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 Folk Tales of Ireland (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), 4. 22  Yeats, Mythologies, 60. 21 

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suggestion in The Golden Bough that ‘savage’ peoples do not distinguish between the real and the unreal, a view also propounded by Andrew Lang in Myth, Ritual and Religion, a book Yeats read and annotated.23 I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and the supernatural very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and cats like, above all, to be in the ‘forths’ and lisses after nightfall; and he will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about a spirit with less change of voice than when he is going to speak about a marten cat – a rare beast nowadays.24 As Warwick Gould suggests, Yeats ‘read Frazer contra Frazer’: The Golden Bough, for him, ‘focused the challenge to rediscover, and if possible to propagate, that which might be ancient and holistic’.25 Frazer’s and Lang’s studies of animism, with which Yeats was deeply engaged, suggested that various animistic ‘survivals’ could be traced in modern life. Animism, a worldview which these Victorian comparative anthropologists saw as the early stage of religious development and evolution, denotes a vision of the material world as animated or ensouled, having agency. In the Irish peasantry and their folklore (typified here by the old countryman and his faery beliefs), Yeats recognises one such ‘survival’ of the animistic worldview, and identifies in it a possible route to the truth of (and the apprehension of) a supernatural world. The Celtic Twilight, as Sinéad Garrigan Mattar demonstrates, is part of a project to prove that nature in Ireland was animated, and thus opposed to the materialist anglicised world: ‘the subject-object relations of nineteenth-century science were defiantly replaced by the subject-subject experience of the Celtic dawn in these prose anecdotes.’26 That the old countryman’s tone of voice barely shifts when discussing a ghost or a fox signals his sense of the equal spirituality of the two. Because he apparently does not register modern distinction between natural and supernatural, the material world becomes a site of enchantment. It is not surprising that Yeats situates this animated worldview in the ‘Enchanted Woods’. Indeed, in his cultural history of forests, Robert Pogue Harrison summarises many of these potentialities: In Western religion, mythology and literature, forests and woodlands appear as ‘a place where the logic of distinction goes astray. Or where our subjective categories are confounded. Or where perceptions become promiscuous with one another, disclosing latent dimensions of time and consciousness. In the forest the inanimate may suddenly become animate, the god turns into a beast [. . .] the straight line forms a circle, the ordinary gives way to the fabulous.27 23 

‘A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural.’ James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edn (London: Macmillan, 1925), 10. Likewise, Andrew Lang suggested that ‘The savage draws no hard and fast line between himself and the things in the world’. Andrew Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion (London: Longmans, Green, 1887), 161; quoted in Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, ‘Yeats, Fairies, and the New Animism’, New Literary History 43, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 140. 24  Yeats, Mythologies, 61. 25  Warwick Gould, ‘Frazer, Yeats and the Reconsecration of Folklore’, in Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination, ed. Robert Fraser (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 121–2. 26  Garrigan Mattar, ‘Yeats, Fairies, and the New Animism’, 148. 27  Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), x.

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Being in the woods gives Yeats a tantalising sense of a direct route back to an enchanted, pre-rational world. When the old man tells him that he has seen a girl in the woods, who vanished when she saw him approaching, Yeats leads the reader back in time, into a personal reflection on ‘the true nature of apparitions’.28 Looping the evolutionary time of comparative anthropology to his own personal history, as though the child Yeats were the ‘primitive’ version of the older Yeats, the poet charts a route back to a non-rational mode of consciousness which is cognisant of nature as animated. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination on me.29 For Yeats, unlike the old countryman, there is a self-consciousness in the imagination. Rather than simply seeing apparitions in the woods, he goes out seeking them. As with the reference to the rarity of the marten cats, the phrase ‘some poor coppice’ suggests a depleted landscape, with, concomitantly, depleted opportunities for spiritual revelation. The ‘Enchanted Woods’ refers to ‘the divine people’ (recalling what The Shadowy Waters calls ‘immortal, mild, proud shadows’), and Yeats is certain that ‘they are surely there’ in the woods.30 However, just as in The Shadowy Waters, there is doubt and questioning that signals the difficulty of escaping the rationalism of modernity. Often, in early Yeats, we find a poet consciously searching for moments of divine knowledge and encounter within disenchanted landscapes. In ‘Magic’, The Shadowy Waters, ‘Enchanted Woods’ and elsewhere, Yeats delineates the series of rituals, habits and modes of looking that he acquired from theosophy, occultism, comparative anthropology and folklore in order to create and recognise temporal or physical sites of spiritual immanence and communication. In each of these texts, the woods, branches, flowers and thorns are given focused attention as portals or modes of invocation. Indeed, through focusing on these natural objects as routes to the spiritual, we might read Yeats productively as a poet whose preoccupations illustrate the ‘anatheism’ of Richard Kearney. Kearney coins the term as ‘an invitation to revisit what might be termed a primary scene of religion: the encounter with a radical Stranger who we choose, or don’t choose, to call God’.31 In the wake of the post-Darwinian loss of faith Yeats describes in his Autobiographies (where he was ‘deprived of the simple-minded religion of [his] childhood’32 by the works of evolutionary biology), the poet actively seeks out this ‘primary scene’ of religious experience, retrieving the divine through an attention to the proliferation of moments for spiritual apprehension. Kearney writes that ‘the shortest route from wonder to wonder is loss’, and indeed Yeats begins his poetic oeuvre with loss (‘The woods of Arcady are dead’) and, from this scene, seeks a recovered and rebuilt sense of wonder.33 28 

Yeats, Mythologies, 63. Yeats, Mythologies, 63. 30  Yeats, Mythologies, 64. 31  Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 7. 32  Yeats, Autobiographies, 115. 33  Kearney, Anatheism, 13. 29 

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Such attention is not limited to Yeats’s earlier writings, though it begins to morph into a set of theories regarding the mask which came to dominate the poet’s thinking in the twentieth century. The clue to this development can be found in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, a 1917 essay which delineates Yeats’s theories of the self and anti-self (also referred to as the ‘daimon’), and, crucially, occurs in the scene of a sacred oak grove. Returning in Per Amica Silentia Lunae to the ideas of symbolic invocation put forward in his 1901 essay ‘Magic’, Yeats reveals that he elaborated methods for provoking dreams, or ‘visions’, by placing leaves or flowers on his pillow or beside his bed. Nearly twenty years later, he tells us, ‘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’.34 When Yeats’s spiritual ‘instructors’ came to him in 1917, they brought with them a complex mythological system which seemed to the poet to be a key to earlier questions that had beset him. Through the theory of the mask, in which a person might adopt a contrary nature, and the anti-self or ‘daimon’, Yeats elaborated a mode of access to anima mundi. One of the pivotal scenes in Per Amica Silentia Lunae features Yeats imagining the discovery of the mask: I thought the hero found hanging upon some oak of Dodona an ancient mask, where perhaps there lingered something of Egypt, and that he changed it to his fancy, touching it a little here and there, gilding the eyebrows or putting a gilt line where the cheek-bone comes; that when at last he looked out of its eyes he knew another’s breath came and went within his breath upon the carvern lips, and that his eyes were upon the instant fixed upon a visionary world: how else could the god have come to us in the forest?35 For Yeats, the poet’s anti-self, which emerges through artistic creation, is also a mask, or daimon. Critics have debated the reasons why Yeats chose to locate the mask, and the site of daimonic communion, at Dodona, rather than at Delphi. Anastasia Psoni suggests a biographical motivation, connecting Yeats’s erotic vacillations between Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult to Sophocles’ Trachiniae, in which Herakles moves between his wife’s love and his desire for a younger woman, and the Dodona oracle’s prophecy is fulfilled.36 This biographical reading, though it sustains a compelling emotional echo, does not get close enough to the crucial importance of the scene to Yeats’s conception of the anti-self. Indeed, Per Amica Silentia Lunae features the first instance of the word ‘Dodona’ in Yeats’s writings, and this imagined scene goes beyond a mirroring between plot and life. Adele Dalsimer detects a Shelleyan connection in the usage, recalling the speech from the verse drama Hellas (1822) in which Ahasuerus imparts his visionary version of reality to Mahmud.37

34 

Yeats, Mythologies, 345. Yeats, Mythologies, 335. 36  Anastasia Psoni, The Image of the Feminine in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Angelois Sikelianos (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2018), 242–3. 37  Adele M. Dalsimer, The Unappeasable Shadow: Shelley’s Influence on Yeats (London: Routledge, 2016), ch. 5 (e-book, unpaginated). 35 

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All is contained in each. Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup Is that which has been or will be, to that Which is – the absent to the present. Certainly, this Shelleyan echo is pertinent, suggesting the infinite ‘absent’ behind the ‘present’, the spiritual behind the material world that Yeats persistently seeks out. As Dalsimer notes, Yeats also suggested that Ahasuerus was one of Shelley’s ‘masks’, thus solidifying the connection. Other possible sources include W. Y. Evans-Wentz’s The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), in which a chapter on ‘The Cult of Sacred Trees’ notes that sacred trees (particularly oak) and plants (particularly mistletoe) were central to Druidic rituals. Citing Pliny, Evans-Wentz suggests that the principal place of assembly and worship for these Druids was ‘the Sacred Oak-grove’, and that ‘they perform no sacred rite without leaves from that tree’.38 Yeats’s library, held at the National Library of Ireland, contains a copy of the 1909 thesis which formed the basis of Evans-Wentz’s book, and Yeats was also well-read in Frazer’s Golden Bough, which discusses the tree as oracle. In ‘The Worship of the Oak’, Frazer connects the ‘rustling of the oak leaves and [. . .] the crash of the thunder’ in the oracular oak at Dodona to the voice of Zeus.39 Expanding this to the kings of Greece, and their Irish kinsmen, Frazer writes that both sought to personify the oak-god by calling for rain and thunder, enacting their power as a source of fertility for the land. As other writers also suggested, Frazer notes that ‘the very name of Druids is believed by good authority to mean no more than “oak men”’.40 It is no surprise, then, that the sacred oak grove’s links to both Druidic worship and visionary experience would coalesce in Yeats’s preference for Dodona over Delphi in Per Amica Silentia Lunae. That said, little attention has been paid to Yeats’s reference to Egypt in the above passage, and this offers a fundamental connection between the theory of the mask and the theory of a sacred, enchanted reality. In Herodotus’ Histories, we are told that the grove and oracle at Dodona are linked to Egypt through an origin myth: two black doves, they say, flew away from Thebes in Egypt, and one of them alighted at Dodona, the other in Libya. The former, perched on an oak, and speaking with a human voice, told them that there, on that very spot, there should be an oracle of Zeus.41 Herodotus dismisses this myth as symbolic: the doves, he tells us, must have been foreign women, whose language sounded like ‘the twittering of birds’. When the dove speaks in a ‘human voice’, it is because the woman had ‘learned to talk intelligibly’.42

38 

W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1911), 434. See also Yeats Library, National Library of Ireland, Item no. 3052. 39  Frazer, Golden Bough, 159. 40  Frazer, Golden Bough, 160. 41  Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, rev. with intro. and notes by John Marincola (London: Penguin, 1972), Book II, 107. 42  Herodotus, The Histories, Book II, 107.

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Such reasoning would have been anathema to Yeats, who was not above crediting animals with religious sensibilities and with languages of their own.43 At Dodona, in the mask Yeats imagined being found by the hero, the voice of the god is passed through animal life into plant life and speaks. The mask itself imparts a visionary consciousness. It is through craft, through the gilding and carving of the mask to suit the hero’s purpose, that this vision of the anti-self is achieved; analogously, through poetry, Yeats crafts masks through which visionary eyes might see, and the god awake. Here, Yeats’s theory of invocation through natural objects, and a portal of access to the true ‘reality’ of the spirit world in the woods, joins with his later more complex mythology of the mask and of historical cycles, and it is no coincidence that this happens in the scene of the sacred grove, under the branches of the oracular oak. In focusing not on the oracle itself, but on a mask that might be picked up and remoulded for each hero, Yeats establishes the possibility that anyone might commune with the god, see through its eyes, and make productive connection with the daimon. Contrary to the post-Enlightenment image of a nature divested of its spiritual potential, Yeats discovers here a visionary connection with anima mundi through the mask: in finding the sacred grove, and in acquiring knowledge of the mask, the poet is able to transport the world of vision rather than seeking it only in the ‘small coppices’ left to disenchanted modernity.44 Yeats has been charged with seeking to bypass physical nature in favour of a symbolic world, as though nature were a representation, an artifice, and not more. As Terry Eagleton quips, Yeats is a poet who can often be caught in the act of ‘cavalierly converting the real to the symbolic, turning a swan into an emblem the instant it glides into view’.45 However, in his attainment of the visionary, the world of the real and the unreal, the natural and supernatural, are to Yeats one and the same. Figuring a porous world, in which nature is animated, and autonomous, the poet presents us with an ensouled pluriverse. His fascination with (and conviction in the veracity of) mediums and séances parallels the theory of the mask; however, the ability of the prepared personality to encounter spiritual people or images was not limited to the séance room, nor to the sacred grove. In The Words upon the Window-Pane (1934), a one-act play, the ghost of Jonathan Swift and his lover Stella speak through a medium in a Dublin household. However, in Yeats’s preface to the play, he is keen to emphasise the truth of visions experienced by a wide variety of people, from Irish countryfolk to Oxford ladies to Indian pilgrims. Not only this, but the central importance of the medium in the play is expanded to a primed spiritual consciousness that is bounded neither by occult initiation nor by geography. The ‘infinite’, here, erupts through into the world of ‘number and part’; the power of acknowledging the truth of this, for Yeats, is that through it, a complete, thorough and entirely real re-enchantment of the world can be affected. Once, a friend of mine was digging in a long-neglected garden and suddenly out of the air came a voice thanking her, an old owner of the garden, she was told later, long since reborn, yet still in the garden. Plotinus said that we should not ‘baulk

43 

For example, Yeats writes in a letter to Katherine Tynan, 20 April 1888, about the sparrows and robins in his garden: ‘I wonder what religion they have.’ See The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: 1865–1895, ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 63. 44  Yeats, Mythologies, 63. 45  Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), 309.

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at this limitlessness of the intellectual; it is an infinitude having nothing to do with number or part’ (Ennead V.7.I.); yet it seems that it can at will re-enter number and part and thereby make itself apparent to our minds. If we accept this idea many strange and beautiful things become credible. The Indian pilgrim has not deceived us; he did hear the bed where the sage of his devotion slept a thousand years ago creak as though someone turned over in it, and he did see – he himself and the old shrine-keeper – the blankets all tossed about at dawn as if someone had just risen; the Irish countrywoman did see the ruined castle lit up, the bridge across the river dropping; those two Oxford ladies did find themselves in the garden of the Petit Trianon with Marie Antoinette and her courtiers, see that garden as those saw it; the gamekeeper did hear those footsteps the other night that sounded like the footsteps of a stag where a stag had not passed these hundred years. All about us there seems to start up a precise inexplicable teeming life, and the earth becomes once more, not in rhetorical metaphor, but in reality, sacred.46

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Hussein Omar and Jacob Erickson for providing helpful references and insights into some of the ideas discussed in this chapter.

Works Cited Bate, A. J. ‘Yeats and the Symbolist Aesthetic.’ MLN 98, no. 5 (1983): 1214–33. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———. Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment: Nature and the State in a Post-Hegelian Era. New York and London: New York University Press, 1987. Dalsimer, Adele M. The Unappeasable Shadow: Shelley’s Influence on Yeats. London: Routledge, 2016. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995. Evans-Wentz, W. Y. The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. London: Oxford University Press, 1911. Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edn. London: Macmillan, 1925. Garrigan Mattar, Sinéad. Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. ———. ‘Yeats, Fairies, and the New Animism.’ New Literary History 43, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 137–57. Gould, Warwick. ‘Frazer, Yeats and the Reconsecration of Folklore.’ In Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination, edited by Robert Fraser, 121–53. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990. Gregory, Lady Augusta. ‘Tree Planting.’ Irish Homestead, 12 and 19 February 1898. Reprinted in Irish Forestry: Journal of the Society of Irish Foresters 33, no. 2 (1976): 94–8. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt. Revised with introduction and notes by John Marincola. London: Penguin, 1972.

46 

Yeats, Explorations, 369.

