled and troubled by took yet a different course, though one with some key similarities to the two we’ve already examined. Like Elsmere, Baldwin moved through spiritual doubt to rejection of the form of organised

 7 

Eliot, Poems, 28. Eliot, Poems, 58.  9  Eliot, Poems, 59. 10  Eliot, Poems, 59. 11  Eliot, Poems, 71.  8 

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Christianity he had known; like Eliot, he took up the vocation of writer and became an enormously influential social critic. As the loosely autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and the pair of essays published as The Fire Next Time (1963) recall, Baldwin grew up in a strongly religious household in New York’s Harlem and, in his mid-teens, briefly became a preacher, a ‘Young Minister’ adroit at stirring the faithful with his eloquence and fervour. In Go Tell It, the Baldwin figure, John, confronts his own iniquity, before this conversion to the faith, in the language of trouble: ‘His mind was like the sea itself: troubled, and too deep for the bravest man’s descent.’12 Immediately after this, he undergoes the wrenching experience of being saved: from late night into the morning, his soul wrestles with this trouble while his body lies on the floor of the church his family attends and congregants look on. At the end, after he comes to the Lord, one of the faithful says, ‘He [the Lord] done moved—hallelujah—He done troubled everybody’s mind’ (246). In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin elaborates on his movement into ministry in a different way. The second and longer of the two essays in the volume begins, ‘I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis.’ What he saw around him that summer in Harlem, he writes, ‘was what I had always seen [. . .] But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace.’13 The young Baldwin recognises that he can easily be dragged into the life of the streets, and that this would be dangerous for him in both religious and practical terms. A life on the edge of the law, a life of sin, seems the surest and perhaps the only way to material improvement, but it carries with it threats of earthly as well as divine prosecution. For the religiously raised Baldwin, really noticing the pimps, prostitutes and thieves at their work means recognising the fragility of his soul, and by extension his own turpitude, even if he hasn’t as yet done anything terribly wrong in the sight of God: I had been far too well raised [. . .] to suppose that any of the extremely explicit overtures made to me that summer, sometimes by boys and girls but also, more alarmingly, by older men and women, had anything to do with my attractiveness. On the contrary, since the Harlem idea of seduction is, to put it mildly, blunt, whatever these people saw in me merely confirmed my sense of my depravity. (25) Earthly and heavenly are linked opposites in another crucial sense for him, however, since for a young man in his situation, religion furnishes an alternative career path to that of criminality. The young Baldwin turns to the church not only out of fear of losing God’s grace but also because in his view what he – like any other African American who aims to be something – needs to ‘lift him out, to start him on his way’ is ‘a gimmick’. And ‘[i]t was my career in the church’, as a teenage preacher, ‘that turned out, precisely, to be my gimmick’ (24). (Baldwin would return to this gimmick in sketching the career of another charismatic young preacher, the fictional Julia Miller, in 1979’s Just Above My Head.)

12 

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Vintage, 2013), 170. References to Go Tell It on the Mountain are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 13  James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993), 16. References to The Fire Next Time are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses.

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The biographical Baldwin soon came to doubt the truth of Christianity, though he did so in an evolution both like and unlike Elsmere’s. Baldwin’s passage was like Elsmere’s in that it started with reading: ‘I began, fatally, with Dostoevski’ (34), Baldwin recalls in Fire. But it differed from Elsmere’s because in addition to having a source in books, Baldwin’s doubt was moral and grounded in experience – in his witness to the hypocrisies and failings of the church and to a virulently racist world whose creator couldn’t possibly, in the end, be embraced. Although he expresses his admiration for aspects of African American Christianity in Fire, Baldwin closes the section just quoted with the observation that it is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being [. . .] must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him. (47) Again, the vocation to which Baldwin would eventually turn was that of writer. When, later in The Fire Next Time, he meets Elijah Muhammad, he tells the leader of the Nation of Islam, ‘I left the church twenty years ago and I haven’t joined anything since.’ When Muhammad asks in return, ‘And what are you now?’ Baldwin replies, ‘I’m a writer. I like doing things alone’ (70). Of course, the earlier language of ‘gimmick’ is a sort of inverse prefiguration: writing will provide Baldwin a way out without compromising him ethically. Through writing he, like Eliot, can work against the conditions of the world that he’s troubled by – though for him, as a Black man in America, this troubled by can never be lived at much of a distance at all from troubled. Taken together, Ward’s, Eliot’s and Baldwin’s renderings of troubled and troubled by raise any number of significant questions; for the purposes of this chapter, we can focus on an aspect illuminated especially clearly, though by a kind of omission, in Robert Elsmere. A striking feature of Ward’s rendering of Elsmere’s transition from old life to new is that it gives little space to the question of how he decides what work he’ll pursue after he resigns his position. The reader is treated essentially to no meditation on this matter on Elsmere’s part; instead, his plans are signalled when Catherine asks, ‘And have you any idea of what we shall do next, Robert—of—of our future?’ and he answers, ‘Shall we try London for a little? [. . .] I should find work among the poor—so would you—and I can go on with my book’ (417–18). The natural option for Elsmere seems to be a continuing of the provision of assistance to the materially disadvantaged that he had already undertaken, with satisfaction, as a cleric in the Surrey countryside. Other possibilities are not discussed. To be sure, there are many explanations for the apparent self-evidence of this choice, including Elsmere’s temperament, the example set by another cleric who spent a decade in the East End, and the evident truth that if one wants to get back on one’s feet, pursuing a career geared to one’s demonstrated skill set isn’t the worst idea. But there’s another way of looking at the question of Elsmere’s occupation. As just noted, he had, as rector, applied himself to two tasks, the promotion of Christian religion and the material care of the poor. And while his loss of the old faith makes it impossible for him to carry on with the first without hypocrisy, it doesn’t affect the validity of the second. After his crisis of doubt, what remains certain is that there’s suffering he might work

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to diminish – which certainty, in a character like Elsmere’s, is practically guaranteed to beget a renewal of application and energy. Troubled by thus emerges as something of a remedy for troubled in Elsmere’s narrative, and this is partly because the plight of the poor is something about which he can feel no empirical doubt whatever. Something similar occurs in Eliot’s conversion to the old religion. After that turning point, Eliot may have enjoyed great strength of faith, but at the same time he saw before him a world in a parlous state on countless fronts that he would make it his business to critique. In The Idea of a Christian Society, he speaks of the need to face such problems as the hypertrophy of the motive of Profit into a social ideal, the distinction between the use of natural resources and their exploitation, the use of labour and its exploitation, the advantages unfairly accruing to the trader in contrast to the primary producer, the misdirection of the financial machine, the iniquity of usury, and other features of a commercialised society which must be scrutinised on Christian principles.14 The politico-economic order around him being very far from realising Christian ideals, there was much work for the Christian critic to do. Social criticism was not a new project for religious commentators when Eliot entered the arena, of course. The prophets of antiquity too condemned society’s ills, and there was no shortage of religious denunciation of exploitation and inequity in Eliot’s own time. What solicits our attention here is that confrontation with the monstrosity of conditions in the world permeates Eliot’s pre-conversion poetry as well as his post-conversion commentary, though on very different terms. Those early poems administer a corrosive irony to nearly everything and everyone they light upon, from Boston society ladies to middle-class men fearful of women, from working-class oafs to clueless bohemians. One salient difficulty for this writing, however, is that its obsession with the vulgarity and squalor of the world doesn’t exhibit a clear moral purpose. Its indictment of fallen modern life suggesting no particular path back to elevation, and exuding a tonal pessimism that the ‘Datta . . . Dayadhvam . . . Damyata’ of The Waste Land does little to dispel, it risks being dismissed, for all its brilliance, as a kind of late decadent posturing. To be sure, Eliot seems to implicate his poetic speakers, and by extension himself, in the wretchedness and vacuity – but this only amplifies the problem, in the end, since the soul undergoing the fabulous torments of katabasis was itself a staple of decadent efforts to unnerve. After his conversion, however, Eliot came to regard the malevolence of things as bound up with society’s being neither Christian nor conducive to Christianity but predominantly pagan and liberal. Where in his early work troubled by could seem almost a matter of taste – the world is vulgar, according to the speaker – after his conversion, troubled by captures the undeniable point that things are very bad for many people, materially and spiritually. Upon this irrefragable situation the perspicacious Christian could go to work. In Eliot’s case as in Elsmere’s, then, the movement in which troubled by shows its capacity to make one less troubled (or troubled in a different way) is a passage both from uncertainty to conviction and from aimlessness to purpose.

14 

Eliot, Christianity, 26.

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A similar trajectory tacitly informs Baldwin’s story. The teenage Baldwin loses his faith for multiple reasons, but one of these especially solicits our attention here. In recounting his career as a Young Minister, Baldwin the adult writer remarks, when I faced a congregation it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike. When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto? (Fire 39) Baldwin here makes the reader feel that his turn from belief had to be the lifting of a great moral weight – that whatever anguish he might have experienced in giving up religion, his apostasy had to be a liberation from unbearable contradictions, a move not just from hypocrisy into plain dealing but also from ambiguity (does the Christian God exist?) to certitude (the conditions to which white society consigns Black people in the United States are appalling, incontestably). For Baldwin too, the movement is one from doubt to assurance, though the assurance is that of injustice and dispossession. As Baldwin’s case makes especially clear, we need to be careful how we frame what the certitude of misery in the world offers the apostate (or, in Eliot’s case, the convert). Unlike Elsmere’s turn from the old belief, Baldwin’s doesn’t lead to a clear vocational crisis. Rather, it’s impelled by the manifest truth of African Americans’ oppression (where to the clerical Elsmere, ministering to the poor had seemed a natural remit for a kind and just divinity’s parish servant). It would obviously be grotesque, then, to say that Baldwin was consoled by the oppression of African Americans. Yet it would scarcely be more accurate to say that Eliot was consoled by the corruption of modern society or that Elsmere is consoled by the state of the East End, even if he finds consolation in his new work on behalf of its inhabitants. Perhaps a better way to characterise what troubled by bequeaths all three would be to think of their turns as bound up with a sort of epoche, a removal of accretions of uncertainty that leaves the observer facing a bare world whose truth is that it contains much that’s bad. At one point in his book-length essay on film, The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin writes, ‘The blacks have a song which says, I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.’15 The context is a discussion of apt Black suspicion of white promises. But the phrase also captures the difference between trust in religious guides’ adumbrations of the unseen, on the one hand, and evils forced on one’s attention just by living in the world, on the other. It speaks in yet another fashion to the association of troubled by with certainty and of troubled with doubt.

Implications How does late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature answer the question of where one should turn if one ceases to believe in God? Perhaps its best-known

15 

James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: An Essay (New York: Vintage, 2011), 522.

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response, still, is that one might direct one’s attention to the plenitude of the world at hand, whose value becomes more intensely apparent when we appreciate the mortality of everything. This is certainly the answer Walter Pater supplied in his 1873 Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which has often been held to herald or usher in modernism in Britain and beyond: To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. [. . .] While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.16 This is also the answer that Wallace Stevens, channelling Keats as well as Pater, would offer in ‘Sunday Morning’ at another dawn of modernism, 1915: Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.17 And later in the poem: Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires.18 Other versions of this answer were, of course, advanced by other atheist or agnostic celebrants of the quotidian such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. 16 

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, The 1893 Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 189. 17  Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1990), 67. 18  Stevens, Collected Poems, 68–9.

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The interplay of troubled and troubled by in Ward, Eliot and Baldwin suggests a different way of proceeding after belief in God has been shaken – a turning not to the immediate sensuous beauty of the world or other satisfactions of sublunary existence but to the certitude of ongoing suffering and wrong. Obviously, to say this is not to assert that before modernism, literature – or religion – somehow ignored the reality of worldly misery. Rather, it’s to add another element to our picture of how modernism addressed, and was shaped by, the ascent of what Charles Taylor calls secularity 3, ‘a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace’.19 If the Paterian line points to the world’s relishable goodness, that of Ward, Eliot and Baldwin points to its reliable badness. If the first is about intensity and pleasure, the second is about certainty and action. Recognising this line of address to crises of belief is surely most important for the reason just stated: because it shows that modernism’s repertoire of responses to the question of how life can have meaning once faith is no longer the default position is larger than has usually been acknowledged. But attention to the resolutions and opportunities that troubled by presents has two further consequences worth noting, both of which we might describe as genre-related. The first concerns theodicy. Per the OED, theodicy is not just the elucidation of God’s ways but, more specifically, ‘The, or a, vindication of the divine attributes, esp. justice and holiness, in respect to the existence of evil’. In other words, the undisputed donnée from which the genre of theodicy, if it can be called a genre, takes off is that living in the world means meeting phenomena that we deem evil: suffering, injustice, deprivation. The fundamental move of Augustinian and Thomistic theodicy is to explain that evil is an absence of good, but theodicy by definition cannot dispute that (what seem to be) evils confront everyone in the course of life. As Aquinas frames the key proposition he’ll then set out to refute, It seems that there is no God. For if one of two contraries were infinite, the other would be completely destroyed. But by the word ‘God’ we understand a certain infinite good. So, if God existed, nobody would ever encounter evil. But we do encounter evil in the world. So, God does not exist.20 Theodicy is thus grounded in precisely the same experience of how things are that grounds the trajectory we’ve seen in Ward, Eliot and Baldwin. But the two proceed in opposite directions. In theodicy, the certitude of evil is a problem that demands a solution, while in the narrative arc of our three writers – what we might call reverse theodicy – the certitude of evil offers at least a partial answer to the question of what remains to be believed in after the dissolution of religious faith. As we’ve seen, however, something in addition to epistemological stability is at stake in our three writers’ shifts in belief. If the self-evidence of bad things in the world matters a little because it proffers a residual certainty, it matters much more because it assists with the question of how life can have meaning sans the certainty of a God to

19 

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Questions on God, trans. Brian Davies, ed. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 24.

20 

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supply that meaning. On this front as well, the Ward(-Eliot)-Baldwin trajectory runs in a direction opposite to that of theodicy as such – as we can see clearly if we pause, for a moment, over the question of how God’s existence or non-existence must, philosophically speaking, affect our prospect of living a meaningful life. In a recent overview of approaches to this problem, the philosopher Thaddeus Metz places under the heading ‘extreme naturalism’ arguments that ‘the presence of God or a soul would in fact reduce our odds of obtaining meaning in certain ways’, that ‘it would be better in respect of [. . .] meaning in life if there were no God or soul and there existed only a physical world’.21 Metz finds an early example of this position in Jean-Paul Sartre’s view that ‘if God existed and had created us for a purpose, then our lives would be degraded for being akin to the status of a knife or some other artefact. [. . .] If an individual’s purpose [. . .] has been assigned to her, then she is being treated like a thing, which [. . .] reduces the meaning in her life.’22 Other versions of extreme naturalism Metz summarises point to the vacuity of all action that would follow from the soul’s immortality, the meaninglessness of selfsacrifice in a universe where God ultimately rewards all the just, and the elevation of servility and conformity that would obtain if worship were human beings’ highest purpose. As Martin Hägglund puts it in his widely discussed book of 2019, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, ‘An eternal life is [. . .] undesirable, since it would eliminate the care and passion that animate my life.’23 ‘For anything to be intelligible as mattering—for anything to be at stake’, in Hägglund’s account, ‘we have to believe in the irreplaceable value of someone or something that is finite’, whereas ‘both capitalism and religions make us disown our lives, rather than enabling us to own the question of what we ought to do with our finite time’.24 From the point of view of extreme naturalism, in other words, a cosmos where evil never really has a chance (and where life really has no ending) would be one devoid of genuine possibility for meaning. It’s the evils of the universe we inhabit that ultimately make meaning possible. Extreme naturalism thus contains its own version of reverse or inverse theodicy: for it, the fact of bad things in life is less a problem that mobilises a search for solutions than an answer to the question of how there can be meaning at all. Ward and Baldwin (and needless to say Eliot) don’t explicitly consider the threats to meaning posed by God and immortality, but their linking of meaning to contention with evils in the world, against the background of religious doubt, does mark a point of contact with extreme naturalist schemata such as Hägglund’s. With respect to meaningfulness as with respect to certainty, their lighting upon the strange fertility of the badness of things counters Christian apologetics in a manner different from that of the Pater-Stevens line, which also discerns how value arises from perishability but which tethers meaning less to manifest evil than to savourable good. The other genre whose relationship to modernism may look different when viewed through the lens of Ward, Eliot and Baldwin is that of realism, which Lukács in ‘The Ideology of Modernism’ positions as modernism’s implacable and ethically superior 21 

Thaddeus Metz, God, Soul and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, electronic edition), 1, 35. 22  Metz, God, Soul and the Meaning of Life, 36. 23  Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 2019), 3. 24  Hägglund, This Life, 49, 330.

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other. ‘Between Joyce’s intentions and those of [. . .] Mann’, Lukács avers, there is ‘a total opposition. The perpetually oscillating patterns of sense- and memory-data [in Joyce], their powerfully charged – but aimless and directionless – fields of force, give rise to an epic structure which is static, reflecting a belief in the basically static character of events.’25 For Lukács, this stasis implies imperviousness to amelioration, which is to say that the world as represented by modernism, unlike the world that realism describes, resists every effort to change it for the better: ‘As the ideology of most modernist writers asserts the unalterability of outward reality (even if this is reduced to a mere state of consciousness), human activity is, a priori, rendered impotent and robbed of meaning.’26 According to Lukács, modernism is affiliated with meaninglessness precisely because it denies the capacity of human action to affect the world. As we’ve just seen, however, Ward, Eliot and Baldwin assert just what Lukács says modernism never asserts: that the world can be affected by human action and indeed that such action sustains the possibility of meaning in life. Robert Elsmere, The Idea of a Christian Society, Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time in this sense illuminate an important commonality between the realism Lukács praises and modernism as we tend to define it today. Of course, it matters a good deal that in Lukács’s own moment, ‘modernism’ was a much less capacious term than it is now. Indeed it might fairly be objected that Lukács would have characterised Ward and Baldwin as practitioners of realism, not of modernism – and that invoking these two writers therefore supports rather than challenges his claims. Even if Lukács is on shaky ground when associating Joyce and Eliot with a view of reality as unchangeable, it could be argued, Ward’s and Baldwin’s visions of charity and activism contrast sharply with the elaboration of existential futility that Lukács – casting his eye also on the likes of Kafka and Beckett – was entitled to consider the core of modernism as it appeared in 1955. Against this objection in turn, however, it must be observed that the expansion of the reach of ‘modernism’ in recent decades has been plausible in part because there are so many salient commonalities between the more restrictive modernist canon of yore and a much broader range of twentieth-century texts. Even were the aforementioned reduction utterly true to Kafka’s and Beckett’s works, it wouldn’t diminish the point that the divide between modernism and Lukács’s realism looks less sharp, and less momentous, when we see how Ward and Baldwin converge with Eliot on, for example, the significance for the questing soul of a world full of evils. Moreover, attention to this convergence highlights something Lukács’s account omits: the role of religious belief and doubt in setting the terms of early twentieth-century approaches to meaningfulness. If our frame of reference is one in which religion plays no part at all, then the miseries of Waiting for Godot and Happy Days may well be taken as asserting the impossibility of meaning in life. (The badness of things is immitigable.) But if our frame is something like the actual or perceived intensification of secularity 3, Beckett’s plays might rather be taken to say that where God is absent or cruel, meaning will have to be sought not in the divinity but in what one does, however paltry or tattered

25 

Lukács, Meaning, 18. Lukács, Meaning, 36; emphasis added.

26 

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that may appear. (The badness of things is an opportunity.) And it’s just here that the matters of reverse theodicy and realism interestingly converge. Insofar as the former is a feature of modernist writing, Lukács’s radical opposition between modernism and the latter becomes harder to sustain. There is, however, at least one more difficulty attending the thought that the arc of troubled and troubled by sketched by Ward, Eliot, and Baldwin offers a generative response to disorientations of secularity 3. As Heart of Darkness is, per Achebe, perversely arrogant in ‘reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind’, so, clearly, the reverse theodicy described here threatens to reduce the beneficiaries of the subject’s good works to props for that subject’s salvation. The victim of poverty, corruption or injustice appears in this light as a mere stepping stone to a valid life for the comparatively privileged benefactor (formerly more troubled, now more satisfyingly troubled-by), which is to say that reverse theodicy seems in danger of collapsing into what looks like theodicy plain and simple, minus God. (That is, a justification of evil in the world on the grounds that without it, the subject would have nothing important to do.) One might say, adapting Lukács’s terms, that this form of reverse theodicy confuses the genuine significance of human activity vis-à-vis the object with a much more dubious significance accruing to the acting subject. This problem doesn’t upend the claim that reverse theodicy is a real aspect of modernism’s address to secularity 3, of course. What it unsettles, rather, is the hope that reverse theodicy would enhance, or at least not diminish, modernism’s ethical stature. And because the charge is ultimately unanswerable – because the provision of meaning for the subject can never be purged of the subject’s stake in finding meaning – attention to reverse theodicy doesn’t offer the kind of restabilisation of value that the reader of modernist writing might desire. Rather, it requires the thoughtful reader to explore in new ways, down new avenues, modernism’s messy and jagged moral terrain. That said, it bears emphasising again that Baldwin does not suffer a crisis of meaning and then gleefully seize on the oppression of African Americans as a way to resolve it, nor does Eliot wonder what to do with a sordid world and then perceive with relief that its paganness might be the key to its instrumentalisation. Elsmere does, certainly, suffer a crisis of purpose to which worldly misery helps supply an answer, but as we’ve noted, his recognition of a way forward is markedly unmarked, his accession to the next phase of his life as much a bowing to the conditions there in front of him as the invention of a new form of endeavour. In Ward’s novel as in Eliot and Baldwin, then, the movement from spiritual trouble to the certitude of troubled-by is at bottom a meeting with the world just as it is – for better and for worse.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. ‘An Image of Africa.’ The Massachusetts Review 18, no. 4 (1977): 782–94. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, Questions on God. Translated by Brian Davies. Edited by Brian Davies and Brian Leftow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Baldwin, James. The Devil Finds Work: An Essay. New York: Vintage, 2011. ———. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage, 1993. ———. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Vintage, 2013. Eliot, T. S. Christianity and Culture. San Diego: Harcourt, 1977. ———. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 5. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. ———. The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.

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Hägglund, Martin. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York: Pantheon, 2019. Lukács, Georg. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. London: Merlin, 1963. Metz, Thaddeus. God, Soul and the Meaning of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Electronic edition. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, The 1893 Text. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage, 1990. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Ward, Mary Augusta. Robert Elsmere. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2018.

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8 Modernism, Secular Hope and the Posthumous Trace David Sherman

Four Theses on Modernism’s Secular Imaginary

I

n this chapter, I suggest some ways to approach modernism’s secular imaginary, primarily through themes of time and posthumous personhood. If the so-called secularisation thesis – that religion is steadily subtracted in modernity from reasonable and differentiated societies – has been pronounced dead, dissected and laid to rest, the secular nevertheless remains a problem for literary history and theory. Secularisation is inextricable from the multifarious, ever-shifting phenomena designated ‘religion’, but is in its own right as complex and strange a character in stories of modern cultures. We should consider the possibility that the secular is as arduous to inhabit, as complex to construct, and as challenging to conceptualise as faith, the sacred, divinity, prophecy, conversion, revelation, grace, the eternal soul, divine judgement, covenant and so on, and that one of modern literature’s great struggles has been to imagine secular worlds. If this is the case – that the secular is not the passive remainder of other cultural practices (‘religions’) but an audacious cultural project that dreams itself in literature – we have many questions to answer. In what follows, I approach the idea of a secular world as one committed to human survival; the ambiguity of what human survival means in modernity, and ambivalence about its worth, are what so dynamically engage (and viciously trouble) modernism’s imaginative capacities. The four propositions below are incremental steps for gaining further traction in thinking about modernism and the secular. My goal is to clarify methodological issues and test a normative claim about the secular, as a commitment to human survival and specific stance toward human remains. I intend for this thematic and conceptual approach to complement Suzanne Hobson’s rich historicist scholarship on interwar organised secularism.1 Comparatively, what follows are speculative propositions which explore the secular as a historically situated metaphysical stance, an approach which also contrasts with political interpretations of secularism as an expression of biopolitics and governmentality, in a discursive and administrative play of colonial domination.2 1 

Suzanne Hobson, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 2  This biopolitical interpretation of secularism is crucial for many cultural histories and social analyses (and I work within it elsewhere). See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), and many who have extended his project. For an astute recent discussion of this approach, see Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 23–47.

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In this existential and ethical approach to the secular, I suggest that other political interpretations may be possible. I conclude with a brief reading of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’ in terms of the questions at hand about the secular as a distinctive ethical stance toward time. My basic ground is that modernism is a rich archive for investigating the complexity of secularisation and a powerful discourse about the possibility of living in secular existential and ethical frameworks. This is peculiar ground because many scholars take the secular for granted, ignore it, or reduce it to the negative space of religion. So, I start with a claim about the peculiar status of the secular in modernist studies. Thesis 1: Literary scholars face a conceptual and methodological impasse in researching the secular dimensions of modernism. This impasse arises because the secular nature of academic criticism conditions scholars to alternate between disregarding religion and regarding modern stances toward religion as a primary phenomenon to be explained, rather than stances toward the secular. While other humanities and social science disciplines have developed analytical tools for addressing secularisation as a compelling issue and question, few in modernist studies have used them.3 The way most literary scholars do secular criticism – what Aamir Mufti, following Edward Said, describes as ‘a practice of unbelief [. . .] [directed] at all those moments at which thought and culture become frozen, congealed, thinglike, and self-enclosed’ – tends to prevent us from taking the secular itself as an object of knowledge, or even identifying it as a phenomenon at stake in our fields.4 This minimal intelligibility is in part the problem of foreground and background; the secular remains almost entirely in the background of our analyses of other social and cultural phenomena, including religion, as if secular social formations were a neutral or simple fact. Yet many modernist writers, as well as theorists in other disciplines, hold a very different view, that secular world-making is an enormously complicated and fraught enterprise. Modernism is often ‘about’ theology, faith traditions, sacred ritual and related phenomena, but it is also about the existential complexities and ethical negotiations distinctive to secular worlds. Just as modernist writers desired, loathed, marvelled at, identified with, repudiated and otherwise engaged religion, so with secularisation. Secularisation was, and remains, a dynamically expressive cultural project at the heart of modern literature,

3 

Significant, exemplary research in modernist studies on secularisation includes Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) and ‘Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy’, PMLA 132, no. 2 (March 2008): 466–76; Vincent Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015); Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Matthew Mutter, Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); and Hobson, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture. 4  Aamir Mufti, ‘Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times’, boundary 2 31, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 2–3. See Edward Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1–30. Other important considerations of this question include essays collected in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), and Stathis Gourgouris, Lessons in Secular Criticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

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even if few of our analyses have adequately registered the force of modernism’s secular imaginary. Modernist studies has scarcely articulated the potential for making discoveries, through our research, about secular social formations and symbolic practices. The unfamiliarity, even peculiarity, of the question ‘what is the secular dimension of modernist literature?’ needs to be interrogated. If this question sounds nearly tautological – akin to asking ‘what is the modern dimension of modernist literature?’ – the problem lies in our guiding methods and concepts, rather than with the question itself. In this claim that we should shift our questions, I want to complicate Susan Stanford Friedman’s recent observation that ‘modernism – at least in early twentieth-century Europe – has seemed predominantly secular’.5 While this observation facilitates Friedman’s important study of imperial configurations of religion in modernism, my concern is not whether we should consider these texts to be secular or religious – an often confusing exercise in categorisation or definition. Rather, my concern is how these texts imagine and invent the secular, an intricate symbolic field, whatever degree they may be said to endorse or inhabit it. We can consider the difficulty of addressing the secular dimension of modernist literature with another spatial metaphor. Where, in what textual sites, is modernist writing secular? Much of this writing seems to simply show its secular condition on every surface, in any description, image or effect that is not explicitly religious, as a nearly constant and unproblematic default announcement; and it is also too deep, with the social fact of secularisation a foundational precondition for its very textual existence. Assumed to be either too superficial or too embedded to be discerned as a discrete phenomenon, modernism’s secular dimension is foreclosed as an intelligible literary issue. From this perspective, there seems to be an asymmetry between reading for religion and reading for the secular: while it would be coherent to describe a novel as religiously expressive or to propose an anthology of religious poetry, the claim that a novel features secular characters, or a proposal for an anthology of secular poetry, or a plan for a museum of secular lifeways, would be met with some confusion. Similarly, the religious and the secular conjugate with modern institutional forms in asymmetrical ways: institutions are frequently demarcated as religious, but there is scarcely an equivalent concept of an institution that expresses the secular as a social identity or that bears the meaning or purpose of the secular as such (even if these institutions are products of differentiation). Charles Hirschkind explores this asymmetry, in his anthropological work, as a problem of embodied determinants: each time we attempt to characterize a secular subject in terms of a determinant set of embodied dispositions, we lose a sense of what secular refers to. Note as well that, while the statement, ‘He lives a very religious life’ gives us some sense of the shape of a life, ‘He lives a very secular life’ tells us almost nothing (except, negatively, that the person does not engage in practices of worship).6 In what follows, I suggest some possibilities for conceptualising the secular in positive terms; rather than an absence or deficit, I hope to show that the secular is a distinct

5 

Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison’, in The New Modernist Studies, ed. Douglas Mao (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 90. 6  Charles Hirschkind, ‘Is There a Secular Body?’, Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 641.

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normative project that draws on modernism’s rich aesthetic capacities to emerge into thought, feeling and action. Modernism helps us understand the secular as a world-making project and ethical venture, intelligible in its own terms. As a second thesis, I propose that the secular dimension of modernism responds in unique ways to specific problems of valuing human lives in the face of modernity’s most extreme disruptions and disorientations. It fashions a distinct metaphysical grammar of human survival. Thesis 2: The secular is a distinctive attempt to imagine human survival in, and despite, modernity’s specific contradictions for valuing human life. Modernism articulates the secular as a new stance toward what remains of persons. As a modern stance toward what survives, the secular is a speculative discourse about traces. The problematic of survival and concept of the trace, as indices of human finitude, are crucial for understanding modernism as a secular discourse. In this line of thought, modernism’s secular imaginary stages metaphysical questions about time, as the condition of human subjectivity, and works through possibilities for the material and symbolic survival of mortal beings. It is an aesthetic engagement with this existential situation, finitude and the survival of worldly traces with complex symbolic force. The secular is a new stance toward what can survive in an immanent, material frame. Rather than primarily an interior drama of faith or scepticism, investigation of affective relations to religious symbols or rituals, or engagement with theodicy, modernism’s secular imaginary is crucially about the grammar, or temporal and logical structure, of mortal personhood and its posthumous legibility as traces. Modernism is secular in those registers that work through the enterprise of human survival in timeboundedness, its construction of symbolic zones of worldly meaning for fragile and vanishing beings. The cultural or political disavowal of religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for secular ways of imagining human survival in time, as a metaphysical stance toward what remains of persons; and, depending on the context, the avowal of religion does not necessarily preclude a secular concern with finite survival and the social circulation of compelling traces of human lives. Theological critique and doubts about faith are fundamental to religion itself, core aspects of religious life, and not the equivalent of secular world-making. Nor is complete indifference toward or ignorance of religion a normative secular project; in this sense, non-religion is not the definition of the secular. Secular life is actively oriented toward the question of human survival, in material and symbolic forms, conceived entirely in the passing time of this world. Early in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Flanders reflects awkwardly on her husband’s epitaph, on display in the local graveyard: ‘A merchant of this city,’ the tombstone said; though why Betty Flanders had chosen so to call him [. . .] – well, she had to call him something [. . .] Had he, then, been nothing? An unanswerable question, since even if it weren’t the habit of the undertaker to close the eyes, the light so soon goes out of them.7

7 

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (New York: Penguin, 1992), 11.

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Woolf sounds the peculiarity of the rhetoric and imagery by which he lives on, a posthumous person bearing a social identity. He is ambiguously present, between his gravesite and her memory, but one can not quite name what it is of him that survives, legible for the living. Woolf presents him in dispersal, undone by an irony of his cultural situation – one of diminished figurative resources and attenuated ritual practices oriented toward dead people. I suggest that the secular, as a normative ethical project, is the attempt to qualify this posthumous dispersal of identity in new ways, to negotiate new terms for ameliorating this dispersal of traces and undoing of personhood. Seven years prior, Kafka stopped writing The Trial with K. executed on the outskirts of town. What of him will remain? K. will be gone, we know in the novel’s final sentence, but ‘it was as if the shame of it would outlive him’.8 The awkwardness, peculiarity or shame of being dead in modernised social worlds is at the heart of modernism’s secular imaginary. This writing explores new conjugations of is and was, new formulations of presence and absence, as an attempt to develop a secular metaphysics of posthumous personhood. As an exploration of what survives in history, memory and material culture, rather than ahistorically or atemporally, modernism imagines secular worlds capable of holding the human, in our finitude. It renders the proposition: this world is the one that the dead go to. As I further argue below, the secular values the human in its specific, modern confrontations with overwhelming economic and social forces that require persons to be constituted as expendable and fungible. The secular addresses this modern situation by imagining modes of human survival and developing strategies for shaping the presence of posthumous persons. These strategies involve grappling with the metaphysics of time and the political economy of traces, rather than theologies of eternity or a desire for timelessness. This argument, that interpretation of modernism’s secular imaginary should take seriously its metaphysical grammar of human survival, draws crucial terms directly from Martin Hägglund’s extensive philosophical and literary engagements with the religious and the secular. Across several studies, Hägglund conceptualises the secular as a recognition that finitude, time-boundedness and vulnerability are the constitutive conditions for our valuing anything that we commit to or care about. An eternal horizon, without loss, makes our effortful care and passionate attachments unintelligible. Hägglund argues that we desire living on, more of human life, rather than eternity, an endless condition without change, difference or the possibility of loss: ‘The precarious experience of time is not only a negative peril but also the positive possibility of coming into being, living on, and being motivated to act’; ‘Being eternal is therefore undesirable and a standpoint of eternity is unintelligible, since it would remove any form of practical commitment that makes it possible to be engaged in the world.’9 His elaborate deductions about the undesirability of infinite existence, which forecloses human life as an experience of caring, concern and effort, offer an abstract framework for approaching modernism as a secular discourse. From this perspective, modernism’s secular imaginary is articulated in aesthetic performances of the complex desire to

8 

Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 249. Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 2019), 44, 48. See also Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) and Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

9 

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live on, rather than to experience timelessness; it invents new forms for time-bounded remaining, for mortal creatures who dwell in history, collective memory, and other existential orientations constituted by change and the risk of annihilation. Modernism is a discourse about precarious human survival in an immanent frame, through worldly care and the material circulation of traces.10 The artists of the modernising world sought strategies for holding these traces, in a waste-ridden age of ecological precarity, against their increasingly efficient disposal. There is an acute historical significance to modernism’s commitment to imagining human survival in an immanent frame, in terms of temporal instability and human sociality rather than transcendence. This metaphysical project was historically situated and conditioned; secularisation matters because of the way it answers specific needs of its cultural moment. In several regions throughout the world, heavy industrialisation, complex bureaucratisation in politics and law, intensifications of capital circulation, and the domination of other highly depersonalised systems over important aspects of many lives changed basic experiences of personhood and communal belonging. These organisational changes in human life fundamentally altered experiences of social identity and agency, and posed the problem of human survival in a new way. The modernisation of social life posed, as never before, the existential problem of the fungibility of persons. Thesis 3: As a new stance toward what remains, the secular is a canny response to the increasing fungibility of persons in social life. The secular is a creative ethical response to new regimes of human abstraction, quantification and replaceability. [E]ven though we are much more dependent on the whole of society through the complexity of our needs on the one hand, and the specialization of our abilities on the other, than are primitive people who could make their way through life with their very narrow isolated group, we are remarkably independent of every specific member of this society, because his significance for us has been transferred to the one-sided objectivity of his contribution, which can be just as easily produced by any number of other people with different personalities with whom we are connected only by an interest that can be completely expressed in money terms. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1900, 321–2) In this thesis, on modernity as a regime of the radical fungibility of persons, I suggest a distinction between modernisation as a set of social and technological processes and the secular as a cultural response to, and reaction against, them. While secularisation

10 

In this opening framing of the secular as a complex normative project, rather than a deficit or lack of religion, we can complement Hägglund’s argument about the necessity of a secular metaphysics for a recognisable human life with two other recent studies. While Paul Saint-Amour’s Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016) do not thematise the secular as such, they offer bracing, eloquent descriptions of modern aesthetic engagements with the fragility of human survival and posthumous personhood in dispersal. Both books investigate art under urgent pressure to create forms capable of holding the dead in this world, as investigations of an ethics of survival. Our question is about how secular worlds gather traces for survival in an immanent frame; Sharpe and Saint-Amour approach this question in original and complex ways, emphasising aesthetic responses to traumatic violence, the racial politics of being, and other issues entailing precarious world-making and the survival of traces in the context of annihilation.

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is often described as a disenchanting social process, akin to the rise of the nationstate and its bureaucracies, industrialisation, the rationalisation of social relations, and pervasive extension of market economies, I propose a different approach: that we consider the secular to be the world-making cultural practices that resist specific corrosive effects of modernisation. In this argument, the secular is how modernity thinks the irreducible singularity of persons against emerging conditions for their substitution or sublation, in and against a pervasive context of human fungibility. I approach the secular in its acute ambivalence, as both extremely modern and contrary to modernisation. In modernism, the secular seeks terms for human survival from within its new social and existential situations. Simmel’s passage symptomises what became increasingly thinkable in the past century, the embeddedness of human lives in increasingly complex social, economic and industrial systems, systems that themselves generated systems for organising human lives on a mass scale. In an extending and interconnected field of bureaucracies and institutions, subject to increasingly complex and empowered algorithms, people frequently came to experience their own anonymous quantification. In the same era, Max Weber’s nuanced attempts to grasp the nature of bureaucracies, as enduring administrative machines for applying abstract regulations, were fundamentally based on concepts of depersonalisation: ‘It is decisive for the specific nature of modern loyalty to an office that, in the pure type, it does not establish a relationship to a person, like the vassal’s or disciple’s faith in feudal or in patrimonial relations of authority. Modern loyalty is devoted to impersonal and functional purposes’; ‘Bureaucratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely objective considerations [. . .] The “objective” discharge of business primarily means a discharge of business according to calculable rules and “without regard for persons”.’11 The world we know now became, in its emerging dominance, intelligible for self-understanding then: an efficient indifference to particular people in countless interactions, tasks and projects accumulated into a new social ontology, the pervasive functional equivalency of persons in many spheres of life. My broad assertion is that the secular is an ethical response to this machinic devaluing of persons. Only by considering this sea-change in the available contexts for personhood can we understand the new attempts to relate to mortality and posthumous personhood that constitute the secular.12

11 

Max Weber, ‘Bureaucracy’, in Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Routledge, 2009), 199, 215. 12  Theoretical inquiry into the political ramifications of fungibility has emerged most forcefully in analyses of anti-blackness and related critical theorisation of race and imperialism, a complex context for my argument, with its very different focus on the secular. See as exemplary Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 27–98; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21, 25–6; Stephen H. Marshall, ‘The Political Life of Fungibility’, Theory & Event 15, no. 3 (2012); Tiffany Lethabo King, ‘The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly)’, Antipode 48, no. 4 (2016): 1022–39; C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 55–97; Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); Sabine Broeck, Gender and the Abjection of Blackness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), 97–176; Mark Rifkin, Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 73–116; and Caroline H. Yang, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2020), 65–108.

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In this sense of the secular, as a pointed resistance to modern fungibility, the rampant factory scenes of Chaplin’s Modern Times, for example, are in a startling conversation with Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy: ‘Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we, too, / just once. And never again. But to have been / this once, completely, even if only once: / to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.’13 Across the arts, the secular expressed itself as an ethos, not for repudiating faith, but as a commitment to working through remaining possibilities for human traces against the mechanical reproduction of disposable personhood in social life. Secular cultural expressions became an alternative to established religious practices for symbolising, or wishing for, the non-fungibility of humans and their posthumous traces. Significant aspects of modernism express an imaginative commitment to singular persons in a world of their dynamic interchangeability. Because this interchangeability was also directly involved in new experiences of social freedom – including freedom from ecclesiastical authorities – modernism’s secular imaginary confronts several complexities. For many, fungibility was an aspect of independence. Simmel formulates this tension between fungibility and freedom as the tension between subjective and objective aspects of personhood: ‘The cause as well as the effect of such objective dependencies, where the subject as such remains free, rests upon the interchangeability of persons: the change of human subjects [. . .] discloses the indifference to subjective elements of dependence that characterizes the experience of freedom.’14 If the secular, as a new stance toward human survival, is an imaginative reaction against the indifferent replaceability of people in modernised social spheres, it is also a negotiation with the subjective sense of freedom afforded by it. Modernism asks: how does the social flexibility and independence afforded by fungibility relate to the desire for survival? As people increasingly experience the interchangeability of their social being, what aspect of them remains capable of ethical, non-instrumental signification? Modernism, the quintessential art of contingency, was also an investigation into the power of existential traces to survive in their singularity as a strong mark in time. As a new stance toward what survives of persons in modernity, the secular emerges from a further complexity, the dynamic tension between singularity and fungibility. Thinking fungibility is the precondition to thinking singularity. The dialectical structure of fungibility and singularity, each meaningful only in relation to the other, complicates the claim that the secular is a way to articulate an ethics of human singularity in specifically modern conditions of social fungibility. But that is the claim I try to develop. Every person is singular, also replaceable; the modern individual is both conceptualised as unique and functionally expendable. The drama of liberal humanism, rooted in possessive individualism, is the deep implication of ethical claims of individual rights and worth with the facts of economic, social and political fungibility; the very systems of production and administration that abstract persons as quantifiable and functionally exchangeable are also those that sponsor the ideological category of the individual. My interest is in how a secular stance toward what survives of persons is a response to this contradiction, and in how the secular distinguishes itself from

13 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poetry, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 199. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. David Frisby [1900] (New York: Routledge, 2004), 322–3.

14 

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the religious in addressing it as a problem involved in survival. As I discuss below, I describe this contradiction as the uncertain ground for secular hope. Modern attempts to articulate the inherent value of mortal and dead persons, in their finitude and within a materialist, historical framework, are at the heart of secular world-making. If religious traditions also think the singularity of persons, they do so without the ultimate affirmation of the finite, material existence of vanishing beings in this impermanent world. A secular stance toward this life conceives its value as finite, without other ends aside from this condition of precarious and temporary being. It wishes for no other world. The secular is the struggle to conceive of human value as inherently perishing and metaphysically finite in the context of rampant social and economic systems designed to render human value exchangeable and expendable. It is the cultural project committed to gathering and circulating traces and remains under the new, voracious terms of their fungibility and instrumentalisation. Modernism’s secular imaginary, an investigation into worldly human survival in modern conditions of precarity and fungibility, asks: what non-fungible quotient of personhood might remain for a generation or two, in secular thought and feeling about the dead? What cultural practices characterise secular attempts to maintain these traces against accelerating cycles of consumption and disposal – against the massive increase of waste in daily life? And how can the literary imagination negotiate the task of human survival against fungibility and waste with urgent ecological considerations, faced with damage to ecological systems? Each of these elaborate questions refracts Kant’s bracing, fundamental one: what may we hope in a secular age? Thesis 4: Modernism is a critique of secular hope. Modernism examines the conditions and legitimacy of hope for worldly survival, in a negotiation between the desire to live on and a recognition of the temporal terms of meaningful existence in an age of radical human fungibility and ecological precarity. If the most powerful discourses of hope for millennia were religious, the secular is the emergence of practices and structures of hope in response to new conditions for human survival. Modernist literature is their critique, an attempt both to articulate them and test their sufficiency and legitimacy. In a remarkable passage in ‘The Social Psychology of World Religions’ (1922), Max Weber offers an intricate taxonomy of what religions have hoped, an array of what has been imagined and desired beyond the limits of human possibility. In this gathering, he helps us consider the historical and cultural complexity of hope, as a fundamental way of creating human meaning. And in his analytical, objectifying approach to religious hope, he suggests how a secular critique of hope in and for the modern world might unfold. One could wish to be saved from political and social servitude and lifted into a Messianic realm in the future of this world; or one could wish to be saved from being defiled by ritual impurity and hope for the pure beauty of psychic and bodily existence. One could wish to escape being incarcerated in an impure body and hope for a purely spiritual existence. One could wish to be saved from the eternal and senseless play of human passions and desires and hope for the quietude of the pure beholding of the divine. One could wish to be saved from radical evil and the servitude of sin and hope for the eternal and free benevolence in the lap

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of a fatherly god. One could wish to be saved from peonage under the astrologically conceived determination of stellar constellations and long for the dignity of freedom and partaking of the substance of the hidden deity. One could wish to be redeemed from the barriers to the finite, which express themselves in suffering, misery and death, and the threatening punishment of hell, and hope for an eternal bliss in an earthly or paradisical future existence. One could wish to be saved from the cycle of rebirths with their inexorable compensations for the deeds of the times past and hope for eternal rest. One could wish to be saved from senseless brooding and events and long for the dreamless sleep. Many more varieties of belief have, of course, existed.15 The pathos of this moment in intellectual history – the social scientist looking backward to gather for critical examination, or astonished exhibition, innumerable hopes for transcendence, peace, redemption, justice and freedom – is in part the implicit question that hovers above it: what may we hope now, in modernity, as a secular practice, in an age of our radical social fungibility and complicity in ecological disaster? Many years later, Max Horkheimer observes, from a similar perspective, that ‘religion is the record of the wishes, desires, and accusations of countless generations’.16 My argument is that we can approach modernism as such a record for a modernising world, an imaginative critique of secular hope.

Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’: The Particulars of Survival In the fourth stanza of ‘Sunday Morning’ (1923), Stevens gathers his own eloquent catalogue of transcendent spheres, in order to dismiss them: There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured As April’s green endures17 Stevens offers this brief poetic history of what he considers inoperable or obsolete religious hope in order to relish whatever remains of their imaginative richness, to stage pleasure in their attenuated aesthetic presence. It is theological repudiation as rarefied connoisseurship, which makes explicit a similar suppressed effect in Weber’s litany. Many years later, in his 1951 lecture ‘Two or Three Ideas’, Stevens conceives of gods as creative, stylistic accomplishments of the human communities that create

15 

Max Weber, ‘The Social Psychology of World Religions’, in Essays in Sociology, 280–1. Max Horkheimer, ‘Thoughts on Religion’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 129. 17  Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 54. 16 

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them, not to reduce their significance but to acknowledge their unique cultural force: ‘I do not refer to them in their religious aspects but as creations of the imagination; and I suppose that with all creations of the imagination I have been thinking of them from the point of view of style, that is to say of their style.’18 He suggests that it is gods’ styles – rather than their ethical or theological principles – that remain after their passing from authority. It is their style that makes them gods. [. . .] When the time came for them to go, it was a time when their aesthetic had become invalid in the presence not of a greater aesthetic of the same kind, but of a different aesthetic, of which from the point of view of greatness, the difference was that of an intenser humanity.19 This aesthetic theory of the historicity, or mortality, of the gods, although more idiosyncratic than William James’s pragmatic theory of religious obsolescence, is useful for a surprising suggestion, that hope is the deep embrace of a style.20 For Stevens, style is being, how existence itself is an expressive vocation or aesthetic event; his idea is that style, aesthetic technique, is what remains from past practices of radical hope, that is, hope at a metaphysical pitch. ‘Sunday Morning’ animates the struggle to assume a new stance toward what remains of persons in a situation of their pervasive fungibility and disposability. The poem’s disarming styles, or discursive modes, rather than its particular images, are what concern me. What can we hope in a secular age? In the poem’s second stanza, the voice meditates on what to cherish in the immanent, material world. Yet this embrace of the real is subtly hypothetical, quasi-abstract, ambiguously plural and vaguely gestural: Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul. Stevens’s lyrical rhetoric offers experiences that are neither particular nor abstract, a hybrid of the concrete and the conceptual; these are sensations available to be

18 

Wallace Stevens, ‘Two or Three Ideas’, in Collected Poetry and Prose, 841. Stevens, ‘Two or Three Ideas’, 847. 20  ‘The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who founded the particular cult bore witness was worth something to them personally. They could use him. He guided their imagination, warranted their hopes, and controlled their will – or else they required him as a safeguard against the demon and a curber of other people’s crimes. In any case, they chose him for the value of the fruits he seemed to them to yield [. . .] The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another.’ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), 362–3. 19 

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realised, rather than actualised perceptions; if these scenes are somehow beautiful, it is in their mutual transferability and final equivalence, ‘all pleasures and all pains’ in a sufficient distribution. This is a poetics of qualitative fungibility, the condition of this world. Scholars have long affiliated Stevens’s poetry with the secular, but the problem of a commitment to human survival in emerging contexts of disposable personhood and ecological catastrophe may shift our sense of his style.21 In the poem’s final stanza, he writes: We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. ‘We live’: but there is no content or texture to living in these abstractions that have declined to will themselves into presence; this is life supplanted by the idea of living or a propositional existence. The rhetorical clarity and assurance of these lines merge with a quietly reliable cosmos – the elder sun, enduring partnership between day and night – but humans can leave no trace, make no difference, offer no judgement in this world. People simply pass through, unperceived, individual instances of an abstraction. The final stanza concludes with the slight shift in existential grammar we had not known we awaited, an articulation of singular events in their specific relations, moments that are just once, and never again, and beyond undoing: Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulation as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings. If modernism is a critique of secular hope, it moves between fungibility and singularity to test what remains of passing lives, in the care of others for whom survival is a human practice. In this momentary experience of intricate relation, a world gathering itself, we also find an attunement to those traces that might remain of it: deer prints, bird cry, berry stains, images in some mind of bird flight. Or nothing of these, in their fragility. These traces are what modernism’s secular imaginary provides to us for knowing human existence, remains to be cared for in their ongoing annihilation. The secular hopes that this annihilation is at least complicated, extended, and that what we will have been might be seen through darkness.

21 

For an extensive and nuanced discussion of Stevens’s secularist negotiations with poetic language (particularly anthropomorphism, metaphor and tautology), see Mutter, Restless Secularism, 30–64.

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Works Cited Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, eds. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Berry, Daina Ramey. The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. Best, Stephen M. The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Broeck, Sabine. Gender and the Abjection of Blackness. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. Coviello, Peter. Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Friedman, Susan Stanford. ‘Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison.’ In The New Modernist Studies, edited by Douglas Mao, 88–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Gourgouris, Stathis. Lessons in Secular Criticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Hägglund, Martin. Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. ———. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. ———. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York: Pantheon, 2019. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hirschkind, Charles. ‘Is There a Secular Body?’ Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 633–47. Hobson, Suzanne. Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Horkheimer, Max. ‘Thoughts on Religion.’ In Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. 129–31. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: The Modern Library, 2002. Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956. King, Tiffany Lethabo. ‘The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly).’ Antipode 48, no. 4 (2016): 1022–39. Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Marshall, Stephen H. ‘The Political Life of Fungibility.’ Theory & Event 15, no. 3 (2012). Mufti, Aamir. ‘Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times.’ boundary 2 31, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 1–9. Mutter, Matthew. Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pecora, Vincent. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ———. Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Rifkin, Mark. Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Selected Poetry. Edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

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Saint-Amour, Paul. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Translated by David Frisby. New York: Routledge, 2004. Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Viswanathan, Gauri. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. ———. ‘Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy.’ PMLA 132, no. 2 (March 2008): 466–76. Weber, Max. ‘Bureaucracy.’ In Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. 196–244. New York: Routledge, 2009. ———. ‘The Social Psychology of World Religions.’ In Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. 267–301. New York: Routledge, 2009. Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. New York: Penguin, 1992. Yang, Caroline H. The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2020.

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9 C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards and ‘Word Magic’: Rethinking the Relation of Language to Myth Leigh Wilson

I

n the final essay of their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), ‘Elements of AntiSemitism: Limits of Enlightenment’, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno bring together the arguments of the essays that precede it to show how a reified enlightenment – one that reduces thought to calculation and computation – has led to the horror of the Holocaust. Central to their overall argument is the assertion that such positivism is in fact a form of myth. While ‘Enlightenment’s program’ ostensibly aims at ‘the disenchantment of the world’, regarding the basis of myth as the ‘projection of subjective properties onto nature’ and wanting to ‘dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge’ that has been gained through the application of reason to the data of observation, this ‘extirpation of animism’ in its evacuation of thought leads in fact back to myth. Horkheimer and Adorno challenge the assumption that myth – associated with traditional attitudes to the world and with premodern cultures – and positivism occupy positions of extreme opposition in the relations between subject and object, between mind and world. Rather they assert that without the mediation of thought, positivism reproduces exactly the ‘false projection’ of myth.1 As is clear throughout Dialectic of Enlightenment, language is key in this. Positivism sees language as an enemy: ‘the latest logic denounces the words of language, which bear the stamp of impressions, as counterfeit coins that would be better replaced by neutral counters.’2 Language, under enlightenment, must ‘resign itself to being calculation’.3 In ‘The Culture Industry’, the penultimate essay of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno explain how the language of enlightenment too, however, returns to myth: the more purely and transparently [words] communicate what they designate, the more impenetrable they become. The demythologising of language, as an element of the total process of enlightenment, reverts to magic.4

1 

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 4, 1, 2, 154. 2  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2. 3  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 13. 4  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 133.

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In ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’, Horkheimer and Adorno describe powerfully the kind of language which is the product of the reified enlightenment which in turn makes dialectical thought impossible: ‘In the age of the “three hundred basic words” [der dreihundert Grundworte] the ability to exercise judgment, and therefore to distinguish between true and false, is vanishing.’5 Attempts to reduce and simplify language for the purposes of clearer communication and ease of learning were indeed part of the reformist, rationalising tendencies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Horkheimer and Adorno’s allusion may be to the Berlitz Method of language learning, begun in 1878, which focused on a vocabulary of 1,500 words.6 As the scare quotes of this translation perhaps imply, however, the word ‘basic’ had been co-opted for an actual language in the late 1920s. At the beginning of 1929, the Cambridge polymath C. K. Ogden announced his creation of a new language, Basic English, standing for British American Scientific International Commercial, rooted in Standard English but with a much-reduced vocabulary and a simplified grammar.7 It was designed to speed up the learning of English as a second language in order to facilitate international business and scientific discourse. Beyond this, and more grandly, Ogden believed such improvements in communication would reduce misunderstanding and conflict and eventually make war unnecessary.8 Basic English consisted of just 850 words which Ogden claimed would ‘say clearly and simply almost everything we normally say with fifteen or twenty thousand’.9 He proselytised hard for Basic English through the 1930s, joined in this by his co-author from the 1920s, I. A. Richards.10 In the 1930s and into the 1940s Richards too worked tirelessly in the promotion of Basic, setting up teaching institutions in China, training teachers in Basic, writing books on it and working in the US on the creation of, among other things, Basic cartoons.11 Up until the Second World War, their efforts met with much success. Basic cornered the market in English-language teaching in East Asia, especially in China. It was noted and taken seriously by figures from Ezra Pound to H. G. Wells, from George Orwell to T. S. Eliot. Towards the end of the war, Winston Churchill saw Basic as potentially key to the UK’s future position; he recommended it to the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and set up a government commission to investigate it.12 For Ogden, though, Basic was more than a tool for teaching English, more even than an antidote to war; it was ‘a technique for achieving control of the language

 5 

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 167. ‘Im Zeitalter der dreihundert Grundworte verschwindet die Fähigkeit zur Anstrengung des Urteilens und damit der Unterschied zwischen wahr und falsch’; Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1947).  6  See Gerhard J. Stieglitz, ‘The Berlitz Method’, The Modern Language Journal 39, no. 6 (October 1955): 300–10.  7  C. K. Ogden, ‘The Universal Language’, Psyche 9, no. 3 (January 1929): 1–9.  8  C. K. Ogden, Debabelization (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1931), 12.  9  C. K. Ogden, ‘Basic English and Grammatical Reform’, in From Bentham to Basic English, ed. W. Terrence Gordon [1936] (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994), 188. 10  For a full account of this see James McElvenny, Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism: C. K. Ogden and his Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). 11  See John Paul Russo, I. A. Richards: His Life and Work (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 436. 12  Russo, I. A. Richards, 438.

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machine’,13 a machine that was out of control because it was awash with mythical uses of language, which Ogden named ‘word magic’. This, he believed, was the assumption that the primary relation in language was between words and things, rather than between words and thoughts.14 The work he co-authored in the early 1920s with Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (1923), is largely a setting out of the argument that, rather than a relation of identity between a word and its referent, meaning comprises a complex network of relations between a word and the ‘contexts’ for thought about its referent – memories, that is, of past uses of the word and associated words. ‘Word magic’ mistook a metaphorical relation – similarities between contexts – for an actual one and so wrongly assumed that abstractions – for example ‘beauty’ – denoted entities in the world. So far, so ‘dreihundert Grundworte’. Certainly, critics other than Horkheimer and Adorno have also seen Basic English as unambiguously positivist, but they mostly lack Adorno and Horkheimer’s sense that this would return it to myth. Since the pioneering work on Ogden and his career done by W. Terrence Gordon in the 1990s,15 Basic English has begun to appear regularly in work on the interwar period. Whether seeing it as significant or criticising its error, all of this work has placed Basic English very firmly on the side of positivism. Megan Quigley, in considering the translation into Basic English of part of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake – organised by Ogden in the late 1920s and early 1930s16 – suggests finally that the artificial language is an instance of a ‘naïve enthusiasm’ for ‘all things scientific and rational’ during the period.17 Lydia Liu, from the opposite position, reaches a similar conclusion. She implicitly praises Basic English as a precursor to the probabilistic theories of language initiated by Claude Shannon’s post-war creation of Printed English which laid the basis for information theory. Basic, she says, fundamentally conceives of English ‘as a statistical system’: ‘prior to the invention of the computer, Ogden’s statistical treatment of the vocabulary already presupposed a technological view of language.’18 In this chapter, however, I want to suggest a different reading of Basic English and of the linguistic theories which produced it. Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that the languages of positivism and the languages of myth are entwined in the reified enlightenment, but the assessments of Basic English in Quigley and Liu are based on the assumption that these languages are opposites. In what follows I will show that the work of both Ogden and Richards is key in rethinking the supposed split between positivism and myth. In the work of Ogden through the interwar period can

13 

Ogden, ‘Basic English and Grammatical Reform’, 215. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 8th edn [1923] (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1946), 11. 15  See, for example, W. Terrence Gordon, C. K. Ogden: A Bio-bibliographic Study (Metuchin, NJ, and London: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1990); C. K. Ogden, Psyche, introduced by W. Terrence Gordon, 18 vols (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995); and C. K. Ogden, C. K. Ogden and Linguistics, ed. W. Terrence Gordon, 18 vols (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994). 16  The translation was published first in Ogden’s magazine Psyche in October 1931, then in Eugene Jolas’s transition 21 in 1932. 17  Megan Quigley, Modern Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 146. 18  Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 91, 93. 14 

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be seen, rather than the unambiguous positivism seen by recent critics, the return to myth predicted by Horkheimer and Adorno. By tracing the precise reasons for this, moreover, it becomes apparent how much of the work that Richards did, particularly in the 1930s, rather than preaching a positivism that collapses back into ‘word magic’, propounds a different kind of myth – one which, though partial and contradictory, approaches Horkheimer and Adorno’s sense of mediation as the answer to the reification of enlightenment. What Richards’s work of the 1930s can be seen as struggling towards (even if not achieving) is the sense that humans’ interaction with the world does not consist of disenchanted description – for Horkheimer and Adorno ‘mere perception, classification, and calculation’ – but of ‘mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning’.19

Ogden, Malinowski and Bentham: The Language of Pragmatism vs the Language of Myth Ogden and Richards met at Cambridge in 1918. They wrote together for the Cambridge Magazine – founded and edited by Ogden – and for the journal Psyche (which Ogden edited from 1923). It was in 1923, though, with the publication of The Meaning of Meaning, that their collaboration started to draw widespread attention and led directly to the creation of Basic English.20 The book attempted to create a ‘science of Symbolism’ that would expel ‘word magic’. Indeed such is their exasperation with the word magic of the intellectual culture of their time that Ogden and Richards call for ‘the Eugenics of Language’21 – and Basic English was created by Ogden to carry this out. Ogden called Basic ‘the enemy of Word Magic’ in 1934;22 it would, he argued two years later, ‘be one step nearer to Logic than any of our vernaculars’.23 However, as I will show in this section, Ogden’s ideas on the nature of desirable and undesirable language were much influenced by the work of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, and in repeating the assumptions of his work, Basic English returns inadvertently to myth. In his Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950: Writing on Language as Social Theory (2019), Ken Hirschkop, while seeing Ogden’s work as firmly positivist in its horror of a mythical attitude to language, suggests that it could be argued that The Meaning of Meaning, ‘far from stopping theories of word magic in their tracks [. . .] ended up making theories of word magic even more pervasive’ through its inclusion of an essay by Malinowski.24 While for Ogden word magic constituted a linguistic error, Hirschkop argues, Malinowski sees it as constituting language as such, quoting him as concluding in 1935 that ‘the main function of language is not to express thought,

19 

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 20. Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, v. 21  Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 135. 22  C. K. Ogden, ‘Editorial: Word Magic in Education’, Psyche 14 (1934): 7–8. 23  Ogden, ‘Basic English and Grammatical Reform’, 205. 24  Ken Hirschkop, Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950: Writing on Language as Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 165. 20 

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not to duplicate mental processes, but rather to play an active pragmatic part in human behaviour’.25 Hirschkop concludes from this that The force of magic was just a concentrated version of the general pragmatic force of all language, which, in the second half of the century, would become a subfield of linguistics and a live topic in analytic philosophy (where it would travel under the name of ‘speech acts’).26 He suggests, then, that Ogden’s mistake, and the reason he ended up inadvertently promoting rather than rooting out magic, was seeing magic as something that needed to be expelled from language rather than a misnaming of its central function. This is an acute assessment of Ogden’s mistake; however, Malinowski’s work at the time of his collaboration with Ogden and Richards suggests something other than a redefinition of magical language as pragmatic. In it, rather, implicit and not reflected on, are two senses of magic, one acknowledged but the other not. Malinowski’s work shows the power inherent in the pragmatic language of reference and action, but separates it off from the magic of spells and magical ritual. Ogden took one, the latter, into his word magic, but failed to see that the former inhered in the principles of Basic English. Ogden’s collapse back into myth was because of Malinowski’s influence, not because he misunderstood Malinowski’s argument. On his return from the Trobriand Islands after the First World War Malinowski regularly visited Ogden in Cambridge.27 In the essay Malinowski produced as a supplement for the first edition of The Meaning of Meaning, ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, his focus is on supporting Ogden and Richards’s claim that meaning can only be arrived at when contexts of use, rather than merely the phonetic character of the word, are taken into account – and he demonstrates this in the first half through a discussion of the difficulties of translation between the languages of New Guinea and English. Crucially, it is the pragmatic use of language by the Islanders which is most strongly asserted as supporting the theory of contexts in the essay. Malinowski argues that the language of the Islanders ‘in its primitive function and original form has an essentially pragmatic character’ and is not ‘expression of thought’.28 The real knowledge of a word comes through the practice of appropriately using it within a certain situation. The word, like any man-made implement, becomes significant only after it has been used and properly used under all sorts of conditions. Thus, there can be no definition of a word without the reality which it means being present.29

25 

Malinowski quoted in Hirschkop, Linguistic Turns, 165. Hirschkop, Linguistic Turns, 165. 27  I. A. Richards, ‘Co-author of “The Meaning of Meaning”’, in C. K. Ogden: A Collective Memoir, ed. P. S. Florence and J. R. L. Anderson (London: Pemberton, 1977), 104. 28  Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, in The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, 8th edn [1923] (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1946), 316. 29  Malinowski, ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, 325. 26 

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However, this ‘pragmatic’ use of language is sharply distinguished from magic and myth. In his seminal work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski argues that magic is a ‘special department’ for the Trobriand Islanders, and while words are key, it is only ‘certain words, uttered with the performance of certain actions by the man entitled to do it’ that constitute the magical in language.30 The distinction between this ‘department’ and the rest of life can be seen, Malinowski argues, in the fact that ‘[a] considerable proportion of the words found in magic do not belong to ordinary speech, but are archaisms, mythical names and strange compounds, formed according to unusual linguistic rules’.31 In an essay from three years later, ‘Magic, Science and Religion’, while Malinowski acknowledges that the magical attitude to the physical world had more in common with science than religion, magical language is sharply divided off both from the scientific and from the ‘profane’ side of indigenous life.32 Indeed, Malinowski concludes, while profane language and activity are ‘superficially’ like the magical, actually ‘the real virtue of magic [. . .] is fixed only in the spell and in its rite’.33 What Malinowski discerns in the pragmatic language of the Islanders he studies allies it firmly, though, with what Horkheimer and Adorno call the ‘nominalist tendency’ of positivism:34 The outer world interests [the Trobriand Islander] in so far as it yields things useful [. . .] All such significant things stand out for the savage as isolated, detached units against an undifferentiated background [. . .] In the landscape, the small details are often named and treated in tradition, and they arouse interest, while big stretches of land remain without name and individuality.35 This pragmatic language, as we have seen, used for referring to a world of physical objects, returns for Horkheimer and Adorno to a mythical sense of language. Even though Malinowski does not make this connection in his arguments, such language is in effect a kind of spell, or conjuring, as his description of it in his supplementary essay to The Meaning of Meaning suggests: A word, signifying an important utensil, is used in action, not to comment on its nature or reflect on its properties, but to make it appear, be handed over to the speaker, or to direct another man to its proper use.36 The Meaning of Meaning follows Malinowski’s double sense of language – the pragmatic and the magical or mythic – and like Malinowski fails to see the connections between them. The instrumental nature of words has led to ‘every age’ attributing ‘to 30 

Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), 427. 31  Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 432. 32  Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Magic, Science and Religion’, in Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, selected and with an introduction by Robert Redfield [1925] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), 3, 9–10. 33  Malinowski, ‘Magic, Science and Religion’, 51, 57. 34  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 17. 35  Malinowski, ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, 331. 36  Malinowski, ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, 321.

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them occult powers’,37 Ogden argues in the book’s second chapter. This was authored by him alone, but the inference throughout the book is that the instrumental use of words can be shorn of such erroneous and destructive attitudes. The instrumentality can be kept without the magic. The problems inherent in Malinowski’s division of language into two – pragmatic language and the mythical and metaphorical magic of spells – are apparent, however, in an uncommented upon swerve in The Meaning of Meaning. If the abstract thought of philosophy makes it particularly prone to word magic, Ogden and Richards argue, part of the problem there is indeed the slippery use of metaphor. The use of metaphor, they say, ‘involves the same kind of contexts as abstract thought’ and this is particularly the case for the language of ‘educated persons’. However, while this, as throughout the book, makes it clear that word magic is a problem for the discursive disciplines, they go on to suggest that the more concrete and pragmatic vocabularies of ‘simple folk’, ‘acquired in direct connection with experience’, also lead to their ‘naïve or magical attitude to words’.38 This is not explained or elaborated upon by Ogden and Richards; in this admission, however, pragmatic language too returns to magic. If Ogden took from Malinowski at the time he was writing The Meaning of Meaning a one-sided sense of the operation of a mythical view of language – sparing nominalism and denigrating the language of spells – this split and its effects can also be seen in his study of Jeremy Bentham through the rest of the decade, a study which was key in the creation of Basic English. In 1932 Ogden published Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, a selection of the latter’s writings on the idea of ‘fictions’, much of which had been unpublished in his lifetime and which were scattered throughout the edition of his work that his executor, John Bowring, published in 1843. Ogden’s reconstruction of Bentham’s ideas and the implications he draws from them have been contested by later scholars of Bentham,39 but what he sets out both in his long introduction and through his selection of Bentham’s work repeats the split between nominalism and spells – and the denigration of the latter – that we have seen in Malinowski. Indeed, Ogden uses Malinowski in his introduction to support his contention that ‘science’ and magical language have long since occupied polar positions. He cites Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages (1929) to support his claim that ‘[l]anguage as we know it today is essentially the creation of savages’, and goes on to suggest that the recognition of the need to combat this was something science discovered ‘several centuries ago’.40 What science has discovered and what Bentham’s work asserts, Ogden argues, is on the one hand the nominalism Malinowski locates in the pragmatic language of the Trobriand Islanders and on the other the problematic ‘fictions’ which align with spells. Bentham’s writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were committed to evacuating the unthinking authority of tradition from the central institutions and discourses of the nation-state. His work centred on the law, and crucially on what he called ‘legal fictions’ – entities existing only as linguistic forms which were used to

37 

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 25. Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 214. 39  See for example Nomi Maya Stolzenberg, ‘Bentham’s Theory of Fictions – A “Curious Double Language”’, Cardozo Studies on Law and Literature 11, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 223–61. 40  C. K. Ogden, Bentham’s Theory of Fictions (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1932), cxxi. 38 

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secure and authorise it. This led to Bentham’s identification of the role of ‘fictions’ in language more generally, which he described as ‘those necessary products of the imagination, without which, unreal as they are, discourse could not, scarcely even could thought, be carried on, and which, by being embodied, as it were, in names, and thus put upon a footing with real ones, have been so apt to be mistaken for real ones’.41 Bentham admits that such fictions are vital in producing a language that produces the possibility of human culture, but the problem arises when the fictitious status of these entities is forgotten, when they are mistaken for real entities. Ogden discovered what he saw as the shared arguments of his and Bentham’s work only after the publication of The Meaning of Meaning. He spent the remainder of the 1920s on two linked projects, the creation of Basic English and the championing of Bentham. For Ogden, ‘word magic’ was synonymous with Bentham’s ‘fictions’. However, while Ogden repeated Bentham’s insistence that such fictions were inherent in language, his reading of Bentham beyond that projected into Bentham’s work the sharp division between instrumental language and magical language which he took from Malinowski. The projection of this division into Bentham’s work can be seen by the fact that Ogden, while recognising the echoes of Bentham’s work in Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911), which Ogden translated into English as The Philosophy of ‘As If’ in the early 1920s, gave Bentham’s work priority. Ogden attributes this priority to Vaihinger’s failure to stress the ‘linguistic factor’ in the creation of fictions.42 For Bentham on the other hand, as Ogden asserts by quoting him: ‘To language, then – to language alone – it is that fictitious entities owe their existence, – their impossible yet indispensable existence.’43 What this prioritisation allows Ogden to ignore, though, is Vaihinger’s inclusion of the hard sciences among the discourses which rely on and perpetuate fictions. Matter as a conceptual construct, Vaihinger argues, made up of ‘quite contradictory elements’, is nevertheless ‘very useful for scientific thought, as a fiction’.44 He goes on to consider ‘the atom as a fiction’ and fictions in mechanics and mathematical physics, arguing that they ‘owe their progress in the last few centuries mainly to the introduction of fictions’.45 In contrast, Ogden’s version of Bentham suggests again and again that a more fictionless language is possible, and that the site of this possibility is the physical world and the sciences that investigate and describe it. As Ogden sets out in his introduction, for Bentham there was a strong correlation between physical existence and real entities and the psychical and fictitious ones. He quotes Bentham from his work Logical Arrangements, or Instruments of Invention and Discovery:

41 

Jeremy Bentham, ‘Essay on Logic’, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 8, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), 219; emphasis in original. Note that Bentham italicises the fictitious entities in his own sentence. 42  C. K. Ogden, ‘Bentham’s Philosophy of As-If’, in From Bentham to Basic English, ed. and introduced by W. Terrence Gordon [1928] (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994), 16; C. K. Ogden, Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar, 3rd edn [1930] (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1932), xxxii. 43  Ogden, Basic English, xxxii. 44  Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As If’: A Practical System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. and London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1925), 64. 45  Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As If’, 70–2, 72–3, 72.

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There is no name of a psychical entity which is not also the name of a physical entity, in which capacity alone it must have continued to have been employed, long before it was transferred to the field of psychical entities and made to serve in the character of a name of a psychical, and that most commonly a fictitious, entity.46 Indeed, Ogden, again quoting Bentham in his introduction, claims, in distinction to Vaihinger’s argument that matter is a fiction, that ‘matter is the only direct subject of any portion of verbal discourse’.47 Ogden goes on to explain what this implies about language, and the link between this and his conception of Basic English is clear: Language, according to Bentham [. . .] is essentially a technological apparatus for dealing with the world of things in space. What is ‘there’ to be talked about is primarily a nexus of individual bodies, and when we seem to be talking about other sorts of entities our language is metaphorical – whatever the alleged status of its referents. All such fictional and metaphorical jargon is not only capable of translation but, for purposes of serious discussion or of technology, must be translated into something less deceptive.48 It is the latter type of language, what Malinowski calls the pragmatic use of language, that most resembles the language purified of ‘word magic’. Ogden’s description of the key function of language in ‘Basic English and Grammatical Reform’ repeats exactly the passage from the book on Bentham just quoted.49 Basic English was that ‘less deceptive’ instrument. The creation of Basic began with Ogden and Richards’s work for The Meaning of Meaning and their discovery that at the base of all definitional work were a small number of words. These – including ‘come’, ‘get’, ‘give’, ‘take’ and ‘go’ – form the heart of the hundred ‘operators’ among the 850 words of Basic. The ‘operators’ are made up of a combination of these fundamental verbs and the prepositions which accompany them in the designation of movement in space. As Richards was later to explain, these words rooted Basic in the physical world: if theories of how the mind thinks and perceives are specially doubtful, of what are we more certain? Of how to put and take and go; of how to get out of the way of an oncoming car [. . .] With these acts, we are certain in the sense that we trust them and stake our lives daily on them.50 Throughout his work in the interwar period, what Ogden fails to see is that, following Malinowski and his own reading of Bentham, his assumption that the language of instrumental description can be separated from and secured against the language of spells, and of fictions, inevitably returns him to the magical. The instrumental word, as

46 

Bentham quoted in Ogden, Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, xviii–xix. Bentham quoted in Ogden, Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, xliii. 48  Ogden, Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, xlvi–xlvii. 49  Ogden, ‘Basic English and Grammatical Reform’, 192–3. 50  I. A. Richards, Interpretation in Teaching, 2nd edn [1938] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 202. 47 

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Malinowski argues in his essay included in The Meaning of Meaning, makes the thing described appear. It conjures. While Ogden unwittingly follows the trajectory Horkheimer and Adorno describe, however, Richards’s work in the 1930s follows a very different course. In the final section of this chapter I will show that through the decade, although inconsistently and finally problematically, Richards nevertheless developed a conceptualisation of language and an aim for Basic English that strongly anticipated Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique. Richards’s work at these points, rather than separating the language of science and the language of ‘word magic’, brings them together and sees them both as instances of myth in the sense of myth as projection on to the natural world, but even more radically posits that thought, in every sphere, consists of the work of projection. What is most striking, given Ogden’s claims about Basic English which Richards often repeated, is that in the late 1930s, Richards saw Basic as a central tool in producing this mediated thought that was properly part of the projective nature of all human thinking.

Richards and Coleridge: Language as Myth It is the case that, in his literary critical work from the 1920s, Richards insistently reproduced the argument of The Meaning of Meaning that there are two distinct uses of language and, in particular, that science and poetry are ‘ill-assorted mates’, the separation of which was ‘one of the most important consequences of the investigations into symbolism’.51 In Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), he argues that there are ‘two totally distinct uses of language’, one dominated by reference to the world outside the mind and one articulating the attitudes, thoughts and feelings internal to the mind. It is only science that has any claim to what he calls ‘undistorted reference’, that is, nonmetaphorical relations with the physical world in contrast to the purely mental status of fictions.52 Two years later, in the first edition of Science and Poetry, he argued that, in its use of words, ‘most poetry is the reverse of science’.53 Despite these assertions, however, Richards struggled with this relation in all his work of the interwar period. Russo suggests that this struggle led to a bifurcation in his career, arguing that in the 1930s he moved away from poetry and that Basic English, ostensibly aligned with the ‘undistorted reference’ of science, became his ‘ruling passion’.54 However, while Richards was, along with Ogden, a self-declared Benthamite,55 in the 1930s he attempted to unite the thinking of Bentham with that of a poet whose work could not be more different, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his Coleridge on Imagination (1934), Richards brings them together, and in so doing he arrives at a place very different from one of ‘naïve positivism’; it is rather one that in the end sees all human knowledge as mythic

51 

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 82. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism [1924] (London: Routledge, 2001), 248, 249. 53  I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1926), 29. 54  Russo, I. A. Richards, 360, 362. 55  I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 3rd edn [1934] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 18. Richards follows the lead of John Stuart Mill in attempting to bring together the opposing positions of Bentham and Coleridge. See John Stuart Mill, On Bentham and Coleridge, introduced by F. R. Leavis (New York: Harper, 1950). 52 

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in that ‘all views of Nature are taken to be projections of the mind, and the religions as well as science are included among myths’.56 This is different from the projection of myth in Horkheimer and Adorno’s sense, however, which is free of an awareness of its own projection; Richards asserts that thought itself is such a projection in its mediation between the internal and the external. The response to Coleridge on Imagination was telling. Russo tells us that many positivist critics believed that it showed that Richards had ‘lost his scientific nerve’, while from the other side two leading New Critics ‘thought he had come to his senses and claimed a convert to “Anti-Positivism”’.57 What can be seen in this book is neither, but rather Richards struggling to find a position between a positivism which in the end would consign poetry (and all that it implies about language) to the margins and an idealism with regard to language that his materialism could not countenance. What he ends up with in the book is a version of myth which attempts to (even if it in the end fails to) approach the aims and insights that Horkheimer and Adorno set out in Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Coleridge on Imagination, what centrally concerns Richards, and the problem he is arguing that Coleridge’s theories of poetry can help in answering, is the relation between objective reality and the human mind. Coleridge claimed that, rather than the gulf between an external world of the object and the internal world of the subject, there is instead ‘the coalescence of subject and object’, as Richards names his third chapter, and Richards sees that this has radical implications for the status of scientific thought and knowledge. As Richards glosses it: Into the simplest seeming ‘datum’ a constructing, forming activity from the mind has entered. And the perceiving and the forming are the same. The subject (the self) has gone into what it perceives, and what it perceives is, in this sense, itself. So the object becomes the subject and the subject the object. And as, to understand what Coleridge is saying, we must not take the object as something given to us; so equally we must not take the subject to be a mere empty formless void out of which all things mysteriously and ceaselessly rush to become everything we know. The subject is what it is through the objects it has been.58 This conception of the relation between the subject and the world is redolent of that set out by Horkheimer and Adorno as constituting thought; a conception of the relation which they argue is undone by an undialectical view of the relation between the positivist and the mythical – that is, either by the denial of projection or by its unreflective acceptance. As they describe it: Between the actual object and the indubitable sense datum, between inner and outer, yawns an abyss which the subject must bridge at its own peril. To reflect the thing as it is, the subject must give back to it more than it receives from it. From the traces the thing leaves behind in its senses the subject recreates the world outside

56 

Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 177. Russo, I. A. Richards, 361. 58  Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 56–7. 57 

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it: the unity of the thing in its manifold properties and states; and in so doing, in learning how to impart a synthetic unity not only to the outward impressions but to the inward ones which gradually separate themselves from them, it retroactively constitutes the self.59 This of course has implications for language. Coleridge is important for Richards because he saw that the question of the relation between the inner and outer worlds was fundamentally a linguistic one.60 All description, across the sciences too, then has a mediated rather than an immediate relation to our sensory experiences in the world. Richards asserts that ‘The terms in which we describe the experience will vary with the purposes we need the description for. Admitting this, we will not suppose that units corresponding to these terms actually occur in the experience.’ Description then does not say ‘what happens’ but is a ‘speculative apparatus to assist us in observing a difference’ between experiences.61 Richards’s next literary work, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), makes it even clearer that all language, including that of science, consists of the mutual dependence of words on those around them in a sentence as well as those not spoken or written.62 This he calls ‘interinanimation’ and he shows that it is synonymous with the most powerful of ‘the exchanges between the meanings of words’, that is, metaphor.63 Description, the instrumental language of the sciences, is none other than metaphor. Near the end of Coleridge on Imagination, Richards makes the implications for poetic language clear. For while any part of the world-picture is regarded as not of mythopoeic origin, poetry – earlier recognized as mythopoeic – could not but be given a second place. If philosophic contemplation, or religious experience, or science gave us Reality, then poetry gave us something of less consequence, at best some sort of shadow. If we grant that all is myth, poetry, as the myth-making which most brings [quoting Coleridge] ‘the whole soul of man into activity’ [. . .] becomes the necessary channel for the reconstitution of order.64 The metaphorical language which constitutes Bentham’s ‘fictions’ here then is not ‘word magic’ but rather the fundamental relation between human beings and the world. What is necessary is not to eliminate it but to acknowledge it as the very nature of thought. In effect, Richards’s reading of Coleridge makes a positivist conception of language impossible. What is most surprising, though, given the way that Basic English was characterised by Ogden and has been characterised in so much recent critical work, is that Richards’s reading of projection and its links to metaphor are so entwined with his aims for and understanding of the methods of Basic English. At the centre of his final substantial work of the 1930s, Interpretation in Teaching (1938) – the

59 

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 155. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, xi. 61  Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 85, 87; emphasis in original. 62  I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 47, 57. 63  Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 108–9. 64  Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 228. 60 

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work which in the early 1970s he described as ‘of all my writings, the most worth while’65 – is his assertion that facility with language is necessary to proper thought, but more than that, that this facility cannot be acquired through mere practice, but only through ‘reflective study’ and that Basic English can produce this.66 In translating Standard English into Basic, in breaking down the previously unrecognised metaphors of all language into the reduced vocabulary of Basic, Richards argues that readers will be schooled in the fundamental metaphoricity of language.67 Towards the end of the chapter where Richards sets out exactly how Basic can do this, he calms the worries of those who fear that training in Basic translation will turn out only ‘logicians’ by linking the language explicitly with metaphor. Basic analysis, with its insistence upon the versatility of words under mutual control and its recognition of metaphor as the ruling principle of language, is an influence in the opposite direction. Logic pins its words to fixed definitions. Basic enhances and clarifies our sense of the dependence of any word’s meaning on the other words present with it and on the purpose which, together, they are attempting to fulfil.68 Richards’s account of Basic here sees it as the mediation, the thinking about thought, which for Horkheimer and Adorno offers the escape from the reified enlightenment: ‘Routine, word-for-word translation – of the de-coding, mechanical type – soon fails in Basic – through not making sense.’ It is the reflection induced by the demands of Basic that is key: ‘The value comes from the reflections which accompany the processes of comparison, and the increased span of awareness of the factors (never mentioned, it may be, in the original) which govern the meanings in the supposed settings.’69 Richards’s use of Basic English as set out in Interpretation in Teaching then is the opposite of positivist understandings of language. Its power lies not in eschewing the metaphor of ‘word magic’ and reducing language to instrumental and pragmatic description, but in the way that it makes metaphor visible. On Richards’s account in Interpretation in Teaching, Basic English provides an opportunity to think about thought in a way that approaches Horkheimer and Adorno’s sense of mediation. It is the case, however, that reading Basic English in this way shows too what Richards’s project lacks – what in the end turns it back into myth in Horkheimer and Adorno’s sense. Richards shares with them an acute sense of the consequences of the bifurcation of positivism and myth in the 1930s but his response to them is ultimately quite different. In Coleridge on Imagination, his aim is to show that what seem to be two opposing versions of the relation between human beings and the world, both projections, can be seen as, or made into, a unity. The first version, what he calls the ‘projected nature’ of the natural sciences, is unable to tell us how to live.70 The second ‘projected nature’, consisting of ‘those “images”, “figments”, “things”, “existences” or “realities” which, through the perceptive and imaginative activities of the mind

65 

Richards, Interpretation in Teaching, xxiii; emphasis in original. Richards, Interpretation in Teaching, 6. 67  Richards, Interpretation in Teaching, 199–200. 68  Richards, Interpretation in Teaching, 209–10. 69  Richards, Interpretation in Teaching, 203, 204. 70  Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 170. 66 

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[. . .] we take to be the world in which we live’, is dangerous if disengaged from the former. He explicitly sees the political situation – of ‘Nordic destinies and Japanese “missions”’ – as a result of unchecked operation of the latter kind of projection and so shares with Horkheimer and Adorno the insight that fascism’s fundamental madness is undialectical projection, the mistaking of ‘thoughts for persons and things’.71 In the end, however, he wants to reach an order and wholeness for the mind rather than the continual process of political, social and economic struggle which is paramount in dialectical materialism. It is poetry that he believes will bring this about: There are better reasons, in the work of modern poets, to hope that a creative movement is beginning and that poetry, freed from a mistaken conception of its limitations and read more discerningly than heretofore, will remake our minds and with them our world.72 If this is Richards’s aim, though, what this chapter has shown is that his diagnosis of the effects of the separation of pragmatic language and ‘word magic’ following his engagement with Coleridge in the 1930s produced something quite other than the ‘naïve enthusiasm’ for positivism which can be detected in Ogden’s work. Even more surprisingly, for him Basic English, far from demonstrating a desire to reduce language to a kind of mathematical notation, held the possibility of revealing the inherent metaphoricity of language and of producing the thought necessary to understanding this.

Works Cited Bentham, Jeremy. ‘Essay on Logic.’ In The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 8. Edited by John Bowring. 213–93. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843. Gordon, W. Terrence. C. K. Ogden: A Bio-bibliographic Study. Metuchin, NJ, and London: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1990. Hirschkop, Ken. Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950: Writing on Language as Social Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. ———. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1947. Liu, Lydia H. The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. McElvenny, James. Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism: C. K. Ogden and his Contemporaries. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922. ———. ‘Magic, Science and Religion.’ In Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Selected and with an introduction by Robert Redfield. 1–71. 1925. Boston: Beacon Press, 1948.

71 

Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 170, 157, 172; see Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154. 72  Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 229.

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———. ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.’ In The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, 8th edn. 296–336. 1923. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1946. Mill, John Stuart. On Bentham and Coleridge. Introduced by F. R. Leavis. New York: Harper, 1950. Ogden, C. K. Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar, 3rd edn. 1930. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1932. ———. ‘Basic English and Grammatical Reform.’ In From Bentham to Basic English. Edited and introduced by W. Terrence Gordon. 187–226. 1936. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994. ———. ‘Bentham’s Philosophy of As-If.’ In From Bentham to Basic English. Edited and introduced by W. Terrence Gordon. 1–16. 1928. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994. ———. Bentham’s Theory of Fictions. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1932. ———. C. K. Ogden and Linguistics. Edited by W. Terrence Gordon. 18 vols. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994. ———. Debabelization. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1931. ———. ‘Editorial: Word Magic in Education.’ Psyche 14 (1934): 5–8. ———. Psyche. Introduced by W. Terrence Gordon. 18 vols. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995. ———. ‘The Universal Language.’ Psyche 9, no. 3 (January 1929): 1–9. ———. ‘Word Magic.’ Psyche 18 (1952): 19–126. ——— and I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning, 8th edn. 1923. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1946. Quigley, Megan. Modern Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Richards, I. A. ‘Co-author of “The Meaning of Meaning”.’ In C. K. Ogden: A Collective Memoir, edited by P. S. Florence and J. R. L. Anderson, 96–109. London: Pemberton, 1977. ———. Coleridge on Imagination, 3rd edn. 1934. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. ———. Interpretation in Teaching, 2nd edn. 1938. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. ———. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. ———. Principles of Literary Criticism. 1924. London: Routledge, 2001. ———. Science and Poetry. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1926. Russo, John Paul. I. A. Richards: His Life and Work. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Stieglitz, Gerhard J. ‘The Berlitz Method.’ The Modern Language Journal 39, no. 6 (October 1955): 300–10. Stolzenberg, Nomi Maya. ‘Bentham’s Theory of Fictions – A “Curious Double Language”.’ Cardozo Studies on Law and Literature 11, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 223–61. Vaihinger, Hans. The Philosophy of ‘As If’: A Practical System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind. Translated by C. K. Ogden. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. and London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1925.

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10 Jean Toomer and the Face of the Real: Between Sacred Presence and Disenchanting Violence Matthew Mutter

L

ike his precursor Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer contained multitudes. By turns he was a free-thinking rationalist, a practitioner of Physical Culture, a vitalist, a mystical disciple of George Gurdjieff, and a Quaker. Toomer’s great work Cane (1923) displays a similar plurality: it contains stories, sketches, expressionist drama, lyric poems and graphics (arcs approaching but never completing a circle). Its settings – rural Georgia, Chicago, Washington DC – are as variable as its moods, which range from elegy to satire. I will argue that the most consequential vacillation in Cane concerns Toomer’s disposition towards the African American spirituality that it dramatises. In a letter to his friend Waldo Frank, Toomer commended the ‘violen[t]’ emotional ‘powe[r]’ he found in rural Black churches. ‘Their religious emotion’, he wrote, is ‘very near the sublime’. Even so, he added, ‘[t]heir theology is a farce (Christ is so immediate)’.1 The two judgements seem incongruous: the sublime evokes wonder, farce provokes derision. If ‘the sublime’ names a process in which sensuous apprehension gives way to supersensual transcendence, how can a religion of immediacy court the sublime? By ‘farce’, Toomer can only mean that a properly transcendent reality (Christ) has been absurdly domesticated, so as to become fully available to sensation. A short sketch, the tonally ambiguous ‘Calling Jesus’, elucidates Toomer’s meaning. Its centre is a ‘calling’ woman who imagines two figures: Jesus and a lover who will rescue her. As she calls, these become one figure: the dream of ‘Some one’ who comes to comfort her and who is ‘soft as a cotton boll brushed against the milk-pod cheek of Christ [. . .] soft as the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of southern cotton’ (56). The biblical Christ – who allowed his body to be humiliated and broken – is replaced by a confected Christ, a pliant object of wish-fulfilment. Whether of cheek or foot, the image of cotton inevitably conjures the commodity that drove Black oppression. (In ‘Kabnis’, Fred Halsey says, ‘youre in th land of cotton – hell of a land. Th white folks get th boll; th niggers get the stalk’ (87).) In the sketch, the luxurious materiality of the cotton-Christ displaces the crushing materiality of field labour. Gently but ironically, the narrator informs us that in this dream, the woman’s ‘soul’ stays in the ‘vestibule’ at night like ‘a dog’; it does not belong in the house, or in the bed, where the business of life takes place. As in George 1 

Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: Norton, 2011), 152. References to Cane and to Toomer’s correspondence (unless otherwise noted) are drawn from this Norton Critical Edition and hereafter cited in parentheses.

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Santayana’s account of the ‘genteel tradition’, the decoupling of the spiritual from the material life makes the former sentimental and the latter callous, and inevitably pushes ‘soul’ to the outer rim – the vestibule – of lived experience. From one angle, ‘Calling Jesus’ evinces a recognisably Marxist view of religion as enervating false consciousness. But unlike the Marxist notion of diverting otherworldliness, ‘Calling Jesus’ imagines a diverting worldliness, a fantastical mode of religious imagination that is nonetheless immersed in the erotic particulars of the material world. Toomer’s ambivalence towards the spiritual practices he witnessed in Georgia exemplify a pervasive tension in his work. The woman in ‘Calling Jesus’ enfeebles the religious imagination with her cloying sensuousness. But in a 1922 letter, Toomer told Sherwood Anderson that the ‘art’ of ‘our day’ demanded just this sort of rapprochement between the spiritual and the sensuous. It has, he wrote, ‘a sort of religious function. It is a religion, a spiritualization of the immediate’ (159). Like W. B. Yeats, who complained of a lost ‘Unity of Being’, or T. S. Eliot, who lamented a ‘dissociation of sensibility’, Toomer felt acutely the absence of ‘integration’ or ‘wholeness’ in modernity.2 The ‘technical intellect’ (65), he thought, perpetuated its own estrangement from the body. ‘Theater’, for instance, is a story about a young man whose ‘body is separate from the thoughts that pack his mind’ (51) and who is thus unable to inaugurate an embodied, erotic relation with a young woman he loves. There are many prayers and lamentations in Cane, but when Toomer speaks in his own voice, as in the poem ‘Prayer’, the underlying complaint is that ‘my body is opaque to the soul’ (68). Another name for this condition is ‘disenchantment’. In the disenchanted worldpicture, the physical world is construed as the neutral, mechanical matter on to which the detached mind projects its purposes. Toomer lamented disenchantment, but his work also dramatises the perils of re-enchantment. His overriding desire to bring the abstracted, instrumental mind back into dynamic relation with the material world yields many of the moods that we now find most ambiguous in his work. The problem Toomer faced was this: he discovered in Black, rural Georgia an exemplary outpost of enchantment. It is a world in which visions and prophecies percolate, where the ‘pines whisper to Jesus’ (9, 17, 81). But its enduring enchantment is inextricable from its legacy of racial oppression. It is a world shut out from the spoils of modernity; its organic rhythms are involuntarily founded on the constraints of physical labour. In ‘Cotton Song’, the Black labourers have never heard of the tormented estrangement of body and spirit: ‘God’s body’s got a soul,’ they sing, and this sacramental theology generates the cheerful imperative ‘Come, brother, roll, roll!’ (13). Though Toomer approached this life as an undiscovered element of his racial inheritance, his vitalist sympathies occasionally drove him towards primitivism.3 The enchanted body – especially the

2 

For a comprehensive discussion of the theme of ‘wholeness’ in Toomer, see Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). 3  In his later autobiographical writings, Toomer distanced himself from primitivism, and insisted that his encomia to the ‘soil-soaked beauty’ of Black rural living were not animated by nostalgia: ‘Those who sought to cure themselves by a return to more primitive conditions were either romantics or escapists.’ See Toomer, Wayward and Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1983), 129. For an illuminating study of the paradoxical relationship between vitalist thought and anti-colonial articulations of racial identity, see Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

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Black female body – is entertained as an antidote to deracination (in ‘Box-Seat’, a ‘portly Negress’ exudes a ‘soil-soaked fragrance’ and sinks her ‘strong roots’ beneath the city’s artificial ‘cement floor[s]’ and ‘asphalt streets’ (63)). Yet he recognises that enchantment cannot be reverse-engineered: the ‘sun is setting on’ this ‘song-lit race’, and though he has ‘in time [. . .] returned to thee’, the return can only ‘catch thy plaintive soul soon gone’ (16). For Toomer, re-enchantment was both an existential imperative and an ethical hazard. A curious feature of Toomer scholarship over the last decades is its disavowal of the link among his religious, ethical and political concerns. The major studies tend to construe his spiritual idiom as a kind of political camouflage. In Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, for instance, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr oppose the notion of the ‘political’ Toomer – the writer they adduce – to the ‘mystic and spiritualist’ Toomer.4 The evocation of mystery in Cane, they argue, is merely Toomer’s strategic exploitation of the Gothic genre. It is not ‘mystery’ at all, but rather what Gabriel Marcel called ‘problem’: the enigmatic ‘whispering’ of character and landscape point obscurely to the corpses of Black Americans, buried ignominiously and repressed by white authorities. Mystery is political obfuscation; enchantment is the psychological correlative of fear. Similar claims are made in Barbara Foley’s recent Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution. Foley’s book is without question the most impressive and meticulously researched study available of the early Toomer’s social milieux and political commitments. Still, she posits a rupture between the post1923 Toomer and the earlier Toomer, for whom religion is ostensibly folded into the framework of false consciousness. Foley writes of the protagonist of ‘Esther’, for instance, that ‘her personal decline into madness is connected with her illusion that a Black Messiah will come and save her from her race- and class-based alienation’; of another story, Foley bluntly announces that ‘the animistic Jesus of the pines cannot alleviate the distress of Becky and her mixed-race offspring’.5 Though Foley’s book, like previous studies, claims to be responding to a consensus scholarly picture of Toomer as mystic, the evidence of recent decades suggests that the opposite is true: the religious Toomer has been largely abandoned. I am not interested in rehabilitating a religious Toomer at the expense of a political one. The problem is the governing dichotomy, by which the political and the religious are framed in a zerosum game. The terms of this conception are already audible in Robert Jones’s earlier Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought where Toomer’s turn to mysticism is presented as a flight from ‘reality’: Toomer’s retreat from society into the private realm of idealism and mysticism allowed him to experience life only abstractly [. . .] [His] linguistic and stylistic deformations are similarly functions of his antirealistic, antinaturalistic predilections, rejecting the truth of external, objective phenomena. [. . .] In attempting to use symbols to evoke a reality behind the senses, he often confused and bewildered readers.6

4 

Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr, Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 2. 5  Barbara Foley, Race, Repression, and Revolution (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 212, 202. 6  Robert Jones, Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 139–40.

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While Jones captures undeniable tendencies in the later Toomer, his value-terms depend on an untenable account of the relationship between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ experience. Mysticism is only ‘private’ when a disenchanted ontology is presupposed. Toomer’s mysticism, in fact, aims to disintegrate the boundaries between inside and outside, private and public. The idea, echoed in Scruggs and VanDemarr, that religion is an essentially ‘personal’ or ‘private’ discourse about ‘meaning’ – and that politics and history are the public discourses that take the measure of ‘reality’ – is itself a secular prejudice. Though Jones is writing as a ‘materialist’ against Toomer’s ‘idealism’, his spatial metaphor depends on a recalcitrant dualism, for which an orientation towards ‘meaning’ must appeal to some spiritual dimension ‘behind’ phenomena, by virtue of which empirical reality is a mere set of signs pointing beyond itself. Scholars of Toomer do not need to affirm the priority of material conditions and power relations over the ‘intangible’ or ‘ideal’ or ‘abstract’ character of religious thought and feeling. The tension between these viewpoints has already been dramatised in Cane. The contest between the idealising element of religion and the exigency of material power is the central burden of Toomer’s great work. Toomer can satirise false consciousness in a sketch like ‘Calling Jesus’, or suggest, in a poem like ‘Conversion’, that Black American Christianity is a colonial imposition (a drunk ‘African Guardian of Souls [. . .] yielding’ to ‘a white-faced sardonic god’ (29)). In the same breath, he can take seriously the experience of ‘things unseen to men’ becoming ‘tangibly immediate’ (‘Fern’, 21). It is no accident that the final confrontation in Cane is between Kabnis, a figure for Toomer himself, and ‘Father John’, a figure for the entire tradition of African American prophetic Christianity. The question Lewis poses in ‘Kabnis’ – whether John is ‘a mute John the Baptist of a new religion [. . .] or a tongue-tied shadow of an old [one]’ (104) – is the central and unresolved controversy in Cane. Cane is both religious and secular. To listen to its language is to encounter a sensibility both open to enchantment and persistently harassed by the prospect of disenchantment. I will argue that this enchantment is subtended by two principal experiences: the testimony of beauty and an intimation of the world as personal. For Toomer, the ‘spiritualization of the immediate’ is only tenable – both ontologically and ethically – if ‘spirit’ and materiality are commensurable. If they are not, spirit becomes, in the idiom of Cane, mere ‘dream’, and the material world remains mere ‘body’. Disenchantment is a condition in which body and spirit are fundamentally estranged, or where the logic of the one sphere is incommensurable with the other. In this condition, ‘dream’ is sentimental, ineffectual and solipsistic; embodiment is subjection to violence or determination by arbitrary mechanisms. In Cane, I will argue, the abiding image for the integration of spirit and body is ‘face’, the fully corporeal manifestation of the spiritual person. One dream in Cane is to ‘g[o] out and gather’ the ‘petals’ of ‘white faces’ (‘petals of roses’) and the ‘petals’ of ‘dark faces’ (‘petals of dust’). One reality, in turn, is that ‘white faces’ are ‘pain pollen’, and that the ‘leaves’ of cane ‘cut’ the ‘face and lips’ (78, 105, 35). As Kant observed, the analogy between the judgement of beauty and the recognition of persons turns on the perception that both are ‘ends’ rather than means. In Cane, the experience of beauty becomes an experience of anguish when the world conspires against these insistent finalities. In the terminal story – less story than expressionist drama – the eponymous Kabnis articulates that anguish. Toomer told Waldo Frank that Ralph Kabnis was a portrait of the artist: ‘Kabnis is Me’ (167). The portraiture is symbolic, and Toomer is distributed across another character, Lewis, who symbolises a latent possibility that Kabnis cannot reach. Still, the material conditions that frame

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Kabnis’s world map on to Toomer’s own sojourn in rural Georgia. On the pretext of educational uplift, Kabnis has arrived to search out his racial heritage among poor Blacks. He seeks a way of life that is organically rooted, embodied and spiritual rather than mechanical, abstracted and disenchanted. He discovers, however, that embodiment also means vulnerability to the white lynch mob, that organic community also means fear of outsiders, and that his poetic religion is inadequate for the bald reality of violence. In a moment of despair, Kabnis mutters a peculiar soliloquy that is at once prayer, blasphemous polemic and syllogism: God Almighty, dear God, dear Jesus, do not torture me with beauty. Take it away. Give me an ugly world. [. . .] Dear Jesus, do not chain me to myself and set these hills and valleys, heaving with folk-songs, so close to me that I cannot reach them. There is a radiant beauty in the night that touches and . . . tortures me. Ugh. Hell. Get up, you damn fool. Look around. Whats beautiful there? Hog pens and chicken yards. Dirty red mud. Stinking outhouse. Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you? God, he doesnt exist, but nevertheless He is ugly. Hence, what comes from Him is ugly. [. . .] Oh no, I wont let that emotion come up in me. Stay down. Stay down, I tell you. O Jesus, Thou art beautiful . . . Come, Ralph, pull yourself together. Curses and adoration dont come from what is sane. This loneliness, dumbness, awful, intangible oppression is enough to drive a man insane. Miles from nowhere. A speck on a Georgia hillside. Jesus, can you imagine it – an atom of dust in agony on a hillside? Thats a spectacle for you. (83) In his early twenties, Toomer was more likely to take his aesthetics from Ernst Haeckel, the German Darwinist, than from Haeckel’s great antagonist Kant. Toomer later recalled ‘going to lectures on naturalism and atheism, which were held regularly in big halls downtown in Chicago’s Loop’. There he heard Clarence Darrow lecture ‘on Darwin and Haeckel, and, before I knew it, the logic of his reasoning had completely undermined my picture of the world. [. . .] Suddenly into my world came the ideas and facts of the naturalists and evolutionists. [. . .] [M]y old world suddenly and completely collapsed. I found myself in a world without a God.’7 In the writings Toomer ‘devoured’,8 Haeckel opposed to Kant’s purposive purposelessness a utilitarian aesthetics based on his ‘realistic monism’. For Haeckel, nature is an artist, but its single aesthetic principle is functional power: ‘to drink out the inexhaustible fountain of [the world’s] beauty’ is ‘to trace out the marvelous play of its forces’.9 Accents of Haeckel’s thought are still audible in Cane when Paul thinks of a human establishment as a ‘carbon bubble’ (75), or in the famous lines from ‘Seventh Street’, ‘Who set you flowing?’, which conjure something like Haeckel’s pantheistic ‘god’, which is ‘everywhere identical with nature itself’ and ‘operative within the world as “force” or “energy”’.10

7 

Toomer, Wayward and Seeking, 101. Kerman and Eldridge, Lives of Jean Toomer, 66. 9  Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), 344. 10  Haeckel, Riddle, 288. 8 

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But Toomer’s ‘religious nature’ was ‘vigorously aroused’ on the other side of naturalistic pantheism.11 And Kabnis – whose name is a compound of the Hebrew ‘kab’ (meaning something hollowed out, but also evoking ‘Kabbalah’) and ‘sin’ reversed – cannot help but think of beauty in the context of a transcendent God, for natural principles do not seem to account for its reality. The beauty of the night does not inhere in Haeckel’s principle of functional symmetry, for his surroundings – hog pens, mud, outhouses – are unsightly. Something, however, ‘radiates’ mysteriously from within the apparently repugnant scene, even as the impulse to trace its source to ‘God’ is frustrated. A passage from Simone Weil illuminates Kabnis’s metaphysical ‘hurt’: Beauty is the only finality here below. [. . .] A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers us its own existence. We do not desire anything else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not in the least know what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing. We should like to feed upon it but it is merely something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. [. . .] It alone is good in itself, but without our finding any particular good or advantage in it. It seems itself to be a promise and not a good. But it only gives itself; it never gives anything else.12 What in Weil is mystical conviction is for Kabnis a sort of metaphysical taunt. The beauty of the hills and valleys – the song they seem to sing – creates in Kabnis just this paradoxical combination of nearness and distance. In Weil’s terms, it is ‘painfully tantalizing’; in Kabnis’s, ‘close’, but out of reach, ‘touch[able]’ but elusive, inviting, but isolating. Beauty precipitates desire, but will not satisfy it. Kabnis prays to God, curses God, denies the existence of God, and calls the nonexistent God ugly. The hurt of ugliness is more tolerable than the hurt of beauty, for the former is metaphysically consistent. A thoroughgoing ugliness, uncomplicated by the appearance of beauty, would allow him to say: the world is simply like that. ‘Give me an ugly world,’ he pleads, so as to erase the painful gap between beauty’s promise and the recalcitrance of reality. Kabnis’s wry syllogism – his effort to impart rational order – merely redoubles the confusion. It predicates positive qualities of a being that has been negated in the first premise. Kabnis cannot quite affirm the non-existence of God because beauty’s address to him generates an outraged address from him, and he needs an object for this address. The non-existence of God would, in a sense, be thoroughgoing ugliness, but then there could be no complaint, because there would be no expectation. So Kabnis’s syllogism leaves us with the spectre of a vicious rather than non-existent God. Another name compounds that ambiguity: ‘Jesus’. The leap from the beauty of the night to the beauty of the form of Jesus (‘Thou art beautiful’) exposes the emotion

11 

Toomer, Wayward and Seeking, 120. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 105–6.