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Hewitt, Seán. ‘Yeats’s Re-Enchanted Nature.’ International Yeats Studies 2, no. 2 (May 2018): 1–19. Keane, Patrick J. ‘Yeats’s Counter-Enlightenment.’ Salmagundi 68/69 (Fall 1985–Winter 1986): 125–45. Kearney, Richard. Anatheism: Returning to God after God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Levine, George. Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-Enchantment of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Mills Harper, George. Yeats’s Golden Dawn. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974. Napier, Arthur S. History of the Holy Rood-tree: A Twelfth Century Version of the Cross-Legend. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1894. Pilz, Anna and Andrew Tierney. ‘Trees, Big House Culture, and the Irish Literary Revival.’ New Hibernia Review 19, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 65–82. Psoni, Anastasia. The Image of the Feminine in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Angelois Sikelianos. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2018. Thuente, Mary Helen. W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1980. Tonning, Erik. Modernism and Christianity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Yeats, W. B. Autobiographies: Memories and Reflections. London: Bracken Books, 1995. ———. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: 1865–1895. Edited by John Kelly. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. ———. Essays and Introductions. New York: Macmillan, 1961. ———. Explorations. New York: Macmillan, 1962. ———. Mythologies. London: Papermac, 1989. ———. Uncollected Prose, Volume I: First Reviews and Articles, 1886–1896. London: Macmillan, 1970. ———. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1977. ———, ed. Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995. ———, ed. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936.

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18 The Modernist Grail Quest Andrew Radford

A Not Yet Exhausted Event? For 60 years she had basked in Christ’s sun, and balanced her prayers with works. She had not married, but had seen how people behave, and out of her experience her innocent mind had polished its mirror to reflect the heavenly world.

I

n Mary Butts’s short story ‘The Saint’, an apparently civic-minded elderly lady decides to pilfer a pre-Reformation communion cup from her village church.1 She cares little for what Charles Williams terms in his occult thriller War in Heaven the ‘stored power and concentrated sanctity’ of a time-crusted relic.2 By contrast, the old lady considers the altar vessel a plain ‘piece of jewellery’ – ornamental, not sacramental. She has few qualms about surreptitiously selling the trinket, for a fraction of its true worth, to an antiques dealer. Ultimately, ‘The Saint’ implies how the affective and religious significance of the artefact depends ‘largely on what you bring’ to it.3 As in Butts’s 1928 novel Armed with Madness and Williams’s War in Heaven published two years later, the cultural significance of the cup morphs according to which of its ‘defenders’ perceives it.4 The explicit and coded allusions to the Grail in all these texts transport us to a realm not of the ‘whodunnit’ but instead the ‘what-is-it’. In a 1933 review that affirms the bracingly eclectic erudition of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), Butts remarks that ‘no grail texts were clear’ about whether the receptacle formed the centrepiece of a sacred or a secular event. Butts implies that the Grail’s ongoing ability to ‘haunt men’s souls’ is inextricably tied to how it eludes scholarly interpretations which account for its cultural exclusivity.5 Butts notes that while Weston expounds a theory of the Grail as an ‘Aryan’ symbol, she also anchors the origin of the ‘Legend’ as it evolved as a crucial facet in ‘Welsh’ storytelling.6

1 

Mary Butts, ‘The Saint’, in The Complete Stories (New York: McPherson, 2014), 64, 67. Charles Williams, War in Heaven (London: Vintage, 1996), 56. 3  Mary Butts, The Taverner Novels: ‘Armed with Madness’ and ‘Death of Felicity Taverner’ (New York: McPherson, 2010), 138. 4  See ‘Dealers in Magic’, The New Statesman, 2 August 1930, 547. 5  Mary Butts, ‘The Sanc Grail’, The Bookman 84 (1933): 72–4. See also Jane Garrity, Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 6  Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 178–9. In chapter 14, Weston sets out her argument for the origin and authorship of Grail romantic tradition. The evidence, in her view, points to ‘Wales, probably Pembrokeshire’. 2 

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Consequently, Weston’s claims about the roots of Arthurian romance were often treated (especially by Welsh nationalists) as a tribute to what Butts calls in her Journals the ‘Keltic’ resonance of the Grail.7 It is this ‘Keltic’ aspect that lends a peculiar force to all the primary texts featured in this chapter. ‘The Saint’ offers a vital clue about why lore surrounding this vessel, far from falling off the cultural radar like some other traces of Victorian romantic medievalism, actually impelled, as T. S. Eliot wryly averred in 1956, myriad Celticist scholar-pilgrims (e.g. John Rhŷs and Ernest Rhys, Weston’s early mentor and publisher Alfred Nutt) to ‘chase after [. . .] the Holy Grail’.8 Butts’s Journals suggest how these ‘Keltomanen’,9 and Weston especially, had liberated the lore from a hidebound Tennysonian tradition (the Anglocentric, liberal-bourgeois Idylls of the King) that A. C. Bradley characterised in a 1929 essay as ‘old-fashioned’ and Felix in Armed with Madness as a ‘false’, ‘messy way’ of ‘telling about something that exists’.10 By contrast, the Grail revealed by From Ritual to Romance and J. G. Frazer’s multi-volume The Golden Bough was for Butts a mysteriously troubling, even enticing phenomenon, a ‘not yet exhausted event in the most secret, passionate [. . .] part of the spiritual history of man’.11 Standard readings of European modernist engagements with the Grail frequently cite a narrow and predictable cluster of canonical male authors, such as Henry James, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett. In this ‘Authorised Version’ of the modernist Grail – synonymous with recent research by Jonathan Ullyot and Leon Surette – the vessel, instead of offering untrammelled access to a domain of sacred signs, only serves to highlight a want of faith in providential patterning. Scylla Taverner, designated ‘damsel’ of the ‘Grail’ in Armed with Madness, concedes that while ‘faith was necessary for the knowledge of God’, very few people ‘wanted to believe any more’.12 It is ironic that the main protagonist appears to lend weight to this ‘Authorised Version’ given that Butts’s oeuvre provides a radically contrasting vision and approach. Indeed, I propose that Scylla’s opinion is belied by the zeal with which British interwar literature embraces Arthuriana. What Charles Williams terms ‘the great and awful myth of the Grail’ becomes for Mary Butts ‘our national epic, the “matter of Britain”, as the Iliad is the “matter of Troy”’.13 This cultural trend not only harmonises with Weston’s buoyant stress on the ‘British’ qualities of the ‘original Grail heroes’, but also reinforces Evelyn Underhill’s portrayal, in her own 1909 Grail novel The Column of Dust,

7 

See Mary Butts, The Journals of Mary Butts, ed. Nathalie Blondel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 264. 8  T. S. Eliot, ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), 109–10; Butts, ‘The Sanc Grail’, 73. 9  Elise van der Ven-Ten Bensel, The Character of King Arthur in English Literature (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1925; rpt New York: Haskell House, 1966), 12–13. 10  A. C. Bradley, ‘The Reaction against Tennyson’ [1929], in English Critical Essays: Twentieth Century, ed. Phyllis M. Jones (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 59–86. In Armed with Madness, Felix refers to Tennyson’s ‘idiotic’ conception of ‘temperance knights’ (29–30). 11  Butts, ‘The Sanc Grail’, 72. 12  See Jonathan Ullyot, The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature: The Quest to Fail (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994); Butts, Armed with Madness, 44, 10. 13  Charles Williams, The Image of the City and Other Essays, ed. Anne Ridler (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 179–80; Butts, ‘The Sanc Grail’, 72.

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of the bewitching glamour of ‘great relics’.14 This glamour attracted, on the one hand, David Jones, whose technically daring poetry evinces a conservative Catholic fascination with the Eucharist, and on the other heterodox religious mavens inspired by the formidably prolific historian of freemasonry Arthur Edward Waite. In her polemical pamphlet Traps for Unbelievers (1932), Butts suggests that the popular and specialist interest in Grail lore reveals an urgent sifting for a ceremonial gravitas, even ‘a new value’, beneath the unpromising crust of diurnal actuality – what her admired contemporary Arthur Machen described in 1911 as longing for the ‘sense of wonder’ veiled by ‘all religion and every art’.15 I will show that Armed with Madness expresses this feeling of ‘wonder’ by depicting both the endemic/Keltic and exotic facets of the Grail. Butts’s narrative ploy is extended by less stylistically audacious texts from the period that prioritise the Grail to pinpoint an overlap between the mundane, the supranormal and the ineffable – Machen’s The Secret Glory (1922) and The Great Return (1915) and John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance (1932). In all these novels the nebulous feeling triggered by the Grail can only be explored through mystical romance – a generic template whose tonal instabilities and reliance on moments of vatic illumination often scrambles T. S. Eliot’s mythic modernism as well as the sober mimetic-realist techniques that strive principally to register social and historical events. What makes Armed with Madness sharply idiosyncratic is Butts’s resistance to the notion that her work is either part of a ‘high’, densely allusive modernist project (though she clearly admires Eliot’s Waste Land) or anchored in more popular, bankable writing models synonymous with Charles Williams’s ‘spiritual shockers’ or Sherard Vines’s satirical fantasy of an interwar ‘League of the Holy Graal’ in Return, Belphegor! (1932).16 Armed with Madness disavows, even gleefully collapses, such generic partitions, hierarchies and labels. Her formal tactics thus mirror and enact the plot trajectory, in which a ‘Keltic’ cup of ‘some greenish stone’ fished with a spear from a drought-shrunken well causes chaotic upheaval. The final irony of Armed with Madness is that the ‘knights’ and ‘damsels’ can only process a ‘world of strained nerves and shattered institutions’ by restaging a Grail quest which scars body and mind even further. So, the character Tracy Senior’s antiquarian catalogue of ‘mass-cups’ provokes already ‘violent imaginations’ to breaking point, culminating in Clarence’s attempted ‘crucifixion’ of Scylla.17

Spiritual Upsets The ‘excavation’ of a beguiling cup in Armed with Madness triggers ‘spiritual upsets’ in a rural West Country reminiscent of the barrow-studded uplands evoked by Llewelyn Powys’s Earth Memories (1934) and Dorset Essays (1935) – both of which Butts

14 

Weston, From Ritual to Romance, 178; Evelyn Underhill, The Column of Dust (London: John Murray, 1909), 141. 15  Butts, Armed with Madness, 9; Arthur Machen, ‘The Black Art’, The Academy 2037 (20 May 1911): 609–10. 16  C. S. Lewis, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, with a Memoir by C. S. Lewis (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), viii; Sherard Vines, Return, Belphegor! (London: Wishart, 1932), 188. 17  Edmund Wilson, ‘The Poetry of Drouth’, The Dial 73 (December 1922): 611–16; Butts, Armed with Madness, 86.

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reviewed for the Sunday Times. What some self-appointed antiquarians in Armed with Madness see as the cup held by Jesus at the Last Supper, used by Joseph of Arimathea to gather Jesus’s blood at the crucifixion, and finally transferred to British shores might actually be a container for unholy human leftovers such as spittle or cigarette ash from a Cairo club. In her 1933 Time and Tide review essay ‘The Dark Tower’, Butts posits that ‘the key to reality at its purest lies in religious reality’.18 Here, however, the text seems to revel in the Grail’s association with impure and spurned substances. This vessel embodies the overdetermined ‘category of the occult’ itself, at least in Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s recent definition – a flexible, shifting archive of lore that ‘emerged [during the nineteenth century] as a conceptual waste-basket for “rejected knowledge”’ (my emphasis).19 This is a far cry from ‘the possibility of a possible sanctity’ for which the traumatised Grail-questers of Armed with Madness secretly yearn. Whatever hint of ‘a possible sanctity’ the cup furnishes is soon replaced by a sense of its malign ambiguity. As in Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance, the Grail of Armed with Madness tends to set ‘brother against brother’ and divide ‘human souls’.20 Yet in marked contrast to Powys’s sprawling text – and indeed much of the fiction discussed in this chapter – Armed with Madness illustrates how these disruptive energies can be felt beyond the level of plot mechanics or thematic concern in the very texture of the prose. To address how the Grail exposes an uneasy divergence between a search for mystical communion and the fissures, failings and syntactic swerving of everyday communication, Butts removes connectives, relatives and auxiliary verbs from the narrative fabric. We might speculate that for Arthur Machen, who met Butts’s first husband John Rodker, this ruse was little more than a disagreeable stylistic affectation. Of Butts’s memoir The Crystal Cabinet (1937) Machen averred: ‘I am sure there is good’ in the book. ‘But what made the woman think that the verb may be omitted in an English sentence?’21 However, as Butts recorded in her August 1935 Journals: ‘Re-read Machen on the Sancgrail. Understood again [. . .] that it is the rule of great mystical & magical experience that it cannot be told directly.’22 It is through such calculated obliquities and rifts that Armed with Madness becomes – like the small dish which launches the dramatic action – a confounding curio, one that must be handled with extreme caution, and deciphered using the widest range of interpretive tools. Shortly after wresting the cup from the stagnant well, the protagonists debate the unearthly – and, as it emerges, far from ‘funny’ – aspects of this ‘excavation’: ‘the Sanc-Grail was a very funny thing. [. . .] Those well-shafts on the downs might be any age. So might it [the cup]. Tollerdown had a bad reputation and I never heard of the Sanc-Grail doing anyone any good.’ In her Journals Butts describes her own rite of passage into priestly authority thus: ‘I shall come out into power from a deep well.’

18 

Butts, Armed with Madness, 132, 37, 40; Garrity, Step-Daughters of England, 188–238; Butts, ‘The Dark Tower’, Time and Tide 14, no. 39 (30 September 1933): 1153–4. 19  Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 157–8. 20  J. C. Powys, A Glastonbury Romance (London: John Lane, 1932), 780. 21  Arthur Machen to Colin Summerford, 4 June 1938, in Arthur Machen: Selected Letters: The Private Writings of the Master of the Macabre, ed. Roger Dobson, Godfrey Brangham and R. A. Gilbert (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1988), 131–2, 155. 22  Butts, Journals, 445.

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However, in Armed with Madness the well from which the ‘Sanc-Grail’ is plucked does not seem to do ‘anyone any good’ – prompting comparison with Naomi Mitchison’s later conception of the receptacle in her novel To the Chapel Perilous (1955): ‘The Grail story is a good story. Granted. But it’s a dangerous story. It could get out of hand.’23 The questers of Armed with Madness retrieve the ‘shallow’ trinket from what appears to be a hazardously ‘deep’ well-shaft. This site is depicted as a man-made crater in the south Dorset soil, so implying the ritualistic potency of the dish itself. A ‘cratalis’, from the Latin term crater, is a mixing bowl, and implies how the Grail legend will be parsed as a melange of recondite philosophies in writings of the Aquarian Age and beyond, for example Henry and Renee Kahane’s The Krater and the Grail: Hermetic Sources of the Parzival (1965). These semantic and cultural connotations say much about the narrative curio that Armed with Madness epitomises. Butts’s individualistic verbal performance is ‘mixed’ with more familiar, even stagey, and Grand Guignol tropes reminiscent of late Victorian and interwar paranormal texts by Charles Williams (Descent into Hell), David Lindsay (Devil’s Tor) and Dion Fortune (The Winged Bull). The merging of these expressive and generic traits underscores the central mystery of the text, one that colours the characters’ initial bickering about the cup’s sacral and ‘sexual symbolism’. That is, whether Grail lore indicates a fustian and faded cultural legacy in interwar Europe, shaped ‘by centuries of experience’, and no longer in ‘bloom’? Or an archive of primal vigour that is still perilously operant, so lending Tollerdown a ‘bad reputation’ in the quotation above? That the Grail might be a ‘dangerous’ narrative (in Naomi Mitchison’s terms) is borne out by Dudley Carston’s reaction to seeing ‘the lost cup’ on his mantelpiece in the twelfth chapter: he registers a ‘fever’ in his ‘blood’, a ‘literal fear of the cup, that it was uncanny, tabu’.24 Carston’s experience – he ‘passed a dreadful minute, staring at its impressive antiquity’ – invites comparison with Evelyn Underhill’s fiction, which also dramatises wordless concentration upon a single object as a prelude to commotions of numinous affect. For Willie Hopkinson in The Grey World (1904) it is an Italian fresco; for Paul in The Lost Word (1907) a carved stone angel; while Constance in The Column of Dust focuses on a vessel that might be the Grail itself. However, Carston’s fraught affective response compels us to ask what if that ‘feeling’ becomes, in D. H. Lawrence’s terms, a fateful ‘paroxysm of unbearable sensation’?25 That psychic state is far removed from the exaltation of consciousness Underhill variously documents in The Column of Dust and Mysticism. Butts records in her Journals (8 September 1931) how ‘religion at its pure start, of which our organism is full of exquisite examples, is the agent which frees us from the time-sense’. This journal entry seems to echo classicist Jane Ellen Harrison’s analysis of the formal features of the mystic experience: individuality ‘somehow submerged, partitions [. . .] broken down’, a ‘boundless sense of escape and emancipation from self’.26 However, Carston seems to enjoy little of this ‘emancipation’ or spiritual

23 

Butts, Armed with Madness, 32; Butts, Journals, 259; Naomi Mitchison, To the Chapel Perilous (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955), 56. 24  Butts, Armed with Madness, 20, 86, 61. 25  See D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), 175. 26  Butts, Journals, 367; Jane Ellen Harrison, Alpha and Omega (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915), 63.