12 

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Kabnis wants to suppress. In Christian theology, Jesus is the incarnate beauty of God subjected to the ignominy of human history. Kabnis sees an analogy between Christ’s agony and his own relation to beauty. His address is an identification: Kabnis thinks of himself as a ‘speck on a Georgia hillside’, ‘an atom of dust in agony on a hillside’ and, finally, a ‘spectacle’ – a term that suggests aesthetic perversion or an appetitive way of seeing. In all these aspects he is like Christ: in Christ’s ‘agony’ in Gethsemane, in the spectacle of his crucifixion on the ‘hillside’ of Golgotha, and in the metaphysical sublimity of the source of Being becoming a tiny particle subject to humiliation: ‘an atom of dust in agony’. Kabnis is one of many Toomer characters who experience a dissonance between the mysterious harmony of beauty and the broader context in which it is placed. For Haeckel, beauty is a Darwinian theodicy of the real: its rightness is a sign of its fitness, for its orderliness reveals nature’s ingenuity. By contrast, beauty in Cane has no utility. The stories repeatedly foreground both the ineffectuality of the beauty they praise and the unsatisfied desire it precipitates. For Herbert Spencer, another of Toomer’s early ‘gods’, human beauty is indexed to sexual reproduction. In Cane, however, the men who mistake beauty for the lure of sexual attraction are consistently perplexed: their desire persists, unsatisfied by the sexual encounter. This is so because characters like Karintha ‘carry beauty’: its metaphysical source transcends those who bear it. Men ‘will die not having found’ the object of their desire, and their conflation of desire with appetite has inaugurated a cycle of violent consequences (6). It is tempting to read the recurrent confounding of desire in Cane as a failure of human relation, the failure to ‘connect’ that concerns E. M. Forster or D. H. Lawrence. But a story like ‘Fern’ makes it clear that Toomer’s ‘desire’ is ordered to something beyond the human. Indeed, the story begins with a peculiar characterisation of Fern’s face as the site of another presence, the metaphor for which is drawn not from this or that person but from the quality of personhood per se: Face flowed into her eyes. Flowed in soft cream foam and plaintive ripples, in such a way that wherever your glance may momentarily have rested, it immediately thereafter wavered in the direction of her eyes. [. . .] Why, after noticing it, you sought her eyes, I cannot tell you. [. . .] They were strange eyes. In this, that they sought nothing – that is, nothing that was obvious and tangible and that one could see, and they gave the impression that nothing was to be denied. (18) In the opening sentence, ‘face’ is untethered to article or pronoun. Fern’s eyes do not synecdochally disclose her face; rather, they are a portal for a presence that exceeds them – being in its personal aspect. As with Karintha, who does not generate but ‘carries’ beauty, or the woman in ‘Box-Seat’ whose ‘eyes [. . .] dont belong to her’ (63), ‘face’ is something that ‘flows into’ and radiates through Fern’s eyes. ‘Face’ is a hieroglyph of the divine: ‘Her eyes, unusually weird and open, held me. Held God. He flowed in as I’ve seen the countryside flow in. [. . .] Saw her face flow into them, the countryside and something that I call God, flowing into them’ (21). Fern’s eyes address and draw the viewer in, cultivating a longing that cannot be discovered in the ‘tangible’ or ‘obvious’. The narrator reports that men ‘became attached to her, and hungered after finding the barest trace of what they might desire’ (18). Like Karintha, she neither denies nor satisfies them. Of the desire that is elicited

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and refused by beauty, Simone Weil writes: ‘we do not in the least know what it is’ we seek. That confusion of purpose is evident in the men who desire Fern. Even so, her beauty creates an ambiguous ethical energy. As in Weil, Fern is a ‘mirror’ who reflects back their own desire for goodness: ‘They began to leave her, baffled and ashamed, yet vowing to themselves that some day they would do some fine thing for her.’ The beholder’s subjectivity is decentred: ‘Men in her case seem to lose their selfishness. I lost mine before I touched her.’ The narrator numbers himself among the baffled, and repeats the mysterious imperative again and again: ‘something I would do for her’. The indeterminate ‘something I call God’ – the surplus of meaning he recognises in the ‘face’ – generates an equally indeterminate yet urgent response: a ‘something’ to be done ‘some’ day. The ellipses in the closing paragraph stretch the memory of the experience into a distant future: ‘Something I would do for her. Some fine unnamed thing. . .’ The imperative survives the acknowledgement that ‘nothing ever really happened. Nothing ever came to Fern, not even I.’ The combination of present disappointment and future expectation renders the mood of ‘Fern’, like other stories in Cane, distinctly eschatological. ‘Fernie May Rosen’ is described as a ‘Jewish cantor singing with a broken voice’, who calls (paradoxically) to ‘Christ Jesus’ (21). In this and other stories, Toomer suggests that the paradigmatic eschatological disposition once expressed by the Jewish people has been transferred to Black Americans (‘God has left the Moses-people’ to take up residence in the Black South). The alteration of the group alters the eschaton. Sometimes it is imagined as the actualisation of a hybrid racial identity – a new American anthropology – that synthesises ideal elements. In the final scene of ‘Bona and Paul’, the title characters part ways with the allegorically freighted characters ‘Art’ and ‘Helen’, for Paul envisions a new ‘good’ that supersedes their European domain. Like his namesake, St Paul, he sees through a glass darkly [t]hat something beautiful is going to happen. That the Gardens are purple like a bed of roses would be at dusk. [. . .] That my thoughts were matches thrown into a dark window. And all the while the Gardens were purple like a bed of roses would be at dusk. I came back to tell you, brother, that white faces are petals of roses. That dark faces are petals of dusk. That I am going out and gather petals. That I am going out and know her whom I brought here with me to these Gardens which are purple like a bed of roses would be at dusk. (77–8) When Paul shares this vision with a doorman, Bona – the ‘good’ he envisions – disappears. As in ‘Box-Seat’, where Dan’s impatience with the Black middle class swells into an image of a ‘new-world Christ’ surfacing from ‘the earth’s deep core’, eschatology cannot shake the potential irony that it is a work of private fantasy. When Toomer described the ‘spiritual curve’ of Cane to Waldo Frank, he said that the ‘awakening’ at the end of ‘Bona and Paul’ is followed by the ‘plunge’ into ‘Kabnis’ (163). The ‘Vulcan’ blacksmith imagery and the descent, as the story unfolds, into a cellar known as ‘the Hole’ suggest that the ‘plunge’ it enacts is a form of katabasis modulated by the Christian symbol of Gethsemane. ‘Kabnis’ is a story that tests Paul’s eschatological vision by traversing the harrowing realities that resist it. Paul’s vision of ‘faces’ is generalised into a meditation on both the ontological meaning of the face and its fragility. It begins with an obsessive reflection on the unreality of Kabnis’s own face:

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Near me. Now. Whoever you are, my warm glowing sweetheart, do not think that the face that rests beside you is the real Kabnis. Ralph Kabnis is a dream. And dreams are faces with large eyes and weak chins and broad brows that get smashed by the fists of square faces. The body of the world is bull-necked. A dream is a soft face that fits uncertainly upon it. . . God, if I could develop that in words. Give what I know a bull-neck and a heaving body, all would go well with me, wouldnt it sweetheart? If I could feel that I came to the South to face it. If I, the dream (not what is weak and afraid in me) could become the face of the South. How my lips would sing for it, my songs being the lips of its soul. Soul. Soul hell. There aint no such thing. What in hell was that? (81) The instability and elusiveness of ‘face’ is here linked to its quality of ‘dream’. In ‘Box-Seat’, ‘dream’ names a potential yet unapprehended way of life: ‘Stir the root-life of a withered people [. . .] teach them to dream,’ says the narrator to Dan Moore, the protagonist (57).13 In ‘Box-Seat’, houses are figured as ‘face’: ‘shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusk body of the street’. ‘Face’ is a precarious spiritual achievement. As the corporeal manifestation of spirit, it must fully absorb the body’s vitality – imaged here as the Black (‘dusk’) life of the streets – rather than prudishly bracketing it, as is the practice of the ‘dictie’ Black bourgeoisie in the story. Even so, the ‘body of the world’ is not all dynamic vitality. It can also be stupid appetite and aggression. This is what Kabnis means when he says that ‘the body of the world is bull-necked’: it does not always welcome the ideals of the person. Kabnis’s surrealist image – ‘dreams are faces with large eyes [. . .] that get smashed by the fists of square faces’ – emphasises the fragility of the dream-face. The task is to ‘fit’ the dream-face on the body of the world, so that the dream is not a floating fantasy but an embodied actuality. Kabnis would ‘give what [he] know[s] a bull-neck and a heaving body’, first in poetic language, which is the initial ‘embodiment’ of dream, and then in reality, as a world-transforming eschatological event. In Kabnis’s play on words, ‘to face’ the ‘South’ is both to confront its difficult reality and to transfigure it. It is to draw out the world’s spiritual dimension while acknowledging the refractory forces that, if ignored, would render the vision merely private and sentimental. Kabnis’s ambition is personal – the integrity of his own ‘face’ hangs in the balance – but it is not private. He recognises that the discovery of his identity is inseparable from a reckoning with a painfully material history. Indeed, Kabnis is tempted by a thoroughgoing materialism. He extends the carnal metaphor of the face: song comes from the ‘lips’. But he recoils from his own phrase, ‘lips of the soul’: ‘Soul. Soul hell. There aint no such thing. What in hell was that?’ Still, Kabnis’s protest is supersaturated with the religion it disavows. In this expressionist drama, blasphemous cursing is related to Kabnis’s katabasis. The casualness of ‘what in hell was that?’ belies the anguished condition it expresses. Toomer dialectically ironises the blasphemy he permits Kabnis to voice. The story is replete with profanities

13 

For a fascinating discussion of ‘dream’ in Cane, see Cécile Coquet, ‘Feeding the Soul with Words: Preaching and Dreaming in Cane’, in Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 84–95.

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that entreat the spiritual realities they ostensibly sabotage: ‘Why in Christ’s hell cant you leave me alone?’; ‘Hell of a mess I’ve got in’; ‘Hell of a fine quarters, I’ve got’; ‘Damn it, I wish your [. . .]’; ‘I’m damned’ (84, 75, 87). Hell-slang throughout the story is only outdone by Christ-expletives that recall ‘Jesus, thou art beautiful’: ‘Christ, if he could only drink himself to sleep’; ‘Christ, how cut off from everything he is’; ‘Who in Christ’s world can I talk to?’; ‘Christ no!’; ‘Jesus, how still everything is’; ‘Jesus, do you hear it?’; ‘Christ, but that stuff gets to me’ (82, 83, 84–5, 90, 96, 88). Kabnis’s blasphemy, like Baudelaire’s, manifests an ironic piety, for it discloses an anguish that is distinctly metaphysical, and which can only be experienced by the sort of being his curses disavow: a ‘soul’. Kabnis’s descent comes to a head in the blacksmith Halsey’s workshop on a night that symbolically spans the despair of Holy Saturday and the joy of Resurrection Sunday. The context is a social gathering of townspeople who are not at church. (They hear the congregation’s proceedings.) The final portion of the story hinges on rival views of an old man the group dubs ‘Father John’ – a former slave who symbolises Black Christianity. Kabnis’s Nietzschean view is that John’s religion – the religion of a ‘preacher-ridden race’ – is a world-denying spirituality, insensitive to beauty. ‘When you had eyes,’ he asks the man, ‘did you ever see th beauty of th world?’ (112). This religion, he feels, has converted suffering into virtue and so celebrates self-abasement. When he hears a woman’s ‘plaintive moan’ drifting from the church, Kabnis’s ‘face gives way to an expression of mingled fear, contempt, and pity’ (88). Yet that moan ‘has the sound of evening winds that blow through pinecones’ – it is, in other words, an iteration of the mysterious whisper of the pines throughout Cane, and cannot be comfortably dismissed. The competing view is given by Lewis, an idealised double who represents ‘what a stronger Kabnis might have been’ (95). Lewis names the man ‘Father John’: Lewis: And he rules over – Kabnis: Th smoke an fire of th forge. Lewis: Black Vulcan? I wouldn’t say so. That forehead. Great woolly beard. Those eyes. A mute John the Baptist of a new religion – or a tongue-tied shadow of an old. [. . .] Father John it is from now on. (104) In an interior monologue, Lewis imagines John as a [s]lave boy whom some Christian mistress taught to read the Bible. Black man who saw Jesus in the ricefields, and began preaching to his people. Moses- and Christwords used for songs. Dead blind father of a muted folk who feel their way upward to a life that crushes or absorbs them. (Speak, Father!) Suppose your eyes could see, old man. (The years hold hands. O Sing!) Suppose your lips. . . (104) The parenthetical entreaties link Father John, like the anonymous woman’s moan, to other appeals in Cane: ‘O pines, whisper to Jesus [. . .] Pines shout to Jesus!’ Like the phenomenon of beauty in Cane, Father John is both ‘prophetic’ and ‘immobile’. Lewis suggests that his silence has two possible meanings: as a sign of promise (‘of a new religion’) or as obsolescence (the ‘shadow of an old’). For Kabnis, too, the problem hangs on the use of words. Kabnis doubts the viability of ‘Moses- and

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Christ-words’; he insists that his own aspirations as a poet derive from the legacy of his ancestors, who were, he announces, ‘ORATORS’ rather than ‘preachers’ (109). The rhetoric of the story, however, suggests that Kabnis’s disavowal of Black spirituality is motivated less by the judgement of taste and more by a fear of identification. To trace his line to ‘preachers’ would be to accept his involvement in the condition that made preaching necessary – the historical sin of slavery – and to acknowledge that his own life is one of its casualties. When Kabnis claims that his ancestors, like Toomer’s, were ‘Southern blue-bloods’, Lewis reminds him that they were ‘black’, and Kabnis has to concede, ‘aint much difference between blue and black’: black and blue is the colour of bruising, and so the colour of Black skin in Jim Crow America (106). Kabnis disclaims the preacherly identity because he doesn’t want to ‘face’ the pervasive horror it entails: first, that any appraisal of the world has to account for evil as well as beauty; second, that as a Black man, he is not spared the humiliations extracted by that evil; and third, that Nietzsche’s derision of Judaism and Christianity for their ‘slave mentality’ looks different to those who have been enslaved and who have sought to transfigure their suffering in religion. Kabnis’s deepest difficulty, which is also Toomer’s, is his effort to imagine a language that does justice both to the promise of beauty and to the reality of evil: I’ve been shapin words after a design that branded here. Know whats here? M soul. Ever heard o that? Th hell y have. Been shapin words t fit m soul. [. . .] I’ve been shapin words; ah, but sometimes theyre beautiful an golden an have a taste that makes them fine t roll over with y tongue. (109) The problem, however, is that these words wont fit int th mold thats branded on m soul. Rhyme, y see? Poet, too. Bad rhyme. Bad poet. [. . .] Ugh. Th form thats burned int my soul is some twisted awful thing that crept in from a dream, a godam nightmare, and wont stay still unless I feed it. An it lives on words. Not beautiful words. God Almighty no. Misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words. (109) In her excellent book on Toomer, Karen Jackson Ford has argued that this passage – and ‘Kabnis’ as a whole – signals the abandonment of beauty, in particular the lyrical impulse found in earlier sections of the book, and so constitutes Toomer’s race-conscious version of the modernist resistance to Romantic or Victorian aesthetics. ‘Kabnis’s ugly words’, she writes, ‘articulate violation and atrocious violence, the deformation of beauty, the destruction of promise, and the negation of renewal. [. . .] Constrained by the hideous form that’s branded on his soul, the form of racism, violence, and aborted possibility, he cannot ignore the constant threat that racism poses.’14 This is true, but it is not quite adequate for Kabnis’s problematic, or to what Toomer described as the ‘spiritual’ curve of the book, which is not linear. His diatribe is framed, not as a reaction to the violence

14 

Karen Jackson Ford, Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 123, 125–6.

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of racism per se, but as a reaction to the religious idioms of Black Christianity by which that violence is interpreted and overcome.15 Kabnis is not a modernist hero courageously forging an anti-sentimental poetics. We are meant, rather, to be unsettled by the narcissism of his metaphysical anguish. Consider the migration of certain images in the story. Halsey recounts to Kabnis a horrific story about a lynching in which the unborn child of a Black woman is cut out of her womb and pinned by a knife to a tree. In his ‘split-gut song’ speech, Kabnis wishes that someone would ‘pin’ his soul ‘to a tree’ (109), as if his spiritual alienation were a comparable suffering. He fears (comically) that the hounds from Uncle Tom’s Cabin are coming for him. (‘White folks aint in fer all them theatrics these days,’ says Halsey. ‘Theys more direct than that’ (92).) That figure is then transmuted into a metaphor in which Father John becomes both victim and antagonist, ‘a black hound spiked to an ivory pedestal’ (112). Both images reach, of course, beyond the horror of the lynching to the possibly redemptive horror of Christ pinned to a tree. While the evil of anti-Black racism is part of the reality he has to ‘face’, Kabnis’s fundamental question is whether the world in which it occurs has a ‘face’, in the sense of a spiritual depth, and whether it responds to a traditional name that accounts both for the world’s violence and for its beauty: Christ. The story contemplates a theological term for the world’s violence: ‘sin’. Kabnis has fixated on a word that Father John has ostensibly been ‘murmuring’ all night. What he actually says is ‘sin’, but Kabnis hears that word as ‘death’: An all night long I heard you murmurin that devilish word. They thought I didn’t hear y, but I did. Mumblin, feedin that ornery thing thats livin on my insides. Father John. Father of Satan, more likely. What does it mean t you? [. . .] Whats it goin t get y? A good smashin in th mouth, thats what. My fist’ll sink int y black mush face clear t y guts – if y got any. [. . .] Your soul. Ha. Nigger soul. A gin soul that gets drunk on a preacher’s words. An screams. An shouts. God Almighty, how I hate that shoutin. Where’s th beauty in that? [. . .] When you had eyes, did you ever see th beauty of th world? Tell me that. Th hell y did. (112) Kabnis fears racism, but his deeper fear is having a ‘nigger soul’ that gets ‘drunk on a preacher’s words’. He questions the blind Father John’s ability to have ‘seen beauty’. Yet Kabnis’s response to beauty disfigured is to redouble the disfigurement – to ‘smash’ Father John’s ‘face’. Kabnis’s fantasy of violence actualises the very state he abhors. It is, in René Girard’s terms, one more rotation of the unending cycle of mimetic violence. By conflating ‘sin’ and ‘death’, Kabnis performs the misinterpretation modelled in his own name, which spells ‘sin’ backwards. In this misreading, world-hating morbidity (‘death’) is confused with the diagnosis of a state of morbidity – a diagnosis that is a call to transformation. In Father John’s only line, he articulates ‘sin’ as a state of wilful misreading: ‘O th sin th white folks ’mitted when they made th Bible lie’ (114).

15 

As Josef Sorett has demonstrated powerfully in his recent Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), the history of African American poetics simply is a religious history; regardless of whether the relation between the two is pious or agonistic, it is always intimate.

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If he is right, Kabnis is wrong: it is not religious language that debases, but rather religious language that has been debased. As the drama ends, Kabnis is unreconciled to Father John’s prophetic sentence, but he is chastened by Carrie’s retort: ‘Brother Ralph, is that your best Amen?’ (114). Halsey calls down to Kabnis in the cellar: ‘Th axle an th beam’s all ready waitin f y. Come on’ (115). The call to ascent is simultaneously a call to the discipline of making, or poesis. Making, in turn, is aligned with eschatological expectation. ‘When I use words’, Toomer wrote in a letter of 1922, ‘I wish to create those things which can only come to life in them’ (152). The last words spoken in Cane – Carrie’s ‘Jesus, come’ – establish an analogue between the life of words and eschatological hope. That analogue dissolves, perhaps, the antagonism between ‘preaching’ and ‘oration’ that Kabnis endorsed. Carrie speaks her ‘come’ as morning dawns, and the light through the window illuminates the two figures: Light streaks through the iron-barred cellar window. Within its soft circle, the figures of Carrie and Father John. Outside, the sun arises from its cradle in the tree-tops of the forest. Shadows of pines are dreams the sun shakes from its eyes. The sun arises. Gold-glowing child, it steps into the sky and sends a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town. (115) These final paragraphs quietly inaugurate a vision first articulated in ‘Esther’, a story about a young white woman who, over a decade, concocts an elaborate fantasy in which she becomes the lover of Barlo, a charismatic Black visionary. That story ends in disillusion, and the eclipse of her fantasy evacuates reality altogether: ‘There is no air, no street, and the town has completely disappeared’ (28). Even so, Barlo is the only character in Cane who has risked an interpretation of the whispers that pervade its world: ‘Jesus has been awhisperin strange words deep down, O way down deep, deep in my ears’ (24). Importantly, in his mystical trance, Barlo allows his face to be humiliated: he falls to his knees at a place called ‘The Spittoon’, and the white men, unaware that he is kneeling, ‘continue spitting tobacco juice in his direction. The saffron fluid splashes on his face.’ Yet this ostensible debasement makes his face radiant: ‘His smooth black face begins to glisten and to shine’ (24). Barlo speaks: ‘Brothers an sisters, turn your faces t th sweet face of the Lord, an fill your hearts with glory. Open your eyes an see th dawnin of th mornin light’ (25). Cane ends by turning to that light. Karen Jackson Ford has argued that we should be sceptical of these final ‘sunrises, circles of light, newborns, and songs’. Forgetting that Kabnis is an embattled character, she takes Kabnis’s disenchantment of lyric as the truth about Cane, which ‘has come to regard all lyric with suspicion’, because it ‘obscures the realities of African American life’.16 I invoke this reading not to prosecute an interpretive quarrel, but rather because it exemplifies a canonical secular dichotomy – lyricism versus realism – and the classic anxiety it assumes: that lyric beauty is to historical suffering what subjective sentiment is to the sober truth of reality. The tension between lyricism and realism is deeply felt in Cane, but Toomer engages it at metaphysical and ultimately

16 

Ford, Split-Gut Song, 142–3.

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theological level. For Toomer, the basic question is not whether the lyrical impulse softens the brutal ‘realities’ of racial history, but whether he can articulate a tenably spiritual ontology that ‘faces’ those realities without courting the sentimental or the naively teleological. The closing passage of Cane is not theodicy. It does not fold violence into the charmed circle of aesthetic order or lay a soothing palimpsest of sunlight over darkness. It is better understood as eschatology: it imagines a future consummation that recasts – instead of abandoning – the eschatological intimations of Barlo and Father John, and so aims to revitalise the African American spiritual tradition. It is anchored not in the subjective fiat of private lyricism, but rather in the authoritative presence of beauty and personhood. For Toomer, personhood and beauty are no less ‘real’ than the violence that harasses them. The figural correlative of this conviction is that the world has a ‘face’: ‘Shadows of pines are dreams the sun shakes from its eyes.’ At the start of ‘Kabnis’, ‘face’ is an ineffectual, fantastical dream covered in the darkness of night. At its close, the ‘[s]hadows of pines are dreams the sun shakes from its eyes’. ‘Shadow’ – the recalcitrant violence of history – is not the decisive truth about things. An abiding apprehension of Cane is that ‘dream’ hovers speciously above the ‘body of the world’. Here, however, it is ‘shadow’ that belongs to dream. The hope entertained in these closing images – a hope that is neither knowledge nor illusion, but eschatological possibility – is that a ‘turn’ to the ‘morning light’ may be a turn to the ‘sweet face of the Lord’.

Works Cited Coquet, Cécile. ‘Feeding the Soul with Words: Preaching and Dreaming in Cane.’ In Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith, 84–95. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Foley, Barbara. Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Ford, Karen Jackson. Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Haeckel, Ernst. The Riddle of the Universe. Translated by Joseph McCabe. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900. Jones, Donna V. The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Jones, Robert. Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Kerman, Cynthia Earl and Richard Eldridge. The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Scruggs, Charles and Lee VanDemarr. Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Sorett, Josef. Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Norton, 2011. ———. Wayward and Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1983. Weil, Simon. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001.

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lags and monuments, coronations and commemorations, anthems and pledges – these are but a few of the many rituals and symbols that produce and sustain national imagination. Whether in times such as war or anti-colonial struggle when ‘hot nationalism’ stokes ardent displays of patriotism or during peaceable eras in established nations where ‘unwaved’ flags subtly press their ‘banal nationalism’, the liturgies of national civil religion remain a vital part of modern social and political existence.1 Investigations into those liturgies and their power are a central focus of political theology, a field that Carl A. Raschke describes thus: ‘political theology is not a theology of the political. Instead, it aims to inquire into the grounds – or perhaps we should say the ontological grounding – of the political as we know it.’2 Instead of a totalising and absolute secularity, modern political life shows a persistent field of enchantment. In their introduction to the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Manley Scott write, ‘What the term “political theology” names, then, is the recognition that politics never was drained of the sacred; the primary locus of the sacred merely shifted from church to nation-state and market.’3 This account differs from a ‘post-secular’ awakening where politics becomes newly re-enchanted. Instead, the sacredness once held exclusively in religious faith transferred in modernity to the political realm manifested in the state and economy. Inquiry into this condition has been an inspiration for a host of philosophers, political theorists and theologians, but literary studies has been less prone to draw from its resources. This chapter offers suggestions for further development of the relationship between literature and political theology with particular attention to the value of these cross-disciplinary exchanges for modernist studies. In fields other than modernist studies, political theology has for the past two decades provided a valuable framework for analysing literature. Especially active have been the

1 

The terms ‘hot’ and ‘banal’ nationalism, and the importance of ‘unwaved flags’, are from Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995). Billig explains: ‘the term banal nationalism is introduced to cover the ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced [. . .] these habits are not removed from everyday life, as some observers have supposed. Daily, the nation is indicated, or “flagged”, in the lives of its citizenry. Nationalism, far from being an intermittent mood in established nations, is the endemic condition’ (6). 2  Carl A. Raschke, Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), xii. 3  William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Manley Scott, ‘Introduction to the Second Edition’, in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology: Second Edition, ed. William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Manley Scott (Chichester: Wiley, 2019), 2–3.

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areas of early modernity, Shakespeare studies and Romanticism, where the connections among literary works and political theology have been examined not only for their historical and hermeneutical value but also for conscious intervention in our current age. Julia Reinhard Lupton’s Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (2005) is a standout case in point, a rich work of scholarship that envisions renewed political imagination through critical and contextual analysis of Shakespeare.4 Lupton argues that scholarship on ‘the strange hybridization of religious and political thinking in the Renaissance’ has too often focused on ‘its gallery of dead kings’ rather than ‘the corpus of citizens implied by political theology’, and her exegesis of Shakespeare’s plays displaces the monarchal centre with another protagonist: the hero of this book is not the tyrant-martyr but the citizen-saint, not the two bodies of the king but the many faces of the multitude. By searching for signs of the citizen in the domain of political theology, I emphasize the always-emergent future implied by its sacred tropes of fellowship rather than the termination of its mythic past on the public stage of deposition and regicide.5 For Lupton, literature captures alternative spaces to those defined by the historically recognised sites of power and provides new possibilities for our thinking, acting and belonging today. With a similar focus on the liberating theopolitical possibilities of literature, G. A. Rosso’s The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism (2016) shows how William Blake’s surrealistic and gnomic texts supply a vigorous critique of Britain’s religiously inspired imperialism. Rosso not only shows how political theology enables fresh interpretations of Blake’s work and its late eighteenth-century historical context, but he also insists upon ‘Blake’s relevance for contemporary political theology’ based in a ‘dual critical and creative approach to the Bible and his view that the institutionalization of Christianity compromises its ability to resist state-sanctioned violence’.6 Deciphering Blake’s symbolism through the lens of anti-imperialist political theology helps clarify and interpret early Romantic literature, but Rosso also indicates how literature can contribute to current theopolitical debates and shape our critical imaginations today.7 Lupton, Rosso and others have produced commendable models of disciplinary integration between literary studies and political theology and provided vital pathways for further exploration.8

4 

See also Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, eds, Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 5  Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 6  G. A. Rosso, The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), 48. 7  Rosso’s discussion of the debates about Christianity and nationalism among theologians such as John Howard Yoder and Oliver O’Donovan is exemplary in digging deeper into disciplinary theology than many other examples of cross-disciplinary work. His learnedness about conversations in theology and the ways Blake studies might contribute to them earns a sense of true interdisciplinarity where both fields might gain from reading his work. 8  Another essential introduction to literature and political theology is Jared Hickman, ‘Political Theology’, in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, ed. Mark Knight (New York: Routledge, 2016), 124–34. Hickman’s literary examples are almost entirely from the US in the Romantic period.

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Modernist studies, despite its openness to interdisciplinary and intersectional work, has been slower to engage with political theology. A major reason for this neglect is the persistent misconception about the secularity of modernity, at least by contrast with other historical ages. Shakespeare and Blake, for example, wrote in periods of relatively widespread religious belief, and the mechanisms of political life before the twentieth century were replete with religious language and religiously shaped practices. Though our current scholarly moment has roundly criticised the ‘secularisation thesis’, there has been, I would suggest, insufficient attention to the persistence of enchantment and religious imagination in twentieth-century politics – at least in literary studies. Historians such as John Wolffe and Philip Jenkins have shown that deeply entrenched religious narratives, ideologies, symbols and rituals gave order, structure and meaning to the years of the Great War and its aftermath, fuelling many of the political drives toward war and shaping the post-war memorialisation.9 Scholars such as Vincent P. Pecora and Matthew Mutter have thoughtfully investigated the rich textures of modernist secularism and drawn connections to the impact of heightened religious nationalism during wartime.10 Additional work could be done to show how modernist art functions as political theology that interacted with these ideologies. Two other challenges to the secularisation thesis from modernist studies deserve mention for their importance in the field and their differences from political theology. First, there is the long-standing interest in works by modernist artists who were committed people of faith. Adherents to mainstream religious traditions including T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, David Jones, Muhammad Iqbal and Rabindranath Tagore have had considerable attention based on their active faith in a time of supposed secularity. Other forms of spiritualism, occultism and mysticism beyond traditional orthodoxies have also been crucial for complicating the narrative of modernist secularism.11 What studies in these areas tend to suggest is that individual artists or isolated trends manifested religious beliefs and practices against a backdrop of secularisation. More contentiously, there has also been a wave of scholarship that challenges the secularisation thesis by asserting that the secular is itself the anomaly, and that a continuing presence of belief persisted in modernity. As Pericles Lewis memorably puts it, ‘If God died in the nineteenth century, he had an active afterlife in the twentieth.’12 Many of these studies have complicated and enriched our picture of the religious landscape of the twentieth century, and we are indebted to this work. At times, however, the focus on a generalised ‘religious experience’ seems to assume that ‘religion’ is a matter of personal, individual belief rather than considering the historical, material, social and

9 

See John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (New York: HarperCollins, 2014). 10  See Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), and Matthew Mutter, Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 11  See Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), and George M. Johnson, Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 12  Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 25.

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political dimensions of ‘religion’. By placing our focus on political theology, I am advocating a turn toward theological work that emphasises community, materiality, social action and public witness as essential to faith, not as additional benefits layered on top of an essential foundation of spirituality.13 Political theology refers to a view of theology that is actively engaged in the world, intrinsically connected to communities, publicly expressed, and historically and materially shaped. This notion of theology is distinct from expressions of faith that are merely personal, private, individualistic and ‘spiritual’.

Theopolitical Foundations Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922) is the common touchstone for anyone thinking about political theology in the past hundred years as it pertains to theological conceptions of the state. Schmitt’s translator George Schwab refers to him as ‘undoubtedly the most controversial German legal and political thinker of the twentieth century’, a claim supported by the idiosyncrasy and influence of his theory as well as his trajectory from devout Catholic who considered the priesthood into lawyer who helped devise the Third Reich.14 The most enduring of Schmitt’s maxims is ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’, which he elaborates on, saying this is so ‘not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver – but also because of their systematic structure’.15 This ‘systematic structure’, Schmitt claims, is apparent in the way that the rise of the modern state and the rise of deism occur simultaneously within the rationalist Enlightenment tradition. Schwab offers a concise summary of Schmitt’s central thesis that usefully gets to the core of contention within political theology. Schwab explains: By virtue of its possession of a monopoly on politics, the state is the only entity able to distinguish friend from enemy and thereby demand of its citizens the readiness to die. This claim on the physical life of its constituents distinguishes the state from, and elevates it above, all other organizations and associations. To maintain order, peace, and stability, the legally constituted sovereign authority is supported by an armed force and a bureaucracy operating according to rules established by legally constituted authorities.16

13 

In my sketch of the field in these pages, I focus on theopolitical writing that especially engages with the nation-state, and this is a significant area of discussion across several different types of political theology. There are numerous other areas of political theology that could be valuable for cross-disciplinary work in modernism, including but not limited to the work of Latin American and Black liberation theologies as well as womanist, queer and feminist theologies. See, for instance, Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973); James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1970); M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010). 14  George Schwab, ‘Introduction’, in Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty [1922] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), xi. 15  Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. 16  Schwab, ‘Introduction’, xxvi.

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The crucial factor in this account of the state is that killing and dying, the determination of ultimate sacrifice, has transferred from the purview of religion to the purview of the state. This transference, and the outsized place of the nation-state in modern social organisation, is a source of concern and criticism among many thinkers invested in political theology. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf [. . .] [I]t is like being asked to die for the telephone company.17 For modernist studies, there is a valuable opportunity to reflect more thoroughly on the conversations that Schmitt initiated, especially since Schmitt’s political theory would emerge in horrifying reality with a state that enveloped and extended religious institutions.18 Thus, for the period of modernist studies, the field of political theology offers a rich array of intellectual resources, and literature also offers its own imaginative contributions to theopolitical thought. In considering such cross-disciplinary work, it should be observed that to speak of a ‘field’ of political theology is to overstate, somewhat, the cohesion among the disparate groups and thinkers associated with the term. The Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, one of the most influential political theologians of the past forty years, has referred to political theology as a ‘mass of confusions’.19 Presumably for Hauerwas those confusions pertain to conflicting uses of the term ‘political theology’ as well as the many unstated assumptions about political theology that occur when people from different confessional backgrounds and faith traditions argue about the role of religion in public life. Hauerwas and his many students, including William T. Cavanaugh and Daniel M. Bell Jr, engage polemically with reformed theologians such as James K. A. Smith and Hak Joon Lee, as well as non-theist philosophers and political theorists such as Jeffrey Stout and Romand Coles.20 At issue in these debates is whether Christianity needs to

17 

Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘A Partial Response to my Critics’, in After MacIntyre: Critical Responses on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 303. 18  See Michael Lackey, The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis’ Christian Reich (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). 19  Hauerwas, back matter, James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017). 20  See, for example, Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Abingdon, MD: Abingdon Press, 1989); William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Daniel M. Bell Jr, Divinations: Theopolitics in an Age of Terror (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017); Hak Joon Lee, ‘Public Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Political Theology, ed. Craig Hovey and Elizabeth Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 44–66; Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008).

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assert its political witness as distinct from the secular nation-state or whether collaborative interaction between faith and nation can be a benefit to both church and polis.21 These debates among theologians and scholars of religious studies operate in a parallel sphere to another major field of political theology, and these two realms rarely interact.22 This second large body of scholarship approaches political theology as an outcropping of continental philosophy and is often conducted by non-theists who recognise that modern political life retains an aura of enchantment that cannot be ignored when attempting to theorise better political formations. Among the major figures in this area are Giorgio Agamben, Simon Critchley, Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett and Carl A. Raschke – philosophers who disagree about many aspects of political theology but share a set of reference points and key thinkers (Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Lacan, etc.) in their debates about imagining public life.23 My suggestion for literary scholars interested in political theology is that we need not be limited to just one of these camps. Among Christian theologians there are valuable investigations of the powerful, sometimes insidious allures of nationalism and political liturgies. William Cavanaugh, for example, writes powerfully about the ‘theopolitical imagination’, pointing toward a way for imaginative literary works to contribute to our richer political visions.24 Among continental philosophers there are resources for imagining new collective identities within the theologies of the state. Simon Critchley, for instance, asks: Might we not conceive of the possibility of redefining the secularization that is believed to be definitive of modernity with the idea of modern politics as a metamorphosis of sacralization, where modern forms of politics – whether liberal democracy, fascism, soviet communism, national socialism and the rest – have to be grasped as new articulations and mutations of the sacred, as metamorphoses of sacralization?25

21 

It is also worth noting how the US and US-based writers are the dominant force in the field, a phenomenon that has disproportionately skewed conversations toward the role of the American civil religion and the place of the American church within the US democratic project. See, for instance, Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 22  An important exception is the group of theologians associated with the ‘radical orthodoxy’ movement. John Milbank, for instance, has been a collaborator and interlocutor with both Stanley Hauerwas and Slavoj Žižek. See, for instance, Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank and Creston Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 23  Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, trans. 2011) and The Church and the Kingdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, trans. 2012); Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2013); Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics after Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Raschke, Force of God. 24  William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 5. 25  Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2012), 25.

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Modernist studies is uniquely positioned at a turning point in modern political life when various ideologies – socialist, communist, fascist and liberal – competed for supremacy, and artists imagined their own counter-narratives to these prevailing forces. Pursuing Critchley’s arguments further, he suggests in his political theology the importance of literary works for formulating a new theopolitical imagination. Drawing from Wallace Stevens’s description of an ever-expanding horizon of possibility for what he calls the ‘supreme fiction’, Critchley explains that Stevens ‘writes of the supreme fiction that is not given to us whole and ready-made’ and argues that ‘we might begin to transpose this possibility [imagined by Stevens] from the poetical to the political realm, or indeed to show that both poetry and politics are realms of fiction, and that what we can begin to envision in their collision is the possibility of a supreme fiction’.26 By considering the ways that modernist literary experimentation broadens and refines our capacity to reckon with unimagined possibilities, we may also broaden and refine our capacities to envision political worlds beyond the models we have inherited. While there are certainly theopolitical insights to be gained from examining the explicitly religious modernists such as Eliot, Waugh and Jones, I suggest that political theology offers an opportunity to consider the theopolitical imaginations of atheistic and agnostic writers who engaged with public faith more obliquely or from positions outside of traditional pieties. In nations such as Ireland and Spain where Christianity retained a major public role in the early twentieth century, writers such as James Joyce and Ramón del Valle-Inclán wrote experimental fiction that challenged religious and political hegemonies. Even nations that were supposedly more secular and less patriotic still nurtured theopolitical fiction. Writers such as Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley, for example, wrote extensively about new ways to live in modernity while confronting English civil religion that perpetuated war. Modernism offers a unique site of cultural clashes – between enchantment and disenchantment, among competing utopian visions, and in experiments with aesthetic newness. Modernist writers around the globe who challenged the liturgies of the state may be read as contributors to a form of political theology with resources for our theopolitical imaginations today.

D. H. Lawrence and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Theopolitical Fictions I turn now to a pair of modernist novelists whose work offers new possibilities both for interpretations of their fiction and for engaging with political theology. D. H. Lawrence and Sylvia Townsend Warner may not necessarily be the most essential modernists within our current trends, but they have certainly received considerable scholarly attention and maintain a devoted readership. They are valuable for showing the utility of political theology among writers who were not committed to any mainstream faith traditions, although both were raised in particular, historical expressions of Christianity. These are only sketches within the available space, but I hope they are suggestive for other more substantial research trajectories into modernism and political theology. D. H. Lawrence was raised Congregationalist in the Eastwood Chapel, part of the dissenting low-church tradition that prided itself on being distinct from the 26 

Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, 91–2.

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high-church posturing of mainstream Anglicanism. The features of Christianity that impressed themselves on Lawrence and would remain vital to his thought – despite his rejecting orthodox Christianity as a teenager and renouncing institutional religion tout court – were those of the working-class chapel. His final completed book Apocalypse (1931) is an idiosyncratic commentary on the biblical book of Revelation, and in a signal moment in the text he writes with palpable ire about the version of end-times mythology taught by colliers during Bible studies. ‘The Apocalypse’, he writes, is a ‘strange book’ that ‘shows us the Christian in his relation to the State; which the gospels and epistles avoid doing. It shows him in mad hostility to all of them, having, in the end, to will the destruction of them all.’ For much of Apocalypse, Lawrence seems to replicate the common usage of the word, making it synonymous with ‘mass destruction’ or ‘total devastation’, rather than the more neutral ‘revelation’. This absolute destruction that Lawrence detects in Revelation ‘is the dark side of Christianity [. . .] And it is, simply, suicide. Suicide individual and en masse. If man could will it, it would be cosmic suicide. But the cosmos is not at man’s mercy, and the sun will not perish to please us.’ His reading of Revelation is rather flat-footed and surprisingly literal, and it is closely connected to his belief that ‘this Christianity of the Apocalypse [. . .] is hideous [because] self-righteousness, self-conceit, self-importance and secret envy underlie it all’.27 What Lawrence finds in the revolutionary vision of Revelation is a will-to-destroy that expresses envy toward those who have more power and possessions – rather than an outcry that denounces greed, plutocracy, imperialism and war. Instead of a cry for justice Lawrence hears a gripe of jealousy, and his disgust at this Apocalypse follows from there. It is crucial to notice how this passage does not merely indicate the presence of a generalised ‘religious experience’ but rather demonstrates the specificity of Lawrence’s engagement with biblical Christianity and how it shaped the political vision of workers in his home village. The colliers’ reading of the Bible was not just a private, solitary, devotional act but cast a vision for political imagination (at least in the way Lawrence represents it thirty years later). Lawrence’s response to this biblicism is not to ignore, dismiss or abandon it, but to engage and reimagine it. Apocalypse is a distinctly Lawrentian take on the supernatural meta-narrative cast in the final book of the Christian scriptures. Against the class antagonism and wilful devastation he finds in Eastwood Chapel interpretations, Lawrence supplies a vision of grandiose hope: ‘What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family.’28 Obviously, one’s mileage may vary regarding how compelling Lawrence’s counter-narrative seems, but it is important to recognise that he writes of cosmic renewal found in harmonious integration (rather than triumphal destruction) on the cusp of authoritarian dominance throughout Europe. Lawrence offers a new theology that resists the politics of his childhood home as well as the theologies of the state that were gaining traction in the 1930s.

27 

D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 148, 144. 28  Lawrence, Apocalypse, 149.

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In Apocalypse Lawrence challenges the end-times mythologies of his youth for the ways that they fuse a political attitude with a theological vision he finds distasteful. What he grapples with in the book can be properly called a ‘political eschatology’ – that is, a theological end-times narrative with consequences for contemporary public life. In his own idiosyncratic fashion, Lawrence joins a conversation that continues in academic theology and Christian church discourse today. While Lawrence’s objections to the eschatology of the Eastwood Chapel fail to acknowledge the radical and subversive edge of their political theology – envisioning destruction of the oppressor as a way to sustain hope during fraught and uncertain times – his concern for an eschatology that matters in the present and sustains a hope for renewal echoes the later writings of Jürgen Moltmann. Since his landmark work Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology (1967), Moltmann has been a leading figure in the areas of eschatology and political theology, giving an account of the eschatological that opposes narratives of cataclysmic judgement, earthly demolition and ‘final solutions’. Moltmann pointedly notes that all talk of ‘final solutions’ resonates – not coincidentally – with the genocidal ambitions of the Third Reich,29 and he concludes: If eschatology were no more than religion’s ‘final solution’ to all the questions, a solution allowing it to have the last word, it would undoubtedly be a particularly unpleasant form of theological dogmatism, if not psychological terrorism. And it has in fact been used in just this way by a number of apocalyptic arm-twisters among our contemporaries.30 Moltmann counters that distinctly ‘Christian eschatology has nothing to do with apocalyptic “final solutions” of this kind, for its subject is not “the end” at all. On the contrary, what it is about is the new creation of all things.’31 This account of eschatology as a matter for present political life imbued with a spirit of creation, renewal and regeneration seems deeply consonant with Lawrence’s final message in Apocalypse despite the difference between Moltmann’s Christian orthodoxy and Lawrence’s apostasy. What Moltmann supplies for a reading of Lawrence is a recognition that the political eschatology Lawrence ascribes to all of Christianity (via his depiction of Eastwood biblicism) is really one contentious strain in a broader debate about end-times mythologies and theories developed throughout the history of Christian thought. What Lawrence enables is a glimpse of how a non-Christian writer immersed in a Christian culture can engage in secular political theology that broadens the audience and scope of these claims beyond particular groups of religious adherents. Lawrence’s theopolitical imagining is not limited to his non-fiction, and a case can be made for reading his final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in light of his vision for Apocalypse. For much of its history, Lawrence’s notorious ‘sex book’ has

29 

Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), x. In his argument against eschatology as a ‘final solution’, Moltmann draws on his personal experience as a refugee from Nazism, and he critiques the eschatological thought of the monumental Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, which he claims ‘seems to present the “Endgame” of the theodrama of World History’ – a concept that Moltmann notes von Balthasar borrowed from Beckett (x). 30  Moltmann, The Coming of God, xi. 31  Moltmann, The Coming of God, xi.

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been captive to debates about its relative amounts of feminism or misogyny, but far less attention has been paid to the broader socio-political stakes of the novel.32 The relationship between Connie Chatterley and the gamekeeper Mellors is certainly a dominant through line of the narrative, but the backdrop of the novel in immediate post-war England is no less significant. Clifford Chatterley’s condition as an injured veteran with unaddressed post-traumatic stress links the war to the industrial exploitation of the English countryside. Clifford was not a natural-born patriot, initially feeling a casual resistance to the war aligned with the ‘popular recoil of the young against convention and against any real sort of authority. Fathers were ridiculous [. . .] and armies were ridiculous [. . .] even the war was really ridiculous, though it did kill rather a lot of people.’33 His attitude changes after his elder brother is killed in combat and Clifford takes his place as family heir. Though he is positioned to some extent as the villain of the novel, his antagonism is born more out of the ways he has been positioned due to the brokenness of the world – capitalism, militarism, patriotism and religion have fused to make Clifford who he is as a rival to the life-giving earthiness and eros of Connie and Mellors. The concluding view of the central lovers, captured in a letter written by Mellors to Connie, is rich with political eschatology that coordinates with both Lawrence’s Apocalypse and Moltmann’s eschatological writings. Mellors describes his relationship with Connie in terms lifted from Christian ritual – ‘It’s my Pentecost, the forked flame between me and you’ – but he explicitly reclaims that language for his own unorthodox meaning: The old Pentecost isn’t quite right. Me and God is a bit uppish, somehow. But the little forked flame between me and you: there you are! That’s what I abide by, and will abide by, Cliffords and Berthas, colliery companies and governments and the money mass of people all notwithstanding.34 The ‘flame into being’ has had a long-standing importance in Lawrence studies for the ways it succinctly captures Lawrence’s spiritualism, vitality and fascination with the multivalence of fire. His chosen emblem of the phoenix that dies in flame to be reborn suggests resurrection narratives that strongly resonate with Lawrence’s Christian youth. But that phoenix also evokes an eschatology. Burning to ash, waiting for rebirth, and re-emerging glorious is the lifecycle of the phoenix as well as the narrative arc of Lawrence’s cosmic vision in Apocalypse. Not final judgement and devastation but ultimate rebirth and harmony – this is Lawrence’s hope for Connie and Mellors, for England itself, and for the universal end-times. When Mellors describes the flame’s meaning, it is not limited to love between Connie and himself, but as a contrast with governments, corporations and nations. Lawrence’s political eschatology is richly imagined through this final work of fiction in a story about two lovers that has implications for the cosmos.

32 

Exceptions to this neglect include David Trotter, ‘Techno-Primitivism: Á Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, Modernism/modernity 18, no. 1 (January 2011): 149–66. 33  D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover [1928] (London: Penguin, 1993), 10. 34  Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 301.

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I have suggested how reading Lawrence’s work both as and alongside political theology yields fruitful results, but turning to Sylvia Townsend Warner supplies another avenue for this cross-disciplinary inquiry. To some extent, Lawrence may seem readymade for theological approaches given that all of his work obsessively attempts to contend with the faith of his youth and to craft a new religion of his own devising.35 Lawrence’s idiosyncratic religious sensibility, similar to William Blake’s synthesis of Christianity and the occult, is self-consciously fashioned to affect the reader and change the world, operating in what Charles Burack calls a ‘hierophantic art’.36 Warner, though also raised in the church, seems far less possessed by her Christian upbringing, a background that her biographer Claire Harman describes: ‘she had never had a great deal of Christianity thrust upon her, though she had had, in the usual course of things, a great deal of Church.’37 Harmon’s characterisation captures the ambivalence of her Christian upbringing, where Warner’s Anglicanism was not an onerous burden but that ‘great deal of Church’ persisted to influence her later dealings with Christianity. The overdetermination we can so readily find in Lawrence, however, does not seem as powerful with Warner. Instead, I will briefly sketch the ways that Warner manages to write theopolitical fiction that can be read in dialogue with the secular political theology of Simon Critchley and Jack Halberstam, other non-Christian thinkers who have thoughtfully engaged with the enchantments of the state and envisioned resources for alternatives to state power. Warner’s first novel Lolly Willowes; or, The Loving Huntsman (1926) has enjoyed a recent critical interest for the ways it blends realism with fantasy in service of a queer and feminist agenda. In broadest strokes, the plot concerns a woman named Laura Willowes who leaves her conventional family to find a new life in a rural English village – a town that turns out to be populated entirely by witches and warlocks. Scholars have been drawn to the fantastical narrative swerve of the novel and the ways it breaches the heteronormative and masculinist matrix. Less attention has been given to the novel’s striking critique of British civil religion and complex depiction of anarchism – dimensions of the novel illuminated by a theopolitical interpretation.38 Laced throughout the story are subtle but insistent reminders of the cultural presence of Christianity and the ways it enforces identity norms, sustains militarist ideologies, and contributes to nationalist agendas. The Willoweses are a middle-class English family that has burnished its name, lightly, with the mild success of their ‘great-great-aunt Salome’ who ‘had made the nearest approach to fame’ because her ‘puff-paste had been commended by King George III’ and her published prayer-book was used for numerous civil religious ceremonies.39 Whatever claims they have to gentility and modest celebrity are substantiated by their recognition in the church and

35 

See Luke Ferretter, The Glyph and the Gramophone: D. H. Lawrence’s Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Charles Burack, D. H. Lawrence’s Language of Sacred Experience: The Transfiguration of the Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1. 37  Claire Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography (London: Penguin, 1989), 12. 38  Essential works on Warner that connect queer and feminist approaches to her novels with concerted attention to nationalism and imperialism are Jane Garrity, Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), and Gay Wachman, Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001). Neither of these studies addresses Warner’s grappling with Christianity. 39  Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes; or, The Loving Huntsman [1926] (New York: NYRB, 1999), 10. 36 

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monarchy, dual pillars of civil religious authority. The comedy of manners depicting the Willowes family’s genteel pretensions and their disappointment that ‘Aunt Lolly’ is ageing past respectable marriageability fractures during the outbreak of the Great War. The war changes everything, but not in the familiar way of Great War narratives where bloody destruction turns naive jingoism into disillusioned realism. Instead, the Willowes family has, all things considered, a rather good war, and Laura initially finds their fortitude and resolve a disposition to admire. But soon her admiration curdles, and she reflects (through the narrator’s free indirect discourse) that their stoicism is just hot nationalism in another guise. Laura begins to feel that the Willoweses’ determined inaction is part and parcel of civil religion at its hottest: ‘Was it nothing more than the response of her emotions to other old and honorable symbols such as the trooping of the colors and the fifteenth chapter of Corinthians, symbols too old and too honorable to have called out her thoughts?’40 The stolidity of the Willowes family becomes, in this moment, a version of flag-waving nationalism. The trooping of the colours, a central part of the reigning monarch’s birthday celebration, is a national ceremony uniting military pageantry with adoration of royalty. The fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians is a meditation on the resurrected Christ whose triumph will enable the bodily resurrection of all people. Its famous verses, ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’, which feature prominently in Christian burial rites, echo unspoken in Laura’s mind, combining the post-war mourning rituals with her family’s ritual stoicism.41 The biblical reference is another noteworthy sign of the persistence of Christianity in constructing national responses to war. Just as Christian nationalism helped inspire and fuel the war effort and sustain the home front’s patriotic discipline, the post-war labours to celebrate and commemorate the war are imbued with transcendent meaning through their fusion with Christian mythologies. It is against this backdrop of Christian-inspired nationalism that Laura’s turning toward an ambivalent fellowship with Satan achieves its theopolitical importance. Her migration to Great Mop, the rural harbour for a secret coven, has been widely recognised as a victory for queer resistance – a renunciation of the heteronormative expectations of Laura’s family and broader culture. What has been less obvious is how to understand the deep ambivalence of Laura’s final situation, her relationship with the so-called Loving Huntsman of the title who holds her in ‘his undesiring and unjudging gaze, his satisfied but profoundly indifferent ownership’.42 If Warner’s conclusion were a complete triumph for witchcraft over sexual and gendered norms, her depiction of Laura’s final relationship would, perhaps, be less ambiguous. Instead of an alternative rule by the society of witches, Warner depicts her protagonist thriving in an in-between space that is not governed by heteronormativity steeped in Christianity and Englishness, but is also not contained by Satan’s male-dominated coven. Laura is, in James C. Scott’s terminology, ‘illegible’ to her family and the witches. ‘An illegible society’, Scott writes, ‘is a hindrance to any effective intervention by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is plunder or public welfare.’43 Though this statement,

40 

Warner, Lolly Willowes, 65–6. 1 Cor. 15: 55–7. 42  Warner, Lolly Willowes, 222. 43  James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 78. 41 

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and many of the examples Scott gives, show his recognition that the state’s purposes are not always nefarious, what he offers is a tool for creating alternative spaces within the state. Rather than suggesting that large-scale revolution and a total overthrow of the governing power is essential for rescuing oppressed individuals and communities, Scott indicates that there may be ways to live well in those unseen, illegible spaces ‘outside [the state’s] field of vision’.44 This illegibility is prized by Jack Halberstam, who asserts that ‘wondrous anarchy’ can be achieved through embracing failure rather than ‘succeeding’ by asserting new modes of domination: ‘Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.’45 ‘Failing’, Halberstam writes, ‘is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well.’46 The queer anarchism depicted by the conclusion of Lolly Willowes rivals the civil religion that pervades the first sections of the novel, and through that rivalry offers a position that Simon Critchley explicitly describes as a mode of secular political theology. Critchley theorises a ‘mystical anarchism’ with echoes of both Halberstam and Scott: ‘Politics is perhaps no longer, as it was in the so-called anti-globalization movement, a struggle for and with visibility. Resistance is about the cultivation of invisibility, opacity, anonymity, and resonance.’47 Like Scott’s notion of ‘illegibility’ where a productive political life can be nurtured in the spaces unseen by the state, Critchley’s view of resistance endorses a position that thrives within dominant power structures, subverting them but not establishing a new hegemony. In Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2013), Critchley describes what he calls ‘anarchic meta-politics’48 and champions an anarchism that forms an ‘interstitial distance within the state’.49 Warner’s novel explores the breaks and fissures within the dominant power structures established by a church united with the state. Rather than overturning such structures to create an alternative kingdom, counter-hegemony or rival utopia, her fiction dwells in the awkward, unbecoming and anarchic spaces. What these brief commentaries on Lawrence and Warner intend is a potential for thinking more deeply about the ways modernist art can be productively interpreted through political theology, as well as indications about the possibilities for using modernist works to provoke dialogue with political theology. Work by committed Christians such as Moltmann and secular theologians such as Critchley and Halberstam has been under-used by scholars seeking to broaden the range of tools engaged under the banner of ‘religion and literature’. Though fictions by Lawrence and Warner might suggest the post-secular aura of ‘religious experience’, they are also rich with historically specific, materially invested and politically engaged imagination. By envisioning an end-times mythology that alters current political action or imagining the creative space of mystical anarchism, these writers point to creative possibilities for theopolitical modernism. At a

44 

Scott, Seeing Like a State, 12. J. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2–3. 46  Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 3. 47  Simon Critchley, ‘Mystical Anarchism’, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simon-critchley-mysticalanarchism (accessed 3 May 2022). 48  Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 88. 49  Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 111. 45 

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time of ebbing and flowing hot nationalism stoked by global conflict, anti-colonialism, authoritarian resurgence and shifting dominance among the superpowers, modernism beckons for deeper consideration of political enchantment and the ways creative cultural artefacts responded to, shaped and reacted against such forces.

Works Cited Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage, 1995. Burack, Charles. D. H. Lawrence’s Language of Sacred Experience: The Transfiguration of the Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Cavanaugh, William T. Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. ——— and Peter Manley Scott. ‘Introduction to the Second Edition.’ In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology: Second Edition, edited by William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Manley Scott, 1–12. Chichester: Wiley, 2019. Critchley, Simon. The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. London: Verso, 2012. ———. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso, 2013. ———. ‘Mystical Anarchism.’ https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simon-critchley-mysticalanarchism (accessed 3 May 2022). Halberstam, J. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Harman, Claire. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. London: Penguin, 1989. Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ———. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 1928. London: Penguin, 1993. Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. MacIntyre, Alasdair. ‘A Partial Response to my Critics.’ In After MacIntyre: Critical Responses on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, edited by John Horton and Susan Mendus, 283–304. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. Moltmann, Jürgen. The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. Raschke, Carl A. Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Rosso, G. A. The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. 1922. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Schwab, George. ‘Introduction.’ In Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty by Carl Schmitt, xi–xxvi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Warner, Sylvia Townsend. Lolly Willowes; or, The Loving Huntsman. 1926. New York: NYRB, 1999.

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Part III: Religious Forms

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12 Virginia Woolf’s Agnostic, Visionary Mysticism: Approaching and Retreating from the Sacred Gabrielle McIntire

V

irginia Woolf’s literary masterpieces assume a culture and a milieu of modern secularity, with her central characters (mostly) untethered to what she considered to be the restrictive dogmas and illusions of traditional religious beliefs. Woolf herself has primarily been understood as an atheist, with a statement she makes in her posthumously published autobiography, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1941), that there is ‘no God’,1 taken as retrospective evidence and confirmation of a thoroughgoing conviction. Both her fictional and non-fictional prose, though, are deeply traversed with cautious but persistent explorations of sacred experience. Woolf celebrates the expansiveness of the ‘human spirit’,2 believes in an immaterial ‘soul’, and conveys intimations of a singular oneness with an inexplicable ‘real’ ‘behind appearances’ (‘Sketch’ 72); her work is permeated with visionary, transformative ‘moments’ characterised by quasi-religious feelings of ‘rapture’ and ‘ecstasy’, while she emphasises the miraculous in the everyday. Her diaries, letters and novels also include frequent mention of chapels, churches, cathedrals and prayer. Terms like ‘revelation’, ‘illumination’ and ‘vision’ recur so often in her writing that they begin to seem like key words to grasping the meaning of her oeuvre. The visionary artist of To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe, laments that the ‘great revelation had never come’, but she, like Woolf, finds consolation in and sustaining gratitude for epiphanic glimpses of ‘little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark’.3 Later in the novel Lily’s claim about the miraculous becomes more expansive: ‘all was miracle’ (180), and even ordinary objects – a chair, a table – make her feel ‘It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy’ (202). Woolf also frequently ruminates about a theistic Absolute; indeed, a varied pantheon of monotheistic and pagan gods appears across her novels and short stories. References to ‘God’, ‘goddesses’ or ‘gods’ occur thirty times in Mrs Dalloway alone, beginning with Septimus Smith’s declaration about his ‘revelation’ that ‘There is a God’.4 In Jacob’s Room, Jacob swoons about the rays of the sun hitting the Scilly

1 

Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 2nd edn, ed. and intro. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt, 1985), 72. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 2  For one example of this see Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, 1984), 153. 3  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 161. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 4  Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, annotated and with an introduction by Bonnie Kime Scott (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 24. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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Isles which cause ‘the very foundations of scepticism’ to ‘shake’, prompting him to wonder, ‘what about God?’5 During the General Strike in May 1926 Woolf confesses in her diary, ‘What one prays for is God: the King or God; some impartial person to say kiss & be friends – as apparently we all desire.’6 She also makes frequent apostrophic appeals to ‘God’ in both her fiction and her personal writings that we would be hard-pressed to read as entirely or always ironic, satirical, sarcastic or banal. For a planned ‘book on literature’ for the Hogarth Press that she never completed, she imagined ‘Six chapters’, with one of them being about ‘God’.7 Instead of finding a rigid or secure atheism in Woolf, then, we discern a charged, agnostic fascination and ambivalence about sacred and mystical experience.8 While Woolf regards organised religion as socio-culturally retrograde, often anti-feminist, and sometimes distasteful – she expresses ‘shock’ at the ‘obscene’ nature of T. S. Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism9 – she nevertheless invites her readers to be open to visionary eruptions of sacred experience and wonder in the midst of the seemingly secular. In Woolf’s unfinished autobiographical fragment, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, she describes a series of ‘exceptional moments’ that ‘shock’ her with their visionary and revelatory quality (72). These ‘moments of being’, as she calls them, are crucial sites of psychic anchoring and personal insight, while they structurally and thematically animate her novels and stories with flashes of perception that make approaches to the mystical. In the segment of her memoir where she makes her claim that there is ‘no God’, she is prompted to develop a ‘philosophy’ about relationships between writing, art, truth, human being-ness, intense emotion and visionary transcendence: it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool [of daily life] is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is

5 

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, ed. Vara Neverow (New York: Harcourt, 2008), 49. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 6  Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 78. 7  Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, 107. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie note that although Woolf refers to this planned book ‘several times’ between 1925 and 1928, only ‘portions’ were eventually published as articles under the title ‘Phases of Fiction’ (1929). See Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, 50. 8  Jane de Gay, Emily Griesinger and Stephanie Paulsell have recently suggested that we reconsider the designation of Woolf as an ‘atheist’ in light of the complexity and range of Woolf’s interest in religious and theological questions. De Gay contends, ‘It is inaccurate to describe Woolf as atheist: she speculates far too often about the existence and nature of God for us to say that she had a thoroughgoing and consistent conviction that God did not exist.’ Jane de Gay, Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 220. Griesinger argues that we should no longer persist in ‘assuming that Woolf is primarily and irrefutably an atheist’ in her chapter ‘Quaker Mysticism and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse’, in Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf, ed. Kristina K. Groover (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 133. Paulsell considers that Woolf had ‘transformed the agnosticism she inherited from her father into something less dogmatic’ in Religion Around Virginia Woolf (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 31. 9  The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1923–1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 3, 457–8.

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no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock. (‘Sketch’ 72) Refuting both individual and divine authorship within a world which she nevertheless perceives to be created and creational, Woolf comes close to the language of an avant-garde modern theology that makes allowance for radical doubt even as she denies the existence of ‘God’. That is, in the very moment that she affirms an atheistic worldview Woolf undermines her ostensible convictions with a sense of the limits of a post-Enlightenment secularity, attesting to the mystery of an absolute totality of words, music and ‘the thing itself’.10 Such moments offer sustaining insights about ‘some real thing behind appearances’ (‘Sketch’ 72) and inspire her to undertake what she elsewhere calls ‘the transmuting process’ of translating ‘thought’ into creative literary art.11 Writing, she proposes, enables her to make ‘real’ within her own life the partial ‘token’ she perceives of an ultimate and eternal ‘real’; textual expression, as such, allows her to participate in a doubling of the ‘real’, where the ultimate real is layered in with her real process of healing trauma and pain. Her role almost becomes one of an author-god, capable of translating fragments into ‘wholeness’, and it gives her ‘a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what’ (‘Sketch’ 72). Atheism, we recall, is largely a modern, post-Enlightenment development that coincided with, but is not necessarily an offshoot of, a turn to secularisation as one ‘option’ among many.12 After Descartes’s cogito ergo sum it became possible to conceive of ‘God’ as yet another object of contemplation among many, with meta-critical reflections about a sovereign Self, consciousness, and subjectivity increasingly becoming objects of study. Woolf came of age in the Bloomsbury milieu where, as Stephanie Paulsell notes, the group found, in G. E. Moore and others, ‘“a religion without god” in which truth, love, and beauty were intrinsic goods and communion with friends and lovers and the contemplation of art were the practices that brought one into relationship with those goods’.13 Among Woolf’s circles, organised religion was often repudiated, but her yearnings for transcendent meaning and feelings of reverence, wonder and attentiveness to immanence remained. We thus witness Woolf struggling, sometimes simultaneously, against two impossible convictions: convinced atheism on the one hand, and religious belief on the other.14 Her impulses to describe sacred meaning and experience always had to reconstitute themselves in the face of this tension so that what emerges is a form

10 

Her statement also aligns with theoretical quantum physics which offers scientific rather than sacred solutions to the ‘patterning’ of the universe. For some provocative discussions of modernist literary approaches to this idea see Rachel Crossland, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 11  Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, 102. 12  This is a central argument of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). See also J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane’s Atheism and Theism, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 13  Paulsell, Religion Around Virginia Woolf, 90. 14  As Pericles Lewis and others have noted, Woolf’s distaste for rigid dogma of any kind was strong, whether religious or atheist. See Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 143.

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of secular-sacred poetics in line with her modernist, avant-garde literary experiments where the sacred is often hidden from view in her work and yet in plain sight. She thus both hides the sacred and hides from the sacred, while she simultaneously repudiates and remains entranced with sacred and even religious experience. We can say that Woolf’s agnosticism was broad, open, unimpressed with strictures of any kind, whether of atheism or religion. As Jack Caputo writes about Jacques Derrida, ‘even though [Derrida] does indeed “quite rightly pass for an atheist” with respect to the God of the orthodox faiths, still he has an absolved, “absolutely private language” in which he speaks of God all the time’.15 Still, a tendency remains to overdetermine Woolf’s late statement about there being ‘no God’, and to assume a retrospective atheism that characterises her worldview across her lifetime. The ‘moment of being’ Woolf parses in the passage I cite from ‘A Sketch of the Past’ takes her into the heart of what I want to call a secular-sacred epiphany where, to borrow William Wordsworth’s phrase from ‘Tintern Abbey’, she suddenly and briefly is able to ‘see into the life of things’.16 This piercing insight removes what Woolf calls the ‘screens’17 of rational judgement and allows her to ‘get at the thing itself’, and this desire for proximity with the essential whatness or thingness of being, the universe, and experience preoccupied her through most of her adult life. What she characterises as a ‘revelation’ carries qualities of both Christian religious epiphany (with its unexpected insights about messianic redemption) and Joycean epiphany (with its reprisal of religious language to convey the shocking sting of life-altering awakenings that suddenly befall one, as if from an outside). Woolf possessed an ambivalent admiration for James Joyce, and praises him in her 1921 essay, ‘Modern Fiction’, for doing justice to what she calls ‘the spirit’, ‘truth’, and ‘reality’. Joyce, she writes, is ‘spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain’.18 Without suggesting that Joycean ‘epiphanies’ and ‘moments of being’ are interchangeable, both mark instances when the mind is suddenly aware of its own ontology and of the distinctiveness of its unique epistemological and phenomenological self-awareness. Both Woolf and Joyce also suggest that such revelations hold a special relationship to language, where the supra-linguistic ‘ah-ha’ moment of insight must almost immediately confront the limits of language and narration; this prompts a secondary, acute, meta-critical awareness about oneself or one’s relation to the world in either (or both) a secular or sacred domain. These secular-sacred epiphanies also echo what Woolf describes in her diary as ephemeral ‘moments of great intensity’ within her own marriage to Leonard Woolf; these moments she considered analogous to Thomas ‘Hardy’s “moments of vision”’.19 Of the utmost significance, immersively transcendent ‘moments of being’ are fleeting, but provide ‘scaffolding’, to use Woolf’s word, that enlivens the rest of experience (‘Sketch’ 73). Pericles Lewis

15 

Jack Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xvii. 16  William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798’, in Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (New York: Norton, 2013), l. 50. 17  Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, 104. 18  Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, 151. 19  Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, 105.

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writes about them as ‘almost sacred moments in which experience enters the sublime’, and he considers Woolf’s ‘embrace’ of them as a ‘modern form of polytheism’.20 And Woolf is able to convey these moments with such intensity, in language, that she manages to prompt secondary small leaps of faith in her readers, reaching across the fourth wall to invite us to be attentive to the significance of such visionary moments – little awakenings – in our own lives. The Wordsworthian ‘life of things’ that Woolf perceives is one of radical interdependence and permeability between human beings, created works of literature and music, and the ‘vast mass that we call the world’, which would include for her global culture, geo-history, phenomena, psychology and a sense of the world’s cosmogony. Woolf’s statement links transhistorical artistic impulses and achievements with a mystical, visionary interconnectedness where human beings are synecdochally part of the world’s ongoing oeuvre-as-creation, even as she refutes both God and individual signatory genius. She elaborates her mysticism outside of a theistic framework, even as she celebrates transcendence, immanence and altered, intensified states of perception. Woolf’s logic affirms the ultimate ‘truth’ of a creative, fundamentally artistic universe – of Beethoven, Shakespeare and, strikingly, of the human: ‘we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself’ (‘Sketch’ 72). In this way she insists on a co-extensivity between each human being and a universal, essential whatness. Importantly, she dispenses with any gesture that would establish mere similitude: she does not use similes – she notably does not write we are like the words; we are like the music. Instead, she declares, human beings are art. We are the tools, the media and the product of a cosmic creative process. The heavy anaphoric repetition of her declaration depends on the copulative musculature of the ‘we are’, putting human being-ness on equal and continuous footing with the mystery of ultimate Being and ‘thing’-ness. Further, she elaborates that ‘I see this when I have a shock’ (my emphasis). The flash of insight about our symbiotic relation to a fundamentally wholistic order of things means that we are not traces of something else but that all is singular. In this altered state Woolf participates in a form of visioning that theologians, saints and psychologists have long designated as ‘mystical’, and indeed, Woolf overtly characterises her writing method, her literary aims and her moods at various points as ‘mystical’. When she is close to finishing To the Lighthouse in 1926 she observes a ‘mystical side’ of her solitude, and this state of mind leads her to imagine the ‘advent of a book’ (likely ‘The Moths’, which would become The Waves) as ‘a dramatization of my mood at Rodmell. It is to be an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we aren’t there.’21 Again, when conceiving of The Waves in 1928, Woolf imagines it as a hybridised ‘abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem’, and she worried that she might sometimes be ‘too mystical’.22

20 

Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, 145. Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, 113–14. 22  Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, 203. Julie Kane draws a dividing line between Woolf’s ‘dismissal of her own mystical bent’ in her writings of the 1910s and earlier 1920s and the moment in 1928 when Woolf began conceiving The Waves and consciously decided ‘I must come to terms with these mystical feelings’ (Diary, vol. 3, 203). ‘Varieties of Mystical Experience in the Writings of Virginia Woolf’, Twentieth-Century Literature 41, no. 4 (1995): 329. 21 

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Some of Woolf’s earliest readers recognised her ‘mysticism’, including the poet and fellow modernist writer W. H. Auden. Auden proposed in 1954 in The New Yorker that ‘What she felt and expressed with the most intense passion was a mystical, religious vision of life’.23 Woolf’s nephew, Quentin Bell, who became one of her most important biographers with the publication of Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972), writes that Woolf ‘tended to be, as she herself put it, “mystical”’.24 Elizabeth Anderson reminds us recently that ‘Mystical Woolf is not an uncontested term’,25 but a quiet line of critical reception has challenged the predominant narrative of Woolf as a thoroughly secularised atheist. Both Martin Corner26 and Suzette Henke note her mystical impulses as early as 1981, with Henke suggesting that Woolf’s Quaker aunt, Caroline Emelia Stephen, ‘may have inspired Woolf’s lifelong interest in the religious and “mystical” dimensions of reality’.27 William James, who coined that crucial phrase that inflected the methods of modernist fiction, ‘stream of consciousness’, defines mysticism in his seminal study, Varieties of Religious Experience, as involving ‘states that are of brief duration’ in which our consciousness is altered and intensified. Such moments are notable, he proposes, for their ‘illuminations’ and ‘revelations’ that feel ‘full of significance and importance’, ‘unplumbed by the discursive intellect’, and yet they remain ‘ineffable’ and difficult to translate into words. James argues, too, that global traditions from Hinduism to Neoplatonism, Sufism, Christianity and even what he calls ‘Whitmanism’ have described the mystical state as one where ‘we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness’.28 Using similar language, Evelyn Underhill, an influential modernist Christian mystic and theologian of whom Woolf was aware, traces visions of a cosmic co-extensivity across epochs and cultures from Plotinus to St Augustine, from Eckhart to Ruysbroeck, Jacob Boehme, Kabir, Mechtild of Magdeburg and others. Each understands ‘mystical consciousness’, Underhill explains, as ‘a closer reading of truth [. . .] an apprehension of the divine unifying principle behind appearance’.29 In Woolf’s revelatory states of consciousness that unexpectedly puncture and transform the flow of time – much like the ‘poignant’ ‘accident’ of Roland Barthes’s punctum that he describes in Camera Lucida30 – she describes a simultaneous sense of breaking free of ordinary, fragmented, partial perception together with an awareness of the potential for a fullness of perception. Woolf’s secular-sacred epiphanic ‘moments of being’ thus attest to a susceptibility to entrancement where the Self’s ecstatic mingling and blending with what is otherwise gives both unsurpassable pleasure and insight.

23 

W. H. Auden, ‘A Consciousness of Reality’, The New Yorker, 26 February 1964. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (Orlando: Harcourt, 1972), 136. 25  Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Silence, Darkness, and Dirt: Mysticism and Materiality in The Years and Between the Acts’, in Virginia Woolf and Heritage: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Sixth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane de Gay, Tom Breckin and Anne Reus (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2017), 102. 26  Martin Corner, ‘Mysticism and Atheism in To the Lighthouse’, Studies in the Novel 13, no. 4 (1981): 410. 27  Suzette A. Henke, ‘Mrs Dalloway: The Communion of Saints’, in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 145, n. 8. 28  William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Matthew Bradley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 59, 291, 320. 29  Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen, 1960), 289. 30  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1981), 27. 24 

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In Woolf’s frequent borrowing from the language of religion and mysticism she articulates a permeable oneness with a ‘hidden pattern[ing]’, order and logic (perhaps a version of the Greek logos) that subtends all life and ‘proves that one’s life is not confined to one’s body and what one says and does’. This is a ‘conception’, she notes, that ‘affects me everyday’ (‘Sketch’ 72–3). Part of what this radical singularity of all things means is that our difference from every imaginable alterity – things, art, divinity, others – is collapsed. The eternally deferred différance that structures our being as always-already alienated is resolved in such a vision since nothing about our ontology is ever deferred if ‘we are the thing itself’. This unified vision of the holistic, even transparent, clear nature of things appears in moments of secular-sacred epiphanies that are scattered through Woolf’s fiction. They occur in the light-filled dinner scene of To the Lighthouse where ‘looking together united them’ (97). Here Mrs Ramsay perceives a vision of ‘a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out’ (105). We find them, too, in the ‘mysterious illumination’ Louis describes in The Waves at the last meeting of the six characters when, as Rhoda says, ‘we enjoy this momentary alleviation (it is not often that one has no anxiety) when the walls of the mind become transparent’.31 Instead of the chronic psychic condition of alienation and estrangement from otherness that troubles Woolf’s characters in so much of her fiction – we might think, among others, of Septimus Smith, Peter Walsh and Mrs Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway; Lily Briscoe, Mr Ramsay, Mrs Ramsay, James and Cam in To the Lighthouse; every character but Percival in The Waves (Louis laments, ‘We differ, it may be too profoundly’ (92)) – Woolf’s ‘Sketch’ affirms ‘connect[ion]’, a ‘hidden pattern’, and the creative unfolding of a brilliant universe that manifests itself in bodies, beings, words, art, and music. Estrangement and alienation is alleviated with flashes of redemptive visioning in Mrs Dalloway when Clarissa recalls the transformative, revelatory moment when Sally Seton had ‘kissed her on the lips’, figuring it as a ‘present [. . .] something infinitely precious’ that had been given to her. From here Woolf slips immediately into religious, visionary language to convey the astonishing intensity of the eroticism: ‘the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!’ (35). Intellectually Woolf is uncertain and sceptical of faith, belief, and sacred experience, and maintains a rational distancing from organised religion which she perceives as cognitively dissonant; emotionally, though, she is drawn to plumb the wondrous and relay the convictions of mystical insight. Recent studies generally agree that modernism’s ostensible secularity has been overstated, even simplified. As David Sherman argues, the secularisation hypothesis always involves ‘a complex and tense knotting together of religion and non-religion, enchantment and disenchantment, across individuals, families, communities, and nations’.32 When Woolf writes about her admiration for Russian literature she suggests, In every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our famous novels to tinsel and trickery.33 31 

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, annotated and with an introduction by Molly Hite (New York: Harcourt, 2006), 168. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 32  David Sherman, ‘Woolf’s Secular Imaginary’, Modernism/modernity 23, no. 4 (2016): 714. 33  Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, 153.

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Woolf did not feel comfortable following any specific religion, but neither did she wish to trivialise matters of the ‘spirit’, and she often undercuts her ostensibly irreligious leanings to veer into an agnostic language of at least partial conviction about the existence of an Absolute. Her curiosity and uncertainties thus situate her on an interstitial edge, an in-between space where she alternately acknowledges and disavows religious impulses. In practice, in her fiction, Woolf does not repudiate the possibility of what we might call a divinity-of-the-world, or divinity-in-the-world. For Clarissa Dalloway London possesses a ‘divine vitality’ (7). In To the Lighthouse Woolf refers multiple times to the ‘divine’, mentioning ‘divine promptitude’ (128), ‘divine bounty’ (133) and an active ‘divine goodness’ (127–8). Like the ‘saints’ of Russian literature, a personified ‘divine goodness’ – a phrase Woolf repeats – takes pity on ‘human penitence and all its toil’ (128); for a moment, like some kind of cosmic puppeteer-God with the power to hide and reveal, ‘divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking, which, did we deserve them, should be ours always’ (127–8). Woolf grants ‘divine goodness’ an arbitrariness as well as an ethos: he (yes, he is gendered male) chooses when to offer flashes of pure seeing. But, as is the case with almost every momentary vision in Woolf’s work, the in-sight is quickly snatched away, as if it is entirely beyond personal will; ‘divine goodness’ ‘draws the curtain’, curtailing the vision, and ‘he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth’ (128). The desire is to perceive things singly, as they are – almost in an Imagistic purity that would cohere with mysticism. The challenge of how to read Woolf’s perspectives on the sacred, the religious, the secular, the atheistic, the spiritual and the mystical has perplexed scholars ever since Woolf became an object of study. Woolf was resistant to both organised religion and atheism: an agnostic preoccupied with the ways in which sacred experience erupts in the midst of a seemingly secularised life, participating in what Vincent Pecora has called ‘Modern culture’s tortuous approach to religion’.34 In her 1928 diary, she writes of feeling ‘very little’ at a funeral, ‘only the beauty of the Come unto me all ye that are weary; but as usual the obstacle of not believing dulled & bothered me. Who is “God” & what the Grace of Christ?’35 Her questions, again, simultaneously displace and yet participate in the theological imagination and she overtly ponders age-old theological quandaries. She renders ‘not believing’ as an ‘obstacle’, as if, like Thomas Hardy’s sceptical speaker at the nativity scene in ‘The Oxen’ – a poem published on Christmas Eve 1916 in The Times, which Woolf may have read given her admiration for Hardy – she was half ‘Hoping it might be so’.36 This dullness is also antithetical to the piercing epiphanic moments of heightened insight and intensity that she makes crucial to her artistic vision.

34 

Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 122. 35  Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, 181. 36  Thomas Hardy, ‘The Oxen’, in Thomas Hardy: Selected Poetry, ed. Samuel Hynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), l. 16.

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‘Awake’ is the final, single-word sentence that closes To the Lighthouse’s experimental, lyrical middle section, ‘Time Passes’ (143). This literal awakening of the visionaryartist, Lily Briscoe, at the end of a section devoted almost entirely to the effects of time and human absence on the Ramsay country house, brilliantly parallels Lily’s ontologically rich exclamation at the close of the novel about the achievement of her abstract expressionist painting, ‘I have had my vision’ (209). Lily, akin to the seer Tiresias in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, is a witness to the ‘substance’ of the narrative: she sees and names the telos of the story as intertwining vision with voyaging belatedly to a beacon of light. She also arrives at her own singular ‘vision’ after borrowing from the language of Christ’s moment of death in her post-creative exhaustion: ‘It was done; it was finished’ – a phrase that echoes the earlier statement about Mrs McNab’s and Mrs Bast’s own creative labours to restore the Ramsay country house: ‘it was finished’ (209, 141). Framing Part III of the novel this way – with its title, ‘The Window’, offering another notation that we should register as having to do with vision(ing) – invites the reader, too, to wake up, to be alert. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, after reading both Christian and Hindu scriptures, wrote persistently about the human longing – the desire – to wake up, to ‘see into the life of things’, as Wordsworth would have it. In Walden (1854) Thoreau insists, ‘I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?’37 In Nature (1836) Emerson writes of collapsing otherness into ‘the Universal Being’ through losing ‘egotism’ to become pure perception: ‘Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.’38 Underhill writes of ‘a sharp and sudden break with the old and obvious way of seeing things’ as a hallmark of mysticism,39 and in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ Woolf considers that pure perception is part of what sets ‘moments of being’ apart: each epistemological and ontological breakthrough that reaches us within time ‘is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances’ (71). In describing the temporality of her ‘moment of being’ about the ‘hidden pattern’ Woolf articulates an instantiation of sacred time to which we are prone, in everyday existence, that can suddenly transport us outside the ordinary temporal register while significantly altering how we experience and perceive. Woolf’s mystical experiences happen in time, but they take us outside of time, even as we are inevitably pulled back into time, almost magnetically, by the sheer force of temporality: Woolf’s visions, just as those in mystical traditions, always-already know they will be broken or interrupted by the inevitability of their transience. In William James’s view ‘transiency’ is a feature of almost all mystical experience: ‘Mystical states cannot be sustained for long.’40 Such moments bring us very suddenly to the brink of awakenings and insight; possibly to awakenings about the sacred. They arguably bring us to a boundary of what we might

37 

Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, ed. William John Rossi (New York: Norton, 1992), 61. 38  Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, in The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward W. Emerson (New York: William H. Wise & Co., 1929), 1. 39  Underhill, Mysticism, 130. 40  James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 291.

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call an enlightenment. Woolf is also, of course, communicating a version of sacred time that writers, philosophers and theologians have written about for millennia; she is articulating a version of the Greek conception of kairos in contrast to chronos: sacred, special, unquantifiable temporality in contrast to measurable, ordinary, diurnal clock time. Charles Taylor writes of these moments via Peter Berger as times ‘when “ordinary reality” is “abolished” and something terrifyingly other shines through’.41 What we discover is that sacred experience is not an either/or for Woolf within a definite continuum of sacred ‘versus’ secular. Instead, Woolf frequently attests to her disbelief or uncertainty precisely when she is grappling with the wonder of mystical insight, encountering her own resistance at the very moment of revelation. She thus takes her reader with her as she halts and arrests mystical moments, refusing to be bowled over by them, even as, like the mystic, she revels in their ‘rapture’ and ‘ecstasy’. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’, precisely as she is affirming and exploring a radical, immersive, transhistorical co-extensivity of selves with otherness, she interrupts and interjects to exclaim there is ‘no God’. This pattern of the immersive enchantment followed by recoil, disavowal, and then a critical, rational interjection or correction occurs repeatedly in her work, and in most instances Woolf emphasises a destabilisation within the startlement and wonder of her reveries. Her secular-sacred epiphanies bring her nearer to ultimate meaning and yet force her to involve the intellect, too, to confront the very problem of mystery. The enigma of the sacred – that something ‘set apart’ from ordinary experience – then stands as a metonymy of some (possible) relation to some (possible) transcendence which compels Woolf but about which she is uncertain, agnostic. The almost Kantian, sublime incomprehensibility of her ‘moments of being’ is part of what short-circuits them and produces, abruptly, a turn back to subjectivity and self-consciousness, breaking the communion with ‘the thing itself’. Indeed, Woolf returns to this pattern so often that I begin to wonder if this self-conscious doubling back upon herself and within her characters is almost a sacred ritual or game in itself – one of Nietzsche’s ‘sacred games’ of ‘atonement’ that he wondered if we would need to invent in the long shadow of our killing of ‘God’; an uncertain but still-entranced substitution for a direct approach to the divine.42 In To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay experiences and rhythmically re-experiences, in echo of the ocean’s waves that she observes, an ecstatic merging of her Self with the light of the lighthouse; what Martin Corner calls her ‘fusing’ of ‘self and not-self’.43 The omniscient narrator enters Mrs Ramsay’s mind to convey her identification with the lighthouse: she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse. [. . .] Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at – that light, for example. And it would lift up on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like that – ‘Children don’t forget, children don’t forget’ – which she would repeat and begin adding to

41 

Taylor, A Secular Age, 5–6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181. 43  Corner, ‘Mysticism and Atheism’, 410. 42 

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it, It will end, it will end, she said. It will come, it will come, when suddenly she added, We are in the hands of the Lord. But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean. (63) Mrs Ramsay, in an immersive ideation and identification with the Lighthouse ‘stroke’ – a synaesthetic light that touches, sensually, like a lover, while it illuminates – ‘became the thing she looked at’ (my emphasis). She here casts aside distinctions of self and other, inside and outside, same and different as the great mystics from Teresa of Avila to Eckhart do, affirming instead her co-extensivity with the essence of ‘that light’: the very light of the ‘lighthouse’ that names the book and acts as its teleological symbol, destination, psychic and topographical end-point. Mrs Ramsay’s becoming the object of her sight – ‘that light’ – also reveals a subjectivity prone to absorption in alterity. Perhaps her maternal subjectivity was too sacrificial, too ready to give away its Self to the needs and demands of her children and husband, subsuming herself too easily to otherness. In this way Mrs Ramsay’s mysticism also feels ascetic, self-denying. What can it mean, though, for Woolf’s major female protagonist, this sacrificial maternal figure and creator of eight children, home, dinner, and social-familial harmony, to vocalise a refrain from standard Christian worship – ‘We are in the hands of the Lord’ – that signals a doctrine of trust, faith, and surrender together with an absolute vulnerability and submission to the divine? In one of the many abrupt, unmarked shifts in the novel between voices, the narrator declares, immediately after this statement of faith, ‘instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that’. Mrs Ramsay insists she could not have said it and that she had walked into a ‘trap’ of convention, as if her subjectivity had been overtaken, occupied; as if her lips uttered the words automatically, without her full consent. This is one of many moments in the novel and in Woolf’s other works when religion erupts beyond conscious control. In the impulse to repeat a common phrase from Christian liturgy Mrs Ramsay inhabits for a brief moment a faith-based episteme which she quickly repudiates. She is, then, traversed with faith even as she resists faith’s comforts; like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, her mind ‘is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve’.44 It is also unclear what Mrs Ramsay is expecting to ‘come’ – ‘It will come, it will come’ – though it would be fair to consider it a foreshadowing of her impending death in the next section of the novel. A moment later, though, despite her protests that it was not herself who uttered the phrase of faith, Mrs Ramsay finds herself slipping into another sacred moment where she almost careens into the allure of religious, prayerful language, like a moth to a flame, ‘praising the light’. Mapping again a sacred ecology of co-extensivity where the person is of the same essence as ‘the thing itself’, Mrs Ramsay goes on to remark on her merging not only with the lighthouse beam, but also with ‘inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one; in a sense were one’ (63). This expansive, mystical pastoralism, animated without an acknowledged theistic impetus, feels, again, copulative, with interiority ecstatically and erotically blending with the scene she beholds: ‘there curled up off the floor of the

44 

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (New York: Penguin, 2016), 222.

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mind, rose from the lake of one’s being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover’ (64). Again, though, the narrative stutters, and Mrs Ramsay circles back to repeat her query ‘What brought her to say that: “We are in the hands of the Lord?”’ (64). But instead of total recoil from these eruptions of prayerful language – a chance, perhaps, for Woolf to pronounce an atheistic perspective – Mrs Ramsay poses a question that sounds agnostic: ‘How could any Lord have made this world?’ (64). The world, she observes, lacks ‘justice’ and is filled with ‘treachery’; the world presents too many insoluble problems of ‘suffering, death, the poor’ (64). But after this hiatus of cognitive doubt Mrs Ramsay again re-enters the visionary, ecstatic state: she ‘saw the light again’ – initially with ‘some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one’s relations changed’ (64) – and she is then transported into a reverie so powerful that ‘the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!’ (65). What does Mrs Ramsay mean by her repeated exclamation ‘It is enough! It is enough!’? The words protest a too-muchness of ‘ecstasy’ and ‘delight’ while attesting to the complete sufficiency of the visionary experience. Woolf will, in fact, return to this motif of enough-ness in both The Waves and Mrs Dalloway. In The Waves, during Bernard’s final soliloquy, a few pages before he exclaims, ‘Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’, he affirms a radical sufficiency of these supreme moments in time: ‘The moment was all; the moment was enough’ (220, 206). In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway, as I will explore further below, also asserts that ‘it was enough’ to experience a brief ‘moment’ of ‘revelation’ (32). These repeated phrases in Woolf echo J. S. Bach’s Cantata ‘Ich habe genug’ (BWV 82) (‘I have enough’), written in 1827 for the Feast of the Purification of Mary.45 Emma Sutton tells us that Woolf attended the Bach Festival at Westminster, London, that ran from 16 to 20 April 1920, and that Virginia and Leonard owned more than eighty Bach recordings which they would have played on their gramophone.46 Given the strong resonance with Woolf’s repeated affirmation ‘It is enough’, it seems worth examining a verse from Bach’s Cantata: Aria: Ich habe genug (I have enough) Recitative: Ich habe genug (I have enough) Aria: Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen (Doze off, you dull eyes) Recitative: Mein Gott! wann kommst das schone: Nun! (My God! When does the beautiful one come: Well!) Aria (Vivace): Ich freue mich auf meinen Tod (I look forward to my death) Bach’s sublime affirmation of plenty through the aria, supported with vocal and instrumental repetition of words and themes, draws upon several biblical passages that

45 

I owe this insight to Alison Sorbie, a doctoral candidate at Queen’s University, who first drew my attention to the resonance between Woolf’s ‘It is enough!’ and Bach’s ‘Ich habe genug’ in her essay ‘The Consolations of Nature: Winged Presence in Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse’, submitted for English 863, 6 December 2021. 46  For a fascinating discussion of this see chapter 4 of Emma Sutton, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 90–112.

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speak of the sufficiency of God’s grace, including 2 Corinthians 9: 8: ‘ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.’ Bach’s affirmation of earthly sufficiency and his anticipatory embrace of death’s inevitability resonates with Mrs Ramsay’s position at what is, uncannily, exactly the midpoint of the first section of To the Lighthouse. Secular-sacred epiphanies occur, too, when Mrs Ramsay – also a sacrificial, feminised Christ figure and a modernist version of the Madonna and child whom Lily Briscoe paints as a ‘purple triangle’ ‘without irreverence’ – hosts the family’s last meal together. The religiously laden language here combines Christological reverence with occultism, mysticism, and even magic: Mrs Ramsay ‘led’ them all ‘to the altar’, a Last Supper tableau that brings about uncanny feelings of ‘love’ (101), unity, and of seeing together under Mrs Ramsay’s ‘spell’ and the glowing light of the eight candles that she lights. Together they momentarily feel ‘eternity’ (105): ‘Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right’; ‘Here was the still space that lies about the heart of things’ (104–5). This is the material of mysticism. Woolf is relating intense experiences of a deeper, otherwise hidden reality; she is noting the sudden and unprovoked nature of rapturous feelings; she is relaying a group experience of the numinous. Once again, though, Woolf will not allow her characters to slide completely into rapture. Even as Mrs Ramsay’s experience is coalescing into one of wonder and ‘joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather [. . .] in this profound stillness’ (105), Woolf’s omniscient narrator, identified here with Mrs Ramsay, parenthetically interrupts the narrative flow to remark ‘but this cannot last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment’ (104). Again, Woolf finds herself needing to interrupt mystical experience; to halt it; to worry it; to query its validity. Put positively, what Woolf may be portraying is a moment of mindful, lucid self-observation, with Mrs Ramsay consciously appreciating her state of trance without leaving it. As such, she, like Woolf, is able to straddle two conflicting perspectives to partake of both the secular and the sacred moment simultaneously. In Mrs Dalloway the omniscient narrator, identified with the titular character, poignantly describes another ‘moment of being’ in terms of the secular-sacred of a sensual, deeply sustaining but ‘sudden’ and resisted ‘revelation’ that breaks through the everyday. Woolf takes recourse again to language typically associated with sacred experience – ‘revelation’, ‘astonishing significance’, ‘rapture’, ‘extraordinary alleviation’, ‘illumination’, ‘an inner meaning’. As with Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and Bernard in The Waves, the brief ‘moment’ is sustaining; it is ‘enough’: Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over – the moment. (32) This time it is not Mrs Dalloway who retreats from the moment, but, like ‘divine goodness’ in To the Lighthouse who ‘draws the curtain’ after the epiphanic, revelatory

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insight, some exterior power or effect ‘withdrew’ from the almost-meaning precisely as a fuller meaning was about to be clarified. The moment follows William James’s characterisations of the mystical as ineffable and inevitably short-lived, and Woolf is painfully aware that each of these piercing insights is a fragment, fragile and ephemeral. Interestingly, in this regard Woolf’s agnosticism echoes one of her father’s observations that theologians have often noted our very limited abilities to gain insight into the divine. In An Agnostic’s Apology Leslie Stephen quotes the Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent where ‘Newman tells us that we “can only glean from the surface of the world some faint and fragmentary views” of God’.47 Woolf questions, troubles and queries the place of the divine and other aspects of mystical experience through her work, and her posture toward sacrality – as for so many other writers of her period and of ours – exists on a spectrum of mystery, uncertainty, unknowing and conviction, where the precise articulation of belief or faith is ultimately a self-alienating and impossible task. In our current age of fluid, non-binary gender identities that Woolf presaged with her queer, feminist, and trans explorations a century ago – in Orlando, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, especially – it might be time to let go of the desire to place Woolf, or anyone, definitively on to a single, unmovable spot on the spectrum of belief and disbelief, or into strict, oppositional binarisms of the sacred versus the secular. Woolf’s avant-gardism was capacious enough to allow that moments of atheism and a general agnosticism can include transcendent and immanent moments that elude definition or capture and she inhabited a transitional, in-between, ‘trans’-mysticism that allowed her to be both sceptical of and participatory in sacred experience at the same time. The undecidability about these in-between numinosities is essential to her overall vision. By hiding her mysticism in plain sight, sometimes even from herself, Woolf echoes the concealment she notices as intrinsic to the ‘hidden pattern’ that both imbues and underlies everything. In this way her fictional, poetic and creative work dynamically conceal and disclose mystical meaning, alternately closing and opening to visionary insight, rendering the oscillation between illumination and darkness, exposure and hiddenness, insight and not-knowing as inherent to human experiences of the sacred.

Works Cited Anderson, Elizabeth. ‘Silence, Darkness, and Dirt: Mysticism and Materiality in The Years and Between the Acts.’ In Virginia Woolf and Heritage: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Sixth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by Jane de Gay, Tom Breckin and Anne Reus, 102–8. Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2017. Auden, W. H. ‘A Consciousness of Reality.’ The New Yorker, 26 February 1964. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage, 1981. Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. Orlando: Harcourt, 1972. Caputo, Jack. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

47 

Leslie Stephen, An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays, 2nd edn (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1903), 11. Both of Woolf’s parents considered themselves agnostic.

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Corner, Martin. ‘Mysticism and Atheism in To the Lighthouse.’ Studies in the Novel 13, no. 4 (1981): 408–23. Crossland, Rachel. Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. de Gay, Jane. ‘Some Restless Searcher in Me: Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Mysticism.’ In Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf, edited by Kristina K. Groover, 15–31. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. ———. Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. ‘Nature.’ In The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Edward W. Emerson. New York: William H. Wise & Co., 1929. Griesinger, Emily. ‘Quaker Mysticism and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.’ In Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf, edited by Kristina K. Groover, 131–50. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Groover, Kristina K., ed. Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Hardy, Thomas. ‘The Oxen.’ In Thomas Hardy: Selected Poetry. Edited by Samuel Hynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Henke, Suzette A. ‘Mrs Dalloway: The Communion of Saints.’ In New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, edited by Jane Marcus, 125–47. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. James, William. Varieties of Religious Experience. Edited by Matthew Bradley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by Seamus Deane. New York: Penguin, 2016. Kane, Julie. ‘Varieties of Mystical Experience in the Writings of Virginia Woolf.’ TwentiethCentury Literature 41, no. 4 (1995): 328–49. Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Paulsell, Stephanie. Religion Around Virginia Woolf. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pecora, Vincent P. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Sherman, David. ‘Woolf’s Secular Imaginary.’ Modernism/modernity 23, no. 4 (2016): 711–31. Sim, Lorraine. ‘“The Thing Is In Itself Enough”: Virginia Woolf’s Sacred Everyday.’ In Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf, edited by Kristina K. Groover, 51–68. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Smart, J. J. C. and J. J. Haldane. Atheism and Theism, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Stephen, Leslie. An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays, 2nd edn. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1903. Sutton, Emma. Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. Edited by William John Rossi. New York: Norton, 1992. Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. London: Methuen, 1960. Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1984. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1925–1930. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1980. ———. Jacob’s Room. Edited by Vara Neverow. New York: Harcourt, 2008.