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enlargement. His nationality is important here. Figured as a jejune North American interloper, Carston is one of those ‘foreign bodies’ from what Butts calls, in a 1929 book review, a vast ‘land of maladjustments’, whose ‘colonists [. . .] have neither guarded their ritual or “sacra” nor invented them again’. So for Carston, the found object spurs grave misgivings about ‘uncanny’ forces that seem to harry, unground and de-substantiate the reasoning, self-aware subject. While J. C. Powys’s Weymouth Sands, Maiden Castle and A Glastonbury Romance also explore uncanny sites in an imaginary Wessex, Butts is more preoccupied with testing the cup’s status as a repository of ‘mana’ – a force that seems to stir in the American visitor Carston a ‘cringing terror’.27 As Butts’s Classical Novels demonstrate, to ‘come near to the Gods you must do the proper things which make a bridge between their life and our life [. . .] There are scents, sounds, objects, names, ceremonies.’ However, when the Grail questers participate in a ‘sacred game’, the narrator leaves it uncertain whether Carston can truly appreciate and enact ‘ceremonies’ in a spirit that transcends the touristic dilettantism Butts deplores in Traps for Unbelievers and elsewhere. Indeed, the more Carston and the other ‘knights’ try ‘to think backwards’, to supply a closely reasoned explanation for the cup’s original purpose (a Victorian ‘finger-bowl’), the more they learn that each clue gives rise to numberless others. This baffled (and baffling) experience is mirrored and enacted in a prose style whose parataxis, tergiversation and deployment of double negatives ensure that cadences displace each other so that no single interpretation can be advanced with total assurance. Ultimately this ‘piece of worn jade’ is ‘the question mark to the question we can none of us answer’.28 Butts’s declaration of intent in her Journals for 19 April 1921 – ‘I want to find out what is the essence of religion, study the various ideas of God under their images’ – implies perhaps a solemn, even humourless appraisal of Grail symbology that the bizarre ‘adventure of the cup’ in Armed with Madness slyly subverts. Butts’s text indicates that Grail lore is best treated not by high-minded lay theologians or comparative mythographers like J. G. Frazer but tall-tale tellers with sportive wit, ‘courage’ and ‘imagination’ aplenty.29 These storytellers savour how a ‘Keltic’ mass-cup, instead of pointing to august ‘Mysteries of long-vanished faiths’ – over which Jessie Weston broods in The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913) – may be nothing more than a humble ‘cocktail shaker’.30 That Scylla Taverner is positioned by the end – and in Death of Felicity Taverner, the unofficial sequel to Armed with Madness – as ‘damsel of the Sanc Grail’ is notable. She emerges as a figure of tenacious intelligence and ‘immense vitality’, whose devotion to her Wessex birth-place is such that she views it as a ‘land-cup’ – a geographical stage for the Grail itself as well as an impish pun on her surname. This surname, first appearing on record in the second half of the twelfth century, derives from the Anglo-Norman French occupational surname ‘taverner’, or ‘inn keeper’, and hints at the destiny of

27 

Mary Butts, ‘Mr. Wescott’s Third Book’, The Dial 82 (May 1929): 424–7; R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), 97. On Butts’s complex racial politics see Garrity, Step-Daughters of England, 188–240; Amy Clukey, ‘Enchanting Modernism: Mary Butts, Decadence, and the Ethics of Occultism’, Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 78–107. 28  Mary Butts, The Classical Novels (New York: McPherson, 1995), 226; Butts, Armed with Madness, 68, 137. 29  Butts, Journals, 181; Butts, Armed with Madness, 25. 30  Jessie L. Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail (London: G. Bell, 1913), 138; Butts, Armed with Madness, 95, 115.

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Ambrose Meyrick in Machen’s The Secret Glory who ‘drinks from an Eternal Cup’ in a ‘blissful and everlasting Tavern’. While the ‘shining rapture’ of Ambrose’s martyrdom reflects a conviction that the Grail is of ‘Keltic’ provenance, Scylla cherishes the jade cup because it is ‘inconclusive’, implying a legend ‘that, in art [. . .] has not yet found its final form’.31 Scylla grasps that there are, in Naomi Mitchison’s words, a ‘plurality of Grails’, and the ‘quest could have more than one ending’.32 This is no cause for existential torment, however, far from it. Armed with Madness illustrates that the curio welcomes, and rewards, the busy ‘spinning’ of highly spiced tales where the forensic bleeds into the fabulous, and the hallowed into hokum.

‘Ecstasy by means of symbols’ Mary Butts supplies an apt case study for this chapter since her published Journals, book reviews and polemical pamphlets demonstrate a close regard for those ‘Grailquesting’ authors like Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Charles Williams, A. E. Waite, John Cowper Powys and Evelyn Underhill who rarely, if ever, feature as major literary players in recent scholarship of aesthetic modernism.33 This is partly because Butts’s fascination with the speculative, weird and autobiographical texts penned by these authors, such as the second volume of Machen’s memoirs Things Near and Far, does not appear to tally with the typical interests of a technically innovative and cosmopolitan artistic vanguard. It is also true that secondary scholarship has struggled to account for the elusively complex ways in which these writers ‘mix’ arcane philosophy and heterodox Christian theology to ask ‘whether’, in the words of the elderly vicar from Armed with Madness, a ‘true picture of the real is shown by our senses alone’. These authors variously seek a credible conceptual scaffold, one that crystallises what Butts terms a ‘spiritual intuition’ that separates ‘fashionable fads’ like Tarot, palmistry and hypnotism from genuinely potent ancient mysteries synonymous with the Grail itself.34 Machen supplies an instructive comparison with Mary Butts here. They both contributed in decisive yet still poorly understood ways to the religious and cultural milieu of the first three decades of the twentieth century. While the experience of reading Evelyn Underhill’s The Column of Dust left her ‘shaking off disgusts’, Butts lauded and frequently quoted from Machen’s oeuvre, such as ‘The Secret of the Sangraal’ (1907).35 On 16 December 1936, she reflected in her Journals: [Philip W.] Sergeant’s book on Witchcraft [Witches and Warlocks] – suffers from the simple disability to allow for the ‘supernatural’ under any form, from the 31 

Butts, Armed with Madness, 44, 68; Arthur Machen, The Secret Glory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), 277–8; Butts, Armed with Madness, 109, 41. 32  Mitchison, To the Chapel Perilous, 55–6. 33  Mary Butts greatly admired Blackwood’s paranormal and occult fiction. In 1935 she was hoping to co-edit with Blackwood an anthology of contemporary writers’ mystical experiences for Methuen, but the project never materialised. On Mary Butts’s correspondence with Charles Williams in the 1930s see Grevel Lindop, Charles Williams: The Third Inkling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 266–70. 34  Butts, Armed with Madness, 137; Mary Butts, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), 51. 35  Butts, Journals, 140, 209, 257, 309–11, 394n, 449, 459. Machen, it seems, did not care overmuch for Underhill’s novel either, which was dedicated to him and his wife. See Machen to Colin Summerford, 12 May 1924, in Arthur Machen: Selected Letters, 93–4.

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existence of God down. No God, no Devil, no spiritual natures. This makes all his conclusions woolly & undecided. [. . .] Now the fashion is beginning to be – hypnotism & Murray’s ‘Dianic cult’ plus all the rest. Machen, of course, worth the whole lot put together.36 This entry pays tribute to Machen’s understanding of divergent numinous texts and tropes. Throughout these Journals Machen appears as a figure of wilful contrarianism, whose syncretic sensibility voices a keen interest in Grail lore as well as extractions from other dimensions and previous worlds. ‘There are two kinds of reading,’ Butts declared in a May 1920 journal entry: ‘reading which is contemplation – even a kind of vision’, and ‘reading for information’. She places Machen’s inventively eclectic corpus in the first group. Here she construes him as a writer for whom a primarily secular art form like narrative prose fiction can unlock a revelatory perception, even a momentary dismantling of material awareness – ‘ecstasy by means of symbols’ like the Grail.37 Machen’s abiding interest in Grail lore is consistent with his highly stylised selfpresentation in Things Near and Far and other autobiographical texts as the descendant of Welsh hierophants and scribes – custodian of their unique esoteric discoveries. This can be measured against Butts’s lofty notion of her own sacral lineage in a Journals entry of 25 May 1921: ‘A priestly house. Alkmaionids, Eumolpidoi, Blake, I [. . .]?’38 Here she ponders whether she is beneficiary of wisdom drawn from the annals of recondite, ceremonial and sacramental mysticism. The Alkmaionids, an immensely wealthy, conservative patrician clan in ancient Athens, were tasked with reconstructing the fire-damaged temple of Apollo at Delphi, while the Eumolpidae personified unflagging devotion to the service of Demeter at Athens and Eleusis. Machen’s tropes of the privileged and stalwart Grail quester were no less fervid, though coloured, as The Secret Glory implies, by energetically eccentric depictions of a mystical Welsh hinterland instead of Butts’s feminist classicism which charts how organised ‘Christianity’ had divested ‘women [of] their priestesshood’.39 The Secret Glory chronicles Ambrose Meyrick’s efforts to protect a ‘cup, which had been preserved in one family for many hundred years’ by returning it to a ‘concealed shrine in Asia’.40 This narrative throws into relief a striking contrast with Armed with Madness, in which Butts exploits – and revels in – the Grail as a storehouse for myriad fringe, dissident and fake stories of ‘faith’. However, Machen’s later texts show an increasingly vocal investment in a Grail linked with the sacramental legends and hagiography of a Celtic church that greatly antedated the endeavours of Catholic missionaries. Machen’s post-1900 writing carefully separates this hypothesis from the ‘chalices of perdition and madness’ peddled in a crowded spiritual marketplace whose ‘catalogue’

36 

Butts, Journals, 464. Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (London: Unicorn Press, 1960), 125. See also Christine Ferguson, ‘Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen, A. E. Waite, and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction’, Journal of Victorian Culture 21, no. 1 (2016): 40–55. 38  Butts, Journals, 183. 39  Butts, Journals, 422. 40  Machen, The Secret Glory, 278. 37 

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of vulgarities includes ‘Theosophy and “New Thought” [. . .] “Christian Science” [and] “Liberal Christianity”’.41 The ‘most glorious Quest’ of ‘the Sangraal’ set forth in The Secret Glory, like Butts’s interwar writing, addresses spiritual sensibilities that move between wildly off-kilter and more dogmatically clear-cut strands of Anglo-Catholicism. This suggests the difficulty – perhaps even the folly – of making Machen and Butts stand under the umbrella of a specific literary or religious ‘school’. That Butts and Machen are self-conscious outliers in their approach to Grail lore is apparent in their shared suspicion both of the lyrical flights of G. K. Chesterton – whose ‘The White Witch’ evokes those ‘wiser knights’ who ‘[f]ollow the Grail and not the Gleam’42 – and of the Roman Catholic homilies and apologetics synonymous with Robert Hugh Benson’s Confessions of a Convert (1913). Moreover, a cursory reading of Butts’s Classical Novels and unpublished narrative of Julian the Apostate shows her resistance to the melodramatic flourishes that distinguish Marie Corelli’s biblical bestsellers. Instead, Butts and Machen manifest a mutual preoccupation with occult, Graeco-Roman and medieval literature, imbuing what Butts calls throughout her Journals a science of mysticism. Her science deplores on the one hand a strident secularism and on the other the Broad Church moralists who are more committed to petty sermonising than the urgent spiritual needs of a populace reeling from the ruinous endgame of World War I. Machen’s The Secret Glory offers an especially withering chronicle of these socio-religious blights. While Armed with Madness reveals numerous rhetorical ‘knight’s moves’ that mirror the dislocating intricacies of the Grail object – aposiopesis, abstract nouns placed against indefinite nouns, sudden shifts between interjections of the first person and stretches of omniscient third-person narration – The Secret Glory favours a more densely packed, symbolist and at times beatific literary register.43 Machen’s text conveys states of hallucinatory reverie through anaphora, formalised disturbances of syntax, sonorous Latin and French citations, as well as ethnographic terms – all of which point to the cup’s ‘interwoven sorcery’. One of these terms is ‘Temenoi’.44 In Butts’s Journals and first published novel Ashe of Rings (1925) a ‘temenos’ signals – as it does in her intellectual mentor Jane Ellen Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual (1913) – a temple precinct segregated ‘from the common land and dedicated to a god’.45 This enclosure evokes the ‘Sacred Wood’ near Scylla Taverner’s home, the centre of a ‘Grail Country’ in Butts’s Death of Felicity Taverner which offers initiates a ‘release that felt like a glory’.46 In The Secret Glory, however, Machen satirically misapplies ‘Temenoi’ to portray the materialist Horbury’s absurd reverence for the ‘great rite’ of publicschool sports and the ‘holy ground’ – a muddy, cheerless field – on which the ‘manliest’ games are played.47

41 

Machen, ‘The Black Art’, 609–10. G. K. Chesterton, The Poems of G. K. Chesterton (London: Macmillan, 1984), 78. 43  On the complexities of Machen’s literary lexicon and spiritual affiliations see Nick Freeman, ‘Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany’, Literature and Theology 24, no. 3 (September 2010): 242–55. 44  Machen, The Secret Glory, 90, 48. 45  Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 10–11. 46  Butts, Death of Felicity Taverner, 283. 47  Machen, The Secret Glory, 48. 42 

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‘In the Middle Ages’, according to George Moore’s Vale (1914), ‘young men went searching for the Grail; to-day the quest’ of a conventional youth in The Secret Glory is mere athletic prowess. This is why Machen’s attempt to reinstate the proper sense of ‘temenos’ is couched in ceremonial and burnished phraseology. His narrator’s evocation of the Grail quest is deliberately ‘cut off’ from the ‘common’, inane rhythms of the public-school slang – ‘bully-downs’, ‘rammers’ – that dominates the early chapters. What Machen strives for in this Grail text is a version of the ‘fine literature’ that he espouses in Hieroglyphics (1923): anchored in ‘rapture, adoration’, yearning ‘for the unknown’ and ‘withdrawal from the common life and the common consciousness’ (my emphasis). To facilitate this ‘withdrawal’, one must privilege what Machen calls ‘the “Shadowy Companion” [. . .] who whispers to us his ineffable secrets, which we clumsily endeavour to set down in mortal language’.48 Here Machen seems to invoke an occult entity analogous to the invisible Watchers of human existence in Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance, or the Watcher under whose dominion Constance apprehends the Grail object in The Column of Dust. We are meant to construe Ambrose’s growing awareness of the Grail’s ‘mystic sanctity’ and the ‘sweet’ platonic realm behind it – ‘brave earthly shows are but broken copies’ of ‘immortal things’ – as a sharp contrast to the choking grime of the industrial towns near his school. Ambrose’s soul had been caught in the sweet thickets of the woods; it had been bathed in the pure water of blessed fountains; it had knelt before the altars of the old saints, till all the earth was become a sanctuary, all life was a rite and ceremony, the end of which was the attainment of the mystic sanctity – the achieving of the Graal. For this – for what else? – were all things made.49 While the verbal texture of Armed with Madness reveals a marked reliance on harsh staccato rhythms, metalepsis and parataxis, Machen crafts a stately gravitas of tone here through captivated pauses, earnest rhetorical questions and semicolons that organise his rolling and ruminative cadences. Sibilance reinforces the graceful flow from one image (‘old saints’) to the next (‘sanctuary [. . .] ceremony [. . .] sanctity’) as Ambrose glimpses the ‘Graal’. The elemental grandeur of this experience is also seen in the way Machen prioritises talismanic lexis at crucial junctures. ‘Rapt/ure’ is used pointedly at least twelve times in the text. Like Charles Williams in War in Heaven and Taliessin through Logres (1938), Machen draws on the stylistic resources of a liturgical register. What distinguishes the ‘entrancing legend’ of The Secret Glory from Williams’s biblical-poetic flourishes is Machen’s artful use of the passive rather than the active cadence to convey Ambrose’s exultation as he becomes ‘Keeper’ of ‘a Celtic cup’. Williams resists this Celtic origin theory by portraying the Grail as the gateway to Christianity’s venerable Eucharistic tradition, representing ‘the coming together of God and man, heaven and earth’.50

48 

George Moore, Vale (New York: D. Appleton, 1914), 140; Machen, The Secret Glory, 49; Machen, Hieroglyphics, 16–18, 119. 49  Machen, The Secret Glory, 277. 50  Machen, The Secret Glory, 278; see Lindop, Charles Williams, 42–3.