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———. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1923–1928. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt, 1980. ———. Mrs. Dalloway. Annotated and with an introduction by Bonnie Kime Scott. New York: Harcourt, 2005. ———. ‘A Sketch of the Past.’ In Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 2nd edn. Edited and introduced by Jeanne Schulkind. 64–159. New York: Harcourt, 1985. ———. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, 1981. ———. The Waves. Annotated and with an introduction by Molly Hite. New York: Harcourt, 2006. Wordsworth, William. ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.’ In Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose. Edited by Nicholas Halmi. New York: Norton, 2013.

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13 Modernism, Abstraction and Spirituality: Barbara Hepworth and Hilma af Klint Lorraine Sim

‘Abstract’ is a word which is now most frequently used to express only the type of the outer form of a work of art; this makes it difficult to use it in relation to the spiritual vitality or inner life which is the real sculpture.1

I

n this comment from her 1937 essay ‘Sculpture’, which was published in Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) notes the emerging tendency in art criticism to describe abstraction in purely formal terms, as relating to the ‘outer form of a work of art’ as opposed to its content or ‘inner life’. The spiritual dimension of Hepworth’s sculpture was for many decades little-discussed even though ‘[s]piritual faith [. . .] underpins much of [her] thinking and making’.2 Hepworth’s observation points to two important issues regarding the relationship between abstraction and spirituality in modernism. The first is the significant historical relationship between abstraction and spirituality in modern art and literature throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The second is that much twentieth-century art history and modernist studies has suppressed that connection and theorised abstraction in principally formalist terms. This chapter discusses the relationship between abstraction and spirituality in the sculpture and writings of Hepworth, with some comparisons to the life and work of the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). As this chapter testifies, the connections between the history of abstract art, spirituality and gender are complex and still only partially understood. Here, I build on the work of several scholars who have argued that religious faith was central to Hepworth’s ‘sculptural vocabulary’ and a driving force of her modernism.3 While the consonances I draw in the final section of the chapter between Hepworth and af Klint may seem spurious, the comparison offers a productive instance of what Susan Stanford Friedman calls critical ‘collage’.4 1 

Barbara Hepworth, ‘Sculpture’, in Barbara Hepworth: Writings and Conversations, ed. Sophie Bowness (London: Tate Publishing, 2017), 26. Circle was edited by Leslie Martin, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, and designed by Hepworth and Sadie Martin. 2  Penelope Curtis and Chris Stephens, ‘Introduction’, in Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, ed. Penelope Curtis and Chris Stephens (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 10. 3  Curtis and Stephens, ‘Introduction’, 10. 4  Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 11, 217–18.

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Both artists attempted, if in quite different ways, a visual synthesis of the spiritual and natural worlds. In addition, both women remained committed throughout their lives to the spiritual and affirmative vision of their work and that commitment has either been downplayed or, in the case of af Klint, provided the very basis for her exclusion from the annals of abstract art until quite recently.

Modernism, Abstraction and the Spiritual In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis notes that many modernists ‘sought, through formal experiment, to offer new accounts of the sacred for an age of continued religious crisis’.5 The use of abstraction as a means to express spiritual experience or metaphysical ideas was not reserved for painting and sculpture: writers such as Virginia Woolf frequently deferred to abstract images as a way of describing ‘mystical’ experiences and the ‘essence of reality’ they revealed.6 On 30 September 1926 when reflecting on the ‘mystical side of [her] solitude’ and the ‘frightening & exciting’ thing that her ‘profound gloom’ conveyed, she proffers an abstract image: ‘One sees a fin passing far out.’ To me, this image appears as a somewhat eerie, geometric composition: a sole (perhaps grey), triangular form in a vast, blank plane. Yet even this image is perhaps too representational, as Woolf goes on to reflect: ‘What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none I think.’ In the entry, she describes this strange and profound experience as one that transcends subjectivity: ‘it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with.’7 Similarly, in To the Lighthouse, when Mrs Ramsay is reflecting on a form of self that transcends, or subtends, the everyday self, ‘expansive, glittering, vocal’, she imagines an abstract form: ‘a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others’.8 This image is at once an abstract, geometric form, ‘wedge-shaped’, but also in a sense anti-form as darkness cannot reveal form, particularly when it exists as a hidden, unseen, inner ‘core’. It provides one example of the deployment of paradox as a part of the spiritual vocabulary of many moderns, as it was for many mystics before them. Logical contradiction is sometimes employed by Hepworth in her commentaries on modern sculpture, for example: ‘It must be so essentially sculpture that it can exist in no other way, something completely the right size but which has growth, something still and yet having movement, so very quiet and yet with a real vitality.’9 Mrs Ramsay’s ruminations on the self end with an appeal to religious convention: ‘We are in the hands of the Lord.’ This exclamation is one that she immediately disavows: ‘Who had said it? not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did

5 

Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 24. 6  Virginia Woolf, 30 September 1926, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harcourt, 1980), 113. 7  Woolf, Diary, 113. 8  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Stella McNichol (London: Penguin, 1992), 69. 9  Hepworth, statement in Unit 1: The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture (1934), in Bowness, 20.

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not mean.’10 It is Lily Briscoe who finds, through her experiments in Post-Impressionist painting, a means to express the mysteries at the heart of life. Given Woolf’s lifelong engagements with modern art, it is unsurprising that she frequently defers to abstract images to describe spiritual experiences and ideas. As for many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectuals, writers and artists who were spiritual but rejected their Christian heritage, abstraction provided Woolf with an alternative language for writing about the mysterious, the numinous and the apophatic.11 From a historical standpoint, the interrelationship between abstraction and spirituality has been much better documented in modernist art as compared to modernist literature. In his introductory essay to the landmark study The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, Maurice Tuchman states that the volume ‘demonstrates that the genesis and development of abstract art were inextricably tied to spiritual ideas current in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’.12 ‘Visual artists,’ he writes, ‘from the generation born in the 1860s to contemporary times, have turned to a variety of antimaterialist philosophies, with concepts of mysticism or occultism at their core.’13 Tuchman explains that the connection between abstraction and spirituality was recognised very early by a few turn-of-the-century art critics. Arthur Jerome Eddy’s Cubists and Post-Impressionism (1914) was followed by studies by Sheldon Cheney, all of which noted ‘abstract artists’ interest in expressing the spiritual’.14 In a comment that chimes with Hepworth’s statements about the ‘spiritual vitality or inner life which is the real sculpture’, Eddy proposes: A painter may use new and strange forms for the sake of the forms, just for the sake of painting new and strange pictures, but the result will be lifeless. It is only when new and strange forms are used because they are necessary to express a spiritual content that the result is a living work of art. ‘The world reverberates; it is a cosmos of spiritually working human beings. Thus matter is living spirit.’15 According to Tuchman’s account, in the 1930s and 1940s spiritual and occult beliefs came under increasing suspicion given their political associations. One well-known example of this was Nazism’s co-option of ideas from theosophy and anthroposophy to support theories of Aryan supremacy.16 To apply the term ‘spiritual’ to one’s art

10 

Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 70. For a discussion of this passage in terms of the conflict in modernism between secular belief and religious feeling and tradition, see Matthew Mutter, Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (Yale: Yale University Press, 2017), 1–2. 11  On apophasis in Woolf see Donna J. Lazenby, A Mystical Philosophy: Transcendence and Immanence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 180–212. 12  Maurice Tuchman, ‘Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art’, in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, ed. Maurice Tuchman (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), 17. 13  Tuchman, ‘Hidden Meanings’, 19. 14  Tuchman, ‘Hidden Meanings’, 17. Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism (Chicago: McClurg, 1914), Project Gutenberg e-book, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64936/64936-h/64936-h. htm#VII (accessed 6 May 2022); Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924); Sheldon Cheney, Expressionism in Art (New York: Liveright, 1934). 15  Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, 134; original emphasis. 16  See Peter Staudenmaier, Between Occultism and Nazism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

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in the late 1930s and 1940s was ‘near-heresy and dangerous to an artist’s career’.17 Such associations led to a historical obscuring of the connections between abstract art, spirituality and the occult until the 1970s: ‘Intellectuals interested in modernist issues became more concerned with purely aesthetic issues.’18 Tuchman’s assessment has been echoed recently by R. H. Quaytman, who states that there remains ‘a deepseated problem in art history that has not been thought through [. . .] Mysticism, or the spiritual, has been repeatedly repressed and denied.’19 While Quaytman attributes this denial to the influence of Marxism and the Frankfurt School, Tuchman aligns the effect with the rise of formalism. He suggests that art historian Alfred Barr, who was Director of the Museum of Modern Art from 1929 to 1943, in conjunction with the art criticism of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, proffered an influential history of modern art that eschewed ‘content’ in favour of form.20 Thus, when Hepworth complains in her 1937 essay ‘Sculpture’ about a current tendency for the word ‘abstract’ to be used to ‘express only the type of the outer form of a work of art’, she is referring to a theory of formalism that was taking hold at the time, particularly in America. The historical-critical trend described by Tuchman, combined with the ‘ingrained prejudice against women artists’ that persisted through much of the twentieth century, has influenced the reception and uptake of the work of women artists such as Hepworth and af Klint, if in quite different ways.21 In the case of Hepworth, for decades her sculpture was assessed in principally formalist terms and in the context of her professional and personal relationships with male modernists – specifically the sculptor Henry Moore, the sculptor and painter John Skeaping (Hepworth’s first husband from 1925 to 1933, separated in 1931), the painter Ben Nicholson (Hepworth’s second partner from 1931 to 1951, married in 1938), and the Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo. As Ann Compton observes, an ‘emphasis on personal connections is symptomatic of the containment of Hepworth’s sculpture within a narrow and ultimately reflexive frame of reference’.22 Such an emphasis is particularly common in critical appraisals of women artists. Writing in 1996, following a major retrospective of Hepworth’s art at the Tate Gallery Liverpool, Penelope Curtis made a similar complaint, describing Hepworth as an artist who had been ‘oddly neglected during the previous twenty-five years’: ‘Apart from the fact that Hepworth’s work has not been presented in any depth, we have lacked a framework in which to discuss it. The conventional framework “Moore, Nicholson, Gabo” is not only outmoded, it is also worn out.’23

17 

Tuchman, ‘Hidden Meanings’, 18. Tuchman, ‘Hidden Meanings’, 18. 19  This is published as a transcription of a meeting held in Brooklyn, New York, between a group of artists, curators and art historians, moderated by Helen Molesworth, ‘Art for Another Future: Learning from Hilma af Klint’, in Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, ed. Tracy Bashkoff (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2018), 46. 20  Tuchman, ‘Hidden Meanings’, 18. 21  Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, ‘Introduction’, in Barbara Hepworth: Works in the Tate Gallery Collection and the Barbara Hepworth Museum St Ives, ed. Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens (London: Tate Gallery, 1999), 10. 22  Ann Compton, ‘Crafting Modernism: Hepworth’s Practice in the 1920s’, in Barbara Hepworth, ed. Curtis and Stephens, 13. 23  Penelope Curtis, ‘What Is Left Unsaid’, in Barbara Hepworth Reconsidered, ed. David Thistlewood (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 155; see also Curtis and Stephens, ‘Introduction’, 9. 18 

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Such critical trends have meant that important contexts for understanding Hepworth’s sculpture were overlooked, such as nature and pre-history, religion, science, and the relationship between gender and creativity.24 It has also meant that Hepworth’s original contribution to the history of abstract art in Britain was long under-appreciated.25 Moreover, in line with the logic of formalism, since the 1930s Hepworth and her work have often been characterised as ‘cool and restrained’.26 This assessment seems particularly strange when one reads Hepworth’s essays and interviews, as they reveal how centrally feeling informed her practice: hers was an affective, not a cool, intellectual modernism.

Hepworth: The ‘Vitality of Forms’ Hepworth’s practice as a sculptor could be described as a process of making the ‘spiritual inner life’ of forms manifest. In this sense she was, like Hilma af Klint, tapping into the spiritual life of things and giving that ‘life force’ visible expression.27 Her carving was informed by her religious faith which centred on ideas of divine unity, relationality, continuity and affirmation. Her decision to move to a more abstract ‘sculptural idiom’ from 1931 has ‘a distinct religious resonance’.28 Like Woolf, Hepworth disliked doctrines and theories and was independently minded.29 In a letter to her friend Hartley Ramsden in 1946 she stated, ‘I don’t like theories or doctrines because I wish to be free to break laws if necessary!’30 At different times she described herself as a Christian Scientist, an Anglican Catholic and even an atheist, but she clarified that the last by no means meant she was not religious: ‘I am rather specially so + I feel personally, everything has to be worked out here + now.’31 Hepworth’s personal philosophy was very much centred on this world and this life. In what is the most sustained analysis of Hepworth and religion, Lucy Kent has argued for the importance of Christian Science and Anglicanism on Hepworth’s thought and life, and how the spiritual principles that she lived by provide the basis for a new visual analysis of her work. Hepworth was baptised at Wakefield Cathedral and her parents were committed to Christian Science, a religious denomination founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879. Her second husband, Ben Nicholson, was also a devout follower of the religion and that faith formed a key part of their relationship, particularly during the 1930s. By the 1940s, Hepworth became more critical of the transcendental emphasis of Christian Science and this ultimately created tensions in the marriage.32

24 

Access to Hepworth’s archives and the publication of many of Hepworth’s writings in recent years by Sophie Bowness have been instrumental in reinvigorating scholarship on Hepworth’s sculpture. 25  Gale and Stephens, ‘Introduction’, 9–10. 26  Curtis, ‘What is Left Unsaid’, 156. 27  Hepworth, from the interview ‘The Aim of the Modern Artist: Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson’ (Studio, 1932), in Bowness, 17. 28  Lucy Kent, ‘“An Act of Praise”: Religion and the Work of Barbara Hepworth’, in Barbara Hepworth, ed. Curtis and Stephens, 40. 29  Gale and Stephens, ‘Introduction’, 15. 30  Cited in Kent, ‘An Act of Praise’, 37. Ramsden was an artist and writer who wrote some important commentaries on Hepworth’s sculpture; see Curtis, ‘What Is Left Unsaid’, 158–60. 31  Hepworth in a letter to E. H. Ramsden, 1944, cited in Kent, ‘An Act of Praise’, 37. 32  Kent, ‘An Act of Praise’, 37, 38, 42.

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As Kent demonstrates, Christian Science and Anglicanism were important influences on Hepworth’s thought at various stages of her life. However, an ongoing tension, even disconnect, existed between the idealism that underpinned Christian Science and Hepworth’s attitude to, and engagement with, the physical realm. As detailed in the movement’s foundational text, Eddy’s Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures (1875), Christian Science presents an almost Platonic disavowal of the reality of matter and sensation that was at odds with Hepworth’s day-to-day life and experience – one that centred on the meticulous working of organic materials (particularly wood and stone), a close observation of the natural world, and the very embodied business of raising four children. Kent notes that Hepworth was ambivalent about aspects of the theory, and Gale and Stephens comment that Hepworth’s ‘scepticism [. . .] turned to disillusionment by the mid-1940s’: ‘its transcendental nature seemed too impersonal, dislocated from the primal sensuality that lay at the core of human experience.’33 Kent explains how some of Hepworth’s key religious beliefs, such as the fundamental spiritual unity of all things and the concept of ‘continuity’, find expression in Eddy’s theories of ‘divine Mind’.34 However, related ideas can be traced in other spiritual philosophies that were circulating at the time and of interest to Hepworth and her contemporaries, such as Zen Buddhism, Taoism and theosophy.35 While my discussion in no way detracts from Kent’s compelling analysis, I want to emphasise Hepworth’s comments regarding the relationship between the material and the spiritual, and how abstraction provided her with a sculptural language through which to express the spiritual. Contrary to the orthodox view in modernist studies and art history, Hepworth did not regard abstraction as a reaction against representational realism. Neither was abstraction ‘new’: ‘Abstract sculptural qualities’, she observes, ‘are found in good sculpture of all times; in the works of the Aztecs, the Sumerians, the Neolithic, the Cycladic, the Etruscan periods.’36 What is ‘significant’ about ‘contemporary sculpture and painting’, she states, is that they ‘have become abstract in thought and concept’.37 As she explains in a statement for Unit 1: The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture in 1934: The understanding of form and colour in the abstract is an essential of carving or painting; but it is not simply the desire to avoid naturalism in the carving that leads to an abstract work. I feel that the conception itself, the quality of thought that is embodied, must be abstract – an impersonal vision individualised in the particular medium.38 Hepworth’s ‘vision’ was a spiritual one based on a belief in the fundamental unity and interconnection of things, a unifying ‘life force’ that she sees expressed across the arts: ‘Beethoven, Bach, Cézanne and Picasso, negro carvings, all give infinitely because of

33 

Gale and Stephens, ‘Introduction’, 17; Kent, ‘An Act of Praise’, 38. Kent, ‘An Act of Praise’, 39–40, 43. 35  According to Gale and Stephens, one of Hepworth’s favourite books was Zen and the Art of Archery; ‘Introduction’, 19. Theosophy was a major influence on the thought and work of Piet Mondrian and Jean Arp, while Constantin Brancusi and Georges Braque were interested in Zen Buddhism. 36  Hepworth, from an interview with J. P. Hodin, ‘Portrait of the Artist’ (1950), in Bowness, 46. 37  Hepworth, from the interview ‘Portrait of the Artist’, in Bowness, 46. 38  Hepworth, statement in Unit 1, in Bowness, 22. 34 

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their life force.’39 Sharing with many of her peers a belief in the potential social value of modern art, Hepworth stated in her 1937 essay ‘Sculpture’ that abstraction has ‘become our thought, our faith, waking or sleeping’ and can be ‘the solution to life and to living’.40 Through an emphasis on ‘generalisation’ of idea,41 the abstract artist is, she contends, concerned with ‘the basic principles and underlying structures of things’, and this expression of primordial structures and forces, be it in terms of ‘the unity of man with nature’ or the cosmos, is what makes abstract art ‘spiritually affirmative’.42 As she reiterates across many of her autobiographical essays, statements and interviews, Hepworth was constantly inspired by the ‘loveliness’ and ‘mystery’ inherent in ordinary things and the natural world: ‘In an electric train moving south I see a blue aeroplane between a ploughed field and a green field, pylons in lovely juxtaposition with springy turf and trees of every stature [. . .] It is the relationship and the mystery that makes such loveliness and I want to project my feeling about it into sculpture.’43 Even in the mid 1930s, at the height of her engagement with Christian Science, she stresses the importance of ‘Nature’ and the ‘mythology’ of ‘[s]mall things found and kept’ (‘a bright blue box’, ‘weighty pebbles’) to her understanding of the universal. ‘In the contemplation of Nature’, she writes in 1934, ‘we are perpetually renewed, our sense of mystery and our imagination is kept alive, and rightly understood, it gives us the power to project into a plastic medium some universal or abstract vision of beauty.’44 However, carving was not a one-way process whereby the carver merely exerts his or her will, or idea, on the material. It depended on a dialogue with, and responsiveness to, the ‘vitality’ or ‘inner life’ of the stone or wood: ‘the material has vitality – it resists and makes demands.’45 Hepworth’s elemental sculptures explore forms of relationality and the idea of ‘underlying structures’.46 Her interest in ‘the internal structure of natural phenomena’ has been interpreted by critics in scientific, mathematical and metaphysical contexts.47 Works such as Three Forms from 1935 in white Serravezza marble (Figure 13.1) were part of a series of sculptures from the 1930s comprising ‘simple round, oval or egg-shaped forms in small groups of two or three’.48 The forms suggest natural, observable phenomena: a pebble on the sand, a boulder, the moon, or three people in relation.49 However, the arrangement of

39 

Hepworth, from the interview ‘The Aim of the Modern Artist’, in Bowness, 17. Hepworth, ‘Sculpture’, in Bowness, 27. 41  Hepworth, from the series ‘Contemporary English Sculptors’, The Architectural Association Journal (1930), in Bowness, 14. 42  Hepworth, lecture to surgeons in Exeter, typescript (1953) and text by Hepworth for the exhibition catalogue Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective Exhibition of Carvings and Drawings from 1927 to 1954 (1954), in Bowness, 85, 94, 85, underline in original. 43  Hepworth, statement in Unit 1, in Bowness, 20. 44  Hepworth, statement in Unit 1, in Bowness, 22, 23. 45  Hepworth, ‘Approach to Sculpture’ (Studio, 1946), in Bowness, 33. 46  Hepworth, lecture to surgeons in Exeter, in Bowness, 85, underline in original. 47  See, for example, Anne J. Barlow, ‘Barbara Hepworth and Science’, in Barbara Hepworth Reconsidered, ed. Thistlewood, 95–107, 102. Barlow discusses Hepworth’s interest in the relationship between science, mathematics and art, particularly in the context of her friendship with John Desmond Bernal, the Irish scientist who specialised in structural crystallography. 48  Valerie Holman, ‘Barbara Hepworth in Print: Acquiring an International Reputation’, in Barbara Hepworth, ed. Curtis and Stephens, 32. 49  Gale and Stephens note that Hepworth carved several tripartite works following the birth of her triplets on 3 October 1934; ‘Introduction’, 13. 40 

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Figure 13.1.  Three Forms, 1935, Barbara Hepworth, © Bowness, Hepworth Estate. Photo: Tate Gallery. these forms also suggests a series of bodies in atomic or cosmic relation, orbiting in harmony with one another. The Three Forms are grounded, having contact with the marble base/earth, but they are also poised, almost suspended, and appear to transcend the laws of gravity and matter that they simultaneously connote: they are ‘still and yet having movement’. The effect of light on the smooth, white marble surfaces gives the forms a transcendent quality, making them ‘the right size’ but having ‘growth’, emanating outwards beyond the confines of their material boundaries.50 Two Forms from 1934, in ironstone (Figure 13.2), places ideas of the material and the occult in a sculptural dialogue. The two forms are of the earth, like those smooth, worn pebbles one might try to skim in play across the surface of the sea. And yet their physical arrangement as standing forms in space transforms them into vital entities hovering in their own miniature cosmos. As Kent eloquently describes, through her experimentations with matter and space, Hepworth created ‘spiritually charged atmospheres’: ‘Her carefully poised objects began to generate their own miniature orbits of psychic tension, corresponding with the greater cosmos like druidic ruins.’51 50 

Hepworth, statement in Unit 1, in Bowness, 20. Kent, ‘An Act of Praise’, 40.

51 

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Figure 13.2.  Two Forms, 1934, Barbara Hepworth, © Bowness, Hepworth Estate. Source: Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings (1952). Photo: provided by author.

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In her experimentations with abstraction, an important breakthrough occurred for Hepworth in 1932 when, through a ‘pioneering penetration of the block’, she created her first ‘pierced form’.52 Of this process she wrote: ‘in the Pierced Form I had felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.’53 Kent notes that this sculpture was made during the height of Hepworth’s enthusiasm for Christian Science and provided her with a way of addressing the religion’s denial of the ‘reality of material existence’. She could now ‘sculpt not only with matter, but with space’.54 Rather than accepting Eddy’s repudiation of the material, however, this technique provided Hepworth with another means of expressing her interest in their dialectical relation. The pierced form is both matter and space, bounded and unbounded, visible and invisible. It provided a formal means of expressing her conviction that ‘[t]here is an inside and an outside to every form’.55 A belief in the ‘unity of man with nature’ was a constant influence on Hepworth’s religious thought and work.56 ‘The main sources of my inspiration’, she states in 1946, ‘are the human figure and landscape; also the one in relation to the other.’57 Growing up in the West Riding of Yorkshire, with its contrast between the ‘extraordinary natural beauty and grandeur’ of the surrounding landscape and ‘the unnatural disorder’ and ugliness of industrialised ‘towns’ and ‘slag heaps’, instilled in her a sense of ‘the dignity’ of working-class people and the interdependency of humans and the natural world.58 When Hepworth and her family moved from London to St Ives, Cornwall, in 1939 due to the outbreak of the war, the dramatic sea cliffs, ocean, moors and abundant natural light offered new sources of aesthetic inspiration. Discovering ‘the remarkable pagan landscape which lies between St. Ives, Penzance and Land’s End’ had a ‘very deep effect’ on her and informed her ‘ideas about the relationship of the human figure in landscape’.59 As she explains in an interview with Edouard Roditi in 1960, her use of the term ‘landscape’ meant something quite different from the idea of landscape in painting: ‘I think of landscape in a far broader sense. I extend its meaning to include an idea of the whole universe.’60 The natural environments of Yorkshire and Cornwall attuned her sense of deep time, ‘the primeval forces activating man’s sensibilities’, and ‘the continuity of life’.61 An interest in pre-history, combined with her approach to landscape as ‘the whole universe’, contributes to the pagan elements that run through her personal philosophy and much of her sculpture. As many critics have observed, and as Hepworth herself

52 

Gale and Stephens, ‘Introduction’, 10. Gale and Stephens date this work as 1931, but the Barbara Hepworth Estate dates it as 1932; see http://barbarahepworth.org.uk/sculptures/1932/pierced-form (accessed 6 May 2022). 53  Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings (intro. Herbert Read, 1952), in Bowness, 61. 54  Kent, ‘An Act of Praise’, 38–9. 55  Hepworth, Carvings and Drawings, in Bowness, 60. 56  Hepworth, Retrospective Exhibition catalogue, in Bowness, 94. 57  Hepworth, ‘Approach to Sculpture’, in Bowness, 33. 58  Hepworth, Retrospective Exhibition catalogue, in Bowness, 94. 59  Hepworth, Carvings and Drawings, in Bowness, 67. 60  Hepworth, interview with Edouard Roditi in Dialogues on Art (1960), in Bowness, 134. 61  Hepworth, Carvings and Drawings, in Bowness, 62.

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alluded as early as 1937, her ‘standing forms’ recall the Neolithic monuments and sites found in various locations across the British Isles, including Avebury, Stonehenge and Men-an-Tol.62 This is evident in works from the 1930s, such as Two Forms from 1937 in Serravezza marble, and in later works, such as the imposing Monolith (Empyrean) from 1953 in limestone.63 Forms in Echelon, made in 1938 in tulipwood (Figure 13.3), is one example of a pair of simple, standing forms that, with their upward growth, signify ‘an act of praise’ to the cosmos.64 But at the same time, ‘the curves of the two monoliths make a closed composition which, in the open, with light all round [. . .] create a quietness’ – an atmosphere of sacred stillness, contemplation and repose.65

Figure 13.3.  Forms in Echelon, 1938, Barbara Hepworth, © Bowness, Hepworth Estate. Photo: Tate Gallery. 62 

On being sent some materials from Avebury by Nicholson in 1937, Hepworth commented in a letter: ‘I expect I helped to put up some of the stones . . . It all seems very familiar’; cited in Andrew Causey, ‘Barbara Hepworth, Prehistory and the Cornish Landscape’, Sculpture Journal 17, no. 2 (2008): 10. Three photographs of Stonehenge were published in Circle (July 1937) in between short essays by Hepworth and Moore. 63  Two Forms can be viewed at the Barbara Hepworth website, http://barbarahepworth.org.uk/sculptures/ 1937/two-forms-4, as can Monolith (Empyrean), http://barbarahepworth.org.uk/sculptures/1953/monolithempyrean (both accessed 6 May 2022). 64  Hepworth, from ‘Sculpture – An Act of Praise’, originally published in The Christian Science Monitor (1965), in Bowness, 188. 65  This description comes from Hepworth’s comments on the sculpture as cited in the Tate Gallery caption for Forms in Echelon, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hepworth-forms-in-echelon-t00698 (accessed 6 May 2022).

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While the precise intent and symbolic significance of Neolithic stones and sites are largely a matter of speculation, Hepworth’s many standing forms can be understood as part of a long continuum of human endeavour to create monuments that communicate outwards towards the wider cosmos, and signify our connection to its underlying structures and ‘evolution’.66 ‘[T]he standing stone’, she wrote in 1961, ‘is a sign of our desire for survival & security.’67 For Hepworth, ‘[m]onuments such as Stonehenge and Avebury were both visual evidence of the origins of British history and exemplary of formal solutions appropriate to [a] modern world’ that she believed was in need of spiritual nourishment.68 In 1959, in a statement for the catalogue for the exhibition Moments of Vision, Hepworth reflected: If I claimed in the past a spiritual or metaphysical intention, then I was too proud. This does not alter my belief that if we have the wits to be quiet and ‘intake’, then those qualities flow in. I do believe it and in all those works of art which move me most I find this special sense of timeless praising and affirmative creation.69 Here, Hepworth comments on the need to be quiet and receptive to the spiritual force that might ‘flow in’ during the act of creativity. This recalls Lily Briscoe who, when she returns to her painting in ‘Time Passes’, feels herself falling ‘in with some rhythm which was dictated to her’ as she paints, and loses consciousness of ‘personality’.70 In contrast to the tradition of male genius that emphasises the creator as god-like, Hepworth, like Hilma af Klint, did not create as though she ‘were a god’ but sought to learn how to ‘reflect God or the universal laws of evolution’.71 Like her peers Nicholson, Gabo, Mondrian, Kandinsky and many others, in the 1930s and 1940s Hepworth had great optimism for the affirmative capacity of non-figurative art and its role in the healing and evolution of humanity. While this faith never waned, by the 1960s she lamented what she saw as a lost opportunity for modern sculpture and the continued violence, fear and threat of destruction that shaped the twentieth century. In a conversation with J. P. Hodin in 1961, she reiterated her belief that through ‘its insistence on elementary values, sculpture is perhaps more important today than ever before because life’s continuity is threatened and this has given us a sense of unbalance’.72 Commenting on the state of architecture in the early 1960s as compared to the 1930s, she criticises the economic rationalism and emerging culture of obsolescence of the time: Nowadays there is nothing done which conveys the feeling of praise. We have no time for praise. And yet, without this feeling of inner wealth that can afford to

66 

Hepworth, from a typescript on the nature of art (1959), in Bowness, 125. Hepworth, typescript notes for the film Barbara Hepworth (dir. John Read, 1961), in Bowness, 146. 68  Causey, ‘Barbara Hepworth’, 14. 69  Hepworth, statement in exhibition catalogue Moments of Vision (1959), in Bowness, 124. 70  Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 173, 174. 71  Hepworth, typescript on the nature of art (1959), in Bowness, 125, underline in original. 72  Hepworth, ‘Two Conversations with Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life; The Ethos of Sculpture’, with J. P. Hodin (1961), in Bowness, 127. 67 

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praise we are injuring ourselves and each other [. . .] There have never been so many architects, sculptors and painters as now and there has never been less to show for it. What we really suffer from is spiritual malnutrition.73 Seeking to address the ‘spiritual malnutrition’ of the time, Hepworth’s sculptures, with their aura of ‘radiant calm perfection’, comprised an aesthetic antithesis to the violence, division and fear that defined so much of the twentieth century.74 Still today, like the Standing Stones of Stenness or the Men-an-Tol, many of Hepworth’s forms possess a sense of the sacred and mystery and transport the viewer into affective orbits of calm, stillness and wonder, momentarily free from the rush and distraction of modern life. They are also – as I felt repeatedly in writing this chapter – works that resist or exceed conceptual analysis. They have an ineffable quality that in and of itself suggests the transcendent.

Hilma af Klint, Mediumship and the ‘Origins’ of Abstraction If in the earlier stages of her career Hepworth’s discussion of her work was for the most part formalist and reserved, I suspect this had a great deal to do with the challenge of being taken seriously as a young woman in a man’s art world.75 Her willingness in the later stages of her career to speak more freely about her views on the spiritual and social dimensions of her art was perhaps due to the relative success she had achieved by the 1950s. In the course of my research for this chapter, I gained great respect for Hepworth’s boldness of vision and approach: her independently minded views about faith, abstract art and society; her capacity to juggle a large family with a prolific creative output; and her commitment to direct carving and the production of many large-scale works, something that was uncommon for women sculptors at the time. This boldness of vision and approach is also evident when we turn to the life and work of Hilma af Klint. She provides a useful point of comparison to close a chapter concerned with gender, abstraction and the spiritual – a topic that requires a great deal of further research if the history of European and American abstract art is to become more complete and nuanced. Af Klint was a formally trained artist who studied drawing and painting at the Royal Academy in Stockholm from 1882 to 1887. There she mastered a curriculum that was ‘dedicated exclusively to realism’.76 She excelled at ‘painting portraits, landscapes, and seascapes’, and was also a talented botanical artist.77 It was such traditional works that she exhibited and sold during much of her life. However, her private practice took a radically different direction from 1906 when she commenced working on a monumental series of paintings. This cycle of 193 works, collectively called The Paintings for the Temple, was quite literally ‘guided’ by her spiritualism. The Paintings for the Temple comprises an astonishing and ambitious range of abstract works that pre-dated the non-figurative art of af

73 

Hepworth, ‘Two Conversations’, in Bowness, 128. Ronald Alley, from Barbara Hepworth: [catalogue of an exhibition at] the Tate Gallery, 3 April–19 May 1968 (London: Tate Gallery, 1968), 26. 75  Gale and Stephens, ‘Introduction’, 15. 76  Tracy Bashkoff, ‘Temples for Paintings’, in Hilma af Klint, ed. Bashkoff, 18. 77  Bashkoff, ‘Temples for Paintings’, 18. 74 

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Klint’s European contemporaries – Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and František Kupka – by about a decade.78 From her late teens, af Klint was deeply engaged in spiritualism and read widely across a range of spiritual philosophies of the day, particularly theosophy, anthroposophy, Rosicrucianism and Christianity.79 As her art testifies, she was also interested in contemporary science. By 1896, af Klint was meeting every Friday with a group of four women who called themselves The Five (De Fem), to conduct spiritual gatherings. During these meetings, which included benedictions, readings and meditation, the women would also conduct séances and produce automatic writings and drawings that were transmitted to them through their guides. In 1904, af Klint was advised by one of their guides, Ananda, that she would be ‘called on to convey the spiritual world in paintings’. In the same year, another guide informed her that ‘she would be summoned to design a temple’ to house the works. None of the other members of The Five wanted to take up the commission for fear that such a deep dive into the spiritual realm could lead to madness. In 1906, af Klint received from another guide, Amaliel, what she called her ‘great commission’: The Paintings for the Temple.80 Af Klint’s productivity in the ensuing years is staggering. From November 1906 to the spring of 1908 she produced the first 111 works, followed by another eighty-two works from 1912 to 1915.81 Some of the paintings, such as The Ten Largest, produced between October and December of 1907, are monumental in scale, measuring over three metres (see Figure 13.4). Each of The Ten Largest was created, without any planning, in four days.82 Footprints on some of these canvases suggest she painted them with the canvases on the floor – a wild departure from conventions of the time.83 Af Klint described herself as a medium in the creation of The Paintings for the Temple: a conduit whose task was to transmit spiritual knowledge as revealed to her through her guides. The works, the specific details of which were shown to her via her guides, comprised a radical break from traditional art of the day. Some, such as The Swan, No. 1 (from Group IX/SUW, 1915), combined representational and abstract elements, but many works were completely abstract (see, for example, Figure 13.5). The Paintings for the Temple, which af Klint maintained must be kept together and exhibited in their assigned order, combined a complex mixture of ‘floral, geometric, and biomorphic forms’ and often included symbols and letters (see Figure 13.5).84 These hermetic, often diagrammatic works present what appears to be a transcendental system, a ‘whole cosmology’,85 that offers a syncretic vision of ‘[s]cience and spirit, mind and matter, the micro and the macro’.86 Af Klint felt unable to completely

78 

‘About Hilma af Klint’, Hilma af Klint Foundation website, https://www.hilmaafklint.se/om-hilma-afklint (accessed 6 May 2022). 79  Julia Voss, ‘The Traveling Hilma af Klint’, in Hilma af Klint, ed. Bashkoff, 54; Bashkoff, ‘Temples for Paintings’, 22. 80  Bashkoff, ‘Temples for Paintings’, 19, 20. 81  Bashkoff, ‘Temples for Paintings’, 21; Voss, ‘The Traveling Hilma af Klint’, 58. 82  Bashkoff, ‘Temples for Paintings’, 23; Voss, ‘The Traveling Hilma af Klint’, 58. 83  Bashkoff, ‘Temples for Paintings’, 23. 84  Bashkoff, ‘Temples for Paintings’, 24. 85  Lisa Florman in Molesworth, ‘Art for Another Future’, 41. 86  Bashkoff, ‘Temples for Paintings’, 24.

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Figure 13.4.  Hilma af Klint, Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood, 1907. Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas, 315 x 235 cm. Courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm. Photo: Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

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Figure 13.5.  Hilma af Klint, Group X, No. 2, Altarpiece, 1915. Oil and metal leaf on canvas, 238 x 179 cm. Courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm. Photo: Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

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explain the meaning of her spiritual paintings. In 1908 she asked the theosophist and later founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, to view and interpret some of the paintings. He offered no such interpretation and his ambivalent reaction is understood to have contributed to af Klint suspending work on the cycle until 1912.87 For Molesworth, af Klint’s paintings bring together ‘disparate fields of knowledge in a synthetic manner’ to offer a ‘Gaia-like theory of radical holistic interconnectivity’.88 As with Hepworth, af Klint’s spiritual vision centred on unity, interconnectivity, and an affirmative vision for the future. Like her contemporary Kandinsky, af Klint knew that the world was not ready for her paintings. During the 1910s and 1920s ‘[a]bstraction as well as the appearance of the “spiritual in art” was largely met with suspicion’ by the Swedish art establishment and general public.89 In a 1932 notebook, af Klint stated that her work should not be shown to the public until twenty years after her death, a request honoured by her family.90 It was not until 1985 that her artworks became known internationally when some of her paintings were included in the exhibition curated by Maurice Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Archival research by Tracy Bashkoff, Julia Voss and Andrea Kollnitz supports the view that while af Klint was aware of the networks of modern art in Sweden and their sources of influence in Paris and Berlin, her own ‘break from traditional artistic modes occurred’ separate from these networks. She was not a part of the Swedish avant-garde and, according to Kollnitz, ‘consciously turned away from the public art scene when she began creating her own forward-looking artwork’.91 To a twenty-first-century viewer, af Klint clearly appears as a ‘pioneer’ of abstraction. However, that attribution was initially resisted by the art establishment and is still sometimes approached with a degree of equivocation for reasons that are directly related to her spiritualism. While both art and art history have always been patriarchal, the downplaying of women’s contributions to the development and history of abstract art is particularly pronounced.92 For an obscure Swedish woman to disrupt the accepted male lineage of the evolution of abstraction (Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich) is much like exploding the myths in modernist literature surrounding the ‘men of 1914’. Contemporary discussions of af Klint’s work continue to debate questions about her status as a pioneer of abstraction, and these discussions turn in interesting ways around ideas of authorship and autonomy.93 For example, the fact that af Klint

87 

Bashkoff, ‘Temples for Paintings’, 24. Molesworth, ‘Art for Another Future’, 38. 89  Andrea Kollnitz, ‘Questioning the Spiritual in Art: Hilma af Klint, Vasily Kandinsky, and the Swedish Art World’, in Hilma af Klint, ed. Bashkoff, 75. 90  Voss, ‘The Traveling Hilma af Klint’, 51. 91  Kollnitz, ‘Questioning the Spiritual in Art’, 72. 92  See M. Lluïsa Faxedas, ‘Women Artists of Cercle et Carré: Abstraction, Gender and Modernity’, Women’s Art Journal 36, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2015): 37–46; Christopher Knight, ‘A Groundbreaking Show to Confront the Gender Bias in Art: “Women of Abstract Expressionism”’, Los Angeles Times, 11 April 2017, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-women-abstract-expressionism-20170416-htmlstory. html (accessed 6 May 2022). 93  See David Max Horowitz, ‘“The World Keeps You in Fetters: Cast Them Aside”: Hilma af Klint, Spiritualism, and Agency’, in Hilma af Klint, ed. Bashkoff, 128–33. 88 

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adopted a model of creativity that ‘disavow[ed] solo authorship’ and centred on collaboration, both between the members of The Five and with her spiritual guides, has raised questions about the authorship of her art.94 As a medium who translated metaphysical knowledge via her guides, in what sense is the work ‘hers’?95 Moreover, if in The Paintings for the Temple af Klint’s principal intention was to communicate spiritual knowledge about the nature of reality, not to break with figurative painting, can we technically describe her identity as that of an abstract artist? As Christine Burgin frames the issue: ‘I mean [calling her an artist] is fine, it’s just the abstract thing that bothers me. I’m not sure her goal was to make something abstract.’96 What these ambivalences reveal is how a phallocentric model of creativity long favoured in modernist studies and art history – one centred on the individual genius – persists in serving as the measuring stick for authorship, creativity and innovation. As Branden Joseph has argued, for those who deny af Klint’s status as artist or pioneer of abstraction, ‘the spirit medium’s lack of intentional subjectivity implies a form of alterity that the prevailing Modernist history of abstraction cannot encompass’.97 Rather than allowing the extant narratives surrounding the history of modernism or abstraction to define the terms of creativity and innovation, surely artists like Hilma af Klint are the very real historical interventions required to revise those models? Clearly she was an artist, and she produced large series of abstract paintings that were unlike anything produced at that time. Indeed, for decades modernist studies paid little attention to the topics of religion, spirituality and the occult. This was probably because they were seen as out of step with modernism’s presumed privileging of newness and, by extension, secularism. However, in the creative practices of Hilma af Klint, Barbara Hepworth and Lily Briscoe, all of whom espouse a model of creativity that eschews ego in favour of ‘intake’, we see that spirituality is in fact the very basis and source of innovation. As Amy Sillman eloquently observes, af Klint’s ‘mysticism is a flip on modernism: she says, “I received this,” rather than, “I invented this”’.98

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Sophie Bowness at the Hepworth Estate for her assistance with this chapter and for granting me permission to reproduce images of several of Hepworth’s artworks. Thanks also to Stefan Ståhle at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, for permission to reproduce images of artworks by Hilma af Klint.

94 

Molesworth, ‘Art for Another Future’, 44; Horowitz, ‘The World Keeps You in Fetters’, 128. Horowitz provides the most detailed account of the shifting relationship between af Klint’s artistic production and spiritualism across her career, and how channelling enabled her to attain an ‘authorial artistic voice’ at a time when such a path was largely denied to women; ‘The World Keeps You in Fetters’, 128. 96  Burgin, in Molesworth, ‘Art for Another Future’, 40. 97  Branden W. Joseph, ‘Knowledge, Painting, Abstraction, and Desire’, in Hilma af Klint: Seeing Is Believing, ed. Kurt Almqvist and Louise Belfrage (London: Koenig Books, 2017), 121. On the privileging of ‘individual genius’ in the history of abstraction, see Dickerman in Molesworth, ‘Art for Another Future’, 43. 98  Sillman, in Molesworth, ‘Art for Another Future’, 37. 95 

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Works Cited ‘About Hilma af Klint.’ Hilma af Klint Foundation website: https://www.hilmaafklint.se/omhilma-af-klint (accessed 6 May 2022). Alley, Ronald. From Barbara Hepworth: [catalogue of an exhibition at] the Tate Gallery, 3 April–19 May 1968. London: Tate Gallery, 1968. Barlow, Anne J. ‘Barbara Hepworth and Science.’ In Barbara Hepworth Reconsidered, edited by David Thistlewood, 95–107. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996. Bashkoff, Tracy. ‘Temples for Paintings.’ In Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, edited by Tracy Bashkoff, 17–31. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2018. Bowness, Sophie, ed. Barbara Hepworth: Writings and Conversations. London: Tate Publishing, 2017. Causey, Andrew. ‘Barbara Hepworth, Prehistory and the Cornish Landscape.’ Sculpture Journal 17, no. 2 (2008): 9–22. Cheney, Sheldon. Expressionism in Art. New York: Liveright, 1934. ———. A Primer of Modern Art. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924. Compton, Ann. ‘Crafting Modernism: Hepworth’s Practice in the 1920s.’ In Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, edited by Penelope Curtis and Chris Stephens, 12–19. London: Tate Publishing, 2015. Curtis, Penelope. ‘What Is Left Unsaid.’ In Barbara Hepworth Reconsidered, edited by David Thistlewood, 155–62. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996. ——— and Chris Stephens. ‘Introduction.’ In Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, edited by Penelope Curtis and Chris Stephens, 8–11. London: Tate Publishing, 2015. Eddy, Arthur Jerome. Cubists and Post-Impressionism. Chicago: McClurg, 1914. Project Gutenberg e-book: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64936/64936-h/64936-h.htm#VII (accessed 6 May 2022). Faxedas, M. Lluïsa. ‘Women Artists of Cercle et Carré: Abstraction, Gender and Modernity.’ Women’s Art Journal 36, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2015): 37–46. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Gale, Matthew and Chris Stephens. ‘Introduction.’ In Barbara Hepworth: Works in the Tate Gallery Collection and the Barbara Hepworth Museum St Ives, edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, 9–22. London: Tate Gallery, 1999. Holman, Valerie. ‘Barbara Hepworth in Print: Acquiring an International Reputation.’ In Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, edited by Penelope Curtis and Chris Stephens, 26–35. London: Tate Publishing, 2015. Horowitz, David Max. ‘“The World Keeps You in Fetters: Cast Them Aside”: Hilma af Klint, Spiritualism, and Agency.’ In Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, edited by Tracy Bashkoff, 128–33. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2018. Joseph, Branden W. ‘Knowledge, Painting, Abstraction, and Desire.’ In Hilma af Klint: Seeing Is Believing, edited by Kurt Almqvist and Louise Belfrage, 117–23. London: Koenig Books, 2017. Kent, Lucy. ‘“An Act of Praise”: Religion and the Work of Barbara Hepworth.’ In Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, edited by Penelope Curtis and Chris Stephens, 36–49. London: Tate Publishing, 2015. Knight, Christopher. ‘A Groundbreaking Show to Confront the Gender Bias in Art: “Women of Abstract Expressionism”.’ Los Angeles Times, 11 April 2017. https://www.latimes.com/ entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-women-abstract-expressionism-20170416-htmlstory.html (accessed 6 May 2022). Kollnitz, Andrea. ‘Questioning the Spiritual in Art: Hilma af Klint, Vasily Kandinsky, and the Swedish Art World.’ In Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, edited by Tracy Bashkoff, 72–7. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2018.

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Lazenby, Donna J. A Mystical Philosophy: Transcendence and Immanence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Molesworth, Helen. ‘Art for Another Future: Learning from Hilma af Klint.’ In Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, edited by Tracy Bashkoff, 33–47. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2018. Mutter, Matthew. Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance. Yale: Yale University Press, 2017. Staudenmaier, Peter. Between Occultism and Nazism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Tuchman, Maurice. ‘Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art.’ In The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, edited by Maurice Tuchman, 17–61. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987. Voss, Julia. ‘The Traveling Hilma af Klint.’ In Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, edited by Tracy Bashkoff, 49–63. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2018. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt, 1980. ———. ‘A Sketch of the Past.’ In Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 2nd edn. Edited and introduced by Jeanne Schulkind. 64–159. New York: Harcourt, 1985. ———. To the Lighthouse. Edited by Stella McNichol. London: Penguin, 1992.

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14 Modernism and the Hymn Sean Pryor

W

hat could be further from modernism than the hymn? A congregation’s song of praise, the sincere expression of shared values and beliefs, the hymn has little of modernism’s irony or shock. The collectivity of the hymn and its broad popularity seem to oppose, say, the individualism of The Egoist and limited or deluxe editions published by small presses. The ongoing life of old hymns in public memory and public practice, their authors and their original contexts often forgotten, appears to differ radically from modernist investments in making it new and in the distinctive style of each individual talent. To be popular, the hymn must be accessible, deploying a common language and familiar concepts, but modernism famously spurns simplicity for difficulty, for rebarbative forms and the critique of modernity. Most of all, the hymn seems an instrumental genre, framed by institutions, tethered to particular occasions and didactic purposes, while modernism promises the autonomy of art. But that is a caricature, both of the hymn and of modernism. Some modernist works also offered sincere expressions of shared values and beliefs, some were very popular and some were occasional or didactic. Modernism’s novelties and experiments emerged out of and in relation to traditions and conventions. Modernism’s autonomy was always partial or compromised. And modernism engaged actively with the hymn, variously adopting and adapting its history and its forms. The hymn itself was, in the early part of the twentieth century, a diverse genre, or set of related genres. In this chapter, I first sketch the situation of the hymn at this time, and then explore what the hymn meant to modernist poetry.1 My focus is not on broad spiritual and intellectual narratives, whether the rise of secularism or the shifting relation between religion and art.2 Instead, I focus on specific negotiations with generic conventions and connotations, and I argue that modernism turned to the hymn to work through two central problems: the difficulty of collective thinking and feeling, and the difficulty of finding someone or something worthy of praise or responsive to appeal.

Traditions and Developments By the end of the nineteenth century, Hymns Ancient and Modern had achieved widespread acceptance in the Church of England, but in 1904 a new edition appeared. 1 

For a recent survey of the hymn’s appearance in twentieth-century novels, see Noreen Masud, ‘Sound Words: Hymns in Twentieth-Century Literature’, Review of English Studies 70, no. 296 (September 2019): 732–51. 2  See, for instance, Michael Bell, ‘Myth and Religion in Modernist Literature’, in The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, ed. Ulrika Maude and Mark Nixon (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 99–116.

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Though its preface advertised its adherence to the same principles as previous editions, this new volume caused considerable controversy, not least by returning to the original texts of several hymns, when they had become well-loved in revised versions.3 Two years later, a rival volume was published, The English Hymnal, which contained several American hymns, as well as work by poets such as William Blake and Christina Rossetti. The English Hymnal emphasised the literary merit of its selections and translations, though not everyone agreed on its success. In an early review, Mary Butts lamented the volume’s ‘exceeding badness as poetry’.4 Together, these two volumes capture something of the changing state of Christian hymnody at this time, caught between tradition and modernisation, liturgical use and literary judgement. There was, more generally, substantial interest in the Christian hymn. Many scholarly studies and popular histories of the hymn and of hymnwriters appeared, ranging from John Julian’s A Dictionary of Hymnology (1892) to Mary Champness’s Half-Hours with ‘The Methodist Hymn-Book’ (1905). The hymn also played a major role in the family, and it came especially to be associated with childhood.5 As his mother was dying, Wallace Stevens remembered in his journal that, when he was young, she would sit at the piano and ‘play hymns on Sunday evenings, and sing’.6 D. H. Lawrence remarked that the hymns he learned as a child singing in the Eastwood Congregational Chapel ‘mean to me almost more than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other’.7 This was true even though Lawrence had long ago ceased to believe. ‘To open the hymn-book and wander there at will’, urged Scribner’s Magazine in 1917, ‘is to evoke, as nothing else can do, the mystic mood of our childhood’s faith.’8 But what exactly is a hymn? ‘In its broader sense’, wrote Jeremiah Reeves in The Hymn as Literature (1924), the term hymn ‘includes canticles, psalms, carols, “spirituals,” and chants’, while ‘in its more limited sense it includes only religious lyrics in rime and meter’.9 In particular, the terms hymn and psalm had overlapping histories. As long ago as 1707, Isaac Watts had sought to distinguish between the psalm, being a song performed to instrumental accompaniment, and the hymn, being a song of praise.10 But terminologies remained unstable, and this instability had its roots in the ancient world. In Hebrew the Book of Psalms is known as , meaning ‘praises’ or  3 

Hymns Ancient and Modern for Use in the Services of the Church (London: William Clowes and Son, 1904), iv; J. R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 516.  4  [Mary Butts], ‘The Poetry of Hymns’, Outlook 18, no. 461 (1 December 1906): 696. For the attribution of this review to Butts, see Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts: Scenes from a Life (Kingston: McPherson, 1998), 19 and 445, n. 31.  5  On hymns and hymnbooks for children, see Susan M. Tamke, Make a Joyful Noise unto the Lord: Hymns as a Reflection of Victorian Social Attitudes (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), 75–90; Lionel Adey, Class and Idol in the English Hymn (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988), 93–174; Christopher N. Phillips, The Hymnal: A Reading History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 105–52.  6  Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 173.  7  D. H. Lawrence, ‘Hymns in a Man’s Life’ [1928], in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 130.  8  ‘The Point of View’, Scribner’s Magazine, February 1917, 251.  9  Jeremiah Bascom Reeves, The Hymn as Literature (New York: Century Company, 1924), 7. 10  Isaac Watts, ‘A Short Essay toward the Improvement of Psalmody’, in Hymns and Spiritual Songs, in Three Books (London: John Lawrence, 1707), 236.