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The final chapters of The Secret Glory indicate how, in the terms of Armed with Madness, the ‘Sanc-Grail did not call on everybody’.51 Ambrose is the recipient of a vision at the Grail castle ‘into whose secret the deadly flesh may scarcely enter’. While the ‘holy magic of the cup’ is presumably accessible to all, within ‘the Tavern there is an inner Tavern’, the ‘door’ of which ‘is visible to few indeed’.52 Here the architectural figurations point to exclusivity rather than equalitarianism, evoking the patrician hauteur of Mary Butts’s ‘damsel’ of the Grail, Scylla Taverner. Machen’s phraseology also echoes his friend A. E. Waite’s conception of a secret sanctuary which is forever locked to the majority of reader-pilgrims. In contrast to The Secret Glory, Machen’s novella The Great Return (1915) exploits a less opulent and incantatory lexicon to present Grail lore that seems firmly embedded in quotidian habits, rhythms and homespun communities. The adoption of a cooler tone of reportage in The Great Return is key here. It implies that the Celtic consciousness of a veiled transcendent actuality linked with the Grail has been scotched not only by the incursions of warring Saxons, Latin medievalism and modern Anglicanism but also by the coarsening materialism of which newspaper discourse is both symptom and origin. Commissioned by the Faith Press, a small Christian publishing house, The Great Return documents the Grail’s apparent reappearance in Llantrisant. A journalist-narrator’s investigation uncovers extraordinary happenings in this bucolic region, the most notable being the miraculous recovery of Olwen, a girl described as ‘a mass of tuberculosis’ who looked ‘ready for the grave’.53 It is telling that in the account of Olwen’s dream-vision, Machen revisits and extends the impassioned tone of Ambrose’s ‘sudden ineffable’ sight of the sacramental vessel in The Secret Glory. Olwen glimpses three men in ‘blood-coloured robes standing beside her bed’. The first has a ‘golden bell’, the second a blue jewel, and the third ‘a cup that was like a rose on fire’. ‘There was a great burning in it,’ says Olwen, ‘and a dropping of blood in it, and a red cloud above it, and I saw a great secret.’54 Her cure seems triggered by seeing the Grail itself, implying the Celtic ‘Bowl’ of plenitude, fecundity and healing that the eponymous protagonist of George Moore’s ‘Peronnik the Fool’ (1921) seeks, along with a ‘Spear’ that delivers life-giving rain to parched terrain.55 The Great Return acknowledges at this stage the challenge of separating the fragile young girl’s vision of ancient Welsh saints from a ‘half-penny Press’56 milieu that seizes upon and exaggerates such phenomena for the benefit of a war-weary audience in need of spiritual solace. However, it is important not to misconstrue Machen’s mischievous use of journalese in The Great Return. The closing phase does not concede that the secularism Mary Butts deplores in Traps for Unbelievers (1932) has entirely quashed the desire of mystery and wonder synonymous with Olwen’s testimony. This misses Machen’s ultimate point because his Grail narrative resists the diluting and domesticating tendencies of ‘penny Press’ lingo. It is telling that those witnesses of ‘The

51 

Butts, Armed with Madness, 21. Machen, The Secret Glory, 90–1, 236. 53  Arthur Machen, The Great Return (London: Faith Press, 1915), 89. 54  Machen, The Great Return, 17–18, 67. 55  George Moore, ‘Peronnik the Fool’, The Dial 71 (November 1921): 497–533. 56  Arthur Machen, ‘Ecclesia Anglicana I’, The Academy 1857 (7 December 1907): 208–9. 52 

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Mass of the Sangraal’ cannot – or will not – voice ‘what was done beyond the veil’. Partly because these occurrences are indirectly portrayed by a sceptical metropolitan ‘newspaper man’, we are left unsure as to whether the Grail signals a palpable actuality justified by empirical evidence (sights, smells); or a solitary figure’s perceptual aberration in which the diurnal setting seems bathed in a brilliant radiance. The novella’s final flourish – a rhetorical question, ‘But at the last, what do we know?’ – hints that the numinous grammar and syntax of Machen’s Grail remains untainted by the crude modes of fact-gathering (or embellishing) synonymous with contemporary reportage.57

The Grail ‘was too ticklish a thing’ The feeling of wonder that Machen’s Grail narratives depict also imbues John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance, whose characters variously apprehend an ‘Unknown Dimension in which our present dream life floats’. Powys’s novel is as diffuse and boisterously bizarre as The Great Return is measured and laconic. Nevertheless, A Glastonbury Romance shares with Machen’s fiction a keen fascination with Romano-Celtic borderlands, and how such ‘enchanted soil’ is permeated by the ‘heady, opiate fumes’ of Arthurian ‘legends’.58 While Evelyn Underhill’s The Column of Dust is ardent in its conception of the chalice as the missing key of the Middle Ages, Powys’s literary enterprise treats Grail lore with puckish, even debunking verve. The text analyses what irascible protagonist John Crow calls assorted ‘poppycock about the Holy Grail’ fostered by amateur antiquarian ‘faddists’. Powys’s ‘zany’ wit and ‘vagabond fancy’ here not only separates A Glastonbury Romance from Machen’s reverent seriousness when portraying Ambrose’s epiphany in The Secret Glory but also foreshadows the wayward flair of Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, drafted in the 1950s but not published until the 1970s, whose plot concerns efforts to return the Grail to the goddess Venus.59 A Glastonbury Romance finds at the bottom of the ostensibly sacred cup neither ‘paradisiac peace’ nor what Mary Butts terms ‘the key to reality at its purest [. . .] the experiences of the great mystics’.60 Instead Powys’s text reveals a murky admixture of psychic turbulence and grotesque humour, signalled by the term ‘ticklish’: [The Grail] was too ticklish a thing not to divide human souls in a disturbing and disconcerting manner, setting brother against brother and friend against friend. All the way down the centuries it had done this, breaking up ordinary normal human relations and exerting whenever it appeared, a startling, shocking, troubling effect. Powys’s portrayal of the Grail is reinforced by a sense that this ‘ticklish’ history can convert a sincere enthusiast for numinous lore like Machen into a ‘bookish doctrinaire’. While Machen’s The Secret Glory shows how the Grail bespeaks an ancient Celtic ‘spiritual grandeur’, the narrator of A Glastonbury Romance firmly resists any

57 

Machen, The Great Return, 72–3. Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 1073, 165, 373. 59  Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 444, 920, 87. 60  Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 729; Butts, ‘The Dark Tower’, 1153–4. 58 

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temptation to delimit the object’s meaning or provenance, given its association with a topographical ‘scroll of flickering enigmas’. This is because Powys’s text is unusually attuned to, and wary of, the affective excesses of Grail devotees, especially their harangues which vaunt a crude single viewpoint over a contradictory and multi-layered legend. In Powys’s massive text Glastonbury has become a mecca for a ‘startling’ cavalcade of occultist ‘hot-heads’. This is implied by the description of the town as ‘the lowest pastoral country in the land of England’ (my emphasis).61 The narrator suggests here that this region exercises a magnetic appeal not only for those who personify what Charles Williams terms, in War in Heaven, ‘the higher way of mind’, but also for cynical ‘cranks’ intent on staging ‘fake-miracles’ to woo the weak and vulnerable.62 This stress on ‘cranks’ reveals the text’s awareness of actual Grail-obsessed ‘visionaries’ and firebrands who flocked to this region in the first three decades of the twentieth century.63 As Mary Butts wryly noted in 1933, ‘there are people alive who are looking for it as hard as Sir Perceval’.64 The Powysian narrator’s sardonic reference to a ‘famous modern antiquary’ suggests the architect Frederick Bligh Bond, whom the Church of England appointed director of excavations at Glastonbury Abbey in 1908. The pointed allusion to ‘mystical intention of compass-points’ later in A Glastonbury Romance confirms Bond’s status as one of the first British exponents of what is nowadays termed ‘psychic archaeology’.65 Like the ‘queer’ jade cup in Armed with Madness, Powys’s Grail never approaches a coherent standard of measurement in A Glastonbury Romance. As Naomi Mitchison argues in The Moral Basis of Politics (1938): ‘Even supposing that the True, the Good and the Beautiful were all locked away somewhere, we have no key to the treasurehouse of absolutes.’ Powys’s myriad questers, like John Crow, not only lack this ‘key’ but discover that the Grail, especially in the second half of the novel, points not to the ‘Good’ but rather to a riddling – even pernicious – capacity to topple ‘all proprieties’.66 While there are, as John Crow concedes, ‘several ways of taking the Grail-cult’, no redemptive or cathartic grand narrative emerges in the final chapters to fuse all the disparate views of Glastonbury as a historic palimpsest and the chalice synonymous with it. This is in keeping with Powys’s preface for the 1955 edition, written twenty years after the novel first appeared in print. He indicates that the text’s ‘heroine is the Grail. Its hero is the Life poured into the Grail. Its message is that no one Receptacle of Life and no one Fountain of Life poured into that Receptacle can contain or explain what the world offers us.’ And so the maddening elusiveness of the Grail – ‘that something’ which ‘has been dropped within the earthly atmosphere that surrounds Glastonbury’, according to Johnny Geard – permits the narrator to dramatise a dizzying melange of ‘contradictions’.67

61 

Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 780–1, 444, 339, 667, 108. See Judith Kollmann, ‘The Legend of the Grail and War in Heaven: From Medieval to Modern Romance’, Mythlore 10, no. 4 (Spring 1984): 20–2; Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 444, 677, 350. 63  Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 755. 64  Butts, ‘The Sanc Grail’, 73. 65  Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 229, 703. 66  Naomi Mitchison, The Moral Basis of Politics (London: Constable, 1938), 19–20; Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 522. 67  Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 337, xiii, 471, 672. 62 

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Rather than endorsing the ‘materialistic’ John Crow’s claim that ‘the Grail story’ is ‘a learned lie’, Powys’s narrator uses the Pageant at the midpoint of the text to probe a range of theories about a relic linked in legend with King Arthur, Morgan le Fay and ‘old Celtic magicians’. This shows how Glastonbury, rather than a fossilised ‘fragment of history’, is ‘something that’s making’ – indeed, inciting reader-pilgrims to perform – ‘history’.68 The Pageant operates to revivify ‘certain frozen gestures’ about the past through a syncretic staging of the Arthurian, Judeo-Christian and ‘heathen’ chronicles of the chalice. Owen Evans’s private quest for the Grail secret throws into bolder relief the more disturbing resonances of this curio. In the Pageant, he plays the crucified Christ and apprehends numberless cruel scenes which have been enacted in the grimier districts of Glastonbury over the centuries: ‘“People lie to the condemned for whom there is no hope.”’ What Owen Evans voices here is that Glastonbury’s many tangible and imagined treasures – the carved memorials to saints and sovereigns, the churches, towers and temples – say little to, or about, the many ‘nondescripts’ and ‘failures in the merciless struggle of existence’, consigned to the lowest rung of regional society. However, these ‘failures’ seem to grasp better than the moneyed ecclesiologists in this text ‘the terrible magic of this spot’ – and by extension the Grail itself, handed down ‘from far-off centuries’.69 A core facet of the Pageant’s macabre fascination is how the performance prompts the town’s ‘nondescripts’ to ‘revolt against all the gregarious traditions of the human crowd’. The Arthurian tableau engenders in them not simply an impulse of ‘released roguery’, but instead a ‘scoriac fury’. This is because the Pageant supplies a version of the past that is little better than antiquarian ‘chatter about the old gods’ – typically indulged by a self-seeking regional elite eager to parade its own legendary ancestry.70 The urban poor cannot invest in this staging of the Grail because they are made to feel it does not truly belong to them – it cannot allay the ‘miseries’ caused by interwar political systems and unjust economic institutions. Perhaps, the text concludes, the pageantry surrounding Arthur will only consign the Grail to the repressive rubble of history. The legend must be repurposed to craft new national narratives that will empower the Glastonbury ‘weak against the strong’.71 Ultimately, for Powys, as for the other primary authors examined here, the task of repurposing Grail lore falls to those who cherish the first articles of Mary Butts’s storytelling credo in Armed with Madness: ‘courage’ and ‘imagination’. This bold imagination is distinguished by its espousal of generic models – fable, mystical romance, occult thriller, allegory, existential parable – for which there has been little room at the inn when we scan the many well-regarded surveys of aesthetic modernism published over the last decade. The Grail, however, is a cratalis that encourages the fusion of these unfashionable genres to expose the grievous limitations of a regnant – or stagnant? – interwar documentary realism. What we are left with is a cluster of hybrid narratives which confront, scramble or cut across the heavily policed frontiers between so-called high formal experiment and low pulpy page-turner, the transcendent and the immanent, ‘cant and candour’.72 68 

Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 679, 1095, 830. Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 618, 269, 1113, 170. 70  Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 383, 384, 728. 71  Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, 649, 1174. 72  Butts, Armed with Madness, 25, 16. 69 

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Works Cited Bensel, Elise van der Ven-Ten. The Character of King Arthur in English Literature. Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1925; rpt New York: Haskell House, 1966. Bradley, A. C. English Critical Essays: Twentieth Century. Edited by Phyllis M. Jones. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Butts, Mary. The Classical Novels. New York: McPherson, 1995. ———. The Complete Stories. New York: McPherson, 2014. ———. The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns. Manchester: Carcanet, 1988. ———. ‘The Dark Tower.’ Time and Tide 14, no. 39 (30 September 1933): 1153–4. ———. The Journals of Mary Butts. Edited by Nathalie Blondel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. ———. ‘Mr. Wescott’s Third Book.’ The Dial 82 (May 1929): 424–7. ———. ‘The Sanc Grail.’ The Bookman 84 (1933): 72–4. ———. The Taverner Novels: ‘Armed with Madness’ and ‘Death of Felicity Taverner’. New York: McPherson, 2010. Chesterton, G. K. The Poems of G. K. Chesterton. London: Macmillan, 1984. Clukey, Amy. ‘Enchanting Modernism: Mary Butts, Decadence, and the Ethics of Occultism.’ Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 78–107. ‘Dealers in Magic.’ The New Statesman, 2 August 1930, 547. Eliot, T. S. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957. Ferguson, Christine. ‘Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen, A. E. Waite, and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction.’ Journal of Victorian Culture 21, no. 1 (2016): 40–55. Freeman, Nick. ‘Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany.’ Literature and Theology 24, no. 3 (September 2010): 242–55. Garrity, Jane. Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Hanegraaff, Wouter J. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Harrison, Jane Ellen. Alpha and Omega. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915. ———. Ancient Art and Ritual. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913. Kollmann, Judith. ‘The Legend of the Grail and War in Heaven: From Medieval to Modern Romance.’ Mythlore 10, no. 4 (Spring 1984): 20–4. Lawrence, D. H. The Lost Girl. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005. Lewis, C. S. Essays Presented to Charles Williams, with a Memoir by C. S. Lewis. London: Oxford University Press, 1947. Lindop, Grevel. Charles Williams: The Third Inkling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Machen, Arthur. Arthur Machen: Selected Letters: The Private Writings of the Master of the Macabre. Edited by Roger Dobson, Godfrey Brangham and R. A. Gilbert. Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1988. ———. ‘The Black Art.’ The Academy 2037 (20 May 1911): 609–10. ———. ‘Ecclesia Anglicana I.’ The Academy 1857 (7 December 1907): 208–9. ———. The Great Return. London: Faith Press, 1915. ———. Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature. London: Unicorn Press, 1960. ———. The Secret Glory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922. Marett, R. R. The Threshold of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909. Mitchison, Naomi. The Moral Basis of Politics. London: Constable, 1938. ———. To the Chapel Perilous. London: Allen & Unwin, 1955. Moore, George. ‘Peronnik the Fool.’ The Dial 71 (November 1921): 497–533. ———. Vale. New York: D. Appleton, 1914. Powys, J. C. A Glastonbury Romance. London: John Lane, 1932.