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‘songs of praise’, and the Septuagint sometimes translates this Hebrew term as ὕμνος (e.g. Psalm 119: 171), the Greek noun from which English hymn derives. However, the Septuagint translation of the Psalms uses ὕμνος and the associated verb ὕμνειν in other contexts, too, and though the Vulgate sometimes uses hymnus (e.g. Psalm 65: 1), it also translates the Greek noun and verb as carmen (e.g. Psalm 6: 1), laudere (e.g. Psalm 22: 22) and cantatio (e.g. Psalm 71: 6). In ancient Greece, the ὕμνος was a song or, more specifically, a song addressed to a god, hero, abstraction or feature of the natural world. The Orphic Hymns include songs to the sea, to justice and to death, but the most famous examples are the Homeric Hymns, songs to Dionysus, to Demeter and to other gods. When Plato banishes poetry from the republic, he makes an exception for ‘hymns to the gods’ (ὕμνους θεοῖς) and ‘praises of good men’.11 In the modern period, the ancient hymn was sometimes taken to represent the wellspring of poetry itself. In 1589, George Puttenham called ‘hymns to the gods [. . .] the first form of poesy and the highest and the stateliest’.12 Over three centuries later, in praising the early poems of H.D. as ‘acts of worship’ towards nature, John Gould Fletcher likened them to the ‘hymns of some forgotten and primitive religion’.13 And in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially, attention to the Greek and Hebrew traditions was extended by the study of other ancient cultures. In the third edition of The Golden Bough (1906–15), James Frazer discusses Babylonian hymns, Egyptian hymns and the hymns of the ancient Sanskrit Rig Veda, as well as medieval Latin hymns.14 The medieval hymn was in turn of interest to some modernists. Richard Aldington, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound all knew Remy de Gourmont’s Le latin mystique (1892), a compendious study of medieval Latin poetry featuring many hymns.15 In his critical works, Eliot also cites John Swinnerton Phillimore’s Hundred Best Latin Hymns (1926), as well as referring specifically to the hymns of Prudentius, Aquinas, Ambrose, Fortunatus and others.16 This diversity of traditions illustrates the flexibility of the term hymn, and many of these traditions influenced modern poetry in English. Some poets modelled their work on Greek hymns, some on the Psalms and some on Christian hymnody. Phillis Wheatley combined both classical and Christian traditions in her hymns to the morning, to the evening

11 

Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 607a. 12  George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne E. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 119. 13  John Gould Fletcher, ‘Three Imagist Poets’, Little Review 3, no. 4 (June–July 1916): 32. 14  James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd edn, part 1, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1911), 1.67, 1.294, 2.166–7; part 4, Adonis Attis Osiris, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1906), 1.9, 2.131; part 6, The Scapegoat (London: Macmillan, 1913), 356, 410; part 7, Balder the Beautiful, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1913), 1.185–6. 15  Richard Aldington, ‘Le latin mystique’, The Egoist 1, no. 6 (16 March 1914): 101–2; T. S. Eliot, ‘The Twelfth Century’ [1927], in The Complete Prose, vol. 3, ed. Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 175. Pound praised de Gourmont repeatedly, but see, in particular, ‘Remy de Gourmont’, Fortnightly Review, December 1915, 1159–66; ‘Remy de Gourmont’, Poetry 7, no. 4 (January 1916): 197–202; ‘De Gourmont: A Distinction’, Little Review 5, nos 10–11 (February–March 1919): 1–19. 16  T. S. Eliot, The Complete Prose, vol. 2, ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 708, 709; Eliot, The Complete Prose, vol. 3, 175, 487, 564, 590.

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and to humanity. Literary hymns such as these are separate from liturgical uses, though those uses are sometimes invoked. Despite having been published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), and so despite having appeared as a text for readers, Wheatley’s ‘An Hymn to the Morning’ frames itself as a ‘song’ and calls on Calliope to ‘awake the sacred lyre’.17 Alongside the tradition of literary hymns, nineteenth- and twentieth-century hymnals came increasingly to include work by established poets, even when the work in question had not originally been published for liturgical use.18 Songs of Praise (1925), for instance, includes Emily Brontë’s ‘No coward soul is mine’ (1850) and ‘The Children’s Song’ from Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906). This period also saw the rise of hymns focused specifically on social questions. In 1914, Mabel Mussey published a collection titled Social Hymns of Brotherhood and Aspiration, and, a year later, Louis F. Benson declared hymns of social democracy to be the new century’s most important contribution to hymnody.19 Some literary hymns dealt directly with politics. In ‘Battle Hymn of the Women’ (1910), Ella Wheeler Wilcox prophesied that, when each woman ‘breaks from old traditions, and is free’, the ‘world shall rise, and render / Unto woman what is hers’.20 Other hymns addressed recent events. Gerald Kingston responded to the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 1905 with ‘Holy Russia: The Hymn of the Russian Revolutionist’ (1907): ‘They take our lives, our labour, / The very grain we sow, / But shall they fleece us ever? – / Up, brothers, answer “No!”’21 One event which produced an outpouring of new hymns was the First World War.22 Hymnody served to galvanise and console by emphasising both religious and political continuities, not least through its common stock of familiar tropes and phrases. Frequently, new hymns about the war featured a conventional or archaic diction, alongside hypotaxis and inversion: Shield, O Lord, our best and bravest     In their agony and strife, Who for friends, as once Thou gavest,     Give their life.23 Older hymns were recalled for duty, too. Having first appeared in 1896, Kipling’s ‘Hymn before Action’, with its repeated appeal to the ‘Lord God of Battles’, was in 1914 reissued as a separate booklet and included in several anthologies.24 Soon after

17 

Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2001), 32. See Phillips, The Hymnal, 174–83. 19  Louis F. Benson, The English Hymn: Its Development and Use in Worship (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1915), 584–90. 20  Ella Wheeler Wilcox, ‘Battle Hymn of the Women’, in Poems of Experience (London: Gay and Hancock, 1910), 18. 21  Gerald Kingston, ‘Holy Russia: The Hymn of the Russian Revolutionist’, New Age 1, no. 14 (1 August 1907): 211. 22  For discussion of hymnody and the First World War, see Adey, Class and Idol in the English Hymn, 213–21. 23  H. D. Rawnsley, ‘A Vesper Hymn,’ in The European War 1914–1915: Poems (London: J. and J. Bennett, 1915), 56. 24  Rudyard Kipling, Hymn before Action (London: Methuen, 1914). See also Lord God of Battles: A War Anthology, ed. A. E. Manning Foster (London: Cope and Fenwick, 1914); Poems of the Great War, Published on Behalf of the Prince of Wales’s National Relief Fund (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914); Poems of War and Battle, ed. V. H. Collins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1914). 18 

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war broke out, the Headmaster of Christ’s Hospital wrote a letter to The Times, recommending Charles Wesley’s ‘Arm of the Lord, awake, awake’ (1739) as a ‘suitable war hymn for use in our churches and chapels, and perhaps for our sailors and soldiers’.25 The Times then printed the full hymn, giving new meaning to Wesley’s call for God to ‘cast thy foes with fury down’. As Donald Davie remarked, Methodist hymnwriters such as Wesley rarely sought ‘to heighten, to disrupt, or even, in the first place, to enrich the language’.26 In 1825, John Keble praised the writers of ‘sacred hymns’ because, unlike modern poets, they typically display a ‘total carelessness about originality’.27 But this did not please everyone. In 1914, Edward Thomas lamented that, from the perspective of poetry, hymns merely ‘play with common ideas’ and with the ‘words and names which most people have in their heads’.28 This may have served for a congregational song, but it contradicted widespread poetic values. In fact, the relation between hymnody and poetry, or between hymnody and the literary, was persistently vexed. Accompanying literature’s appropriation of the hymn for its own purposes, there was the question of the literary judgement of hymns composed for liturgical use.29 In the preface to A Collection of Hymns, for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1779), John Wesley had insisted on poetic quality: ‘no doggerel; no botches; nothing put in to patch up the rhyme; no feeble expletives’.30 Nevertheless, in July 1901 a professor at the University of Chicago made headlines by declaring that the ‘great bulk of church hymns is mere doggerel, pure and simple’.31 Thirty years later, Benjamin Brawley confessed that even ‘Some of the best-known hymns have manifest literary faults’.32 Popularity and literary merit seemed to many to be at odds. In response, The BBC Hymn Book (1951) sought a compromise, advertising its selection of the ‘good popular’ over the ‘bad popular’.33 For some, the hymn’s instrumentality prevented literary achievement. ‘Hymns are usually a second-rate type of poetry,’ wrote Lord David Cecil in 1940, since, having been composed ‘for the practical purpose of congregational singing, they do not provide a free vehicle for the expression of the poet’s imagination’.34 For others, the hymn’s instrumentality made literary achievement a secondary concern. David Breed argued in 1903 that, though ‘the canons of literary criticism’ may be given some weight, the hymn ‘is employed for one specific purpose and must be judged by rules of its own’.35 In 1898, Duncan Campbell cautioned that when a hymn ‘excites the critical faculty’, as poems so often do, this ‘arrests the flow of devotional feeling’.36 And if poetry in general tended to excite the critical faculty, this would prove especially true of modernist poetry.

25 

‘A War Hymn’, The Times, 11 October 1914, 3. Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 70. 27  [John Keble], ‘Sacred Poetry’, Quarterly Review 32, no. 63 (June 1825): 217. 28  Edward Thomas, ‘War Poetry’, Poetry and Drama 2, no. 8 (December 1914): 344. 29  See Watson, The English Hymn, 11. 30  John Wesley, A Collection of Hymns, for the Use of the People Called Methodists (London: Printed by John Mason, 1779), v. 31  ‘Says Hymns Are Mere Doggerel: Professor O. L. Triggs Tells his Class Protestants Are Unappreciative’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 July 1901, 5. 32  Benjamin Brawley, History of the English Hymn (New York: Abingdon, 1932), 11. 33  The BBC Hymn Book (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), no page. 34  The Oxford Book of Christian Verse, ed. Lord David Cecil (1940), xxiii. 35  David R. Breed, The History and Use of Hymns and Hymn-Tunes (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1903), 82. 36  Duncan Campbell, Hymns and Hymn Makers (London: A. & C. Black, 1898), xvi. 26 

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By the time of modernism’s encounter with the hymn, therefore, the hymn had acquired a complex set of generic conventions and connotations. First, the hymn suggested song. In English this produced what Reeves calls ‘religious lyrics in rime and meter’, and so the hymn came to be associated, especially but by no means only in liturgical contexts, with specific verse-forms. Second, as a communal song the hymn suggested a collective, be that a congregation, culture, nation or empire. Third, the Christian hymn’s prevalence as a communal song in both public and private spheres gave its characteristic tropes and phrases broad currency, and this made them available to other writers for imitation and parody. Partly because the hymn had for many become ‘virtually anonymous, [. . .] quite as if it were a folk-song or a ballad’, such imitations and parodies often operated at the level of genre, rather than as intertextual relations between specific works.37 One especially characteristic trope was the hymnic apostrophe, whether addressed to a god, an abstraction or some other entity. In this the hymn suggested, finally, an act of praise or petition. In moving now to consider what the hymn meant to modernist poetry, I want to begin with apostrophe, before concluding with the problem of collectivity.

Praise and Petition In July 1911, at the First Universal Races Congress in London, W. E. B. Du Bois presented a paper, ‘The Negro Race in the United States of America’, and read aloud a poem, ‘A Hymn to the Peoples’. ‘O Truce of God!’, the poem begins, ‘And primal meeting of the Sons of Man, / Foreshadowing the union of the World!’38 Like many hymns, the poem was occasional and didactic; it sought to inspire and to guide a specific group of people in a specific place at a specific time. Though the hymn is titled ‘to the Peoples’, it addresses God, and it does so through multiple epithets: ‘Almighty Word!’, ‘Lord of Lands and Seas!’, ‘World-Spirit’. Du Bois’s poem ends by petitioning the ‘Human God’ to ‘Help us, [. . .] in this thy Truce / To make Humanity divine’. But the poem’s opening lines address the truce itself, a godly ceasefire to hostilities between the ‘Peoples’ of the world, and that truce is embodied by this Congress or ‘primal meeting’, an assembly of representatives from more than fifty countries. A performative apostrophe, Du Bois’s opening lines praise that assembly as a pact of peace, and in so doing they conjure the unity of those gathered representatives and their peoples.39 If, as Samuel Johnson defines it, a hymn is an ‘encomiastick song, or song of adoration to some superior being’, Du Bois’s opening apostrophe makes the being superior; it makes the assembly worthy of praise.40 Twentieth-century poets played countless variations on the hymnic apostrophe as rhetorical posture and act, and these variations ranged from the sincere to the satirical. Many a war hymn, for example, faithfully petitions God for succour or aid. In Mary C. D. Hamilton’s ‘A Hymn for Aviators’ (1915),

37 

Donald Davie, The Eighteenth-Century Hymn in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘A Hymn to the Peoples’, The Independent 71, no. 3273 (24 August 1911): 400. 39  For a considered discussion of apostrophe in lyric poetry, see Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 211–43. 40  Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan, 1755). 38 

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the congregation calls on God to ‘guard and guide our men who fly / Through the great spaces of the sky’.41 In James A. Mackereth’s ‘Hymn of the Airman in the Hour of Battle’ (1917), however, one of those flying men addresses his airborne enemies: ‘Proud we meet amid the blue: / Who shall speed the world’s endeavour / Splendid foemen, I or you?’42 Cutting across hostilities, apostrophe here conjures a new unity: ‘May weal us all betide!’ In Mackereth’s poem, apostrophe makes the very enemy worthy of praise. Apostrophe takes on different meanings when the addressee is clearly not superior or praiseworthy. A satire on the yoking of religion to patriotism and slaughter, Osbert Sitwell’s ‘World-Hymn to Moloch’ (1919) hails, not a peaceful assembly, nor even a hostile combatant, but the monstrous god of child sacrifice: Holy Moloch, blessed lord, Hatred to our souls impart. Put the heathen to the sword, Wound and pierce each contrite heart.43 This inversion of the conventional hymnic apostrophe serves in fact to critique the poem’s speakers, the congregation of those who, sending their young off to war, stay safe at home: Those of us too old to go Send our sons to face the foe, But, O lord! we must remain Here, to pray and sort the slain.44 Even this parodic appeal to Moloch, however, is an appeal to a god. In his unpublished ‘Hymn to Nothingness’, Lawrence undoes the hymnic apostrophe by addressing not a superior being but what, by definition, has no being at all. Since secular modernity has stripped the world of meaning, since ‘the heavenly host’ has given way to the ‘empty’ ‘vastness’ of an indifferent cosmos and since there ‘is no Great God in the innermost’, Lawrence’s poem instead hymns nothingness: Nullus, nothingness—what’s in a name! Hail and be damned to thee, winning the game!45 Echoing the multiple epithets bestowed on gods by traditional hymns, Lawrence’s Babelish cascade of vocatives figures nothingness as plenitude: ‘Nullus, nullus, nothing and nought / Nichts and niente, rien and nada’. It is as if apostrophe could conjure

41 

Mary C. D. Hamilton, A Hymn for Aviators, music by C. Hubert H. Parry (London: Boosey & Co., 1915), no page. 42  James A. Mackereth, ‘Hymn of the Airman in the Hour of Battle’, in The Red, Red Dawn (London: Erskine MacDonald, 1917), 44. 43  Osbert Sitwell, Argonaut and Juggernaut (London: Chatto & Windus, 1919), 113. 44  Sitwell, Argonaut and Juggernaut, 114. 45  D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013–18), 3.1587. The extant manuscript dates ‘Hymn to Nothingness’ to August 1927.

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presence out of absence or, indeed, as if this is all that sincere and faithful hymns have ever done. The combination of epithet and exclamation on which both Lawrence and Sitwell play ironically was a characteristic feature of the hymn, both liturgical and literary, and it could reach heights of rhetorical excess. ‘O space! O power! illimitable Night!’ cries Mackereth in ‘Hymn to the Midnight’ (1912).46 This ought to measure strength of feeling, but in a literary hymn, especially, these vestiges of hymnody’s heritage as song of praise risk bathos. Du Bois’s ‘O’ registers the occasion of his poem’s live performance, but elsewhere that ‘O’ can, as Mike Chasar observes, sound ‘pretentious, amateur, and archaic’.47 Even in a relatively restrained example, such as Wilfred Rowland Childe’s ‘Hymn to the Earth’ (1920), the ‘O’ seems to genuflect to convention: ‘O dear green earth, who art the only rest, / Apart from God, our truant spirits know’.48 The risk is that speaking or singing not just about but to the midnight or the earth has become merely an affectation. In this context, one of the most striking modernist experiments with the hymnic apostrophe was John Rodker’s Hymns (1920), though Rodker is better known today as a publisher, novelist and translator than as a poet.49 Born to a Jewish family and raised in London, Rodker founded the Ovid Press in 1919, busily printing Eliot’s Ara Vos Prec (1920) and Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), as well as his own Hymns. The volume’s opening poem, ‘Hymn to Love’, begins with a characteristically modernist patchwork of quotations and references: Ave Maria, Stella Maris Ah Paris Yet even in London, Brantôme, Whitman, Vatsyayana.50 First Rodker splices the Hail Mary with ‘Ave Maris Stella’, the medieval vespers hymn, and this then generates a half-rhyme sigh, ‘Ah Paris’. Rodker’s textual collage defers the prayer’s and the hymn’s direct address to Mary, and in lieu of a proper ‘O’, the ‘Ah’ suggests only reflection or remembrance. Perhaps the poem’s speaker turns to Paris as a city of romance or sex, recalling a lovers’ escape across the Channel. Probably the lines encode a private allusion to Mary Butts, whom Rodker married in 1918. This confusion of sacred and profane is then compounded by references to Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, whose memoirs detail the promiscuities of Renaissance court-life, to Walt Whitman, and to Mallanaga Vātsyāyana, who wrote the Kama Sutra. If textual collage defers faithful adoration, this literary catalogue defers sex with textuality itself.

46 

James A. Mackereth, In the Wake of the Phoenix (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), 120. Mike Chasar, ‘The Story of O’, Tulepo Quarterly 20 (2020), http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/mike-chasar (accessed 9 May 2022). See also Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 190. 48  Wilfred Rowland Childe, ‘Hymn to the Earth’, Coterie 6–7 (Winter 1920–21): 26. 49  For more detailed discussion of Hymns, see Sean Pryor, ‘Satyriast’s Beatitudes: John Rodker’s Hymns’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 55, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 473–92. 50  John Rodker, Poems and Adolphe 1920, ed. Andrew Crozier (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), 71. 47 

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In this way, Rodker’s inversions of hymnic convention are frequently irreverent and often blasphemous. Anticipating Lawrence’s emphasis on disenchantment, Rodker especially enjoys splicing hymnic tropes with medical and scientific terminology, as well as hailing far from superior beings. ‘Under her caressing fingers, / Desire wells up in you [. . .] O Proud Erection!’ cries ‘Hymn to Heat’, the volume’s second poem.51 Rodker is also nothing if not unafraid of rhetorical escalation. ‘Hymn to Cold’ is punctuated by a repeated cry – ‘Sneer on my beloved’s lips!’ – and as the poem proceeds, it gradually develops an analogy between this icy scorn and the physics of cold: ‘The mad flight of atoms [. . .] huddles in fear’.52 Rodker’s apostrophic ‘O’, archaic diction, tumbling epithets and repeated exclamation marks produce a highly unstable compound of sincerity and irony: O sneer on my beloved’s lips O terrifying poles! O howling wastes! [. . .] Alas we did not teach thee to congeal blood or bind brains in swift ice. [. . .] O moon, O cold, O howling brain-binding waste thou art a sneer on my beloved’s lips.53 The melding of ‘howling wastes’ and ‘bind brains’ in ‘howling brain-binding waste’, along with that periodic return to the beloved’s sneer, suggests both fixation and intensification. But if the rhetorical excess seems to measure the speaker’s pain, it also undercuts the apparent posture of heartfelt expression. Like many of Rodker’s hymns, ‘Hymn to Cold’ actively reproduces and exaggerates the literary ‘badness’ of the modern hymn. The poem is clearly ridiculous, even if it is unclear quite who or what is being ridiculed, be it the speaker, human desire, an inhuman universe or the urge to anthropomorphise that universe. At first, the poem’s logic of apostrophe appears to involve a double deferral: the speaker addresses not the beloved, but the sneer on the beloved’s lips, and then the address to those terrifying poles and howling wastes tropes on that sneer. This deferral might seem to mark the speaker’s sense of isolation. But the relation of tenor and vehicle in ‘Hymn to Cold’ is more complex than this, since, in the poem’s final couplet, it is actually the sneer that figures the cold. So, too, Rodker’s poem shifts restlessly between apostrophes to the cold, an abstraction; apostrophes to metonymies for cold (‘O ultimate poles!’, ‘O moon!’); and the description of further metonymies (spears of sleet, the northern lights).54 So, while Sitwell’s and Lawrence’s poems upset the convention of hymnic address, Rodker’s poem has no stable addressee at all. For all

51 

Rodker, Poems and Adolphe 1920, 72. Rodker, Poems and Adolphe 1920, 73–4. 53  Rodker, Poems and Adolphe 1920, 74–5. 54  Rodker, Poems and Adolphe 1920, 74, 75. 52 

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its irreverence this is not, ultimately, a satire on the hymn.55 Instead, apostrophe has itself become painful. The wild, scattershot rhetoric of Rodker’s hymns suggests that nothing, whether in human relations or in the inhuman world beyond, merits praise or responds to appeal. Modernism takes up the hymn to address this central problem: what to praise, and where to turn for succour. H.D.’s early poems, which Fletcher likened to the hymns of some forgotten religion, apostrophise not the blossoming rose of poetic convention or the chaste lily of religious tradition, but the ‘Stunted’ sea rose and the sea lily, ‘slashed and torn / but doubly rich’.56 We can see this problem registered in Stevens’s early poetry, too. Stevens’s invocations of the hymn are never ironic, as Rodker’s are, but they often defer the apostrophe in some fashion, as if unable properly to adopt a hymnic posture. In ‘Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion’ (1922), Stevens’s speaker calls upon a ‘dweller in the dark cabin’ to celebrate the good things of the world: the bounty of nature and the possibility of human love. ‘Rise’, the speaker urges, ‘and hail, cry hail, cry hail’.57 But the poem’s address to the dweller in the dark cabin is neatly separated from the dweller’s imagined cry of praise: that cry is a hymn beyond the poem itself. It is telling, too, that the dweller in the cabin is an individual, and so the poem never imagines a communal hymn. This is also true in ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’ (1921). ‘What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?’ Hoon asks, before declaring, in visionary communion with the world, that in fact ‘my ears made the blowing hymns they heard’.58 To achieve this, Hoon must explicitly set aside the thought of loneliness: ‘I descended / The western day through what you called / The loneliest air’. That ‘you’, an unidentified addressee, never reappears. If Du Bois’s hymn conjures the unity of the peoples of the world, the world which Hoon can hymn has in it no other people.

Collectivity This is the other great problem for which modernism takes up the hymn: the problem of collectivity. As a communal song, the hymn serves conventionally to bind a congregation, nation or other collective through the expression of shared values and beliefs. The ancient Greek ‘Hymn of the Kouretes’, wrote Jane Ellen Harrison in 1912, embodies a ‘group-thinking, or rather group-emotion towards life’.59 In the preface to Social Hymns of Brotherhood and Aspiration, Mussey stressed that her aim as editor had been ‘to find hymns that could be sung by all people in all places’.60 Others objected

55 

If satire, Andrew Crozier argues, ‘requires some measure of agreement with its audience about what it represents, that by which it is provoked and which it affronts, the direction of Rodker’s concerns pointed beyond such narrow agreement and defiance’ (Rodker, Poems and Adolphe 1920, xix). 56  H.D., Collected Poems, 1912–1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983), 5, 14. 57  Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 72. 58  Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 51. 59  Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), x. 60  Mabel Hay Barrows Mussey, Social Hymns of Brotherhood and Aspiration (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1914), v.

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that, because ‘Socialism and pacifism have not yet so leavened the lump that there is an instant response to their appeal’, socialist and pacifist hymns, for all their aspiration, fail to ‘express and address universal emotion and conviction’.61 This urge for universality led Percy Dearmer, who had been an editor of both The English Hymnal and Songs of Praise, to prophesy the demise of denominational hymnals. ‘The hymns themselves show how catholic we have already become,’ he wrote in 1933.62 ‘They represent the whole of Christendom, without sectarian limitations.’ At the same time, the communal expression of values and beliefs has a normative function. ‘One of the most successful ways to indoctrinate the masses’, advised the editors of The Free Methodist Hymnal (1910), ‘is to set them to singing the doctrines in which you wish them to become grounded.’63 In comparable fashion, war hymns disseminated the principles of patriotism, loyalty and sacrifice: Nameless the men of Empire! Thine is the name: Shine in the darkness, Britain, as oft of yore. Fuel are they for the beacon; thine the flame, Lifting thy freemen out of bondage of war.64 Having first appeared in The Times, this ‘Hymn to the Nameless’ (1914) by Edmund Beale Sargant then travelled through the empire and beyond, appearing in both the Christchurch Star and the Boston Daily Globe.65 To bind a collective in this way was to set an us against a them. Perhaps the most infamous example was Ernst Lissauer’s ‘Haßgesang gegen England’ (1914), the title of which was swiftly, if loosely, translated by the British and American press as ‘Hymn of Hate’. Published soon after the outbreak of war, Lissauer’s poem rallies Germans against the enemy: ‘We love as one, we hate as one, / We have one foe and one alone— / ENGLAND!’66 It is precisely this logic of inclusion through exclusion which Sitwell parodies in his ‘World-Hymn’: the universal petition to ‘Put the heathen to the sword’.67 In Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘First Hymn to Lenin’ (1931), this dialectic of us and them plays out at the levels of both theme and diction: Here lies your secret, O Lenin,—yours and oors, No’ in the majority will that accepts the result But in the real will that bides its time and kens

61 

‘The Point of View’, 252. Percy Dearmer, Songs of Praise Discussed (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), xxv. 63  The Free Methodist Hymnal (Chicago: Free Methodist Publishing House, 1910), iv. 64  Edmund Beale Sargant, ‘A Hymn to the Nameless’, The Times, 14 December 1914, 9. 65  Edmund Beale Sargant, ‘Hymn to the Nameless’, The Star (Christchurch), 20 February 1915, 1, and Boston Daily Globe, 19 January 1915, 12. 66  Ernst Lissauer, ‘A Chant of Hate against England’, trans. Barbara Henderson, New York Times, 15 October 1914, 12. For early uses of the title ‘Hymn of Hate’, see ‘A Hymn of Hate’, The Times, 29 October 1914, 9; and Will Irwin, ‘British Fight “As One”, but Hate as They Please’, New York Tribune, 22 March 1915, 1. For further discussion, see Richard Millington and Roger Smith, ‘“A Few Bars of the Hymn of Hate”: The Reception of Ernst Lissauer’s “Haßgesang gegen England” in German and English’, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 41, no. 2 (2017), https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1928. 67  Sitwell, Argonaut and Juggernaut, 113. 62 

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The benmaist resolve is the poo’er in which we exult Since naebody’s willingly deprived o’ the good; And, least o’ a’, the crood!68 Here the poem’s speaker, speaking for a we, identifies that we with Lenin and then separates both we and Lenin from ‘the majority’, in order, with some paradox, to celebrate a universal need or desire for the good. That universality is then epitomised by the crowd, which, in being named, is also separated from the we. Moreover, the speaker hazards this complex of collectives, not in Russian or in Standard British English, but in MacDiarmid’s synthesis of Standard British English and Scots. Hymnody had always affirmed or established collectivities through a shared language, but such languages serve to exclude as well as to include. In MacDiarmid’s hymn, a vernacular routinely dismissed as marginal and crude figures the language of ‘the crood’ in general. Scots comes to figure those without power, whether political or literary.69 Still, the synthesis is very much MacDiarmid’s own; MacDiarmid is not at all, as Keble puts it, careless about originality. ‘First Hymn to Lenin’ thus teeters precariously between the collective and the individual. This was an important distinction, for both literary and liturgical hymns. ‘We have preferred the objective type of hymn,’ explained the editors of The Oxford Hymn Book (1908), though ‘we have not felt ourselves precluded from accepting the expression of personal experience’.70 So, too, the editors of The Riverdale Hymn Book (1912) prioritised ‘objective hymns, those that lead thought and emotion away from self’.71 For all that the hymn may seem in other respects so alien to modernism, this emphasis on the objective and the impersonal is strikingly similar to central tenets of modernist poetry. Indeed, Eliot remarked in 1941 that both the epigram and the hymn ‘are extremely objective types of verse: they can and should be charged with intense feeling, but it must be a feeling that can be completely shared’.72 As Pound remembered it, he and Eliot decided, some time before the publication of Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Eliot’s Poems (1919), that vers libre had been diluted by lesser talents, that the remedy lay in returning to rhyme and ‘regular strophes’, and that they would take for their models Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et camées (1852) and The Bay Psalm Book (1640), a metrical psalter which Pound dubbed ‘the Bay State Hymn Book’.73 The first of the quatrain poems which Eliot then

68 

Hugh MacDiarmid, Complete Poems, ed. Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), vol. 1, 298–9. 69  Published in the same year as ‘First Hymn to Lenin’, MacDiarmid’s 1931 essay ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’ attacks the systematic devaluation of Scots and Scots literature in British literary culture and schooling. See Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Prose, ed. Alan Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), 61–80. 70  Thomas Strong, William Sanday, Mary C. Church, James M. Thompson and Basil Harwood, eds, The Oxford Hymn Book (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), vi. 71  The Riverdale Hymn Book, ed. Ira Seymour Dodd and Lindsay Bartholomew Longacre (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1912), no page. 72  T. S. Eliot, ‘Rudyard Kipling’ [1941], in The Complete Prose, vol. 6, ed. David E. Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 217. 73  Ezra Pound, ‘Harold Monro’, The Criterion 11, no. 45 (July 1932): 590. Pound had already cited the ‘Bay State hymn book’ as a model for Eliot in a letter to W. C. Williams on 12 September 1920. See Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 134. Eliot

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drafted seems to have been ‘Airs of Palestine, No. 2’, though it was never published. Probably written in 1917, it deploys hymnic and biblical tropes to attack the revelations offered, and the communities conjured, by the daily press. The poem credits J. A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, with the building of a heavenly city, but it is by no means the city of God: there within ‘Zion’s pearly wall’ souls ‘purge themselves of all their sin’ and learn to ‘hate the Germans more and more’.74 Though the poem does use religious materials with irreverence, its real target is the press, and it invites the reader to share this judgement. ‘Airs of Palestine, No. 2’ thus exploits an apt coincidence between the collectivities established by hymnody and those established by satire, though the one binds to praise and the other to condemn. In Eliot’s subsequent quatrain poems, the satire is more complex. For Leon Surette, the satire in a poem like ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ (1988) is so total as to undo itself. Because the ridicule of such poems is not ‘based on any discernible moral or religious ground’, Surette argues, because the poems offer no stable basis for judgement, they are ‘fundamentally nihilistic’.75 The difficulty is that attack requires a vantage. If ‘Airs of Palestine, No. 2’ uses the hymn to attack the press, in ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ the hymn is paradoxically both vantage and target: Sweeney shifts from ham to ham Stirring the water in his bath. The masters of the subtle schools Are controversial, polymath.76 Sweeney’s bath is a debased baptism, and the sacrament is blasphemed by Sweeney. Those supersubtle theologians mock and are mocked by Sweeney’s crude carnality. Both Sweeney and the masters prove unworthy of a hymn, and the hymn fails to find a superior being. Nothing in this poem is sacrosanct.77 ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ is unusual among Eliot’s quatrain poems, in that it identifies no speaker or speakers. Only ‘Mr. Eliot’ remains, in the title, as a wry warning not to conflate the poem’s judgements with its author’s. In contrast, ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (1918) moves from the singular to the plural, from ‘Donne, I suppose,

 

later confirmed that it was Pound who suggested writing quatrains and who prompted him to look at Gautier, though Eliot never mentions The Bay Psalm Book. See ‘Ezra Pound’, Poetry 68, no. 6 (September 1946): 335; ‘The Art of Poetry I’, Paris Review 21 (Spring–Summer 1959): 52–3. For further discussion of Eliot and The Bay Psalm Book, see John Perryman, ‘Back to The Bay Psalm Book: T. S. Eliot’s Identity Crisis and “Sweeney Erect”’, The Midwest Quarterly 47, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 244–61. 74  T. S. Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 1.277. 75  Leon Surette, The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Humanism (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2008), 108. 76  Eliot, Poems, vol. 1, 50. 77  The authority underwriting judgement in these poems, writes James Longenbach, is that of the author, ‘standing outside the poem’. See ‘Ara Vos Prec: Eliot’s Negotiation of Satire and Suffering’, in T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, ed. Ronald Bush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 61.

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was such another / Who found no substitute for sense’ to ‘But our lot crawls between dry ribs / To keep our metaphysics warm’.78 That final judgement is thus displaced on to an individual who speaks unreliably for an unidentified collective.79 The reverse movement occurs in ‘The Hippopotamus’ (1917), which Christopher Ricks calls a ‘sardonic and even blasphemous hymn’, and which begins with the collective expression of shared experience and established doctrine.80 Though the hippopotamus ‘seems so firm to us / He is merely flesh and blood’, and though ‘Flesh and blood is weak and frail, [. . .] Every week we hear rejoice / The Church, at being one with God’.81 There are in fact at least three collectives here: the Church, the we and the alliance of reader and poem. We are invited by the we, who do not sing, to judge the Church, which sings. We are invited by the poem to judge that we for the doctrines they inherit from the Church. Susceptible to both invitations, we can securely accede to neither judgement.82 At this point, ‘The Hippopotamus’ has turned traditional hymnody against itself. But the poem then switches to the singular for a vision of the hippopotamus’s fate: ‘I saw the ’potamus take wing [. . .] And quiring angels round him sing / The praise of God’.83 This complicates the poem’s collage of hymnic and biblical motifs. The speaker’s prophecy that ‘Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean’ foists collective hope on to a preposterous object by revoicing Charles Wesley’s hymn, ‘Come let us rejoice in confident hope’: ‘The blood of the Lamb shall wash our hearts clean’.84 Having claimed access to visionary experience unavailable to ‘we’ or the Church, the ‘I’ separates himself from congregational expression through ironic allusion and denies the envisioned salvation to both the congregation and himself. If the speaker in Psalm 51 can speak for all, petitioning God to ‘wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow’ (Psalms 51: 7), Eliot’s speaker condemns us all when he pictures, not himself, not a collective, but the hapless hippopotamus ‘washed as white as snow’. In this way, ‘The Hippopotamus’ and some of Eliot’s other quatrain poems interrogate unstable or fractured collectives. Eliot’s modernist encounter with the hymn confronts the difficulty, in the modern world, of thinking and feeling with and for other people.

78 

Eliot, Poems, vol. 1, 47–8. For Jeffrey M. Perl, ‘our lot’ consists only of the speaker, Donne and Webster. See ‘Disambivalent Quatrains’, in A Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. David Chinitz (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 137. But the phrase may also include the reader, who has already been invited to share the speaker’s judgement on Grishkin. 80  T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 284. 81  Eliot, Poems, vol. 1, 43. 82  Eliot’s quatrain poems ‘manipulate the reader into taking positions of knowing superiority that are destabilized by uncertainty’, writes Nigel Alderman, and especially by an uncertainty as to whether the reader is herself ‘implicated’. See Nigel Alderman, ‘“Where Are the Eagles and the Trumpets?” The Strange Case of Eliot’s Missing Quatrains’, Twentieth-Century Literature 39, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 140. 83  Eliot, Poems, vol. 1, 44. 84  John and Charles Wesley, The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, ed. George Osborn, 13 vols (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Conference Office, 1868–72), 5.334. Cf. Revelation 7: 14. For further allusions, see Christine Meyer, ‘Some Unnoted Religious Allusions in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hippopotamus”’, Modern Language Notes 66, no. 4 (April 1951): 241–5. 79 

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Works Cited Adey, Lionel. Class and Idol in the English Hymn. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988. Alderman, Nigel. ‘“Where Are the Eagles and the Trumpets?” The Strange Case of Eliot’s Missing Quatrains.’ Twentieth-Century Literature 39, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 129–51. Aldington, Richard. ‘Le latin mystique.’ The Egoist 1, no. 6 (16 March 1914): 101–2. The BBC Hymn Book. London: Oxford University Press, 1951. Bell, Michael. ‘Myth and Religion in Modernist Literature.’ In The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, edited by Ulrika Maude and Mark Nixon, 99–116. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Benson, Louis F. The English Hymn: Its Development and Use in Worship. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1915. Blondel, Nathalie. Mary Butts: Scenes from a Life. Kingston: McPherson, 1998. Brawley, Benjamin. History of the English Hymn. New York: Abingdon, 1932. Breed, David R. The History and Use of Hymns and Hymn-Tunes. Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1903. [Butts, Mary]. ‘The Poetry of Hymns.’ Outlook 18, no. 461 (1 December 1906): 696–7. Campbell, Duncan. Hymns and Hymn Makers. London: A. & C. Black, 1898. Cecil, Lord David, ed. The Oxford Book of Christian Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940. Chasar, Mike. ‘The Story of O.’ Tulepo Quarterly 20 (2020). http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/ mike-chasar (accessed 9 May 2022). Childe, Wilfred Rowland. ‘Hymn to the Earth.’ Coterie 6–7 (Winter 1920–21): 26–7. Collins, V. H., ed. Poems of War and Battle. Oxford: Clarendon, 1914. Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Davie, Donald. The Eighteenth-Century Hymn in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. Dearmer, Percy. Songs of Praise Discussed. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Dodd, Ira Seymour and Lindsay Bartholomew Longacre, eds. The Riverdale Hymn Book. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1912. Du Bois, W. E. B. ‘A Hymn to the Peoples.’ The Independent 71, no. 3273 (24 August 1911): 400. Eliot, T. S. ‘The Art of Poetry I.’ Paris Review 21 (Spring–Summer 1959): 47–70. ———. The Complete Prose, vol. 2. Edited by Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. ———. The Complete Prose, vol. 3. Edited by Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli and Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. ———. ‘Ezra Pound.’ Poetry 68, no. 6 (September 1946): 326–38. ———. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917. Edited by Christopher Ricks. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. ———. The Poems of T. S. Eliot. Edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. ———. ‘Rudyard Kipling.’ 1941. In The Complete Prose, vol. 6. Edited by David E. Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard. 210–38. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. ———. ‘The Twelfth Century.’ 1927. In The Complete Prose, vol. 3. Edited by Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli and Ronald Schuchard. 175–8. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Fletcher, John Gould. ‘Three Imagist Poets.’ Little Review 3, no. 4 (June–July 1916): 32–41. Foster, A. E. Manning, ed. Lord God of Battles: A War Anthology. London: Cope and Fenwick, 1914. The Free Methodist Hymnal. Chicago: Free Methodist Publishing House, 1910.

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H.D. Collected Poems, 1912–1944. Edited by Louis L. Martz. New York: New Directions, 1983. Hamilton, Mary C. D. A Hymn for Aviators, music by C. Hubert H. Parry. London: Boosey & Co., 1915. Harrison, Jane Ellen. Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912. Hymns Ancient and Modern for Use in the Services of the Church. London: William Clowes and Son, 1904. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. London: W. Strahan, 1755. [Keble, John]. ‘Sacred Poetry.’ Quarterly Review 32, no. 63 (June 1825): 211–32. Kingston, Gerald. ‘Holy Russia: The Hymn of the Russian Revolutionist.’ New Age 1, no. 14 (1 August 1907): 211. Kipling, Rudyard. Hymn before Action. London: Methuen, 1914. Lawrence, D. H. ‘Hymns in a Man’s Life.’ 1928. In Late Essays and Articles. Edited by James T. Boulton. 130–4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. The Poems. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013–18. Lissauer, Ernst. ‘A Chant of Hate against England.’ Translated by Barbara Henderson. New York Times, 15 October 1914, 12. Longenbach, James. ‘Ara Vos Prec: Eliot’s Negotiation of Satire and Suffering.’ In T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, edited by Ronald Bush, 41–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. MacDiarmid, Hugh. Complete Poems. Edited by Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. ———. Selected Prose. Edited by Alan Riach. Manchester: Carcanet, 1992. Mackereth, James A. ‘Hymn of the Airman in the Hour of Battle.’ In The Red, Red Dawn. 42–4. London: Erskine MacDonald, 1917. ———. In the Wake of the Phoenix. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912. Masud, Noreen. ‘Sound Words: Hymns in Twentieth-Century Literature.’ Review of English Studies 70, no. 296 (September 2019): 732–51. Meyer, Christine. ‘Some Unnoted Religious Allusions in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hippopotamus”.’ Modern Language Notes 66, no. 4 (April 1951): 241–5. Millington, Richard and Roger Smith. ‘“A Few Bars of the Hymn of Hate”: The Reception of Ernst Lissauer’s “Haßgesang gegen England” in German and English.’ Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 41, no. 2 (2017). https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1928. Mussey, Mabel Hay Barrows. Social Hymns of Brotherhood and Aspiration. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1914. Perl, Jeffrey M. ‘Disambivalent Quatrains.’ In A Companion to T. S. Eliot, edited by David Chinitz, 133–44. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Perryman, John. ‘Back to The Bay Psalm Book: T. S. Eliot’s Identity Crisis and “Sweeney Erect”.’ The Midwest Quarterly 47, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 244–61. Phillips, Christopher N. The Hymnal: A Reading History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Plato, The Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935. Poems of the Great War, Published on Behalf of the Prince of Wales’s National Relief Fund. London: Chatto & Windus, 1914. ‘The Point of View.’ Scribner’s Magazine, February 1917, 251–5. Pound, Ezra. ‘De Gourmont: A Distinction.’ Little Review 5, nos 10–11 (February–March 1919): 1–19. ———. ‘Harold Monro.’ The Criterion 11, no. 45 (July 1932): 581–92.

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———. ‘Remy de Gourmont.’ Fortnightly Review, December 1915, 1159–66. ———. ‘Remy de Gourmont.’ Poetry 7, no. 4 (January 1916): 197–202. ———. Selected Prose, 1909–1965. Edited by William Cookson. London: Faber and Faber, 1973. Pryor, Sean. ‘Satyriast’s Beatitudes: John Rodker’s Hymns.’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 55, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 473–92. Puttenham, George. The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition. Edited by Frank Whigham and Wayne E. Rebhorn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Rawnsley, H. D. ‘A Vesper Hymn.’ In The European War 1914–1915: Poems. 56. London: J. and J. Bennett, 1915. Reeves, Jeremiah Bascom. The Hymn as Literature. New York: Century Company, 1924. Rodker, John. Poems and Adolphe 1920. Edited by Andrew Crozier. Manchester: Carcanet, 1996. Sargant, Edmund Beale. ‘A Hymn to the Nameless.’ The Times, 14 December 1914, 9; The Star (Christchurch), 20 February 1915, 1; and Boston Daily Globe, 19 January 1915, 12. ‘Says Hymns Are Mere Doggerel: Professor O. L. Triggs Tells his Class Protestants Are Unappreciative.’ Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 July 1901, 5. Sitwell, Osbert. Argonaut and Juggernaut. London: Chatto & Windus, 1919. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. ———. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Edited by Holly Stevens. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Strong, Thomas, William Sanday, Mary C. Church, James M. Thompson and Basil Harwood, eds. The Oxford Hymn Book. Oxford: Clarendon, 1908. Surette, Leon. The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Humanism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. Tamke, Susan M. Make a Joyful Noise unto the Lord: Hymns as a Reflection of Victorian Social Attitudes. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978. Thomas, Edward. ‘War Poetry.’ Poetry and Drama 2, no. 8 (December 1914): 341–5. ‘A War Hymn.’ The Times, 11 October 1914, 3. Watson, J. R. The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Watts, Isaac. ‘A Short Essay toward the Improvement of Psalmody.’ In Hymns and Spiritual Songs, in Three Books. 233–76. London: John Lawrence, 1707. Wesley, John. A Collection of Hymns, for the Use of the People Called Methodists. London: Printed by John Mason, 1779. ——— and Charles Wesley. The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley. Edited by George Osborn. 13 vols. London: Wesleyan-Methodist Conference Office, 1868–72. Wheatley, Phillis. Complete Writings. Edited by Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin, 2001. Wilcox, Ella Wheeler. Poems of Experience. London: Gay and Hancock, 1910.

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15 William James, Mysticism and the Modernist Epiphany Graham H. Jensen

T

he ideas and personal accounts of mystical phenomena contained in the American philosopher and psychologist William James’s massively influential The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902) – which he first shared as part of his 1901–02 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh – stimulated literary, scholarly and popular debates during his own lifetime, and have continued to do so long after his death in 1910. Still, despite a recent surge of interest in James’s literary legacy,1 and despite David H. Evans’s contention that James was ‘closer perhaps than any other single figure to the center of the confluence of intellectual currents that defined the culture of modernism’, James is still championed by literary critics primarily as the pragmatist who coined the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’.2 Such assessments grossly underplay his impact on modern literature and society as a whole. Indeed, Varieties, specifically, came to serve as a touchstone for prominent writers across multiple generations, religious orientations and literary movements; its notion of ‘personal’ as opposed to ‘institutional’ religion in particular seems to have anticipated, and even helped spur, the widespread privatisation of religion that sociologists have routinely associated with the mid twentieth century.3 Varieties provides not only prophetic commentary on broader socio-religious changes – such as the rise of liberal theology in Protestant churches and seminaries, or the increase in interfaith dialogue and awareness in the decades following the inaugural World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago (1893) – but also an interpretive framework through which critics can better understand the heterogeneous forms of mystical experience that would continue to populate modernist, postmodernist and contemporary literatures.4 In a 2018 essay, Valeria Taddei made important inroads in this latter, largely unexplored area of inquiry. She demonstrates that the language

1 

See, for example, Todd Barosky and Justin Rogers-Cooper, eds, ‘Further Directions in William James and Literary Studies’, special issue, William James Studies 13, no. 2 (2017); David H. Evans, ‘Introduction: Unstiffening All our Theories: William James and the Culture of Modernism’, in Understanding James, Understanding Modernism, ed. David H. Evans (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 1–14; and Valeria Taddei, ‘The Sacred Mind: William James and Modernist Epiphany’, Working Papers in the Humanities 13 (2018): 40–9. 2  Evans, ‘Introduction’, 2. 3  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, ed. Martin E. Marty (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 28. 4  See A Museum of Faiths: Histories and Legacies of the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, ed. Eric Ziolkowski (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993).

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of mystical experience and conversion narratives deployed in the numerous textual fragments excerpted in James’s book is in many ways indistinguishable from the language of epiphanies so central to literary modernism. However, Varieties did not just inspire modernist writers by providing them with compelling, ready-made templates of what Sharon Kim, in a similarly groundbreaking study, calls spirituality’s ‘discursive form[s]’.5 As I will suggest here, Varieties was also influenced by Romantic literature in largely unacknowledged ways that invite further critical investigation in the opposite direction, into modernism’s literary and religious origins. The history of literary epiphanies spans multiple literary periods, of course, and literary epiphanies operate in multiple, sometimes conflicting registers. On occasion, they are articulated using the language of religious conversion. In other cases, these epiphanies eschew religious language, appearing to function as what Ashton Nichols calls ‘form[s] of purely secular revelation’.6 Nevertheless, as Kim convincingly argues throughout Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950: Constellations of the Soul, modernist epiphanies cannot be fully understood according to this either/or logic. Instead, modernist epiphanies remind us of modernism’s religious and Romantic inheritances – two of its many vestigial tails. They also remind us of modernism’s ongoing conversions, its ongoing imperative to ‘make it new’ in more than a strictly aesthetic sense. Notably, though, the definitions of literary epiphanies supplied by Morris Beja, Nichols or writers such as James Joyce are often framed using the kinds of mystical and conversion discourse reproduced in Varieties. In this way, the modernist epiphany serves as a compelling – and crucial – piece of evidence of how religious and literary rhetoric remained inextricably linked in a period frequently associated with processes of secularisation. Yet the parallels between religious and literary epiphanies, and specifically between James’s ‘four marks’ of mystical experience and canonical as well as ‘late’ or other non-canonical examples of modernist epiphanies in poetry and prose, cumulatively highlight not a thoroughgoing project of secularisation, but modernists’ ongoing – albeit highly varied and sometimes unorthodox – commitments to religious imaginaries and ideals. The modernist epiphany, like its predecessors, continues to blur rather than reaffirm the religious-secular distinction, though studies of James and his works have only begun to map out the full extent of his role in this process. As Nichols explains in The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment, modernist epiphanies – loosely defined as ephemeral ‘elevations of ordinary events into moments of extraordinary significance’ – were adapted from William Wordsworth and other Romantics, but soon facilitated the creation of ‘a new kind of literary representation of experience’.7 This new epiphany registered modernism’s documented obsession with the quotidian or mundane, an obsession Erich Auerbach refers to as ‘one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century literature’.8 In a

5 

Sharon Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950: Constellations of the Soul (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 26. Kim is interested in the spiritual meanings of epiphany, but mentions James only a few times in passing and examines epiphanies primarily as a trigger for, or indicator of, character development. 6  Ashton Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), xii. 7  Nichols, Poetics of Epiphany, xi, 12. 8  Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 546.