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Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994. Ullyot, Jonathan. The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature: The Quest to Fail. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Underhill, Evelyn. The Column of Dust. London: John Murray, 1909. Vines, Sherard. Return, Belphegor! London: Wishart, 1932. Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. ———. The Quest of the Holy Grail. London: G. Bell, 1913. Williams, Charles. The Image of the City and Other Essays. Edited by Anne Ridler. London: Oxford University Press, 1958. ———. War in Heaven. London: Vintage, 1996. Wilson, Edmund. ‘The Poetry of Drouth.’ The Dial 73 (December 1922): 611–16.

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19 The Burial of the Dead in Mann’s The Magic Mountain Pericles Lewis

D

uring the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020, readers of modernist literature have often been reminded of the flu epidemic of 1918–1920, which killed tens of millions exactly one century ago.1 Modern fiction is full of dead bodies, more often associated with the First World War than with communicable disease. One of the great authors of the period, Thomas Mann, wrote a pair of works, however, that used disease as a metaphor for the state of European society on the eve of the war. Death in Venice (1912) sets the decline of an aristocratic German writer and his love for a young Polish boy against the backdrop of the last major cholera epidemic to affect Italy, in 1911. Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain, originally intended as a ‘humorous companion-piece’ to the earlier novella, was begun in 1912 but not completed until 1924, and it grew along the way into a 700-page epic spanning seven years of ill health.2 Intermittently funny and lugubrious, it anatomises pre-war bourgeois society as represented by the inmates of a tuberculosis asylum in Davos, Switzerland.3 Although the current pandemic has not caused nearly as much disruption to uppermiddle-class life as Mann’s contemporaries experienced in a decade of cholera, tuberculosis, influenza and war, The Magic Mountain has taken on a renewed relevance for those of us experiencing enforced immobility and social distancing amidst widespread political paralysis.4 Shortly after Hans Castorp arrives at the Berghof Sanatorium in the opening pages of the novel, his cousin Joachim Ziemssen explains that, at the Schatzalp Sanatorium, even higher in the Alps, ‘They have to transport the bodies down by bobsled in the winter, because the roads are impassable.’ Castorp is shocked at what he calls his

1 

A timely new work on this topic in anglophone literature is Elizabeth Outka’s Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). I am grateful to Sam Alexander, Amy Hungerford, Elizabeth Krontiris, Sean McCann, John Paul Riquelme and Caleb Smith for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter and to Tobias Boes for more general conversations about Mann. 2  Michael Beddow, ‘The Magic Mountain’, in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, ed. Ritchie Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 137. 3  Although Westerners today may think of tuberculosis as a particularly literary disease of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it remains the world’s most deadly communicable disease, killing almost as many people in the developing world every year (1.4 million in 2019) as COVID-19 has killed worldwide at the time of writing this essay (November 2020). 4  See Susan Sontag, ‘Time to Climb The Magic Mountain’, The Economist, 20 June 2020.

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cousin’s ‘cynicism’: ‘The bodies? Oh, I see. You don’t say! On bobsleds! And you can sit there and tell me that so calm and cool.’5 This discussion of how to dispose of the bodies of tuberculosis patients sets the uneasy tone for Castorp’s first day at the sanatorium. It also typifies a concern in modernist fiction with the proper rites for the burial of the dead. Modernist novels are full of dead bodies and debates regarding the best ways to dispose of them, debates that came to mind this year as many overwhelmed medical systems faced the problem of how to preserve the bodies of the dead as they awaited burial. In this chapter, I would like to investigate in some detail the burial of the dead in The Magic Mountain with reference to an earlier study of works by James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and several other ‘high’ modernist authors. I will argue that Mann sees the novel, as a genre, as having a particular ability to represent the process of mourning because of its powers of ironic distancing: it can represent both the public ritual of the funeral service and the private thoughts of the mourner, which may or may not accord with official sentiment.6 The modern novel shows how we project our own desires and fears on to the dead. The modernists often draw on classical models – especially Homer – in trying to imagine what happens to people after they die, in part because they seem to be seeking a model of relation to the dead that is not dependent on what Woolf called ‘Christianity and its consolations’.7 After reviewing the role of burial in The Magic Mountain and the works of some of Mann’s contemporaries, I will suggest some of the ways that this novel can help us understand recent critical debates about the role of religion or spirituality in modernist literature. The dialectics of Mann’s greatest novel remain relevant a century later in a still only partially secular age, in which we struggle to reconcile reverence for the dead with a sometimes forlorn faith in historical progress.

The Resurrection and the Life Hans Castorp spends a long seven years at Davos, but Mann spent even longer writing the book – twelve years spanning the First World War – and when it came out in 1924 the novel was among the most important of several major works of modern fiction that explored the pre-war years, which had already taken on a ghostly, nostalgic sepia tint. The author makes both heavy and playful use of irony right from the novel’s foreword in which he points out that the story ‘took place before the war’ and speaks of the ‘before’ much as today we (sometimes jokingly) speak of the time before COVID as the ‘before time’ (xi). The novel ends with a mock burial in the mud of battle; the fascination with corpses in the literature of the 1920s can certainly be traced in part to the trenches of the First World War. The war seems to me, however, to be too limited a framework for this fascination, which results also from a broader search for new forms of ritual to replace the rituals

5 

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 9. References to The Magic Mountain are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 6  Some of these ideas are reworked from my book: Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 170–86. 7  Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 13.

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of the Church. After all, Mann began the novel before the war and many of its themes were already present in Death in Venice. Like Joyce in Ulysses (1922), Woolf in To the Lighthouse (1927) and Proust in the later volumes of Remembrance of Things Past (which he was still revising when he died in 1922), Mann recreates a world before the war that by the time of writing seems already to belong to a mythic past. As he asks in the foreword, ‘But is not the pastness of a story that much more profound, more complete, more like a fairy tale, the tighter it fits up against the “before”?’ (xii). None of these great novels would have been the same without the war, but perhaps we could say that these particular authors became the great novelists of the interwar period partly because their pre-war experiences (especially of the deaths of close family members) had prepared them to write the great post-war novels. Nor perhaps is it accidental that Joyce was a spectacularly lapsed Catholic, Proust was the product of a mixed marriage, and Woolf and Mann, though raised Protestants, both married Jews. None belonged firmly to a church, and the church service and such rituals as the burial of the dead spoke to them only incompletely. The modernists’ interest in dead bodies is often quite literal, and the focus is indeed on the body rather than the soul. In the second section of The Magic Mountain, the narrator relates Hans Castorp’s prior experiences with death: the deaths of his mother and father when Hans was between five and seven, and then the death of his paternal grandfather. At his grandfather’s funeral, Hans notes without exactly ‘admitting it to himself in so many words’ that ‘the masses of flowers and more especially the very well represented tuberoses were there for a more sobering reason [than to celebrate his grandfather’s passing into eternity] – and that was to gloss over the other side of death, the one that is neither beautiful nor sad, but almost indecent in its base physicality, to make people forget it or at least not be reminded of it’ (26). Mann shows by the indirection of his own prose the fact that Hans cannot bring himself to refer specifically to the smell of his grandfather’s rotting corpse, but as the servant old Fiete tries to shoo away a fly that persistently lands on Grandfather’s forehead and fingers, Mann states the point more directly: Hans Castorp thought he could smell more clearly than before those faint, but very peculiar and persistent fumes that he knew from before, and which, to his shame, always reminded him of a school chum who suffered from an offensive affliction that made everyone avoid him, the same odor that the tuberose scent was supposed to cover up on the sly, but was unable to do, for all its lovely, austere richness. (27) Yet, after this memorable funeral, most of the burials in The Magic Mountain take place off stage, as it were. Director Behrens and his staff prefer to keep the dying – the moribundi, as they are referred to in Latin – out of sight, and the only sign of a death at the sanatorium is the open door to a room that is being fumigated. Castorp and his cousin Ziemssen go to great lengths to visit with the moribundi and display a morbid interest in their physical fates. When they finally manage to see the corpse of a fellow inmate, the Austrian horseman, Castorp meditates, as many modern novelists will do, on the power of language, lapsing into the Church’s language although he is still standing in the sanatorium: ‘“Requiescat in pace,” he said. “Sit tibi terra levis. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine.”’ Castorp is here repeating fragments of Latin prayers. ‘You see, when it comes to death, when one speaks to the dead or

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about them, Latin comes into its own. It’s the official language in such cases, which only points up how special death is’ (288). Castorp’s rather weak Latin, a running joke throughout the novel, epitomises his unease with discussion of ‘higher’ matters but perhaps also the inadequacy of the consolations provided by authorised religion. The 1920s saw a number of explicitly religious efforts to reimagine the burial of the dead, ranging from the official to the marginal. Among these were a renewed interest in spiritualism and efforts to contact the departed, a failed attempt to update the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, including the rite for the Burial of the Dead, for the first time since the seventeenth century, and the introduction of such alternative liturgies as the scholar and traveller Walter Evans-Wentz’s compilation The Tibetan Book of the Dead.8 All these cases demonstrate a particular concern with the correct language of ritual, apparent also in scenes of burial in many novels of the period. Throughout the day on 16 June 1904, Stephen Dedalus, in Joyce’s Ulysses, murmurs to himself the Latin prayer for the dead that he had refused to recite at the side of his mother’s deathbed: ‘Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet.’9 At Paddy Dignam’s funeral in the ‘Hades’ episode, Leopold Bloom listens to Father Coffey’s prayers: ‘Non intres in judicium cum servo tuo, Domine.’ Bloom has even less Latin than Hans Castorp, but his reflections resemble those of his younger Lutheran contemporary: ‘Makes them feel more important to be prayed over in Latin.’ As the service concludes, the freemason Mr Kernan comments to Bloom that the service of the Anglican Church of Ireland is ‘simpler, more impressive’, and then quotes the English service: ‘—I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man’s inmost heart.’ Bloom politely agrees: ‘it does’, but then thinks to himself, ‘Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that.’10 One of Virginia Woolf’s last and most popular novels, though little studied now, is The Years (1937), which features the burial of the protagonist’s mother in 1880. Delia Pargiter responds positively to the first line of the service, ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’: ‘Pent up as she had been all these days in the half-lit house which smelt of flowers, the outspoken words filled her with glory. This she could feel genuinely; this was something that she said herself.’ As the service progresses, however, the priest, her cousin James, begins to sound ‘as if he did not believe what he was saying’.11 He continues, nearing the end of the service: ‘“We give thee hearty thanks,” said the voice, “for that it has pleased thee to deliver this our sister out of the miseries of this sinful world—” What a lie! she cried to herself. What a damnable lie! He had robbed her of the one feeling that was genuine; he had spoilt her one moment of understanding.’12 Woolf’s is the most outspoken and direct rejection of the service; Mann’s and Joyce’s characters assume a more ironic, distanced attitude to what they hear, but in any case the main theme is of a mourner listening to the official service and seeing it as, at best,

 8 

See J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2001).  9  James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986), 9. 10  Joyce, Ulysses, 87. 11  Virginia Woolf, The Years (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 85. 12  Woolf, The Years, 87.

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a bit of trickery, and at worst, a lie. Proust, although he spends a lot of time and energy on death, has relatively little to say about funerals. We may recall the social comedy as well as pathos of Proust’s description of the narrator’s grandmother’s death, or the considerations of art and immortality that accompany Bergotte’s death at the Vermeer exhibition, which he had attended in order to admire the painter’s ‘little patch of yellow wall’.13 One of Proust’s typical observations is about how quickly the dead are forgotten; this is exemplified by Mme Verdurin who will not allow any of her guests to speak about the dead lest they spoil her parties; she prefers to act as if her recently deceased friends have simply gone on vacation. Apart from Proust, the examples cited here suggest some of the inadequacies of Philippe Ariès’s influential account of the difference between modern and medieval death, which he summarises in the statement: ‘The old attitude in which death was both familiar and near, evoking no great fear or awe, offers too marked a contrast to ours, where death is so frightful that we dare not utter its name.’14 Ariès’s account is of course in part a form of the oft-disputed secularisation thesis, and it echoes on a much grander scale some observations of Walter Benjamin in ‘The Storyteller’, to the effect that ‘It has been observable for a number of centuries how in the general consciousness the thought of death has declined in omnipresence and vividness’.15 The account of Benjamin and Ariès seems to me inadequate because it underestimates the fear and awe that attended death in earlier times and overestimates the extent to which modern culture avoids death. It is clear, however, that Ariès’s narrative of the inadequacies of modern culture, or what Ernest Becker described in the 1970s as ‘The Denial of Death’, shares something with the views of the modernists and perhaps particularly of Mann, who objects to the solitary, sequestered, hygienic nature of death at the sanatorium. These historians also gesture towards important questions raised by Sandra M. Gilbert in her recent Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve,16 which movingly treats the modern elegy in relation to a very detailed and updated account of Ariès’s analysis of modern death; and by Robert Pogue Harrison’s remarkable Dominion of the Dead, in which he writes that ‘to be human means above all to bury’.17 These scholars of the history and anthropology of death and dying allow us to see that the modernists themselves were engaged in a sort of literary anthropology, trying to understand the rituals of death and their role in human society as it recovered from untold disasters in the absence of traditional faith. The novelists were also, perhaps, making a claim on behalf of their art form. None of the typical rituals, either ancient like the funeral service or modern like the séance, seems as true to the experience of mourning as does the novel, and what is particularly true about the novelist’s representation of the funeral is his or her ability to represent the disjunction between the public rituals of mourning and the private thoughts

13 

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 3, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 186. 14  Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 13. 15  Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 93. 16  Sandra M. Gilbert, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (New York: Norton, 2006). 17  Robert Pogue Harrison, Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xi.

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of the mourner, whether these are Delia Pargiter’s agonies over her mother’s death or Leopold Bloom’s and Hans Castorp’s rather down-to-earth considerations of the process of decay. In one sense, these ambitions on the part of modern novelists are indeed the product of secularisation: it is because the traditional rites of the church no longer seem adequate that the modern novelist feels called to offer an alternative. In another sense, though, the modernists are seeking through their art to perform many of the traditional functions of religion and especially the function of ritual: to provide the language for understanding such major forms of human experience as, in Philip Larkin’s words, ‘marriage, and birth, / And death, and thoughts of these’.18

Analysis Pagan references are common in these high modernist novels. One frequent theme, again owing something to the experience of trench warfare, is the descent into the underworld, or katabasis, especially as imagined by Homer in Book XI of the Odyssey and subsequently reimagined by Virgil and Dante. This literary tradition bespeaks the difficulty of communication with the dead. The Magic Mountain ends with Hans Castorp at war, performing a grotesque sort of inadvertent burial of a comrade: ‘He is soaked through, his face is flushed, like all the others. He runs with feet weighed down by mud [. . .] Look, he is stepping on the hand of a fallen comrade—stepping on it with his hobnailed boots, pressing it deep into the soggy, branch-strewn earth’ (705). The branchstrewn earth recalls the Homeric simile according to which the generations of men are like leaves (Iliad 6.146–9) and more specifically perhaps the golden bough that Aeneas plucks as he descends into the underworld (Aeneid 6.125–44). Hans’s stepping on the hand of his comrade may also recall Dante’s stepping on the face of the traitor Bocca Degli Abati in the deepest circle of hell (Inferno 32). Again, a general concern with mass death occasioned by the war is often accompanied by a more personal, but also more universal, fascination with the relationship of the living to the dead. The Magic Mountain depends on a topographical inversion of the descent into the underworld, as Hans Castorp journeys up into the mountains and leaves behind his career as an engineer in the ‘flatlands’. In his first conversation with Castorp, the liberal humanist Herr Settembrini asks him how long the sanatorium doctors want him to stay: ‘How many months have our Minos and Rhadamanthus saddled you with?’ (55). As Castorp tries to recall who exactly Minos and Rhadamanthus were (judges in Hades), he haltingly explains that he is only in Davos for a visit, to which Settembrini responds, ‘Great Scott! You are not one of us? You are healthy, you are merely stopping over, as it were, like Odysseus in the realm of the shades? How bold of you to descend into the depths, where the futile dead live on without their wits—’ (56). Castorp points out the reversal here: he has climbed 5,000 feet, hardly the typical katabasis. Yet Settembrini insists that he has in fact descended into Hades; the residents of the sanatorium are already like the shades in the underworld, living in a sort of suspended animation. After Castorp’s liaison with the ‘oriental’ Mme Chauchat,

18 

Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’, in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 97–8.

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Settembrini asks him, ‘Well, my good engineer, how did you like the pomegranate?’ – recalling the seeds of pomegranate that Persephone ate and that prevented her from leaving Hades for good (349). The Magic Mountain is, in part, a novel of ideas, and Mann personifies the struggle of ideas about disease, secularisation and historical progress in memorable pairs of characters. The Minos and Rhadamanthus of the sanatorium are the doctors Krokowski and Behrens. Rhadamanthus, the famously upright king of Crete, becomes Behrens, a matter-of-fact materialist, who flirts with the female patients, teases Castorp about his love life, and sees death as a simple and inevitable physical process. When one patient makes ‘a dreadful scene right at the end and absolutely refuses to die’, Behrens talks to him man to man and tells him not to ‘make such a fuss’ (53). The patient obediently quiets down and peaceably dies. The mythical king Minos, brother and usurper of Rhadamanthus, directed the bestial offspring of his wife’s love for a bull, the Minotaur, to devour the children of Athens in his labyrinth. The Minos of the Berghof Sanatorium is the second-in-command, Dr Krokowski. Likewise, a master of a hidden and bestial labyrinth – the unconscious – Krokowski is a mixture of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. In the chapter ‘Analysis’, he lectures the inmates on the notion of disease as an expression of repressed erotic desire. Elsewhere, Krokowski tells Castorp that he has never met a perfectly healthy person and, when Castorp himself eventually develops tuberculosis, explains that it must be a symptom of a deeper mental or spiritual disease: ‘organic factors are always secondary’ (188). The novel might seem to resemble a journey into the unconscious, as if Conrad’s Heart of Darkness were set in the heart of a different continent, but Hans Castorp does not really resemble Conrad’s Marlow or Kurtz in that he prefers to stay near the surface of things, so we get glimpses of deeper forces, for example in his relationship with Mme Chauchat on Walpurgisnacht, but never quite feel that we have grasped his soul. Mann shows a certain disdain for the two medical professionals Behrens and Krokowski, but he restates their differences on a higher philosophical plane in the persons of Settembrini and his arch-rival, the Jewish revolutionary and misanthropic failed Jesuit priest Naphta, said by Mann to have been based on a young Georg Lukács. Their debates dominate the second half of the novel, only briefly interrupted by Castorp’s dalliances and the comings and goings of inmates in the sanatorium. Settembrini, an heir of classical Athens and liberal Italy, seems to suffer from writer’s block as he prepares a volume analysing all the masterpieces of world literature for The Sociology of Suffering, a volume of an encyclopedia to be published by the International League for the Organization of Progress. The unachievable goal of this unending task of literary criticism is to eradicate suffering. Mann underlines his misguided idealism by having him frequently express his faith in ‘ideas of peace and plans for disarmament’, which seems about as likely to bring about European harmony as the patients’ efforts to learn Esperanto (373). The pessimist Naphta proclaims the ‘world-conquering cosmopolitanism of the Church’ and combines his Christianity with communism but foresees the onset of war unleashed by the forces of nationalism (377). Far from wishing to eradicate suffering, he esteems it and praises Gothic art for its ‘radical proclamation of suffering and the weakness of the flesh’ (387). Hans Castorp thinks, ‘There is something of the occult about Naphta’ (379). Although the Jewish Jesuit’s misanthropy and depression undercut many of his observations, Mann frequently suggests the essential accuracy of his tragic worldview.

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Hans Castorp himself, ‘one of life’s problem children’ of limited intellectual depth, cannot resolve the conflicts between Behrens and Krokowski or between Settembrini and Naphta, and arguably neither can the reader (303). In the case of the duelling philosophers (as also in the death of the charismatic Pieter Peeperkorn), Castorp is perhaps even criminally negligent in the ultimate crisis. But it is perhaps not entirely his fault that he finds it hard to resolve these contradictions. Mann himself is drawn to a vision of human life, and perhaps especially modern life, as a struggle between the rational, optimistic and progressive forces represented by Behrens and Settembrini and the atavistic forces tapped by Krokowski and Naphta. He seems to take delight in Naphta’s revelation to Castorp that Settembrini’s vaunted freemasonry is just a substitute for religion, complete with hierarchies, rites and superstitions, which has subsequently degenerated into ‘bourgeois misery organized as a club’ (503). In this regard as in many others, Mann’s novel prefigures the arguments of the cultural Marxists Horkheimer and Adorno in their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), heavily influenced by Lukács, though Mann’s own cosmopolitan political liberalism (at least during the period of writing the novel) more closely resembled that of Settembrini than the revolutionary pessimism of the fictional Naphta or the real Lukács, Horkheimer and Adorno.19 In a book published a decade ago, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, I argued that a group of agnostic or atheistic novelists sought, in the early twentieth century, ‘to make the novel more capable of describing transcendent experiences’ and that modernist novels, far from being the ‘secular product of a secular age’, were ‘peculiarly God-haunted’.20 A great deal of recent criticism, especially since Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age (2007), has explored the persistence of religious themes in modern literature. Particularly notable for the topic of burial is the fine study of corpses in English-language fiction by David Sherman, In a Strange Room.21 What strikes me today, in reviewing some of the work of the past decade, is that the polarity of the struggles between Settembrini and Naphta has been somewhat reversed. Among at least some recent critics, those who see modernism as a secular revolt against Christianity tend to profess the more culturally pessimistic views of the Krokowski-Naphta type, while those who perceive in modern fiction an effort at some kind of mystical re-enchantment of the world seem to hold out more hope for authentic forms of community in our postmodern world, à la Settembrini or Behrens. To take two distinguished recent examples, Stephen Kern writes in Modernism After the Death of God of the modernists’ rejection of oppressive Christian sexual morality. He focuses for the most part on the role of fragmentation and cultural rebellion in six male modernists, but he does find moments of unification in the fiction of Virginia Woolf. Nonetheless, his analysis shares with Freud (one of his seven subjects) and the fictional Krokowski a view of Victorian religiosity as an oppressive dogma from which modernism sought to liberate the individual. By contrast, Stephanie Paulsell in

19 

See Tobias Boes, Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), and Beddow, ‘The Magic Mountain’, 139. 20  Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, 20, 179. 21  See David Sherman, In a Strange Room: Modernism’s Corpses and Mortal Obligation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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Religion Around Virginia Woolf emphasises the continuities between Woolf and her Victorian forebears, especially her Quaker aunt Caroline Stephen. Paulsell’s account finds in Woolf’s modernism a mystical openness to others that preserves some sacred notion of community in a secular age, sharing perhaps some of the liberal optimism of Mann’s freemason Settembrini. Like other important new work by Elizabeth Anderson, Anthony Domestico, Suzanne Hobson, Matthew Mutter, Justin Neuman, Steve Pinkerton, Erik Tonning, and Craig Woelfel, these recent studies show that no matter how powerful the forces of secularisation in the early twentieth century, the major writers of the period remained actively engaged with their religious heritage, whether in search of a substitute for religion, a new form of aesthetic experience freed from Christian dogmas, or a renewed version of a traditional faith.22

Highly Questionable The disjuncture between public ritual and private grief finds moving expression in one of the final scenes of The Magic Mountain. In the atmosphere of exhaustion and anxiety that precedes the First World War, and to which the narrator refers as ‘The Great Stupor’ and ‘The Great Petulance’, Castorp attends a séance where the other residents of the sanatorium try to contact his cousin Ziemssen, now long dead. One of the last scenes in The Magic Mountain, from the chapter ‘Highly Questionable’, was also the last passage I analysed in my book Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. I quote those paragraphs of my earlier study here. As in Ulysses, the idea of spiritual resurrection in the machine-run and modern world is ironized by the assistance of technology, here a gramophone that plays ‘light favorites’ and an air from Gounod’s Faust. After a harrowing and hysterical scene in which the virginal Danish medium Elly Brand seems to be giving birth, the assembled inmates claim to see Ziemssen appear in the visitor’s chair of the doctor’s office where the séance takes place. Hans Castorp seems to see him as well, and Mann gives a lengthy description of Joachim’s appearance, in an old-fashioned military uniform: ‘Two deep creases were engraved on his brow between the eyes, which had sunk deep into their bony sockets, although that did not distract from the tenderness of the gaze that came from those beautiful, large, dark eyes, directed in friendly silence at Hans Castorp, at him alone.’ Has the medium actually conjured the dead cousin to life? Is Hans the victim of a collective hallucination? Like Ajax in Book 11 of the Odyssey, Joachim does not speak. Hans tries to concentrate on the vision: ‘Bending forward and leaning out to see past the hands

22 

Elizabeth Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); 1–7 Anthony Domestico, Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Suzanne Hobson, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960 (London: Palgrave, 2011); Matthew Mutter, Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Justin Neuman, Fiction Beyond Secularism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017); Steve Pinkerton, Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity (London: Palgrave, 2014); Craig Bradshaw Woelfel, Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and the Dissociation of Belief (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018).

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and head on his knees, he stared into red darkness at the visitor in the chair. For a moment he thought he would throw up. His throat contracted and cramped in four or five fervent sobs. “Forgive me!” he whispered to himself, and then the tears came to his eyes and he saw nothing more.’ [671–2] Disobeying the psychoanalyst’s command to speak to the ghost, Hans stands up, turns on the electric light, and leaves the room. Hans Castorp is here rejecting the mystical attitude that Mann associates not only with spiritualism but also with psychoanalysis: the tendency to indulge unconscious desires and to believe in the magical power of collective identities. Yet he is also criticizing the way that the living put the dead to their own use. To do so seems to trivialize the dead by relegating them below our own (usually fairly petty) goals; it also falsifies the experience of death by allowing us to imagine that the afterlife is not ultimately so different from our own life. A few pages before Joachim’s ghostly apparition, Mann provides a strikingly cynical account of our attitude regarding the resurrection of the dead: ‘And yet, the return of those who have died – or better, the desirability of such a return – is always a complicated, ticklish matter. Ultimately, to put it plainly, it does not exist, this desirability. It is a miscalculation; by the light of cold day, it is as impossible as the thing itself, which would be immediately evident if nature rescinded that impossibility even once; and what we call mourning is perhaps not so much the pain of the impossibility of ever seeing the dead return to life, as the pain of not being able to wish it’ (666).23 In these final pages of his epic novel, Mann seems to tip his hand in favour of rationality, modernity and enlightenment (the electric light) and against the mysticism he associates with psychoanalysis. One could say that he comes out on the side of the liberal humanist Settembrini, whom Hans Castorp has imagined on an earlier evening ‘suddenly bursting in and turning on the light so that reason and social order might hold sway’ (603). Yet in the final chapters of the novel Settembrini, like Castorp himself, becomes consumed by patriotic fervour for the war. Unlike the optimist Settembrini, Mann himself does not imagine a world without suffering. He is a critic of any moralising of illness or celebration of suffering, but he recognises that suffering and death are our lot.24 Literature cannot save us from our fate, but it can offer some modern consolations, not the least of which is a deeper aesthetic and ethical understanding of the human condition. The novelists discussed here imagined desire as a force that would guarantee our continuation after death, but they all undoubtedly knew what Mann reveals in the episode of the séance: the desire truly in question is that of the survivors. And yet, despite the dubious power of Latin prayers and other special languages for remembering or even resurrecting the dead, many modernist novels are devoted to their own form of resurrection. Joyce called it metempsychosis, a task he shares with Proust, Woolf and Mann.25 Indeed, as I concluded in my book, it is the modernists’ extreme awareness of our uneasy

23 

Lewis, Religious Experience, 190–1. For a classic critique of the literary moralising of suffering, see Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978). She discusses The Magic Mountain briefly at 34–5. 25  The pathetic lover Wehsal briefly mentions metempsychosis, a favourite modernist trope of the persistence of the dead. See Mann, Magic Mountain, 608. 24 

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and often forgetful relationship with those who have gone before us that prompted them to make their own immense monuments to the dead and to life, their novels.

Works Cited Anderson, Elizabeth. H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Ariès, Philippe. Western Attitudes toward Death. Translated by Patricia M. Ranum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Beddow, Michael. ‘The Magic Mountain.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, ed. Ritchie Robertson, 137–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Storyteller.’ In Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. 83–109. New York: Schocken, 1968. Boes, Tobias. Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Brown, Callum G. The Death of Christian Britain. London: Routledge, 2001. Domestico, Anthony. Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Gilbert, Sandra M. Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. New York: Norton, 2006. Harrison, Robert Pogue. Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Hobson, Suzanne. Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960. London: Palgrave, 2011. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Random House, 1986. Larkin, Philip. ‘Church Going.’ In Collected Poems. Edited by Anthony Thwaite. 97–8. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by John E. Woods. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. 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, 2017. Outka, Elizabeth. Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pinkerton, Steve. Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 3. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Sherman, David. In a Strange Room: Modernism’s Corpses and Mortal Obligation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. ———. ‘Time to Climb The Magic Mountain.’ The Economist, 20 June 2020. Tonning, Erik. Modernism and Christianity. London: Palgrave, 2014. Winter, J. M. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Woelfel, Craig Bradshaw. Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and the Dissociation of Belief. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays, vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press, 1967. ———. The Years. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969.

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Part V: Modern Esotericism, Pantheism and Spiritualism

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20 The Modernist Afterlives of Theosophy Allan Kilner-Johnson

I

n his address at the cremation of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1891, a young Englishman called G. R. S. Mead, who, two years earlier, had been appointed General Secretary of the European Section of the Theosophical Society, professed that Theosophy is not dead because to-day we stand by H.P.B.’s dead body. It lives and must live, because Truth can never die; but on us, the upholders of this Truth, must ever rest the heaviest of all responsibilities, the effort so to shape our own characters and lives that the truth may be thereby commended to others.1 Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, founded in New York City in 1875, had offered a radically new structure of spiritual belief fixed initially in spiritualism and, slightly later, in a syncretic approach to Buddhism and Hinduism which sought to create an ecumenical fraternity in which, as the Society’s motto states, ‘There is no religion higher than the truth’. Blavatsky wasn’t striving to create a new religion, but a combinatory system of spiritual belief and a universalising cultural vision that brought together diffuse spiritual traditions. The decisive influences of the Theosophical Society on late Victorian culture, on the history of Indian Home Rule, and on the emergence of the spiritual New Age of the second half of the twentieth century have been well documented.2 Mahatma Gandhi

1 

G. R. S. Mead, ‘The Cremation’, in In Memory of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky by Some of her Pupils (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1891), 9. 2  See, in particular, Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Antoine Faivre, Western Esotericism: A Concise History, trans. Christine Rhone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Helena Blavatsky: Western Esoteric Masters (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2004); Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Paul K. Johnson, The Masters Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Stephen Prothero, ‘From Spiritualism to Theosophy: “Uplifting” a Democratic Tradition’, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 3, no. 2 (1993): 197–216; Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru (London: Secker & Warburg, 1993).