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similar vein, Beja adds that the epiphanic mode was ‘vital to the artistic concepts and aims of many of our most significant [modernist] novelists’ – many of whom sought new means of representing reality in the wake of the First World War or the radical pronouncements of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud and Einstein.9 In modernist literature, then, epiphanic discourse was inevitably linked to broader discourses of the new, which the literary avant-garde used both to disavow their literary predecessors and to legitimise their own aesthetic experiments. The same can be said of my own national literary context: in Canadian modernism, epiphanic discourse as rupture informs an impressive range of texts, including the theosophical reflections of the Whitmanesque magazine The Sunset of Bon Echo (1916–20), the politically inflected manifestos of Montreal little magazines Preview (1942–44) and First Statement (1942–45), and the poetry of the celebrated Canadian writer Margaret Avison, whose exposure to James’s Varieties inspired her to return to church and eventually led to her own epiphanic experience and conversion to Christianity in 1963.10 The editors of Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media maintain that, in its early stages, Canadian literature ‘was everywhere encoded by metaphors of the new’.11 As one of the more common varieties of such rhetoric, epiphanic discourse featured prominently in Canada’s modernist magazines in both its earlier and more mature mid-century manifestations; as was the case elsewhere, these magazines were the formative sites of cultural activity around which fluid communities of poets, polemicists, novelists, dramatists, artists and editors would constellate, or from which they would disperse. But what are epiphanies, and what differentiates the modernist epiphany from the kind of literary epiphanies that feature in Wordsworth, or from the religious experiences in Varieties? Dictionary definitions of ‘epiphany’ indicate multiple interpretive possibilities. First, an epiphany can be ‘A manifestation or appearance of some divine or superhuman being’.12 This primary definition, from the ancient Greek epiphaneia (a ‘shining forth’), obviously lends itself to religious readings; it also indicates the term’s genealogical ties to the Christian celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany, or Theophany (literally the ‘appearance of God’). The second definition – ‘transferred and figurative’ – appears somewhat less helpful.13 Significantly, however, this figurative extension of the first definition opens the door to non-religious readings of epiphanies as sudden visions of a more immanent, mundane variety, and it is therefore the one critics tend to privilege when referring to the modernist literary epiphany as a secular innovation. Regardless of the object of one’s vision, a further distinction must also be made between epiphanic experiences themselves and literary epiphanies – the latter being a term used to describe how epiphanic experiences, real or fictional,

 9 

Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (London: Owen, 1971), 18. For an account of Avison’s conversion and how Varieties ‘got her going back to church’, see Margaret Avison, ‘Margaret Avison: The Dumbfoundling [sic]’, interview by Harry der Nederlanden, Calvinist Contact, 19 October 1979, 1, 3. 11  Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent and Bart Vautour, ‘Introduction’, in Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media, ed. Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent and Bart Vautour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 26. 12  Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘epiphany’, www.oed.com/view/Entry/63447 (accessed 12 August 2021). 13  Oxford English Dictionary, ‘epiphany’. 10 

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are represented and interpreted to others in writing: epiphany as primary experience versus epiphany as literary device. As literary device, the modern literary epiphany is frequently understood to reflect a similar pivot as that enacted in the dictionary, moving away from epiphany’s literal, religious origins towards its figurative, non-religious application in a variety of poetic and prose forms. But this is far too reductive a narrative. Even Katherine Mansfield, whose short stories are frequently cited as evidence of the modernist epiphany’s emphasis on the immanent to the exclusion of the supernatural, remains bound up with what, in her Diaries, she refers to as ‘something quite other’.14 In ‘The Dead’, too, Joyce provides a number of clues – or false clues – that seem to gesture beyond the profane, this-worldly realities depicted in the text. For example, Joyce litters his account of Gabriel’s epiphany in the final scene with allusions to Greek mythology as well as with imagery reminiscent of Christ’s crucifixion, including ‘crosses’, ‘spears’, ‘thorns’ and a Golgotha-like hill associated with the death of one of the narrative’s central characters.15 Even so, one wonders whether such allusions are intended to inspire religious hope so much as ironically invert the Christian themes that Joyce introduces and challenges throughout Dubliners. In keeping with the dictionary definitions I’ve mentioned, and in an attempt to cut through such ambiguity en route to a better understanding of the literary epiphany’s relationship to religion, perhaps, Nichols proposes two distinct types of epiphany: those that ‘[return], via the theophanies of Hopkins, to a theological framework’, and those that ‘[emerge] – by way of the symbolist aesthetic – as the dominant form of purely secular revelation’.16 Yet, as the above example from Dubliners suggests, the line between these two types is often blurred in modernist texts in ways that belie Nichols’s neat separation of a ‘purely secular’ poetics from either epiphany’s theophanic origins or the many different orthodox, esoteric and even heretical frameworks foundational to so much modern art, including Symbolists from Mallarmé and Verlaine to Huysmans, to Yeats, or to those gathered under the occultist banner of Joséphin Péladan’s Salon de la Rose + Croix. Even so, the definitions of literary epiphanies provided both by modernists and by modernist critics other than Nichols have continued to muddy the secular-religious waters. To begin, one might look productively once more to Joyce, who provides his most unambiguous definition in Stephen Hero. For Joyce’s eponymous hero, an epiphany ‘meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.’17 Is Joyce’s ‘spiritual’ roughly equivalent to Mansfield’s ‘something quite other’? Nichols argues that the Joycean epiphany is a secular literary form in which ‘[a] theological concept takes on a psychological application’, and Kim adds that ‘critics have mistaken Joyce’s

14 

Katherine Mansfield, The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield: Including Miscellaneous Works, ed. Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 436. 15  James Joyce, ‘The Dead’, in Dubliners (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 220. 16  Nichols, Poetics of Epiphany, xii. 17  James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York: New Directions, 1955), 211.

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concept as something mystical, religious, or moral, when it expressly denies each of those vectors’.18 Nevertheless, Joyce’s religious allusions and implication in the theological modernist debates of his own time draw us back to the epiphany’s etymological origins and its twentieth-century reinterpretation along new religious as well as psychological axes.19 Like James’s psychological inquiries and innovations in Varieties, Joyce’s in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man go hand in glove with his realignment or rejection of institutional religion, not the replacement of religion’s mystical core altogether. Consider Portrait’s self-styled ‘priest of the eternal imagination’.20 Joyce’s invocation of priests, of the liturgy and rites and the miracle of transubstantiation, foregrounds rather than stands in for the religious framework his fledgling, postepiphany poet qua priest seems destined to replace. On similar grounds, Robert Langbaum’s assertion that the epiphany is ‘the Romantic substitute for religion’ seems problematic at best, though it dovetails with the secularising pronouncements of Shelley, Arnold and others – including literary critics writing about the epiphany, specifically.21 While Langbaum acknowledges that Anglo-American modernists discovered what he refers to elsewhere as ‘a renewing spirituality through intensification rather than elevation’, his substitutionary art-as-religion argument does little to disentangle either spirituality and religion, or the ‘intensification’ of imagery in the immanent frame versus the ‘elevation’ in the transcendent frame it negates; he simply demotes epiphanies from supernatural religious experiences to preternatural or fully naturalised ‘spiritual’ ones.22 Against the larger backdrop of the post-secular turn in modernist studies, this kind of entanglement may be understood more positively as one of the animating features of modernist expression and its subsequent interpretation. The stakes of such a claim for modernist studies more generally are suggested by Virginia Woolf’s contention – as summarised by Kim – that epiphany functions ‘as a modality of literary criticism’.23 Epiphanic discourse still shapes modernist commentary from within, as when Frances Dickey remarks that T. S. Eliot, in his recently unsealed letters to Emily Hale, ‘meditates on the moments of insight that show a pattern in his life, both past and future and their meeting in a present “unattended / Moment” of illumination (“Dry Salvages”

18 

Nichols, Poetics of Epiphany, 11; Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 6. See, for example, Jamie Callison, ‘Jesuits and Modernism? Catholic Responses to Anti-Modernism and Versions of Late Modernism’, Literature and Theology 31, no. 1 (March 2017): 1–18; Finn Fordham, ‘Between Theological and Cultural Modernism: The Vatican’s Oath against Modernism, September 1910’, Literature & History 22, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 8–24; Henry Mead, ‘Modernist Anti-Modernists: T. E. Hulme, “Spilt Religion” and “The Religious Attitude”’, in Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, ed. Erik Tonning, Matthew Feldman and David Addyman (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 80–96; and Joanna Rzepa, ‘Tradition and Individual Experience: T. S. Eliot’s Encounter with Modernist Theology’, in Religion, Philosophy, and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry, ed. Scott Freer and Michael Bell (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016), 99–119. 20  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1964), 221. 21  Robert Langbaum, ‘The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature’, New Literary History 14, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 356. Cf. Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941); Irene Hendry, ‘Joyce’s Epiphanies’, Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 449–67. 22  Langbaum, ‘Epiphanic Mode’, 336. 23  Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 153. 19 

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again). This letter seems to contain seeds of Four Quartets, especially “Burnt Norton” V and “Dry Salvages” II and V.’24 This narrative of Eliot’s creative discovery and development clearly – yet almost certainly unwittingly – echoes several elements of Garry Leonard’s definition of Joycean epiphanies as ‘not so much a moment of insight as a point where hitherto disparate observations, thoughts, and desires rearrange themselves into an unsuspected pattern that shatters often long held ideas about one’s self and one’s surroundings’.25 Like Leonard, Dickey emphasises the passive ‘rearrange[ment]’ of multiple ‘moments of insight’ into a meaningful pattern. Echoes of this kind characterise other definitions, too, some of which raise new questions about the modern literary epiphany’s entanglements with religion and – to return to James – with the idea that religious conversions, like epiphanies, are the product of what Varieties refers to as ‘a new perception, a sudden emotional shock, or an occasion which [. . .] will make the whole fabric fall together’.26 In Epiphany in the Modern Novel, Beja contrasts Joyce’s definition (discussed above) with Joseph Conrad’s description, in Lord Jim, of ‘rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much – everything – in a flash – before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence’.27 On the surface, at least, their definitions have much in common. Most notably, an epiphany is characterised by both Joyce and Conrad as something that appears ‘suddenly’, or ‘in a flash’, and as something that is ‘delicate’, ‘evanescent’ or ‘rare’. The definition Beja himself provides is very similar to Joyce’s, stressing further that a ‘sudden manifestation’ (note the conspicuous omission of the word ‘spiritual’, as in Joyce’s ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’) must be ‘out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it’.28 But here, again, we are in murky territory: to take Langbaum’s words out of context, where does the ‘intensification’ of the immanent end and transcendental ‘elevation’ begin?29 When we say that an epiphany is ‘out of proportion to the strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it’, are we talking about a preternatural experience (that is, a ‘marvel’, in the traditional Thomistic sense), or a supernatural one (that is, a ‘miracle’)? Are we really talking about profound insights or merely ‘incident[s]’ in the weakened sense called for by Robert Scholes?30 In lieu of cursory, unsatisfying answers to these difficult questions, which remain unresolved or unaddressed in much modernist literature and criticism, I would note here only that for James, who was reacting in part against the scientific materialism of his day, the failure of logic and of language highlighted by these epiphanic experiences calls for an ‘over-belief’31 of some kind – a leap of faith in response to feelings that confound rational formulation.

24 

Frances Dickey, ‘Reports from the Emily Hale Archive’, International T. S. Eliot Society, January 2020, https://tseliotsociety.wildapricot.org/news?pg=1 (accessed 9 May 2022). 25  Garry Leonard, ‘Dubliners’, in The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, 2nd edn, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 91. 26  James, Varieties, 197. 27  Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2008), 104. 28  Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel, 18. 29  Langbaum, ‘Epiphanic Mode’, 336. 30  Robert Scholes, ‘Joyce and the Epiphany: The Key to the Labyrinth?’, The Sewanee Review 72, no. 1 (n.d.): 75. 31  James defines ‘over-beliefs’ as ‘buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint’; Varieties, 431.

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Because of the supernatural or at least preternatural quality of religious experiences, and because literary epiphanies are defined as experiences that are likewise ‘out of proportion to the strictly logical relevance of whatever produces [them]’, both religious experiences and epiphanies tend to be explained using mystical discourse.32 This tendency, which still shapes literary criticism today, can also be understood in relation to the rising popularity of spiritualism, theosophy and other forms of antiinstitutional religious expression in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the parallel influence of anti-institutional texts such as Varieties on modernists from Eliot and Ezra Pound to Avison and others gathered at modernism’s midcentury periphery.33 As Taddei observes of epiphanic experiences as they are discussed in literary-critical commentaries, ‘their evolution is understood as a progressive abandonment of supernatural connotations. However, authors and critics continue to put a substantial emphasis on the spiritual aspect of the epiphanic experience, leading some to talk of the modernist epiphanic vogue in terms of a quasi-mysticism.’34 And whether or not these experiences stem from or resolve into institutional religious beliefs, James asserts that the most powerful of these epiphanies frequently involve dramatic transformations of the self, even if – as in Leonard’s description of the Joycean epiphany – the dramatic moment of transformation is preceded by an accumulation of seemingly quotidian insights, thoughts or actions.35 That is to say, both epiphanies and religious experiences frequently entail a ‘conversion’ of sorts. For modernist critics, epiphanies can involve extraordinary transformations as illusions burn up in the light of new knowledge; to have an epiphany is to transcend, at least momentarily, what Woolf calls the ‘cotton wool’ state of daily life.36 Kim goes even further regarding the potential of these fleeting moments to effect lasting changes, positing that ‘sudden spiritual manifestations are integral to the process of a self coming into being’.37 Similarly, for James, to be converted in the religious sense means to ‘be born into the real life’, to step out of old skins and into new ideas, habits or ways of seeing.38 Yet this is also an apt description of the effects of so-called secular epiphanies, which Langbaum refers to ‘as a necessary concomitant of realism’.39 Furthermore, Varieties presents its readers with a nuanced and mutually informative view of conversions and epiphanies: religious conversion is something that frequently takes place – but does not necessarily take place – in the context of an epiphanic experience, whereas epiphanies are experiences that may effect religious as well as other kinds of conversion (to ‘avarice’, atheism or simply a more urgently

32 

Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel, 18. For more on James’s influence on Eliot, see William Pratt, ‘To Doubt Yet Be Devout: The Lesson of the Later Eliot’, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 75, no. 4 (1992): 576–80; for more on his influence on Pound, see Patricia Rae, ‘From Mystical Gaze to Pragmatic Game: Representations of Truth in Vorticist Art’, ELH 56, no. 3 (1989): 716. 34  Taddei, ‘The Sacred Mind’, 40–1. 35  James, Varieties, 196–7. 36  Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Hogarth, 1978), 71. 37  Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 19. 38  James, Varieties, 165. 39  Langbaum, ‘Epiphanic Mode’, 336. 33 

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felt realisation of one’s mortality or the futility of one’s ambitions).40 Accordingly, James’s notion of conversion, in the general sense of a shift in ‘the habitual centre of [one’s] personal energy’,41 accommodates more of these experiences than one might expect. His pluralistic framing of religion in terms of the personal allows for minute gradations between religious and secular positions, as well as for highly idiosyncratic and syncretistic forms of religious and non-religious expression. In other words, the triangulation of James, literary criticism and modernist texts might be said to provide a significant counter-response to critics’ attempted disarticulation of mysticism, conversion and epiphany.42 To read the modernist epiphany in relation to the plural religious as well as literary contexts that produced it is to foreground the messy intersections of such categories and concepts as a constitutive element of modernist expression writ large. Still, the enormous influence of James’s Varieties on modernist literature indicates other, more concrete reasons for the continued imbrication of religious and secular imaginaries in literature. For example, even the kind of epiphanies that appear to be of a wholly secular variety still rely on the language of conversion and mystical experience used by James and so many of the individuals quoted in Varieties. As Taddei maintains, James redefined mysticism in such a way as to make it more compatible with the various kinds of modernist epiphanies that would soon emerge, and she outlines how James’s ‘four marks’ of mystical experience in particular probably shaped epiphanic discourse in texts by authors demonstrably indebted to Varieties.43 Of these, Taddei lists Mansfield and the Italian writer Federigo Tozzi, and in addition to the many usual modernist suspects listed elsewhere by Patricia Rae, I would hasten to add Canadian poets whose work spans the late nineteenth century to the present, including Avison, Bliss Carman, E. J. Pratt, Louis Dudek, P. K. Page, Anne Wilkinson and Susan McCaslin. These authors repeatedly draw on James’s four marks, which also resonate, in fairly striking ways, with the definitions of epiphany quoted above. James’s four marks of mystical experience, briefly, are: (1) ‘ineffability’, or an expression of the failure of language to adequately capture an experience; (2) a ‘noetic quality’ – that is, epiphanies impart knowledge and are therefore ‘full of significance and importance’, says James; (3) ‘transiency’ or impermanence, as in Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, Conrad’s ‘flash’ or Joyce’s ‘most delicate and evanescent of moments’; and (4) ‘passivity’, as in Langbaum’s claim that, ‘In art, epiphany is something that happens to the reader’.44 James states that only the first two marks ‘will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the sense in which I use the word’, whereas the latter two ‘are less sharply marked, but are usually found’ in written accounts of mystical experiences.45 In any

40 

James, Varieties, 175ff. James, Varieties, 196. 42  Nichols, at least, insists on the separation of these things. ‘The literary epiphany’, he writes, ‘represents an important departure from forms of experience with which it has often been confused: divine inspiration, religious conversion, and mystical vision.’ Poetics of Epiphany, 4. 43  Taddei, ‘The Sacred Mind’, 42–3. 44  James, Varieties, 380–2; William Wordsworth, The Prelude (London: Edward Moxon, 1850), 325; Conrad, Lord Jim, 104; Joyce, Stephen Hero, 211; and Langbaum, ‘Epiphanic Mode’, 337. 45  James, Varieties, 381. 41 

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case, many of these marks can be found in modernist epiphanies, too, as in the compact concluding lines of Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’ in Four Quartets, where Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always— Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.46 In the preceding stanza, the speaker introduces the problem of ineffability, embodied here in the suitably cryptic and awkward compound ‘the waste sad time’, when he remarks that ‘Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break’.47 Nevertheless, the speaker has entered into a heightened state of awareness, gesturing to the noetic quality of this moment and the hearer’s proleptic intuition of its possible significance for, or in contrast to, the ‘after’ still to come. Like most epiphanies, the experience is also transient, as the words ‘sudden’ and ‘quick’ imply (particularly in opposition to the long ‘always’ of ‘the waste sad time / Stretching before and after’). Finally, there is an element of passivity in this passage: the unexpected ‘hidden laughter / Of children in the foliage’ appears to have triggered the speaker’s epiphany. Regarding the problem of ineffability, Woolf suggests that ‘as one gets older one has a greater power through reason to provide an explanation’ of an epiphany or of ‘exceptional moments’, but she goes on to say that ‘this explanation blunts the sledgehammer force of the blow’.48 In other words, no explanation can convey the full force or meaning of an epiphanic moment; the moment of its articulation is a moment of loss. Or, as Nichols puts it, one’s experience of an epiphany ‘is characterized by a feeling, not by a sustained ratiocination that can be discursively articulated’.49 But note the overlap with James’s description of a mystical experience’s noetic effects. According to James, mystical experiences ‘are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.’50 Characterised in this way, both literary epiphanies and religious experiences seem to increase in significance partially because – not in spite – of our inability to communicate the strong feelings and certainties they provoke. The more urgent point to be made, though, is that many critics tacitly rely on this criterion of an experience’s noetic quality when attempting to differentiate between the putatively secular modernist epiphany and its more religiously inflected forebears: in this view, the modernist epiphany is modernist precisely to the extent that the reader’s

46 

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1943), 8. Eliot, Four Quartets, 7. 48  Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, 72. 49  Nichols, Poetics of Epiphany, 84. 50  James, Varieties, 380–1. 47 

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desire for some greater meaning or transcendental knowledge is denied. For instance, Nichols, describing Woolf’s attempts to write about her epiphanic experiences, remarks that, ‘Unlike traditional notions of inspiration [i.e., experiences deemed religious], the literary epiphany does not contain its own interpretation. The feeling is primary; interpretation is secondary and derivative.’51 This description closely resembles James’s discussion of religious experience in Varieties: religious feelings are primary, whereas their interpretation happens at a remove, involving the addition of what James called ‘secondary growths superimposed’.52 Yet the literary epiphany, like any account of religious experience, is always secondary; as a verbal construction, it is open to endless interpretation and misinterpretation, and in this way is perhaps far less ‘relative and indeterminate’ in its ‘significance’ than Nichols suggests.53 By the same token, the problematically monolithic conception of ‘traditional religious experience’ on which he relies throughout his study is far less ‘absolute and determinate’ in its expression than he claims, or than the sheer range of textual evidence on display in both Varieties and modernist literature indicates. Even in its invocation of ineffability, the literary epiphany can serve as an interpretive record of an event and its significance, including in the mystical terms provided by James; paradoxically, to define the modern literary epiphany as resistant to interpretation is to risk rendering it further amenable to classification under the rubric of ineffable, noetic mystical experience. With James’s pluralistic reimagining of religion in mind, it might be more accurate to conclude that the shift to the modern literary epiphany signals a shift not from religious determinacy to secular indeterminacy, then, as Nichols maintains, but from religious determinacy to religious as well as secular indeterminacy – to a plurality that readmits the multitude of religious, secular and ambiguous alternatives that characterised the modernist landscape in the early twentieth century. In agreement with Taddei, I would stress that more can and should be done to elucidate James’s influence on epiphanic discourse in modernist literature. Yet I would also suggest that Taddei is only half-right when she asserts that ‘By inventorying mystical states as mental experiences independent from an institutional sense of the divine, James was [. . .] also unknowingly offering a typological survey of literary epiphanies’.54 As David E. Leary reveals, it is very possible that Varieties was not ‘unknowingly’ framed to engage with literary conceptions of the epiphany, after all; instead, James’s articulation of mystical experiences without necessary recourse to institutional religious frameworks was actually entangled with literature from the outset. Leary explains that James’s exposure to the poetry of Wordsworth made an indelible mark on his life, his philosophy, and his own unorthodox approach to religion. Wordsworth’s influence on James may help explain James’s rejection of scientific materialism, for example, as well as Varieties’ concomitant embrace of religious feeling.55 However, this influence also

51 

Nichols, Poetics of Epiphany, 97. James, quoted in Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), 406. 53  Nichols, Poetics of Epiphany, 4. 54  Taddei, ‘The Sacred Mind’, 43. 55  See, for example, David E. Leary, ‘“Authentic Tidings”: What Wordsworth Gave to William James’, William James Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 3, 10–12. 52 

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provides further evidence of how Wordsworth’s poetry may have informed James’s pluralistic philosophy of religion. In fact, Wordsworth’s emphasis on feeling over reason, on the limitations of subjectivity, and on the power of over-belief as an antidote to pessimism had a tremendous influence on James’s writings about mystical experiences.56 Even James’s ‘four marks’ can be identified in the literary epiphanies of Wordsworth, including one of The Prelude’s most famous passages:     There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence—depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations, and the round Of ordinary intercourse—our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired; A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced, That penetrates, enables us to mount, When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks Among those passages of life that give Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how, The mind is lord and master—outward sense The obedient servant of her will. Such moments Are scattered everywhere, taking their date From our first childhood. [. . .] [. . .] It was, in truth, An ordinary sight; but I should need Colours and words that are unknown to man, To paint the visionary dreariness57 Here, in the modern epiphany’s Wordsworthian beginnings, we see the mystical Jamesian elements that have conditioned the ends of so many modernist narratives: transiency (‘spots of time’ that ‘Are scattered everywhere’); passivity (‘our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired’, and we are ‘penetrate[d]’ or otherwise acted on by an ‘efficacious spirit’); a noetic quality (the experience provides ‘Profoundest knowledge’ and is ‘with distinct pre-eminence retain[ed]’); ineffability (‘I should need / Colours and words that are unknown to man’); and even an anticipatory nod to modernism’s fixation on ‘trivial occupations, and the round / Of ordinary intercourse’. Furthermore, the experience is recorded by ‘A sensitive being, a creative soul’ reminiscent of Joyce’s ‘man of letters’, just as many of the experiences documented in Varieties were – according to James – recorded by ‘religious geniuses’ who ‘have often shown symptoms of nervous instability’ or ‘have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations’.58

56 

See Leary, ‘Authentic Tidings’, and Amy Kittelstrom, The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition (New York: Penguin, 2015), 171. 57  Wordsworth, The Prelude, 325–6, 327. 58  Wordsworth, The Prelude, 325; Joyce, Stephen Hero, 211; and James, Varieties, 6.

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As his reverence for Wordsworth suggests, James had great faith in the efficacy of poetry as a medium for exploration of mystical experiences, or of Mansfield’s ‘something quite other’.59 Curiously, James even ventures that poets are uniquely qualified to grapple with the problem of ineffability and perform what Eliot, in a slightly more pessimistic frame of mind, refers to as ‘a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating’.60 Amy Kittelstrom relates how James’s own epiphanic experience or Walpurgisnacht in the Adirondack Mountains in 1898 contributed to this view: ‘From this peak experience he came to “understand now what a poet is. He is a person who can feel the immense complexity of influences that I felt and make some partial tracks for them in verbal statement.”’61 Tracing James’s possible influence on Eliot’s poetry, William Pratt remarks that, for James, poetry differed from philosophy and theology in terms of its ability to mimic the immediacy and personal power of religious experiences, and yet it was similarly capable of conveying these things – if only ‘partially’ – to and for others.62 James returns us, then, to ineffability as a crux in matters literary as well as religious: the problem of ineffability and how one responds to it underwrites critics’ interpretation of ineffability either as modernist writers’ principal means of signalling a kind of secular indeterminacy, or as proof of the continuity and necessity of mystical or other religious modes of making ‘partial tracks’ in the face of that indeterminacy. Regardless of the extent to which Wordsworth’s epiphanies actually informed James’s four marks of mystical experience or philosophy of religion more generally, Varieties, in turn, has provided a compelling range of possible models for the modernist epiphany in its various forms – including those excluded by Nichols’s narrow definition of traditional religious experience. While its influence is too extensive to limn in any detail here, Varieties provides a through line from Wordsworth to the high modernists, to H. G. Wells’s forgotten God the Invisible King (1917),63 to the Canadian modernists listed above, to major works by mid-century writers such as Malcolm Lowry,64 Aldous Huxley or ‘Romantic modernists’65 such as Allen Ginsberg, right up to contemporary poets such as Charles Wright, Jan Zwicky66 and Christopher

59 

Mansfield, Diaries, 436. Eliot, Four Quartets, 16. 61  Kittelstrom, The Religion of Democracy, 156. 62  Pratt, ‘To Doubt Yet Be Devout’, 578–9. 63  Wesley Raymond Wells’s early review of God the Invisible King quotes its ‘Envoy’, in which H. G. Wells acknowledges his indebtedness to James, and suggests that the ideas outlined in the book ‘deserve examination’ only insofar as ‘the views of Wells are due to James’s influence’. See Wesley Raymond Wells, ‘The Fallacy in Mr. H. G. Wells’s “New Religion”’, The Monist 28, no. 4 (1918): 605. 64  See, for example, Ackerley and Large’s note on Under the Volcano’s second epigraph (misquoted from Varieties) and on Lowry’s letter to Jonathan Cape about the mystical dimensions of drunkenness. Chris Ackerley and David Large, ‘The Malcolm Lowry Project: Under the Volcano’, Under the Volcano: A Hypertextual Companion, 2012, https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-linguistics/english/lowry/content/ parent_frameset.html (accessed 9 May 2022). 65  This label is used in Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 66  Zwicky considers at length James’s ideas about ineffability, listing James as one of the major ‘recent’ writers to make serious ineffability claims. As part of her thesis, she argues that ineffability claims serve as proof not of ineffability, but of our ‘desire to communicate’ – a desire that reveals that ‘meaning is at stake’. See Jan Zwicky, ‘What Is Ineffable?’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26, no. 2 (June 2012): 198. 60 

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Buckley67 or novelists such as David Foster Wallace, who continue to draw inspiration from James and write – though often more self-consciously than their modernist predecessors – of ‘epiphanyish’ experiences.68 This is, admittedly, an unruly, unfinished list. Nevertheless, it reinforces my larger point: James was not only a largely unacknowledged progenitor of modernist forms of literary epiphany, as Taddei notes, but also a central link between modernist epiphany and the seemingly outmoded religious and Romantic forms of expression that shaped its evolution. As such, James helps address John McGowan’s complaint that Nichols’s book ‘provides a close look at all the major romantic texts on epiphanies, but assumes a continuity between the modernists (including Joyce) and the romantics that I find hard to credit’.69 Given the fact that James’s own ‘conversion’ experience and later exploration of religious experiences from a psychological perspective appear to have been profoundly influenced by Wordsworth, ‘the father of modern epiphany’,70 it should perhaps come as little surprise that James’s typology of mystical experiences lends itself to productive analysis of the many border-blurring forms of ‘gentle mysticism’ in modern literary epiphany from Wordsworth to the present.71 As Nichols observes à la Langbaum, Frye and Beja, the ‘Joycean’ epiphany – which for many critics remains synonymous with the ‘modern’ or ‘modernist’ literary epiphany – is in fact essentially Wordsworthian in origin. But it is also essentially Jamesian. What Nichols refers to as ‘The long shadow cast by Wordsworth over nineteenth-century poetic theory and practice’ is a shadow occupied by James, who casts a long shadow of his own over twentieth- and twentyfirst-century literature and criticism.72 On the one hand, I am hesitant to attribute more power of influence to James than my brief discussion here warrants. On the other, however, I am also keenly aware that much remains to be said both about the impact of Varieties on modernist writers and, as Leary puts it, ‘about the reverse effect: the impact of literature upon James’s life and work, whether in psychology or philosophy’.73 To varying degrees, each of the writers discussed above – and many more that are not – acknowledge the importance of James in their own thinking. Their work, and particularly their epiphanic experimentation – their attempts to account for what Joanie Mackowski calls ‘the deity’s heady ta-da’, 67 

See Jerome Blanco, ‘Transcendence as Religious Experience: Q&A with Christopher Buckley’, ZYZZYVA (blog), 4 March 2013, https://www.zyzzyva.org/2013/03/04/transcendence-as-religious-experience-qawith-christopher-buckley (accessed 9 May 2022). 68  Wallace, quoted in Casey Michael Henry, ‘“Sudden Awakening to the Fact That the Mischief Is Irretrievably Done”: Epiphanic Structure in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 56, no. 5 (20 October 2015): 480–502. For more on James’s influence on Wallace, see Henry, ‘Sudden Awakening’, and David H. Evans, ‘“The Chains of Not Choosing”: Free Will and Faith in William James and David Foster Wallace’, in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 171–89. 69  John McGowan, ‘From Pater to Wilde to Joyce: Modernist Epiphany and the Soulful Self’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32, no. 3 (1990): 442. 70  Birgit Neuhold’s Measuring the Sadness notes instances of this epithet in ‘Beja, Nichols, Langbaum, and more recently Wim Tigges’. See Neuhold, Measuring the Sadness: Conrad, Joyce, Woolf and European Epiphany (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 42. 71  James, quoted in Leary, ‘Authentic Tidings’, 4. 72  Nichols, Poetics of Epiphany, 4. 73  Leary, ‘Authentic Tidings’, 2. Of note, Leary also points out that ‘neither Perry nor more recent biographers (e.g., Allen, Simon, or Richardson) nor other James scholars (e.g., Feinstein or Bjork) have explored the possible significance of Wordsworth’s poetry in relation to his later work’; Leary, ‘Authentic Tidings’, 4.

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‘the oh unfurling’ – performs a similar function to Varieties, preserving the ‘spiritual’ element so frequently elided in definitions of literary epiphany.74 In the process, they join James as well as the multitude of voices gathered in his study, collectively mediating our understanding of modernism and its plural, persistent religious legacies.

Works Cited Ackerley, Chris and David Large. ‘The Malcolm Lowry Project: Under the Volcano.’ Under the Volcano: A Hypertextual Companion, 2012. https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-linguistics/ english/lowry/content/parent_frameset.html (accessed 9 May 2022). Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Avison, Margaret. ‘Margaret Avison: The Dumbfoundling [sic].’ Interview by Harry der Nederlanden, Calvinist Contact, 19 October 1979, 1, 3–4. Barosky, Todd and Justin Rogers-Cooper, eds. ‘Further Directions in William James and Literary Studies.’ Special issue, William James Studies 13, no. 2 (2017). Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. London: Owen, 1971. Blanco, Jerome. ‘Transcendence as Religious Experience: Q&A with Christopher Buckley.’ ZYZZYVA (blog), 4 March 2013. https://www.zyzzyva.org/2013/03/04/transcendence-asreligious-experience-qa-with-christopher-buckley (accessed 9 May 2022). Callison, Jamie. ‘Jesuits and Modernism? Catholic Responses to Anti-Modernism and Versions of Late Modernism.’ Literature and Theology 31, no. 1 (March 2017): 1–18. https://doi. org/10.1093/litthe/frw005. Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2008. Dickey, Frances. ‘Reports from the Emily Hale Archive.’ International T. S. Eliot Society, January 2020. https://tseliotsociety.wildapricot.org/news?pg=1 (accessed 9 May 2022). Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, 1943. Evans, David H. ‘“The Chains of Not Choosing”: Free Will and Faith in William James and David Foster Wallace.’ In A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn, 171–89. New York: Palgrave, 2013. ———. ‘Introduction: Unstiffening All our Theories: William James and the Culture of Modernism.’ In Understanding James, Understanding Modernism, edited by David H. Evans, 1–14. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. ———, ed. Understanding James, Understanding Modernism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Fordham, Finn. ‘Between Theological and Cultural Modernism: The Vatican’s Oath against Modernism, September 1910.’ Literature & History 22, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 8–24. Genter, Robert. Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Hendry, Irene. ‘Joyce’s Epiphanies.’ Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 449–67. Henry, Casey Michael. ‘“Sudden Awakening to the Fact That the Mischief Is Irretrievably Done”: Epiphanic Structure in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 56, no. 5 (20 October 2015): 480–502. https://doi.org/10.1080/001 11619.2015.1019402. Irvine, Dean, Vanessa Lent and Bart Vautour. ‘Introduction.’ In Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media, edited by Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent and Bart Vautour, 3–27. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Edited by Martin E. Marty. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

74 

Joanie Mackowski, ‘Epiphany’, Poetry Foundation (November 2011), ll. 6, 26.

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Joyce, James. ‘The Dead.’ In Dubliners. 173–220. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Viking, 1964. ———. Stephen Hero. New York: New Directions, 1955. Kim, Sharon. Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950: Constellations of the Soul. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Kittelstrom, Amy. The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition. New York: Penguin, 2015. Langbaum, Robert. ‘The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature.’ New Literary History 14, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 335–58. Leary, David E. ‘“Authentic Tidings”: What Wordsworth Gave to William James.’ William James Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 1–26. Leonard, Garry. ‘Dubliners.’ In The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, 2nd edn, edited by Derek Attridge, 87–102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Levin, Harry. James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941. McGowan, John. ‘From Pater to Wilde to Joyce: Modernist Epiphany and the Soulful Self.’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32, no. 3 (1990): 417–45. Mackowski, Joanie. ‘Epiphany.’ Poetry Foundation, November 2011. https://www.poetryfoundation. org/poetrymagazine/poems/55054/epiphany-56d2362856f7e (accessed 9 May 2022). Mansfield, Katherine. The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield: Including Miscellaneous Works. Edited by Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Mead, Henry. ‘Modernist Anti-Modernists: T. E. Hulme, “Spilt Religion” and “The Religious Attitude”.’ In Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, edited by Erik Tonning, Matthew Feldman and David Addyman, 80–96. Leiden: Brill, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004282285_006. Neuhold, Birgit. Measuring the Sadness: Conrad, Joyce, Woolf and European Epiphany. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. Nichols, Ashton. The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. Pratt, William. ‘To Doubt Yet Be Devout: The Lesson of the Later Eliot.’ Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 75, no. 4 (1992): 571–86. Rae, Patricia. ‘From Mystical Gaze to Pragmatic Game: Representations of Truth in Vorticist Art.’ ELH 56, no. 3 (1989): 689–720. https://doi.org/10.2307/2873203. Richardson, Robert D. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. Rzepa, Joanna. ‘Tradition and Individual Experience: T. S. Eliot’s Encounter with Modernist Theology.’ In Religion, Philosophy, and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry, edited by Scott Freer and Michael Bell, 99–119. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. Scholes, Robert. ‘Joyce and the Epiphany: The Key to the Labyrinth?’ The Sewanee Review 72, no. 1 (n.d.): 65–77. Taddei, Valeria. ‘The Sacred Mind: William James and Modernist Epiphany.’ Working Papers in the Humanities 13 (2018): 40–9. Wells, H. G. God the Invisible King. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Wells, Wesley Raymond. ‘The Fallacy in Mr. H. G. Wells’s “New Religion”.’ The Monist 28, no. 4 (1918): 604–8. Woolf, Virginia. ‘A Sketch of the Past.’ In Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. 61–138. London: Hogarth, 1978. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. London: Edward Moxon, 1850. https://en.wikisource.org/ wiki/The_Prelude_(Wordsworth) (accessed 9 May 2022). Ziolkowski, Eric, ed. A Museum of Faiths: Histories and Legacies of the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993. Zwicky, Jan. ‘What Is Ineffable?’ International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26, no. 2 (June 2012): 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/02698595.2012.703480.

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Part IV: Myth, Folklore and Magic

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16 Modernist Mythopoeia Scott Freer

T

his chapter argues that modernist mythopoeia was a distinctive aesthetic for expressing ideas of the sacred that fall between the polarities of secular materialism and dogmatic religion. Even though modernist mythopoeia allows for a varied range of spiritual perspectives, this chapter primarily focuses on D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers! (1923) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), because, whereas the former exemplifies a mythopoeic aesthetic, the latter is a significant counterpoint to the modernist tendency to read religion as, or through, myth. Modernist mythopoeia is a period-specific aesthetic, the legacies of which, in terms of the so-called secular-religious divide, are nonetheless reflected in post-secular and post-liberal debates. The long-standing debate on what constitutes modernism has gravitated between notions of historical period and form.1 As Michael Levenson states: ‘So much of the artistic passion of the period was stirred by questions of technique.’2 And for Rebecca Beasley: ‘One of the defining features of literary modernism is the tension it preserves between tradition and originality.’ Whilst moved by Ezra Pound’s rallying cry of ‘make it new’ to break with the past, modernists were devoted ‘genealogists’, unearthing the past.3 In this respect, the use of myth as a modernist poetic – mythopoeia – was a ‘new’ technique for recovering creative ways of engaging with ideas of the sacred. Michael Bell considers modernist literature as ‘often concerned with the question of how to live within a new context of thought, or a new worldview’.4 And so, Friedrich Hölderlin’s line, ‘poetically man dwells upon the earth’, is an apt reference point for understanding modernist mythopoeia as a reimagining of Being in the world.5 For mythopoeia, as a modernist response to how myth and religion intersect in multiple ways, was also a means for overcoming a traditional religious language of symbols, convictions and practices and allowing for new spiritual worldviews.6

1 

‘Modernism is regularly viewed as either a time-bound or a genre-bound art form.’ Peter Childs, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000), 19. 2  Michael Levenson, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 3. 3  Rebecca Beasley, Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound (New York: Routledge, 2007), 63. 4  Michael Bell, ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, 10. 5  Bell, ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’, 27. 6  See Religion and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry, ed. Scott Freer and Michael Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016).

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Michael Bell’s Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (1997) was the first serious scholarly book dedicated to an understanding of ‘mythopoeia’ as an ‘underlying metaphysic of much modernist literature’.7 John Sloan neatly sums up the importance of Bell’s thesis: The emphasis on conscious mythopoeia is an attempt to avoid a collapse of the word ‘myth’ into the reductive semantics of truth and falsehood. It also provides Bell with a means of reaffirming a traditional humanist faith in the distinctive ‘truth’ of literature.8 The emphasis on the ‘double consciousness’ – ‘living a world view as a world view’ – is a crucial and rarely perceived point, for modernist mythopoeia is, in the first instance, a philosophical concern.9 Bell speaks of ‘mythopoeia’ rather than ‘myth’ because what is at stake here is not the use of pre-existing myth narratives, but the conscious understanding of human life as a process of mythic creation. In other words, mythopoeia is a poetic undertaking, involving too a conceptual understanding of how language can be transfigurative (transforming perceptions of ‘being-in-the-world’). Mythopoeia is invariably associated with the fantasy-mythologies of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and Tolkien’s ‘Mythopoeia’ (1931) invokes a myth-making logic: [. . .] There is no firmament, only a void, unless a jewelled tent myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth, unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth.10 Out of ‘a void’, the initial naming is a poetic act. Nonetheless, Tolkien does not indicate an awareness that the recycling of myth-archetypes – ‘myth-woven and elf-patterned’ – can itself be an ideological event, predetermining, via closed metaphors, meaning and being. ‘Myth’, as a site of profound conviction, can be used to justify authoritative and totalising oppression. In modernity, on the other hand, conscious mythic creativity takes on the form of an aesthetic that is transcendent, not formulated by dogma and conducive to a poetic sense of the sacred. And mythopoeia, even though it echoes premodern sensibilities, must be distinguished from ‘primitive’ unselfconscious mythopoeia. In effect, the degree of conscious mythopoeia is determined by the author’s absorption of philosophical thinkers on myth (such as Nietzsche, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger et al.).11

 7 

Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1.  8  John Sloan, review of Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century by Michael Bell, The Review of English Studies 50, no. 197 (February 1999): 126–7.  9  Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth, 1. 10  J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Mythopoeia’, in Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 2009), 83–90. 11  ‘Like these philosophical thinkers [Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger], Lawrence understood the central problems of modernity as a complex of psychological, cultural and ultimately ontological questions – questions, that is, about the nature of being, which could be understood only by an imaginative recovery of the pre-Socratic world.’ Michael Bell, ‘Lawrence and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 180.

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Following the publication of Primitivism (1972) and The Context of English Literature: 1900–1930 (1980), Bell singled out D. H. Lawrence as a mythopoeic author, who ‘sought a return to archaic modes of sensibility or to create an equivalent within the terms of modern consciousness’, whilst well aware that ‘the mythopoeic consciousness of archaic man is itself one of our potent modern myths’.12 In D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (1992), Bell sees Ernst Cassirer’s view of a ‘primitive’ sensibility (particularly in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms) as bearing parallels to Lawrence’s mythopoeia, for there is ‘no sharp division between an inner world of feelings and an external world of nature’.13 The emphasis here is on a consciously inhabited worldview. Bell identifies the influence of Nietzsche in terms of Lawrence’s ‘imaginative recovery of a pre-Socratic’ mythic sensibility and parallels with T. S. Eliot’s notion of a lost unity of being: ‘a belief that modernity had involved a progressive “dissociation of sensibility”’.14 Nonetheless, ‘Eliot’s use of the primitive [. . .] does not denote a Lawrentian trust in the pre-civilized and instinctual modes of feelings and thought’.15 Therefore, appreciating the distinction between Lawrence’s and Eliot’s use of myth is central to appreciating what constitutes mythopoeia and its potential implications. Scott Freer’s Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods (2015) takes its cue from Bell’s statement: ‘The word “myth” inhabits a twilight zone between literature, philosophy and anthropology’, by adding religion to the triptych to form a polyptych.16 Mythopoeia is deemed a significant aesthetic for literary modernists to convey an intermediate perspective between secularism and religion. The resurgence of scholarly interest in literary modernism in relation to religion has revised the long-standing view of modernism as marking the end of the religious debate going on in Victorian liberal theology. For example, Suzanne Hobson, in Angels of Modernism (2011), rightly argues that the problem with the emphatic reading of modernism as literature without God is that it tends to take secularisation for granted.17 To further break down the binaries between secularity and religion, it is important to understand the complex interrelations of myth, mythopoeia and religion. Recently, the religious ‘twilight zone’ has been used in post-secular debates to refer to something indeterminate, ‘shadowy’ and in-between and is often couched in negative terms – as if on the hard edges, there exists a state of certainty.18 Jürgen Habermas has argued that to overcome the dialectic between enlightened reason and religious faith we must rethink the cognitive advance from mythos to logos (the historical narrative that we have progressed out of the swamp of superstitious religion into rational certainties).19 And Hans Blumenberg

12 

Michael Bell, Primitivism (London: Methuen & Co., 1972); Michael Bell, ed., The Context of English Literature: 1900–1930 (London: Methuen & Co., 1980), 20. 13  Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3. 14  Bell, ‘Lawrence and Modernism’, 189. 15  Bell, Primitivism, 44. 16  Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth, 1; Scott Freer, Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods (London: Palgrave, 2015). 17  Suzanne Hobson, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture and Aesthetics 1910–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 5. 18  The shadowy in-between realm is the ‘no man’s land of thinking’. Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds, Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), 1. 19  Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 19.

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states: ‘[That] the course of things proceeded “from mythos to logos” is a dangerous misconstruction.’20 Neither Christianity nor secularism can claim complete logocentric authority. Modernist mythopoeia, as a non-strident poetic, embodies an altered view of mythos and logos. The primary philosophical articulation for modernist mythopoeia comes from Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s poetic philosophy is the starting point for modernist mythopoeia by encapsulating the implicit issues of the logos-mythos debate through a highly metaphoric style. In the context of modern nihilism, Nietzsche offers an affirmative poetic to cope with a godless universe. The constructionist-nihilism of Nietzsche is long overstated.21 Whilst The Anti-Christ (1895) castigates the Apostle Paul for translating Christ’s poetics into a mass mythology predicated on belief, The Birth of Tragedy signals the recovery of a redemptive pre-Socratic aesthetic for confronting and containing suffering in nature without recourse to dogma nor belief nor a spiritual entity beyond a material life. In this respect, tragic art is the sacred language. And Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85) is the founding text of modernist mythopoeia with the poet-prophet, Zarathustra, both deconstructing a Platonic heritage and preaching a Gnosticism of self-overcoming modelled on Christ’s esoteric parables. In other words, mythopoeia is for the few and not the many. Nietzsche, in calling for an intermediate poetic for overcoming the division of belief/disbelief, provided the philosophical origin and frame of reference for the aestheticised mythopoeia in many modernist writers.22 First published in 1923 (the same year as the publication of Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium), Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers! can be considered retrospectively as a pivotal collection of eco-poems that celebrate the wildness and sacred alterity of the non-human. Birds, Beasts and Flowers! is the culmination of Lawrence’s travels (Florence, Australia, Sicily, Ceylon and New Mexico) and insights into pre-Christian or pagan religious practices and symbolism. By this time, divinity was not a matter of logos for Lawrence, in seeing spirituality as lying outside of the remit of truth statements (whether nihilist or metaphysical). As he states at the start of his essay ‘On Being Religious’: ‘The problem is not, and never was, whether God exists or doesn’t exist.’23 Lawrence was opposed to a religious form of dogma that destroyed the feeling of awe in terms of otherness. And this is no more evident than in his poetry that conveys the sacred mysticism of the non-human. The mythopoeic, for Lawrence, is an open metaphorical understanding, inflected by Nietzschean and Frazerian genealogy, of a spirituality that lies outside of religious doctrine and the Anthropocene. John Burnet’s influential book Early Greek Philosophy (1892) introduced to Lawrence the idea that sacredness was to be found in ‘primitive animism’ and The Golden Bough further encouraged his poetic visions of numerous incarnational forms. And Apocalypse (1931) shows that Lawrence’s mythopoeia was served by a genealogical method derived from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) whereby pagan antecedents of more authentic states of spiritual being are recovered. The result is Birds, Beasts and Flowers! that peels away accreted Christian symbolic layers to convey neo-pagan visions 20 

Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 27. ‘Few would deny, I imagine, that Nietzsche’s writings are entangled in the construction of myth.’ Andrew Von Hendy, The Modern Construction of Myth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 71. 22  See Freer, ‘Zarathustra: Nietzsche’s New Redeemer’, in Modernist Mythopoeia, 18–44. 23  D. H. Lawrence, ‘On Being Religious’, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 187. 21 

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of eclectic animal spirituality. The most anthologised poem in the collection is ‘Snake’, and this is a staging towards a less anthropocentric view of the animal world and a poetic sense that the sacred also lies in the non-human.24 Lawrence’s travel writing is evidence of a personal search for spiritual plurality beyond inherited notions of religion. In Mornings in Mexico (1927), for instance, Lawrence gives an account of pagan mythopoeia whereby the rich variety of life is a manifestation of the sacred creative impulse: Everything, everything is the wonderful shimmer of creation, it may be a deadly shimmer like lightning or the anger in the little eyes of the bear, it may be the beautiful shimmer of the moving deer, or the pine-boughs softly swaying under the snow.25 For Lawrence, the multifarious incarnations are free-floating signs of God’s ongoing ‘great creative urge’, and it is a principle that informs his poetic and pluralist visions of sacred ontology in the natural order. The ‘Evangelistic Beasts’ section best characterises Lawrence’s genealogical poetic – to recover usurped animal symbols that indicate other spiritual states of being, by unpicking a theological tradition that equated the gospel writers with particular animals. In the book of Revelation (4: 7–8), the authors of the four Canonical Gospels are represented by four living creatures that surround God’s throne: Matthew (human/ angel), Mark (lion), Luke (ox) and John (eagle). The animals also symbolise aspects of Christian revelation: humanity, kingship, service and resurrection. Lawrence challenges both orthodox transcendence and the allegorical reading of human and animal qualities to assert the animal in the divine. As the cryptic preface to the four poems suggests, Lawrence’s intent is to also challenge the Christian iconography that frames its militant evangelism: ‘Oh put them back, put them back in the four corners of the heavens, where they belong, the Apocalyptic beasts.’26 Lawrence is also attempting to suggest different versions of Christ according to the spectrum of the material and the divine. Imagined as a winged man, the angelic human symbol of Matthew indicates his empathy and compassion for humanity. So, in ‘St. Matthew’, Lawrence negotiates two contrary sacred drives that embody a pagan sensibility and transcendent divinity. He takes his cue from John (12: 32): ‘And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.’ But Lawrence is less interested in who will be elected on the day of reckoning than in the image of being ‘lifted up’, which he literalises for the poem’s central structural metaphor and loads with ideas of transcendent spirituality. Lawrence characterises Matthew as the animal that is man: They are not all beasts. One is a man, for example, and one is a bird. I, Matthew, am a man.27

24 

See Earth Shattering: Ecopoems, ed. Neil Astley (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2007), 113–14. D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places (London: Penguin, 1960), 61. 26  D. H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers! (Boston: Black Sparrow Books, 2008), 55. 27  Lawrence, ‘St. Matthew’, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, 57. 25 

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Lawrence interrogates the dual and limited nature of being human: the urge to be ‘lifted up’ and the need also to be grounded in the earth. Lawrence does not deny the transcendent quality in the human, but he insists that animal aspects, which are on a continuum with human spirituality, are equally recognised and deemed sacred. To be ‘lifted up’ may involve ceasing to be fully human and being disconnected from earthly roots and the biological self. In other words, pure transcendence is a threat to the spiritual qualities in the human animal. Lawrence inverts the metaphysical spirit through a series of descending images and by identifying with animals of the dark underworld – the snake, the fish and the bat. For Lawrence, both the upper and under world are sacred and have equal share in the human. The animal is at the heart of Lawrence’s mythopoeia, and as a ‘queer’ ontology it is apposite to expanding a metaphorical understanding of an inner spirituality. ‘Queer’, as I use it here, refers to the pagan alterity of every creature – the queerer the more ontologically unfamiliar or sublime. Lawrence invariably uses the descriptive ‘queer’ for his animals, for example in The Escaped Cock (1929): ‘He watched the queer, beaky motion of the creature.’28 In a letter to Frederick Carter (1929), he aligns ‘queer otherness’ with a ‘great pagan vision’ of animal spirituality that defies allegory.29 The mosquito is referred to as ‘Queer’.30 Birds, Beasts and Flowers! is a remarkable poetic rendering of ‘queer’ spirituality and Lawrence’s mythopoeia, because it shows a preference for alienated creatures, thus maximising the otherness of non-human transcendence. He is particularly interested in singling out a creature that is beyond the reach of the transcendent god. ‘Snake’ very much conveys the psychological tension in a developing mythopoeic consciousness, the overthrowing of an internal voice that associates the creature with a sinister underworld: ‘And yet those voices: / If you were not afraid, you would kill him!’31 On the other hand, ‘Fish’ foreshadows the shift to the fully fledged, neo-pagan mysticism (the sacred in animal alterity) in Last Poems (1932), where Lawrence no longer negotiates the polarities of the ascending and descending spirit exemplified in ‘St. Matthew’. In Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays (1932), Lawrence described the fish as the embodiment of earthly spirituality: The fish is anima, the animate life, the very clue to the vast sea, the watery element of the first submission. For this reason, Jesus was represented in the first Christian centuries as a fish, in Italy, especially, where the people still thought in Etruscan symbols.32 The use of the Latin term ‘anima’ implies Lawrence believes that the fish is the animating principle of Jesus’s spirituality and the abyss of being. Lawrence’s fish-kind stands for the earthed Christ when all was godly (or God was many bodied). Lawrence’s fish, in embodying a carnal ontology, illumines the overthrow of a dualistic theology. As

28 

D. H. Lawrence, The Escaped Cock, ed. Gerald M. Lacy (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Books, 1981), 21. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Letter to Frederick Carter (1st October 1929)’, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume III: November 1928–February 1930, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 507–8. 30  Lawrence, ‘Mosquito’, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, 74. 31  Lawrence, ‘Snake’, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, 96. 32  Lawrence, Etruscan Places, 151. 29 

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Margot Norris argues, Lawrence’s animal ontology is founded on the ‘negation of the self-conscious subject [and learning] to be animal is to surrender to biological fate’.33 Lawrence signs off ‘Fish’ by alluding to Revelation and suggesting that Christianity may return to the idea of Jesus as a fish-derived spirituality: In the beginning Jesus was called The Fish . . . And in the end.34 Lawrence’s mythopoeic use of Christian language points to a psychological genesis in religious development. The fish is not an incarnation of God, for Lawrence, nonetheless it bears a clue to our spiritual beginnings that can be rekindled. And Lawrence’s humble admission that he is not the measure of this creature allows for a meaningful sense of the sublime that decentres the position of man as lord in this world: And my heart accused himself Thinking: I am not the measure of creation. This is beyond me, this fish. His God stands outside my God.35 Therefore, Lawrence remains outside, a bemused and charmed spectator, who does not wish to enter into a dialogue with the queer animation spirituality of the fish. At times, Lawrence appears to echo the dynamism and compound-phrasing of G. M. Hopkins’s poetry, but Hopkins endorses a sacramental theology that upholds a God-creation continuity: Fishes With their gold, red eyes, and green-pure gleam, and under-gold, And their pre-world loneliness, And more-than-lovelessness, And white meat; They move in circles. Outsiders. Water-wayfarers. Things of one element.36 For Sarah Bouttier, Lawrence’s post-war misanthropy is reflected in the physical sensations of animal poems that also convey ‘Lawrence’s longing for a world devoid of human feelings, and concerns, which echoes the “pure, inhuman otherness of death”’.37

33 

Margot Norris, Beasts of Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 171. 34  Lawrence, ‘Fish’, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, 82. 35  Lawrence, ‘Fish’, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, 81. 36  Lawrence, ‘Fish’, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, 81. 37  Sarah Bouttier, ‘The Way to a Fish’s Heart: Non-Human Emotion and Emotional Tone in Birds, Beasts and Flowers!’, Études Lawrenciennes 43 (2012): 90.

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Lawrence’s free verse is a means of capturing simultaneously the outward physicality and inward spirituality of the queer animal – in other words, the vitalism of life and the in-body divinity. As John Schad argues, ‘queer fish’ can indicate the ‘internal other of Christian orthodoxy’ – the pagan mysticism of animal spirituality that is implied and repressed in the secret symbol of Christianity and that stands outside the traditional view of realist theist God.38 In other words, the open-ended, neo-pagan worldview is a by-product of Lawrence’s mythopoeia. In Last Poems (which parallels the iconoclasm of Apocalypse), Lawrence no longer wishes to be ‘lifted up’ but to descend into the fathomless abyss of the sea. He identifies more fully with this spiritual sphere because it represents an ego death or the Dionysian dimension of self-abnegation. Lucifer, the fallen angel, is accommodated into Lawrence’s vision where God is love without logos, because like other rejected creatures of the underworld he derives from the ‘reversed zenith’ of Christian morality: In the dark-blue depths, under layers and layers of darkness I see him more like the ruby, a gleam within of his magnificence coming like the ruby in the invisible dark, glowing with his own annunciation, towards us.39 With John 1: 5 in mind, ‘The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it’, Lawrence subverts the traditional biblical interpretation that the fallen man lies under the power of darkness and death and has no need of light and life. Lawrence subverts the notion of annunciation – divine visitation and impregnation with redemptive life. For Lucifer and fish are symbolically united, as part of Lawrence’s creative undoing of Christian morality and spirituality, expressing a ‘pure, new relationship with all the cosmos’.40 As Bell states: ‘To claim mythopoeia [. . .] is central to modernism is not to impose a monolithic account. There are authors for whom an emphasis on consciously inhabited world views is not primary.’41 In this sense, Lawrence’s use of myth is mythopoeic and Eliot’s high modernist poem, despite Laurence Coupe’s claim that ‘The Waste Land [is] [. . .] at the heart of modernist mythopoeia’, constitutes a significant counterpoint to the modernist tendency to read religion as, or through, myth.42 The Waste Land certainly exhibits a self-conscious use of myth. Eliot’s review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in the words of Bell, ‘seemed especially to affirm this cousinship’. Yet the review ‘speaks of Joyce “using” the mythic “method”’.43 In other words, Eliot’s use of myth is not an

38 

John Schad, Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2004), 4. 39  D. H. Lawrence, ‘Lucifer’, in Last Poems (London: Martin Secker, 1933), 38. 40  D. H. Lawrence, ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 361. 41  Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth, 120. 42  Laurence Coupe, Myth (London: Routledge, 1997), 30. 43  Michael Bell, ‘Myth and Literature in Modernity: A Question of Priority’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 80, nos 2–3 (2011): 210.

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expression of a mythopoeic worldview on his part.44 The poem does not seek conviction, and at the heart of the poem exists a conflict between nature mythology and a countervailing Christian subtext. There is a long-standing reluctance for critics to consider The Waste Land as an expression of a particular Christian theology that defines itself against nature mythology. The poem’s adopted ‘comparative method’ has often been said to indicate Eliot’s tentative search for spiritual substitutes in a post-religious context. The coinciding presence of myth and doubt in the poem is supposedly a sign that Eliot had not yet personally submitted to Christian faith and during this transitional phase was interested in the kind of syncretism Frazer’s The Golden Bough tended to promote. But, as Stanley Sultan argues, given the element of literary playfulness, Eliot does not necessarily celebrate the sources he uses.45 Eliot’s aesthetic values were certainly classical rather than Romantic, and so Eliot’s rejection of modernist mythopoeia, inherited via Nietzsche, should be considered in light of the author’s purging of Romanticism, which was very much tied to what T. E. Hulme termed ‘spilt religion’: the misdirection of the religious impulse into the human sphere.46 For Eliot, too, man was a bucket and not a well of unlimited possibilities: ‘Man is an extraordinary fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.’47 Eliot’s polemical revolt against Romanticism squares with a personal theological turning: departing from the formative influence of Unitarianism that was optimistic about human nature (and its perfectibility) and moving towards Augustinian theodicy that upheld the belief that we can only escape from inherited sinfulness if we receive grace from God. Throughout Eliot’s poetry, a denial of human sinfulness is associated with spiritual death.48 In Eliot’s collection of critical essays, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), the Romantic poet singled out for criticism is William Blake because of the poet’s emphasis on original virtue.49 And Eliot’s objection to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell can also be illuminated in light of Romantic myth-making, when the revolutionary mythologies were shaped by a syncretic and comparative view of myth that was championed by the poet Thomas Love Peacock – that all religions derive from a universal natural religion, one that originates in the mind of man or man’s observations of his environment, and merges myth and religious sources to imply that their symbolism is of equal status or invoking parallel expressions of the same universal

44 

‘[T]he giving of “shape and significance” seems clearly to mean not a mythopoeic transformation of contemporary history but an ironic and nostalgic backdrop against which its futility can be displayed.’ Bell, ‘Myth and Literature in Modernity’, 210. 45  Stanley Sultan, Eliot, Joyce, and Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 171. 46  T. E. Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, in Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (Edinburgh: Johnston Press, 2008). 47  Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, 116. 48  See Scott Freer, ‘“Man enough for damnation”: Ennui and Acedia in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry’, in Religion and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry, 77–98. 49  T. S. Eliot, ‘Blake’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 128–34. ‘The emotions [in The Songs of Innocence and Experience] are presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form.’ Eliot, ‘Blake’, 130.

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truth.50 This is exemplified when Blake compares the physical austerities practised by Ezekiel (eating dung) to those of the ‘North American tribes’, suggesting that both practices are impelled by a universal desire to experience a ‘perception of the infinite’. Similarly, Blake has Isaiah assert that the Greek Cynic Diogenes shared the same impulse that made him go naked and barefoot for three years. And dining with Isaiah and Ezekiel exemplifies the Romantics’ tendency to pour a pot of treacle over the dinner table – the emptying out of the sacred vessel.51 Given this, it is no coincidence that Eliot in the same essay compares Blake’s ‘mythology’ to that of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Nietzsche’s protagonist is the fusion of prophet figures of various traditions who become united in one narrative of spiritual overcoming: ‘Confusion of thought, emotion, and vision is what we find in such a work as Also Sprach Zarathustra; it is eminently not a Latin virtue.’52 Here ‘Latin virtue’ implies the literary value of restraint that T. E. Hulme spoke of – and not the misdirection of the religious impulse into the human sphere. Whilst Blake adopts the radical Christian heritage of inner sense biblical interpretation (rather than the doctrinal platitudes of the biblical figure Ezekiel), Eliot invokes the voice of Ezekiel in The Waste Land to remind us of unredeemed death without God’s salvation. Eliot first cites ‘Line 20. Cf Ezekiel II, i.’ in the ‘Notes’, and Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones is significant for the poem’s abiding religious message, offsetting the mythical method and the tragic nihilism, the unyielding land and the modern scepticism that underwrites mythopoeia.53 The biblical prophet is privileged as the true seer – man, unassisted by grace, knows only a heap of broken images.54 Furthermore, the publication of The Waste Land coincided with Eliot’s essays on tragedians, demonstrating an awareness of the connection between myth and revenge tragedy – viewing humanity entrapped in punitive and imitative action.55 For instance, in ‘Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe’, Thomas Kyd is acknowledged as the genuine forerunner of ‘English tragedy’.56 ‘Hamlet and his Problems’ reaffirms Eliot’s belief that Shakespeare owed much to the revenge-motive of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo Is Mad Againe.57 The Waste Land reverberates with allusions to tragedy; for instance, in ‘What the Thunder Said’, the line ‘Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus’ precedes the primal sound of ‘DA’ and the fragment borrowed from Spanish Tragedy, ‘Hieronymo’s mad againe’.58 Revenge tragedy frames the Babel finale, and the implication is that the relapse into the poetics of comparative mythology is a form of tragic re-enactment. In ‘A Game of Chess’, the dramatic exit of Ophelia and the dramatic entrance of Cleopatra are bookends to the ‘mythical method’. Eliot’s understanding of a particular type of tragedy is intrinsic to the way his poetic method 50 

Marilyn Butler, Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 51  William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), xx–xxi. 52  Eliot, ‘Blake’, 134. 53  T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (London: W. W. Norton & Company Ltd, 2013), 74. 54  See Freer, ‘The Message of Ezekiel’, in Modernist Mythopoeia, 64–8. 55  For Michael Levenson, the rhetoric of tragedies ‘allows [Eliot] the release of cruelty’. ‘Pain, Cruelty, Humiliation: Eliot’s Poetry of Violence and Reprisal’, The Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (2018): 6. 56  Eliot, ‘Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe’, in The Sacred Wood, 72. 57  Eliot, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, in The Sacred Wood, 82–3. 58  Eliot, The Waste Land, 68–9.

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evokes modern concepts of myth. The Golden Bough would have cemented the view that myth is premised on a repetitive violent act: the sacrificial ritual at Nemi, in which the priest is slain to secure the agrarian prosperity of the land, is a form of crosscultural re-enactment. Frazer, playing the detective, describes the ritual at Nemi as if it were a ‘recurring tragedy’ that had disturbed pastoral paradise: ‘In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy.’59 Controversially, Frazer posits the crucifixion of Christ as one more act of ritualised violence sanctified by a religious institution.60 In a way, Frazer’s view of myth as a ritual enacted according to the laws of agrarian nature would have also confirmed for Eliot that myth is, as human nature is, rooted in the temporal and corrupt source of nature. Given its associations with primitivism, the values of myth square neither with Eliot’s learned classicism nor with his turning towards Christian orthodoxy. It is therefore no coincidence that the section that best characterises Eliot’s use of ‘the mythical method’ is ‘A Game of Chess’ in which Shakespeare’s most violent play, Titus Andronicus (1594), takes centre stage. In producing a complex web of classical myth allusions and cross-cultural correspondences between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Elizabethan Reformation, Shakespeare’s dramatic method anticipates the poetic method of The Waste Land. Both authors use a myth frame to reveal the recurring patterns of human tragedy. ‘A Game of Chess’ exemplifies Eliot’s ‘mythical method’, in manipulating parallels that derive from Ovid’s tale of Philomela’s rape ‘by the barbarous king’, Tereus. The Philomela myth is the most violent and taboo-ridden of Ovid’s myths. Philomela, the daughter of Procne, is raped and mutilated by Tereus, Procne’s husband. When Procne hears of Philomela’s fate, she kills their son, Itys, and has him baked in a pie for Tereus to consume. The macabre ironies of poetic justice are played out, pointing to the mutual drives of familial love, carnal lust, intense passion and human consumption, or mortal ambition and hubris. Ovid’s myths are charged with the sado-masochistic ironies of Thanatos: for violating the flesh of his kin, Tereus eats his own lifeblood; what was once Tereus’ life-seed is turned into a cannibalistic dish that returns into the father’s body – Tereus’ sadistic pleasure (other-destructive) is rewarded with an act of unwitting masochism (self-destructive). Therefore, given that this myth narrative expresses the death drive of human desire, Freud would speculate on the compulsion to repeat and thus to revisit this painful primitive memory – the retelling of the myth not only returns us to the myth-trauma but possibly induces ritualised violence. The fact that Eliot draws substantially from a myth that entails a particularly repulsive revenge-motive demonstrates an understanding of myth as ‘death-driven’. The phrase ‘withered stumps of time’ compounds Eliot’s view that the curse of death is linked to the patterns of myth written into nature, for there are chilling echoes of a scene in Titus, when the ‘deeper read’ and dismembered Lavinia (the Philomela equivalent) incriminates Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the myth model.61 If the term ‘humanist’ is taken to express a faith in the benignity of human nature, then Ovidian myths certainly do not provide palatable truths about ‘the human’. But it appears that classical learning is also not edifying, for it is culpable in triggering 59 

James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 666–76. 61  William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 4.1.30–6. 60 

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the next cycle of anti-Eros impulses. Shakespeare shows that tragedy is more than a technical exercise: tragic life re-enacts the precedents/patterns of myth. In a bid to outdo the classicism of his peers, Shakespeare felt compelled to cook up a richer dish of violent tragedy. When Ovid’s Metamorphoses makes a stage appearance in his play, the Renaissance art of classical imitation becomes implicated in the death drive of myth: ‘Patterned by that the poet here describes, / By nature made for murders and for rapes.’62 Ovid has established a precedent for an imitative art, and Marcus implies the ritualised violence is modelled on a divine archetype. In playing the cook, when he serves Tamora a pie baked with the saucy meat of her two sons who defiled Lavinia, Titus plays the Procne equivalent. The word ‘patterned’ thus takes on a sinister signification: a way of reading that re-enacts myth precedents – or a ritual ontology. Titus is a copycat mythologist. In Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes posits two types of myth readers: the mythologist who accepts the ‘naturalness’ of myth, and the knowing myth reader who is able to demystify the constructing effects.63 For Frank Kermode, the ubiquity of a mythological world that repeats the dogma of violence is explained by treating myths as closed metaphors, thus negating progressive, humanist change: ‘Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent.’64 In other words, the hermeneutic model of myth copying is incriminated in the patterns of revenge tragedy. At the very end, The Waste Land signals the collapse of Christian faith into the heteroglossia, or maddening noise, of comparative mythology: London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam ceu chelidon – O swallow swallow Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih65 Tragic re-enactment is invoked through the allusion to Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1592) when Hieronymo invokes the fall of Babylon. The whirligig of foreign voices underwrites the tragic nihilism of The Waste Land: it is a madness we repeat – in the way we recycle fragments or scraps of knowledge to pulp or synthesise into new whole forms (such as new mythologies). In other words, comparative religion does not bring order to the land but constitutes in Eliot’s view the postponement of redemption fulfilled through a commitment to Christian faith.66

62 

Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 4.1.60. ‘[M]yth is a type of speech.’ Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 2000), 109. 64  Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 39. 65  Eliot, The Waste Land, 68–9. 66  For William Myers, the ‘mad medley’ affirms a ‘disassociation of sensibility’. ‘The Waste Land Today (2019)’, The Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (2019): 1–45. 63 

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The Waste Land conveys the futility and anarchy when belief substitutes are derived from myth reading. Modernist mythopoeia, as I define it, is a means of overcoming nihilism and dogmatic theology, and the poem does not endorse an intermediate perspective, as exemplified in Nietzsche’s philosophy that puts much store into aesthetic salvation whereby elusive gnostic texts teach self-overcoming. Nevertheless, the voice of Ezekiel cuts across the syncretic noise of comparative religion, the mythologies of dying gods and phoney prophecy. For Eliot, only one God is the dispenser of life and death. For D. H. Lawrence, divinity is an immanent force, and the resurrection of Christ can be felt or experienced in earthly incarnations – a mythopoeic consciousness and a nature theology he arrives at through Frazer’s comparative religion. But rather than reading religion via myth, The Waste Land inverts the mythopoeic process by inviting the reader to read myth via religion, to assert the different purposes of myth interpretation and religious belief. Mythopoeia is a development of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism, in particular metaphorical theology – the need to speak of God indirectly through metaphor that carried a doubt in the capacity to know truth. In metaphorical theology, metaphors are a conceptual vehicle, suggesting an understanding of the spiritual ‘Other’ and acknowledging an ontological gap or discontinuity between knowledge and the spiritual world. Matthew Arnold recognises the poetic (mythos) as a means of suggesting something sacred that could not be named as metaphysical dogma.67 And for Sallie McFague, ‘metaphorical theology’ is where the stress is on discontinuity between the spiritual and the physical, or God and creation.68 On the other hand, Gerard Manley Hopkins upholds a sacramental view of the world, even despite the celebration of dynamic individual identity. Ultimately, the instress of ‘inscape’ leads one to Christ and the individual identity of any object bears the stamp of the divine. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like ooze of oil Crushed.69 Hopkins’s poetry invariably assumes the Church concept of a beautiful accord between God and creation.70 And in response to what was seen as a failing modernist aesthetic, certain anti-modern authors rekindled a sacramental view. For example, Evelyn Waugh in his Catholic novels generally expresses his faith through closing epiphanies in which a sacred object – e.g., in Helena (1950), the relic of the ‘True Cross’ – affirms the enduring sublime nature of God. Whilst The Waste Land does not affirm a straightforward sacramental worldview, nonetheless, as a counterpoint to mythopoeia, it anticipates a post-liberal theological

67 

Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible, 2nd edn (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1873), 12. 68  Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1983), 5–6. 69  Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 66. 70  In this respect, I appreciate Professor Phil Shaw’s reflections.

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critique of the modern tendency ‘to look for credentials outside its own faith narrative’ – to read religion via myth sources, to read signs of God in nature, and to celebrate religious pluralism.71 To a significant degree, Eliot shared with Ludwig Wittgenstein a similar view of Frazer’s comparative method – in that the anthropological science of myth (mythography) was deemed an inadequate interpretative means of understanding religious symbolism, practice and consciousness: ‘I cannot subscribe [. . .] to the interpretation [with] which he [Frazer] ends his volume on the Dying God.’72 Eliot’s paper ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’ (1913) is evidence that he understood anthropology and sociology did not provide a satisfactory interpretation of the evolution of religious consciousness: ‘Science of religion must be distinguished from Phil. of Religion.’73 Such a remark foreshadows Wittgenstein’s critique on Frazer’s The Golden Bough, in which he upholds religion as a distinct ‘language game’ impenetrable to the empirical grammar of the ‘comparative method’.74 By equating the crucifixion with the ritual sacrifice of the priest at Nemi, the resurrection narrative is read through nature mythology and divine metaphysics are earthed. In this respect, Bell speaks of the ambivalence in Eliot’s poetic method that does not successfully defend the Christian religion against myth thinking: ‘Is myth merely a technical method enabling the artist to express the futility and anarchy, or is it a principle that actually opposes it?’75 Eliot’s use of Frazer’s comparative method in evoking cross-cultural parallels invites the reader to reconstruct a synthetic unity, or a variant of Frazer’s monomyth out of the rubble. Such a hermeneutic process re-enacts the comparative-religious one, in assuming biblical and myth sources bear equal weight or value. However, rather than ambiguity or confusion, a central conflict unites the poem: myth sources are aligned to non-redemptive tragedy and the failing patterns of a godless nature, whilst the voice of Ezekiel offers the metaphysical succour of redeemed death. Various post-liberal theologians, who argue that the Christian faith should be interpreted in its own terms, have since adopted Wittgenstein’s philosophical defence of religion as a discrete language/symbol game. According to Frank Cioffi, Wittgenstein assigns ‘an expressive, anti-instrumental’ view to magic and religion to preserve a certain mystique to an exotic religious symbolism.76 The concept of causality that is used by Frazer to show the intentionality of the primal deed does not adequately give reason to its expressive significance. The concept of the ‘language game’ expounded in Philosophical Investigations (1953), which posits the varying functions of language, significantly influenced Paul Holmer’s The Grammar of Faith (1978) in which he too argues that religious language cannot be explained away by another interpretative

71 

Ronald T. Michener, Postliberal Theology (London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2013), 6. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’, in Piers Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909–1922 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 130. 73  Eliot, ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’, 130. 74  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, ed. Rush Rees, trans. A. C. Miles and Rush Rees (Bishopstone: Brynmill Press, 2010). 75  Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth, 122. 76  Frank Cioffi, Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 155. Jacques Bouveresse credits Wittgenstein with the conviction that science in general ought to renounce any attempt to penetrate ‘the mysteries of the soul’. Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 16–17. 72 

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domain (such as human psychology).77 Belief in God is not a logical entity, nor a scientific hypothesis. In fact, post-liberal theology is regarded as a development of the interwar debate that was fuelled by the Catholic Church’s concern towards modernist relativising and demythologising trends and the reduction of the Christian faith to secular demands and assumptions – as exemplified in The Golden Bough, which equates the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ to the symbolism of dying God mythologies. Erik Tonning notes that the Catholic Church at the beginning of the twentieth century waged a very public campaign against theological modernism, defined in Pope Pius X’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis as the association of God with, not primarily a pre-existing supernatural order, but the human desire for the divine that can attach itself to various symbolic forms which evolve through time.78 The Waste Land, in upholding a dualistic view, accords with Karl Barth’s Protestant reaction to liberal theology: ‘God is in heaven, and thou art on earth.’79 For Barth, ‘myth’ is the problematic historical view of Jesus – the human-centred means of reading the Bible: ‘The Gospel is not a religious message to inform mankind of their divinity or to tell them how they may become divine. The Gospel proclaims a God utterly distinct from men.’80 Barth’s theological reading is distinct from Nietzsche’s view of man as God, poet and thinker: ‘There is [. . .] no merging or fusion of God and man, no exaltation of humanity to divinity, no overflowing of God into human nature.’81 And in aligning the death drive of tragedy with the fractured effect of comparative mythology, Eliot is also affirming that the revealing of God is not to be found on earth amid nature myths. Whilst The Waste Land points to a reactionary theology, Eliot became aware of ‘the need for spiritual re-evaluation in the face of secularisation’.82 So, despite the ‘dung and death’ depiction of nature in East Coker (1940), the opening to The Dry Salvages (1941) affirms a syncretic search for spiritual meanings: ‘The sea has many voices, / Many gods and many voices.’83 Four Quartets (1943) partly shadows a Lawrentian and post-Romantic worldview by invoking numinous notions of the transcendent.84 Four Quartets exhibits a ‘self-conscious mythopoeia’ because it steps outside of Eliot’s ‘habitual frame of reference’.85 This said, ultimately for Eliot faith in God had to be separated from what nature yields. Despite Eliot’s interest in the burgeoning British organic movement, unlike William Wordsworth, Eliot did not worship nature nor see nature as the work of God.86 In the spectrum of modernist mythopoeia, T. S. Eliot is a fish out of water.

77 

Paul Holmer, The Grammar of Faith (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1978). Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 24. 79  Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Marion Boyars, 1997), 10. 80  Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 28. 81  Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 30. 82  Charika Swanepoel, ‘“Where shall the word be found”: T. S. Eliot Nearing the Post-Secular’, The Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (2020): 59–95. 83  T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), 8. 84  Dan Satterthwaite, ‘Reaching into the Silence: Representing the Transcendent in Four Quartets’, The Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (2021): 75–105. 85  Bell, The Context of English Literature, 43. 86  See Jeremy Diaper, T. S. Eliot and Organicism (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2018). For Matthew Geary, The Dry Salvages is ‘postlapsarian’ and does not accord with Unitarian optimism: ‘[the] belief in man’s earthly salvation’. T. S. Eliot and the Mother (London: Routledge, 2021), 248. 78 

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For other writers, the ‘aesthetic dimension is crucial’.87 For instance, Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium privileges a Nietzschean perspectivism in a godless nature, whilst moved by the metaphoric imagination as a form of aesthetic salvation. And whilst Eliot asserts a hierarchy of myth and religious symbolism, H.D. adopts a syncretic mythical method in Trilogy (1946) to recover a female gospel and gnostic insight, and so Frazer’s comparative method becomes an aesthetic means of ‘unearthing’ belief.88 For Yeats, ‘the roots of belief are always underground; unearthed they wither’.89 In other words, varieties of modernist mythopoeia reveal varied poetic and subjective engagements with the sacred. For the many, myth is a byword for ideology and falsehood, and unearthed myth narratives are unconscious archetypes that regenerate norms. A return to myth can be regressive and not progressive. But, as Terry Eagleton asserts in Hope Without Optimism (2017), language too can be a liberating force, breaking down epistemological frameworks, creating aesthetic wonder and revolutionising the spirit.90 And in the words of Bell: ‘The truly mythopoeic conception [. . .] throws the reader back on to the imaginative experience as primordial in a way that the modernist writers understood.’91 Given this and the post-secularity emphasis on the falsity of the secular-religious binary, modernist mythopoeia should be considered, in contemporary terms too, as a key aesthetic. To quote Talad Asad: ‘The concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion.’92 Equally, religion cannot do without mythopoeia in allowing for an altered perspective between doctrinal and secular dogmatism – by creating new meanings of the sacred.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Michael Bell (Warwick University) for previewing the chapter.

Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible, 2nd edn. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1873. Asad, Talad. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Astley, Neil, ed. Earth Shattering: Ecopoems. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2007. Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Alastair Hamilton. London: Marion Boyars, 1997. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 2000.

87 

Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth, 225. See Freer, ‘Hilda Doolittle and D. H. Lawrence: Polytheistic and Pagan Revisionary Mythopoeia’, in Modernist Mythopoeia, 108–61. 89  Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth, 42. 90  ‘As long as there is language [. . .] hope remains possible.’ Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 124. 91  Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth, 228. 92  Talad Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 66. 88 

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Beasley, Rebecca. Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound. New York: Routledge, 2007. Bell, Michael. D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. ‘Lawrence and Modernism.’ In The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, edited by Anne Fernihough, 179–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, edited by Michael Levenson, 9–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ———. ‘Myth and Literature in Modernity: A Question of Priority.’ Publications of the English Goethe Society 80, nos 2–3 (2011): 204–15. ———. Primitivism. London: Methuen & Co., 1972. ———, ed. The Context of English Literature: 1900–1930. London: Methuen & Co., 1980. Berry, Philippa and Andrew Wernick, eds. Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion. London: Routledge, 1992. Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Bouttier, Sarah. ‘The Way to a Fish’s Heart: Non-Human Emotion and Emotional Tone in Birds, Beasts and Flowers!’ Études Lawrenciennes 43 (2012): 89–103. Bouveresse, Jacques. Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious. Translated by Carol Cosman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Butler, Marilyn. Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Childs, Peter. Modernism. London: Routledge, 2000. Cioffi, Frank. Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Coupe, Laurence. Myth. London: Routledge, 1997. Diaper, Jeremy. T. S. Eliot and Organicism. Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2018. Eagleton, Terry. Hope Without Optimism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Eliot, T. S. The Dry Salvages. London: Faber and Faber, 1941. ———. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. ———. The Waste Land. London: W. W. Norton & Company Ltd, 2013. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Freer, Scott. ‘“Man enough for damnation”: Ennui and Acedia in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry.’ In Religion and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry, edited by Scott Freer and Michael Bell, 77–98. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. ———. Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods. London: Palgrave, 2015. ——— and Michael Bell, eds. Religion and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Geary, Matthew. T. S. Eliot and the Mother. London: Routledge, 2021. Gray, Piers. T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909–1922. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982. Habermas, Jürgen. An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age. Translated by Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Hobson, Suzanne. Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture and Aesthetics 1910–1960. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. Holmer, Paul. The Grammar of Faith. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1978. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Edited by W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Hulme, T. E. Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. Edinburgh: Johnston Press, 2008.

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Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Lawrence, D. H. Birds, Beasts and Flowers! Boston: Black Sparrow Books, 2008. ———. The Escaped Cock. Edited by Gerald M. Lacy. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Books, 1981. ———. Last Poems. London: Martin Secker, 1933. ———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume III: November 1928–February 1930. Edited by Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places. London: Penguin, 1960. ———. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Edited by Michael Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Levenson, Michael. ‘Pain, Cruelty, Humiliation: Eliot’s Poetry of Violence and Reprisal.’ The Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (2018): 1–22. ———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. McFague, Sallie. Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language. London: SCM Press Ltd, 1983. Michener, Ronald T. Postliberal Theology. London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2013. Myers, William. ‘The Waste Land Today (2019).’ The Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (2019): 1–45. Norris, Margot. Beasts of Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Satterthwaite, Dan. ‘Reaching into the Silence: Representing the Transcendent in Four Quartets.’ The Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (2021): 75–105. Schad, John. Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida. Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2004. Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Edited by Jonathan Bate. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Sloan, John. Review of Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century by Michael Bell. The Review of English Studies 50, no. 197 (February 1999): 126–7. Sultan, Stanley. Eliot, Joyce, and Company. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Swanepoel, Charika. ‘“Where shall the word be found”: T. S. Eliot Nearing the Post-Secular.’ The Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (2020): 59–95. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tree and Leaf. London: HarperCollins, 2009. Tonning, Erik. Modernism and Christianity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Von Hendy, Andrew. The Modern Construction of Myth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Edited by Rush Rees. Translated by A. C. Miles and Rush Rees. Bishopstone: Brynmill Press, 2010.

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17 Yeats’s Sacred Grove Seán Hewitt

T

he woods of Arcady are dead / And over is their antique joy.’1 These opening lines, from W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, are also the opening lines to his Collected Poems. As Patrick Keane notes, they act as a gateway, and ‘much in the volume is a variation on this opening theme’.2 The poem itself begins with this definitive declaration, spoken from an age in which the world has ceased to feed on ‘dreaming’, and instead plays only with ‘Grey Truth’ (65). Shirking the ‘dead’ truth of science, ‘the starry men / Who follow with the optic glass’ (66), the happy shepherd chooses to sing instead over a grave, where a faun is buried, imagining that in his singing, the faun’s ghost will walk among the dew, and be ‘pierced’ by songs of ‘old earth’s dreamy youth’ (66). The poem, in this way, is double-edged: it speaks from a ‘dead’, disenchanted world, but through its insistent rhythm and repetition suggests the possibility of re-enchantment through song. Not only this, but it enacts a looping of time that is both mournful and protesting. The woods of Arcady are dead, but their ghosts might be conjured into the present through a dream, and ‘this is also sooth’ (66). Again and again, throughout his poems, prose and drama, Yeats returns to the woods, to the sacred grove, as a site of re-enchantment, a place in which the hegemony of nineteenth-century scientific rationalism might be undone in favour of the animated, the spiritually immanent and the imagined. The death of those Arcadian woods, and the calling to sing their spirit back into the modern age through poetry, reverberates through his oeuvre, and in looking closely at the instances of groves and woodlands in his work, we can more clearly see the poet’s routes to a vision of reality that is ensouled, spiritual and animated. A staunchly anti-Enlightenment thinker, Yeats railed against mechanism and objectivity and the ‘Grey Truth’ of rationality. Humankind, since the Enlightenment, had become, in his words, ‘passive before a mechanized nature’;3 Descartes, Locke and Newton, enlisted as an unholy triad, ‘took away the world and gave us its excrement instead’.4 For Yeats, there were many possible routes back beyond the Enlightenment and its legacies and through to the woods of Arcady: the data of folklore, mythology, comparative anthropology and the practices of occultism were chief among these. By ‘

1 

W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 64. References to Yeats's poems are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 2  Patrick J. Keane, ‘Yeats’s Counter-Enlightenment’, Salmagundi 68/69 (Fall 1985–Winter 1986): 131. 3  W. B. Yeats, ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), xxvii. 4  W. B. Yeats, Explorations (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 325.

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recreating, through these disciplines, ‘the fragments of that “ancient sect” which was at the primitive heart of their heritage, and which survived in their folktales’, Sinéad Garrigan Mattar suggests, ‘the Irish would lead the way back up the stairway to the “proper dark” of revealed religion’.5 Leading back up this stairway meant discarding the apparently false truths of rationalism and materialism. As Jane Bennett argues, and Yeats himself recognised, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ‘sought to demystify the world according to faith, where nature was God’s text, filled with divine signs, intrinsic meaning, and intelligible order’.6 Indeed, Bennett’s list of the rationales of Enlightenment might just as well constitute a list of Yeats’s points of opposition in his own poetic philosophy: In the face of belief in an enchanted cosmos, the Enlightenment sought to push God to a more distant social location; in the face of unreflective allegiance to tradition, it sought self-determination and self-conscious reason; in the face of a view of knowledge as mysterious divine hints, it sought a transparent, certain science; in the face of a sacralized nature, it sought a fund of useful natural resources.7 From the initial crisis of ‘the simple-minded religion of [his] childhood’, caused by Yeats’s reading of the evolutionary works of Huxley and Tyndall, the young writer claimed to have ‘made a new religion, almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions’. Yeats was, he tells us, ‘a very religious person’, and this religiosity survived the ‘deprivation’ of evolutionary theory by being subsumed into, and proliferating through, poetry and the visionary imagination.8 Whatever words the poet could imagine being spoken by ‘those imaginary people’ whom he met in dreams, séances and visions brought him nearest to a truth not bounded by contemporary scientific models of investigation. In this way, Yeats should be seen as a precursor to ecocritical notions of ‘re-enchantment’. He is a writer who sought out, from various traditions and sources, a reality that was autonomous, non-mechanical, spiritual and animated.9 As critics such as Roger Griffin and Erik Tonning have suggested, the crisis of modernism can be viewed as developing out of the erosion of a sheltering ‘sacred canopy’, or ‘any stable system of collective meanings providing cultural value and some form of mythical significance to both individual and societal life’.10 It is not merely a punning associative leap that can lead us from the eroded ‘canopy’ of religious thought to Yeats’s finding, beneath the leafy canopy of the woods, a portal to a re-enchanted and

5 

Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 43. Jane Bennett, Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment: Nature and the State in a Post-Hegelian Era (New York and London: New York University Press, 1987), 7. 7  Bennett, Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment, 7. 8  W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies: Memories and Reflections (London: Bracken Books, 1995), 115–16. 9  See Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3–16. For further studies of writers who sought to re-enchant the world post-Darwin, see George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-Enchantment of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 10  Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 8; Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 4. 6 

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transcendent spiritual existence. Of all the myth-builders of modernism, Yeats was one of the most ardent and serious, not only seeking to revive the pre-Enlightenment truths of occult philosophy and to bolster the contemporary fascination with theosophy and spiritualism, but also to counter the anglicisation of Ireland with a renewed sense of the anti-rational rooted in the country’s folklore and mythology. Thus, his call in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ to ‘Dream, dream, for this is also sooth’ is simultaneously a counter to the ‘Grey Truth’ of science and materialism, and a part of his project to centre the knowledge and traditions of Ireland at the heart of a universal reawakening of spirituality for the coming twentieth century. The Irish Cultural Revival, of which Yeats was a leading figure, was preoccupied with woodlands and reforestation. As Anna Pilz and Andrew Tierney have shown, its major figures displayed both historicised and ahistorical, mythologised visions of ‘the Island of Woods’, an ancient name for the country.11 For Lady Gregory, the planting and upkeep of woods at her Big House home of Coole Park implicitly ascribed a nurturing character to the Anglo-Irish gentry, cultivating both the landscape and the local economy. As Pilz and Tierney note, Gregory argued in an 1898 article on ‘Tree Planting’, published in the Irish Homestead, that Ireland ought to be ‘a country of trees [. . .] for the very letters of her alphabet are named after them’.12 Referring to the Ogham alphabet of early Irish, in which the names of various tree species could be ascribed to individual letters, Gregory draws an inherent cultural connection between Irish literature, culture and the woods. That vast swathes of Irish woodland were felled during the country’s history of colonial rule, and that projects for reforestation were the focus of much renewed attention, is thus implicitly connected to the revival of Irish literature, or ‘letters’. As Gregory’s collaborator and friend, Yeats also shared her vision of a nurturing patrician class, or what he called his ‘dream of the noble and the beggar-man’ (Poems, 603), and though he never demonstrated a practical interest in reforestation, he also established a connection between native trees and poetry, in his case through their ability to evoke dreams and those ‘imaginary people’ through whom different, occult truths might be spoken. In his 1901 essay on ‘Magic’, Yeats posited a number of principles: firstly, that the borders of the mind ‘are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another’; secondly, that the borders of our memory are similarly shifting, and that ‘our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself’; thirdly, ‘that this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols’. In this essay, Yeats suggests that certain natural objects might be used to evoke this ‘Great Memory’ or ‘Great Mind’, including ‘the husk of flax’, or ‘water out of the fork of an elm-tree’.13 The human mind might be positively affected by these objects, and made porous to the wider, shifting mind of Nature, opening up a channel of transhistorical influence.14 The woods, in other words, were posited as instrumental to his conception of visionary evocation.

11 

Anna Pilz and Andrew Tierney, ‘Trees, Big House Culture, and the Irish Literary Revival’, New Hibernia Review 19, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 65–82. 12  Quoted in Pilz and Tierney, ‘Trees’, 65. From Lady Augusta Gregory, ‘Tree Planting’, Irish Homestead, 12 and 19 February 1898; reprinted in Irish Forestry: Journal of the Society of Irish Foresters 33, no. 2 (1976): 94. 13  W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 28, 50. 14  For more on Yeats’s re-enchantments of the natural world, see Seán Hewitt, ‘Yeats’s Re-Enchanted Nature’, International Yeats Studies 2, no. 2 (May 2018): 1–19.

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Later, in his long essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), to which this chapter will return for Yeats’s location of the daimon or ‘mask’ in the sacred grove, Yeats identified this ‘Great Memory’ as ‘Anima Mundi’, a repository of images and flowing memories, and revisited the theory of evocation discussed in 1901’s ‘Magic’: I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full of light and form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I elaborated a symbolism of natural objects that I might give myself dreams during sleep, or rather visions, by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or leaves. Even to-day, after twenty years, the exaltations and the messages that came to me from bits of hawthorn or some other plant seem, of all moments in my life, the happiest and the wisest.15 Connecting various natural objects to certain moments of subconscious revelation, Yeats simultaneously extends the possibility of influence from nature (in this instance, from hawthorns or other plants) to the mind, and also suggests a methodical but occult set of correspondences between specific natural objects and the visions produced or ‘evoked’. Not only this, but he sees a correspondence between the organic growth of trees and plants and the logical, ‘related images’ of anima mundi, so that he comes to understand the ‘Great Mind’ of Nature ‘as a great pool or garden where it moves through its allotted growth like a great water-plant or fragrantly branches in the air’.16 Once nature is understood ‘as a sentient unity, a Great Mind or Memory’, George Mills Harper argues, Yeats can discover ‘the secrets of the universe’ without the attendant impulse to control them.17 This organic imagery was used earlier by Yeats in a poem, ‘The Two Trees’ (134–6), published in his 1893 collection The Rose. The two trees of the title are opposing centres of consciousness. The poem addresses a beloved, telling them that the first tree is ‘in thine own heart’, and the second is growing in ‘a bitter glass’ held up by demons. The latter is a ‘fatal image’, ‘the glass of outer weariness’, and is unconnected with the sacred, ‘holy tree’ within the beloved. Recalling both the ‘optic glass’ (66) of the scientists in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ and William Blake’s ‘vegetable glass’ of nature, the imagery here establishes an opposition between the (literally) rooted imaginative world of the artist and the lover, and the illusions of the exterior, material world. The sacred tree of the heart, in the poem, has the ability to enchant, if seen clearly: From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head

15 

W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (London: Papermac, 1989), 345. Yeats, Mythologies, 352. 17  George Mills Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974), 104. 16 

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Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee. There the Loves a circle go, The flaming circle of our days, Gyring, spiring to and fro In those great ignorant leafy ways (134–5) It is notable here that the ‘holy tree’ in the heart of the beloved is not merely a solipsistic mode of consciousness, but one that, if followed, branches out into a vision of the world that is growing, evolving, melodious and enchanted. Human time, or ‘the flaming circle of our days’, moves in gyres through the ‘leafy ways’ of that tree. Rather than being measured by rule or line, the spiritual world, Yeats suggests, follows an organic, moving logic, always in flux. Yeats’s contemporaneous interest in Rosicrucianism (attested to in both The Rose (1893) and his prose work The Secret Rose (1897)), through his membership of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, lends another interpretative strategy. The Legend of the Rood, a medieval text derived from the Old Testament, describes how Adam sends his son, Seth, back to Paradise. Seth discovers two trees there, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, and finds that they have grown together to form a single tree. The angel guarding him allows him to take three seeds from the tree, and from the seeds grow the burning bush, the trees used to build the Temple at Jerusalem, and the tree used for the cross on which Christ was crucified.18 This Kabbalistic tradition rings through Yeats’s poem, where the two trees of the title signify a desire to deny false scientific knowledge in favour of spiritual enlightenment. In Yeats’s own notes on his poems, in this instance in the note for ‘Aedh hears the Cry of the Sedge’ (later retitled ‘He hears the Cry of the Sedge’), the poet glosses his understanding of the Rose and its symbolism thus: I have imagined it growing upon the Tree of Life [. . .] I once stood beside a man in Ireland when he saw it growing there in a vision, that seemed to have rapt him out of his body. He saw the garden of Eden walled about, and on the top of a high mountain, as in certain medieval diagrams, and after passing the Tree of Knowledge, on which grew fruit full of troubled faces, and through whose branches flowed, he was told, sap that was human souls, he came to a tall, dark tree, with little bitter fruits, and was shown a kind of stair or ladder going up through the tree, and told to go up; and near the top of the tree, a beautiful woman, like the Goddess of Life associated with the tree in Assyria, gave him a rose that seemed to have been growing upon the tree. (811) There are clear links here with ‘The Two Trees’ (not least the echo of the ‘troubled faces’ in the Tree of Knowledge), and with the apocryphal imagery of the Tree of

18 

A full version of this apocryphal story was printed by the Early English Texts Society in Arthur S. Napier, History of the Holy Rood-tree: A Twelfth Century Version of the Cross-Legend (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1894).

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Life and the Tree of Knowledge. The correspondences established in ‘The Two Trees’, between the imaginative world and an enchanted nature, are not, however, merely symbolic or theoretical. Yeats returns to groves and forests often in his work as sites in which a lost or occulted world of vibrant, non-rational, spiritual knowledge may be apprehended and experienced. Perhaps the most famous instance of this is through Yeats’s paean to the seven woods at Coole. These woodlands, in Lady Gregory’s estate at Coole Park, provided a nexus through which Yeats’s concerns with tradition, the peasantry, nature and occultism might be explored. These are not symbolic woodlands, though they carry symbolic potential, and act as a possible portal for a return to the ‘dreamy’ world of Arcady lamented in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’. The ‘Introductory Lines’ to his dramatic poem The Shadowy Waters, dedicated to Lady Gregory, find Yeats walking in the seven woods of Coole, where ‘enchanted eyes / Have seen immortal, mild, proud shadows walk’ (217). The plot of the verse drama itself is concerned with the protagonist Forgael’s attempts to pass beyond the material world, and beyond the self, into ‘a place in the world’s core’ (231), to give himself ‘wholly to the dreams’ (230). Revised over many years, the poem exhibits many of Yeats’s formative themes: apocalypticism, Druid rites, animism, folklore and the occult, and different drafts showcase different emphases.19 The ‘Introductory Lines’, written in 1900, therefore contextualise the poem in the woods – and, by association, in the dreams and ‘immortal shadows’ that roam there – giving a visionary lens to the drama that follows. Yeats writes, I had not eyes like those enchanted eyes, Yet dreamed that beings happier than men Moved round me in the shadows, and at night My dreams were cloven by voices and by fires; And the images I have woven in this story Of Forgael and Dectora and the empty waters Moved round me in the voices and the fires [. . .] How shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows? I only know that all we know comes from you, And that you come from Eden on flying feet. Is Eden far away, or do you hide From human thought, as hares and mice and coneys That run before the reaping hook and lie In the last ridge of the barley? Do our woods And winds and ponds cover more quiet woods, More shining winds, more star-glimmering ponds? Is Eden out of time and out of space? Clearly informed by the poet’s occultism, and drawing on Mme Blavatsky’s theosophical Neoplatonic dictum ‘As Above, So Below’, these lines raise the theory of correspondences for the reader, suggesting a link between the visionary dream-world and the ‘real’ world

19 

See A. J. Bate, ‘Yeats and the Symbolist Aesthetic’, MLN 98, no. 5 (1983): 1225.

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of the woods at Coole Park. Indeed, Yeats goes so far as to invert the nineteenth-century notions of ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ in his studies of magic and folklore. As Mary Helen Thuente writes, ‘Yeats came to believe that the finite world of nineteenth-century materialism was not the “real” world; reality was to be found among the Irish peasants and their legends.’20 Thus, the material world of the woods at Coole becomes significant as a site of proximate intimation of the ‘real’. The dreams, in this poem, come ‘from Eden on flying feet’, as though they are missionaries or messengers from the original garden. Unlike the woods of Arcady in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, however, this Eden is not ‘dead’ or ‘over’. Rather, the poet wonders whether this Eden might exist ‘out of time and out of space’, ‘covered’ by the material world rather than separated from it by a gulf of years. There may also be another way to read the final quoted line, which could also suggest that Eden has run ‘out of time’, and run ‘out of space’, with the tantalising sense that a new spiritual dawn is at hand as the dream-world erupts into the material world. Accessing or unleashing Eden, then, becomes a driving force implicit in The Shadowy Waters, and the woods are the locus of this mission’s revelation. As in ‘The Two Trees’, the ‘Introductory Lines’ to The Shadowy Waters establish two forms of thought, one which is ‘human’, and closely linked to or bound by reason, and the other which is organic and animated. Like the first tree which grows in the heart, and makes a ‘wizard song’, branching out into the gyres of time in which the poet sings his song, the ‘immortal shadows’ of the ‘Introductory Lines’ are compared to wild animals escaping the destructive force of industry and rationalism. Yeats asks them, ‘do you hide / From human thought, as hares and mice and coneys / That run before the reaping hook and lie / In the last ridge of the barley?’ Taking an uncertain sanctuary of the ‘last ridge of the barley’, these shadows, the poet suspects, evade him so long as he thinks in ‘human thought’, rather than visionary or spiritual thought. Eden exists outside of the logic of time and space, and in order to access it, the poet must think beyond such constructions. An immanent, enchanted vision of the world is implicit here: the material world is inhabited, moved by, a logic which is non-human, and presented through imagistic relation to invisible, animated beings. Yeats’s project to show that ‘everyone is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without scratching’21 permeates his ‘Celtic Twilight’ aesthetic in the 1880s and 1890s, and certainly informed earlier versions of The Shadowy Waters. In his collection of prose writings, The Celtic Twilight (1893), the poet collated various short texts illustrating the centrality of faery and folk belief to the Irish peasantry, which he harnessed into his poetics and philosophy. A great assimilator, Yeats nevertheless repurposed beliefs from a wide variety of sources into his own idiosyncratic system. In a piece titled ‘Enchanted Woods’, Yeats relates a series of chance meetings he had with an old countryman whilst ‘wandering in certain roomy woods’ in the summertime. The old man is certain that the cats, ‘of whom there are many in the woods, have a language of their own’.22 Yeats approaches such a revelation through the lens of comparative anthropology, indirectly quoting James Frazer’s

20 

Mary Helen Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1980), 6. W. B. Yeats, ed., Fairy and Fol