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had an early meaningful interest in theosophy, modern artists Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian were deeply influenced by the precepts of the Society, and the notable work of Italian psychoanalyst Roberto Assagioli was unquestionably shaped by his theosophical interests.3 What has been less thoroughly examined are the Theosophical Society’s cadet lines, those early twentieth-century offshoots which, following Mead’s directive to ‘shape our own characters and lives that the truth may be thereby commended to others’, restyled the substance and form of Blavatsky’s teachings in the light of the profound social and aesthetic transformations of the modernist era. Fractured into a wide collection of outgrowths and offshoots during the decades following Blavatsky’s death, the Theosophical Society gave birth to a range of prominent twentieth-century spiritual teachers including Alice Bailey, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Catherine Tingley, G. R. S. Mead and Rudolf Steiner. This chapter examines how the heterodox sympathies and sensibilities of Blavatsky and her followers would stimulate a return to Western mysticism in two early twentieth-century splinter groups which had a pronounced influence on literary modernism: Mead’s Quest Society and Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society. Both Mead and Steiner were members of the most exclusive ‘Esoteric Section’ of the Theosophical Society and had progressed rapidly into substantial leadership roles.4 However, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century both had fallen into dispute with the organisation and saw an opportunity to propose a refreshed and repackaged theosophy rooted in the Matter of Britain, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and Near Eastern wisdom traditions. Like Blavatsky, Mead and Steiner pursued a comparative and combinatory approach to esoteric systems of belief, but returned focus to Western traditions that had been sidelined or dismissed by the Theosophical Society. At a time when the threat of war was increasingly difficult to discount, these two substantive products of the Theosophical Society represented an almost counter-intuitive turn away from the spiritual traditions of India and Tibet to the spiritual inheritance of an increasingly fraught Europe. Mead’s certainty in 1891 that ‘[Theosophy] lives and must live, because Truth can never die’ ultimately proved to be true, yet it was a very different form of theosophy which would permeate the richest flourishes of modernist thought and innovation.5 The prominent historian of Western esotericism Wouter Hanegraaff describes esotericism as an umbrella term covering ‘an “enchanted” pre-Enlightenment worldview with ancient roots but flourishing in the modern period’ as well as ‘a wide array of “occult” currents and organizations that emerged after the Enlightenment as alternatives to traditional religion and rational science’.6 One of the great challenges in identifying the impacts of post-Enlightenment esotericism on modernism is the regularity with which the concepts of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ overlap semantically and historically. The former refers to a growing expression of liberalism, egalitarianism and rationalism that

3 

Tessel M. Bauduin, ‘Science, Occultism, and the Art of the Avant-Garde in the Early Twentieth Century’, Journal of Religion in Europe 5, no. 1 (2012): 23–55; Bruce Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 170–2. 4  Gregory Tillet, ‘Modern Western Magic and Theosophy’, Aries 12, no. 1 (2012): 17–51; Clare GoodrickClark and Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, G. R. S. Mead and the Gnostic Quest (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2005), 3. 5  Mead, ‘The Cremation’, 9. 6  Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism, 4–5.

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took root in the inquisitive eighteenth century and continues to shape our world today. The latter denotes a mode and sensibility of artistic production that first emerged around the turn of the twentieth century and which, in seemingly sharp contrast to modernity, became increasingly hermetic, specialist and rarefied. Although modernism and modernity partially coincided, they aren’t synonymous. Modernist studies for much of the twentieth century had to contend with the uncomfortable recognition that many of its most prominent figures of interest were deeply informed by retrograde esoteric philosophy or, as W. B. Yeats called it, ‘the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic’.7 A common critical approach was to dismiss occult practice as a minor yet embarrassing aberration of personal character which, nevertheless, did not obstruct the emergence of poetic genius. For instance, in Axel’s Castle (1931), Edmund Wilson argued that Yeats ‘has, in rejecting the methods of modern science, cut himself off in a curious way from the general enlightened thought of his time’.8 ‘Madame Blavatsky, the necromantic Theosophist, seems to have made upon him a considerable impression,’ Wilson censoriously continues, before offering an apologetic reading of Yeats’s symbolism as indicative of the scientific materialism of modernity rather than an enduring inheritance from ‘the necromantic Theosophist’.9 More recently, scholars including Leon Surette, Alex Owen and John Bramble have shown in illuminating detail how the domains of magic, esotericism and the occult lay at the unrecognised heart of modernism. Surette argues that occultism is ‘ubiquitous in modernism [and] particularly strong in William Butler Yeats, in his protégé, Ezra Pound, and, to a much lesser extent, in Pound’s sometime protégé, T.S. Eliot’.10 At the time that Surette was writing during the early 1990s, modernist studies was anxiously lumbered with the hereafters of postmodern philosophy, and he indicates, by way of an implicit apology, that he would still take modernism on its own terms and not set out to ‘unveil the errors, self-deceptions, and vices of those geniuses whose impossibly great achievements oppress us all’ or even to ‘expose the folly of all claims to positive, context-free knowledge’.11 By 2004, Owen was able to go even further to contend that occultism ‘must be understood as integral to the shaping of the new at the turn of the century’.12 Part of the reason for this is the curious but consistent overlap between the principal intentions of modernism and the occult: as Bramble pointed out in 2015, ‘to be able to know the world differently – as a kind of Gnostic, a stance which entailed mystical nihilism as much as affirmative transcendence – was an asset for modernism’s quarrel with positivism, uniformity, bourgeois master-narratives, materialist progress

 7 

W. B. Yeats, ‘Magic’, in The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 344. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (New York: Scribner’s, 1931), 47.  9  Wilson, Axel’s Castle, 47. Some recent scholars follow in this tradition of transmuting Yeats’s occult practice into a sanitised vision of a muscular modernity underpinned by rationalism and scientific rigour. See Katherine Ebury, ‘“A New Science”: Yeats’s A Vision and Relativistic Cosmology’, Irish Studies Review 22, no. 2 (2014): 168; Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, ‘Yeats, Fairies, and the New Animism’, New Literary History 43 (2012): 146. 10  Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 5. 11  Surette, The Birth of Modernism, 4. 12  Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 15.  8 

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and the Westernization of the earth’.13 While both the Quest Society and the Anthroposophical Society were, in their own ways, concerned with the binaries of science/ spirit, East/West and self/society, they did not incline toward the domain of nationalistic traditionalism which would give considerable ground to the growth of fascism in Europe during the early twentieth century. Modernism was concerned with change, growth and a self-conscious repudiation of the recent Victorian past in favour of more distant and arcane histories. As this chapter establishes, both the Quest Society and the Anthroposophical Society influentially shaped modernism’s interest in forms of collective and synchronic knowledge that brought individuals into communion with new ways of knowing through an anti-Classical reworking of the inheritances of the past. Rather than making it new, as Ezra Pound’s oft-quoted dictate suggests, occult modernism more regularly made it different by drawing upon the past as a means by which to bring order and understanding to the present. G. R. S. Mead was Blavatsky’s private secretary from 1889 until her death in 1891 and had served as the hardworking subeditor of her ornate, maze-like magnus opus The Secret Doctrine (1888), the content of which she claims to have received telepathically from super-evolved Eastern sages. During the final decade of the nineteenth century, Mead began to depart from the Theosophical Society’s orthodox views in order to re-establish Western and Near Eastern esoteric traditions as critical components in a comprehensive theosophical worldview. During the summer following Blavatsky’s death, he published ‘The Task of Theosophical Scholars in the West’ in Lucifer, the official publishing arm of the Theosophical Society which he would later rename The Theosophical Review. Here Mead championed a variety of Platonic and Neoplatonic mystical texts by writers such as Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus, many of which had been as forcefully rejected by the muscular Christianity of late Victorian British society as by Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Although, in Mead’s view, these ‘fragments of religion, philosophy and mythology [have] come down to us from the initiated ancients’, he cautioned that they had been passed down with unthinking repetitiousness and, like all works of mystical revelation, required constant acts of reinterpretation in order to maintain their function as living, transcendent wisdom.14 ‘“The task” therefore,’ he concluded, ‘“of Theosophical Scholars in the West,” is one of interpretation.’15 This commission of exegetical interpretation of the sacred esoteric traditions of the Western world would set the tone for the rich and suggestive dialogues held under the auspices of his later Quest Society and would directly and prominently influence the work of key figures of modernism including Ezra Pound, Jessie Weston and Carl Jung, among many others. Though Mead was offered the presidency of the Theosophical Society following the death of Henry Steel Olcott in 1907, he ultimately left the Society in February 1909 following its pardoning of a senior leader’s sexual abuse of minors. He took with him approximately 150 former members to form the Quest Society, which first met on 11 March 1909 at Kensington Town Hall in London and which would soon grow to welcome luminaries including Ezra Pound, Jessie Weston, A. E. Waite, Gustav Meyrink,

13 

John Bramble, Modernism and the Occult (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3. G. R. S. Mead, ‘The Task of Theosophical Scholars in the West’, Lucifer 8 (March–August 1891): 477–80. 15  Mead, ‘The Task of Theosophical Scholars in the West’, 480. 14 

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Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Rabindranath Tagore, Anand Coomaraswamy, Evelyn Underhill and Ithell Colquhoun.16 In his inaugural address, Mead spoke of ‘the call of the soul for its complement, its fulfilment, for all that which it seems not to be’ as the prevailing topic of interest for the Quest Society.17 Accordingly, the Society’s two stated objectives were: (1) ‘To promote investigation and comparative study of religion, philosophy and science, on the basis of experience’, and (2) ‘To encourage the expression of the ideal in beautiful form’.18 The comparative remit of the society gave considerable space to outré work on Gnosticism, Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, and, as Clare Goodrick-Clark and Nicholas Goodrick-Clark explain, ‘under Mead’s Western standard, Gnosticism is the ancient precursor of Theosophy, and Theosophy should become the Hermes of the modern age’.19 Mead was the exemplary modernist connector, and one of the first people invited to the famed annual Eranos conference that welcomed thinkers such as Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Gershom Scholem and Joseph Campbell for an annual discussion of depth psychology, comparative religion and philosophy. Although Mead did not ultimately attend Eranos, the Quest Society offered a marked influence on the conference’s interest in returning legitimacy to the interpretative and exegetical nature of human experience and sacred traditions.20 Carl Jung developed an interest in the work of the Quest Society at a similar time. Although Mead’s influence on Jung remains largely unacknowledged in the history of psychoanalytic theory, at least eighteen of Mead’s books appear in Jung’s personal library, and Jung approvingly cited Mead with some regularity from 1911 onwards.21 Richard Noll argues that ‘Jung’s post-Freudian work (after 1912), especially his theories of the collective unconscious and the archetypes, could not have been constructed without the works of Mead on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and the Mithraic Liturgy’.22 Mead appreciated the quieter life of the scholar and did not intend for the Quest Society to become an operative esoteric society with associated rituals and initiations like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society. Instead, the Quest Society was committed to the intellectual exploration of occult knowledge through regular lectures on theological subjects and publication of The Quest: A Quarterly Review, a wide-ranging journal featuring work on comparative religion with a strong but not exclusive interest in Christian, Jewish and Near Eastern mysticism, published from 1909 to 1931. Mead’s substantial influence on Anglo-American literary modernism – particularly on Pound and, through Pound and fellow Quest Society member Jessie Weston, on T. S. Eliot – has gone largely under-appreciated in modernist studies at large. Demetres

16 

Goodrick-Clark and Goodrick-Clark, G. R. S. Mead and the Gnostic Quest, 22–31; Demetres Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s ‘The Cantos’ (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), 86. After WWI, the Quest Society procured a permanent base at 27 Clareville Grove in Kensington. 17  G. R. S. Mead, ‘On the Nature of the Quest’, The Quest: A Quarterly Review 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 29. 18  The Quest: A Quarterly Review 9, no. 1 (1917): leading material. 19  Goodrick-Clark and Goodrick-Clark, G. R. S. Mead and the Gnostic Quest, 9. 20  Goodrick-Clark and Goodrick-Clark, G. R. S. Mead and the Gnostic Quest, 27. 21  Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (London: Fontana Press, 1996), 69. 22  Noll, The Jung Cult, 69.

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Tryphonopoulos has shown with considerable clarity that Mead was Pound’s principal occult teacher and contributed to an ornate personal cosmology that suffused Pound’s poetic work and literary sensibility,23 and Surette maintains that ‘it is not possible to trace an influence between an occultist and an artist as determinately as can be done with Mead and Pound’.24 Pound’s letters up to the 1960s speak admiringly of Mead, and his famous essay ‘Psychology and Troubadours’, which first appeared in The Quest before later being reprinted in the revised 1932 edition of Pound’s The Spirit of Romance, follows Mead to argue that the meaning and value of literature is to be found in the synchronous study of ‘the forces traceable across texts’ which bring uncanny vitality to inherited traditions.25 As Pound argued in ‘Psychology and Troubadours’, ‘an art is vital only so long as it is interpretive, so long, that is, as it manifests something which the artist perceives at greater intensity and more intimately than his public’.26 In sharp contrast to the monolithic nature of nineteenth-century literature and its interpretation, modernism deliberately and knowingly welcomed the embodied understanding of texts, many of which were formally devised with evocative fissures, elisions and dense intertextuality which welcomed the reader into a task of cooperative coproduction of meaning. In this regard, Pound’s epic and yet incomplete The Cantos (1915–62) stands out as a distinctive exemplar of the invitation to engage with the ‘esoteric’ (as in, comprehensible only to those with specialist knowledge) language of modernism in an act of interpretation and meaning-building. While Pound’s commitment to the exegetical obligation of both poetry and sacred tradition is amply apparent in The Cantos, it was perhaps his editorial contribution to Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) that most pointedly signals his philosophical commitment to Mead. Pound is described as the ‘greater craftsman’ in Eliot’s dedication to the poem, and Surette concludes that Eliot ‘submitted his long poem to Pound’s scrutiny specifically because he knew Pound to have some competence in occult theories and beliefs’.27 Mead’s view that the myths and legends of Western Europe grew from an ancient wisdom tradition that could be traced through investigation of living practice and interpretation of historical sources also directly kindled another key influence on The Waste Land, Jessie Weston’s infamous From Ritual to Romance (1920). Weston influentially argued that the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King’s incurable wound offers the ‘sometimes partially understood, sometimes wholly misinterpreted, record of a ritual, originally presumed to exercise a life-giving potency, which, at one time of universal observance, has, even in its decay, shown itself possessed of elements of the most persistent vitality’.28 Weston’s reinterpretation of the Matter of Britain took form initially in the pages of The Quest, and in her acknowledgements to From Ritual to

23 

Tryphonopoulos, Celestial Tradition, 82. Surette, The Birth of Modernism, 18. 25  Anne Birien, ‘Modernist Poetics of Estrangement: Pound’s Answer to Mallarmé’, in Stylistics: Prospect and Retrospect, ed. David L. Hoover and Sharon Lattig (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 32. 26  Ezra Pound, ‘Psychology and Troubadours’, The Quest: A Quarterly Review 4, no. 1 (1912): 37. 27  Leon Surette, ‘The Waste Land and Jessie Weston: A Reassessment’, Twentieth-Century Literature 34, no. 2 (1988): 227. 28  Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance [1920] (New York: Anchor, 1957), 113. On the influence of From Ritual to Romance on modernism, see Allan Johnson, Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature: Castration, Narration, and a Sense of the Beginning (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), ch. 1. 24 

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Romance she conspicuously thanked Mead, ‘of whose knowledge of the mysterious border-land between Christianity and Paganism, and willingness to place that knowledge at the disposal of others, I had, for some years past, had pleasant experience’.29 The haunting story of wounded masculine potency leading to the barrenness and isolation of his land was a deeply resonant trope in the years immediately following World War I; however, as Grail scholar Richard Barber argues, Weston’s book offered ‘an interpretation which has haunted twentieth-century literature to a degree quite disproportionate to its basis in fact’.30 While Weston’s belief that the legend of the Fisher King is traceable to an ancient ritual of regicide has since been revealed as imaginatively productive rather than anthropologically sound, Eliot’s momentous high modernist poem The Waste Land famously drew directly from this mythography. The so-called ‘mythic model’, the reconstitution of ancient myth for modern means, was a decisive force in modernist poetics, which, as Matthew Sterenberg suggests, ‘constituted a new mode of making meaning that appealed to the imagination by making the claim that myths communicate timeless truths that cannot be apprehended through reason or science’.31 In Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), the great proponent of New Criticism Cleanth Brooks accepted the validity and value of Eliot’s source material, finding within Weston’s work an interest in ‘two kinds of life and two kinds of death’. ‘Life devoid of meaning is death,’ Brooks continues, and ‘sacrifice, even the sacrificial death, may be life-giving, an awakening to life. [The Waste Land] occupies itself to a great extent with this paradox, and with a number of variations upon it.’32 While Mead’s influence on Weston remained unacknowledged, both F. O. Matthiessen and Hugh Kenner argued during the 1950s that the influence of From Ritual to Romance on Eliot had become overstated,33 an assessment which Eliot himself appeared to hesitantly support when he acknowledged in 1961 that ‘it was just, no doubt, that I should pay my tribute to the work of Miss Jessie Weston; but I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail’.34 Even so, the formal and thematic structure of The Waste Land is unquestionably concerned with the transmissions and continuation of sacred spiritual insight across a shared global inheritance, and the influence of Mead and his Quest Society seems to be both everywhere and nowhere in modernism. Rudolf Steiner’s earliest intellectual accomplishments were in the area of philosophy, and, no less sweeping than the cosmologies of Blavatsky or Mead, his ornate worldview was cut from an unmistakably Teutonic cloth. His first encounter with the Theosophical Society was in 1899 following an invitation to deliver a lecture on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.35 Up until that point, Steiner’s spiritus rector was

29 

Weston, From Ritual to Romance, 5. Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: A History of a Legend (London: Penguin, 2005), 249. 31  Matthew Sterenberg, Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain: Meaning for Modernity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3. 32  Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), 137. 33  F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958); Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet (New York: Obolensky, 1959). 34  T. S. Eliot, ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), 109. 35  Rudolf Steiner, The Story of My Life (London: Anthroposophical Publishing, 1928), 285. 30 

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Goethe, whose view of the nobility and indivisibility of the soul gave metaphysical shape to his spiritual longings. He became editor of a new edition of Goethe’s collected writings when he was in his early twenties and then, several years later, began work at the Goethe archive in Weimar. As he would later point out in The Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (1907), Goethe’s ‘The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily’ (1795) captures a vast body of Rosicrucian wisdom for ‘those who are able to interpret it rightly’:36 in the fairy tale Goethe moves with his figures in the realm of supersensible perceptions and not of abstract concepts. What is here said about these figures and their experiences is not in any sense a statement that this figure means one thing, and that another. [. . .] Goethe’s consciousness did not of course lay hold of these thoughtimpulses in abstract form. He expressed himself in imaginative figures because to his genius any abstract form of thought would have been too lacking in content.37 It was Goethe’s evocative symbolism that absorbed Steiner, giving him the strong sense that there is a deep and resonant store of meaning contained in abstraction, elision and symbol. ‘Clarity of thought in such things’, Steiner maintained in his preface to the first edition of Goethe’s World View (1897), ‘is held in contempt today as dry intellectual knowledge. It is believed that one can penetrate more deeply if one speaks about one-sidedly mystical abysses of soul life, about demonic powers within the personality.’38 After he was appointed head of the German Section of the Theosophical Society in 1902, Steiner became increasingly unconvinced by the assertion that the spiritual traditions of Asia were the only and most authentic founts of mystical wisdom. Steiner was a follower of perennialism in a Protestant vein, understanding that the scientific materialism of modernity barred access to the inborn spiritual core that unites all of humanity, and recognising that European traditions of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry offered powerful and pivotal approaches to modern spirituality. He saw the Christian faith as the unavoidable birthright of the Western world and, in his view, the perennial wisdom studied by theosophists had been reaffirmed and revised by the teachings of Jesus Christ whose message of divine love was fundamental.39 Annie Besant’s pronouncement that a young Indian boy called Jiddu Krishnamurti was the new ‘World Teacher’ challenged his view of the singularity of Christ’s birth and led him to form the Anthroposophical Society at the end of 1912, taking a large number of the German Section of the Theosophical Society with him in his endeavour. Steiner was a prodigious writer and speaker whose purview covered an impressive range of esoteric and mundane topics. He regularly reformulated his ideas, putting them in new contexts to test their boundaries and implications. For the rank and file members of the Anthroposophical Society, new lessons, lectures and teachings provided a continual process of development, yet Steiner avoided building his work on a cult of personality and, instead, fostered a community of practice in which devotion was

36 

Rudolf Steiner, The Theosophy of the Rosicrucian [1907] (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1966), 7. Rudolf Steiner, Goethe’s Standard of the Soul as Illustrated in Faust and in the Fairy Story of ‘The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily’, trans. D. S. Osmond [1918] (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1925), 49. 38  Rudolf Steiner, Goethe’s World View, trans. William Lindeman [1897] (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1985), 2. 39  Faivre, Western Esotericism, 83. 37 

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shown through regular commitment to a healthy, creative, compassionate life in connection with the natural world, consonant with the healthy-living Lebensreform movement that grew to prominence in early twentieth-century Germany and Switzerland.40 The Anthroposophical Society developed an exhaustive realisation of practical, applied purposes for this spiritual vision. Steiner-Waldorf education, biodynamic farming and the Camphill Movement all emerged directly from Steiner’s teachings, as did several high street healthcare and skincare brands which remain popular today. In this regard, anthroposophy is perhaps the most materially industrious of all twentieth-century occult societies, and, as Dan McKanan reflects, the Anthroposophical Society offered ‘a holistic worldview that seeks to achieve harmony through creative work with the polarities of human and nature, matter and spirit, macrocosm and microcosm’.41 Blavatsky’s interest in the ‘wisdom of god’ became Steiner’s ‘wisdom of humans’, giving his new society its name. Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society sought to exemplify a material context for esoteric practice approaching the realms of the scientific, implicitly aiming to provide proof of the viability and veracity of its aims. McKanan argues that Steiner ‘had little affinity with the antimodernism of other early twentieth-century esoteric currents, notably the “traditionalism” of René Guenon’, and it is clear that Steiner intended his esoteric teachings to be applicable to the common project of the transitional modern world.42 Steiner recognised the material and cultural bankruptcy of modernity, as well as the modernist malaise that had begun to settle upon Europe in the years leading up to World War I. His deft response was to re-sacralise the Earth and its inhabitants by describing a sacerdotal communion between Christ, the planet Earth and humanity. In an early lecture on ‘The Mystery of Golgotha’, Steiner poignantly claimed that ‘Christ is the spirit of the Earth, and the Earth is his body’, continuing, both in this lecture and in later ones, to suggest that Christ’s blood fused with the Earth and sanctified it during the Crucifixion.43 Blavatsky had advanced a worldview which saw Christianity as, in effect, a copy of a copy of the primordial spiritual traditions of India, in part to resist the all-embracing political and social authority of mainline Christianity during the late Victorian period. Steiner drew broadly upon Blavatsky’s cyclical conceptualisation of time – a spiritual as much as historiographical concept which Walter Benjamin would later describe in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940) as ‘messianic time’, a model of history that demarcates past time with the emergence of a longing for redemption during a period of presumed decline – however, his unerring message was that the teachings of Jesus Christ had begun a new period in the history of humanity. While contemporaneous currents of traditionalism gave fuel to the incendiary fascism and nationalism that was growing across Europe, the Anthroposophical Society was strongly anti-fascist and was ultimately banned by the Nazis in 1935.

40 

On the Lebensreform movement see, in particular, John Alexander Williams, Turning to Nature in German: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 11–13. 41  Dan McKanan, Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), xiii. 42  McKanan, Eco-Alchemy, 4. 43  Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Mystery of Golgotha’, in The Christian Mystery: Early Lectures, trans. James Hindes (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1998), 52.

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The material presence of Steiner’s teachings took shape in the building of the Goetheanum – a striking expressionist wooden-domed building designed by Steiner and completed in 1920 – and the four mystery dramas which he wrote to be housed there: The Portal of Initiation (1910), The Soul’s Probation (1911), The Guardian of the Threshold (1912) and The Soul’s Awakening (1913). The ‘First Goetheanum’ (so named because it burnt down in 1922 following suspected arson) was intended as an architectural Gesamtkunstwerk that embodied Steiner’s artistic and spiritual vision of the progressive evolution of humanity with organic form and sweeping lines, and the ‘Second Goetheanum’ (which was completed in 1928 and still stands in Dornach, Switzerland) is widely considered a masterpiece of expressionist architecture.44 However, Steiner’s beguiling mystery dramas that were produced there remain conspicuously missing from accounts of modern European drama. The four epic plays detail the lives of a group of artists and thinkers across approximately fifteen years and trace not merely the spiritual and aesthetic development of the modern artist Johannes, but a gradual, communal progression from theorisation to practical application of spiritual principles in art, industry and human relations. One of the few critical accounts of the mystery dramas is The New School of the Imagination: Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Plays in Literary Tradition (2005), where John O’Mara situates Steiner’s work within a lineage of imaginative writing in England from writers including Coleridge and Wordsworth. It is undoubted that patently mystical approaches to knowledge and sensation appear in these poets and that Steiner was well-acquainted with English-language writing; however, O’Mara overestimates the influence of British Romanticism on Steiner at the expense of the much more apparent and pressing Continental Romanticism of Wagner, Goethe and Schlegel. Steiner’s dramatic writing aimed to offer a tangible, aestheticised record of his own mystical experiences and, ultimately, ‘represent a spiritual landscape that many Anthroposophists believe to be a perceivable reality’.45 The events of the play are the outer, objective manifestation of a sustained progress of initiation within a communitarian context, which, as Eileen Hutchins claims, ‘illustrate[s] how individual human beings have to help one another so that they can make progress in spiritual knowledge and learn to bring about a new state of consciousness’.46 As Christian Clement argues, for Steiner, ‘the ultimate purpose of drama is initiation. Theatre is supposed to not only entertain and educate, but to subject the viewer to a process of radical inner transformation through aesthetic means.’47 The characters are all looking for enlightenment, or as Benedictus, the occult teacher who serves as the connective tissue across the events of the plays, calls it, ‘striving

44 

David Adams, ‘Rudolf Steiner’s First Goetheanum as an Illustration of Organic Functionalism’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 51, no. 2 (1992): 182–204; John Paull, ‘The First Goetheanum: A Centenary for Organic Architecture’, Journal of Fine Arts 3, no. 2 (2000): 1–11; Anna P. Sokolina, ‘Biology in Architecture: The Goetheanum Case Study’, in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, ed. Charissa Terranova and Meredith Tromble (London: Routledge, 2016), 52–70. 45  Edmund Lingan, The Theatre of the Occult Revival: Alternative Spiritual Performance from 1875 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 100. 46  Eileen Hutchins, Introduction to the Mystery Plays of Rudolf Steiner (Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2014), 23. 47  Christian Clement, ‘Weimar Classicism and Modern Spiritual Drama: Rudolf Steiner’s Theatre of Spiritual Realism’, in Weimar Classicism: Studies in Goethe, Schiller, Forster, Berlepsch, Weiland, Herder, and Steiner, ed. David Gallagher (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011), 144.

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for the temple’s light’.48 Benedictus’s Christ-like teaching is that of love, and a recognition that ‘what they have conquered for themselves / each one shall render fruitful for the others’.49 Johannes recognises early in The Soul’s Awakening that ‘I dreamed while conscious, was awake while dreaming’, and his sense of being caught between worlds and pulled between the material realm of humanity and the spiritual world of artistic invention and creation is emphasised by The Portal of Initiation’s ironising frame: the Johannes narrative is portrayed as a play-within-a-play, reasserting the distance of Johannes both from the audience and from the ideal that he aspires toward.50 In The Portal of Initiation, Johannes is thus twice removed from esoteric revelation, and, together, the mystery plays stand as an initiatory ritual that dramaturgically synthesises the symbolic spirit and body of sacred artistic creation. The teachings of Steiner and the Anthroposophical Society had a substantial influence on English writer Owen Barfield, one of the four key members of the Inklings, the important literary discussion circle based at the University of Oxford which also included J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams. As Inkling biographers Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski describe, the Inklings were ‘an intellectual orchestra, a gathering of sparkling talents in common cause, each participant the master of his own chosen instrument’.51 Barfield’s ‘chosen instrument’ was his anthroposophically adjacent understanding of the capacity of language to capture divine, original insight. Tolkien’s Catholicism, Lewis’s Anglicanism and Williams’s esoteric Christianity sat comfortably alongside Barfield’s anthroposophy, and as Verlyn Flieger has shown, Barfield’s work on semiotics had a deep influence on the other Inklings, particularly Tolkien.52 After visiting the Anthroposophical Society in London, Barfield quickly become enamoured of Steiner’s teachings. He joined the Society, became actively engaged in its work, and recognised that ‘Steiner had obviously forgotten volumes more than I had ever dreamed’.53 Barfield would eventually become a member of the Executive Council of the English Anthroposophical Society and wrote widely on anthroposophical subjects.54 A fictionalised Steiner even appears in Barfield’s novel English People (1929) as the German mystic Karl Brockmann. In his preface to the first edition of Poetic Diction (1928), Barfield enthusiastically acknowledges Steiner: ‘it would, it seems, be impossible in a Preface to convey half my own sense of indebtedness without appearing, quite improperly, to father upon him many of the views on poetry which I have expressed – whereas I can scarcely recollect anything he has said or written on that subject at all.’55 While Barfield may thus initially appear to separate the personage of Steiner from his ideas

48 

Rudolf Steiner, The Soul’s Probation in Four Mystery Dramas, trans. Ruth and Hans Pusch (Great Barrington, MA: Steiner Books, 2007), 123. 49  Rudolf Steiner, The Guardian of the Threshold in Four Mystery Dramas, trans. Ruth and Hans Pusch (Great Barrington, MA: Steiner Books, 2007), 117. 50  Rudolf Steiner, The Soul’s Awakening in Four Mystery Dramas, trans. Ruth and Hans Pusch (Great Barrington, MA: Steiner Books, 2007), 37. 51  Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 200. 52  Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002). 53  Quoted in Zaleski and Zaleski, The Fellowship, 108. 54  Zaleski and Zaleski, The Fellowship, 218. 55  Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning [1928] (Oxford: Barfield Press, 2010), 2.

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on poetry, what Poetic Diction ultimately demonstrates is a comprehensive embodiment of Steiner’s Romanticism and sanctification of the creative powers of humanity. Barfield’s central argument is that language ‘flows from two different sources, one of these being the nature of language itself, especially in its earlier stages, and the other the individualized imagination of the poet; and how this in its turn leads to an understanding of the evolution of human consciousness’.56 Barfield’s approach to semiotics centres on the thresholds between knowledge, wisdom and imagination – and the role of the ‘essentially active nature of the poetic consciousness’ which is rooted to a higher form of selfhood – in a form of emanationism strongly rooted in Steiner’s anthroposophy.57 The swell of impassioned spiritual fervour stoked by Helena Blavatsky during the final decades of the nineteenth century seemed at the time to be unbounding, and rightly so. However, the once-unyielding Theosophical Society would begin to lose its traction in the decades following Blavatsky’s death, opening up the opportunity for the ‘wisdom of god’ to be reinterpreted through a modern lens. What Mead and Steiner readapted from the Theosophical Society was twofold: (1) a model for a modern mystery school, and (2) a close sympathy with the idea that there is a sacred esoteric core, or philosophia perennis, connecting all faith systems in a titanic crisscross of practice and belief. Both also moved away from the traditions of India and Tibet in order to return to forms of localised Western esotericism, but the directions in which they would ultimately take this work would vary dramatically, with Mead leaning toward a scholarly, theoretical vision of the philosophia perennis and Steiner pursuing practical, material expressions of his occult sciences. While each brought his own distinguishing quintessence to the enterprise (Mead took particular interest in Gnosticism, Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, while Steiner rooted his teachings in a Christological formulation entrenched in Rosicrucianism), both epitomised the modernist flourishing of liberal theological ideals and the opening up of opportunities for individual spiritual insight.

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Barfield, Poetic Diction, 20. Barfield, Poetic Diction, 39.

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

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ebecca West is not typically identified with spiritualism or occultism. She did not avow an explicit interest in spiritualism, nor did she move in spiritual or occult circles, like several of her modernist contemporaries. Yet her fictions are filled with otherworldly events, apparitions, telepathic readings and acts of spiritual communion between the living and the dead. Both The Return of the Soldier (1918)1 and Harriet Hume (1929)2 portray women protagonists who behave like spiritual mediums or telepaths, projecting themselves into the minds and bodies of other characters.3 West’s optimism about the possibilities of such interpsychic rapport is reflected in her critical essay of the same era, ‘The Strange Necessity’ (1928), in which she declares: ‘it does not seem at all unlikely that we should have a mind-consciousness which tells us as fully about other people’s minds as our body-consciousness tells us about other people’s bodies.’4 Her interest in spiritual mediumship (communication between the living and the dead) and telepathy (psychic communication between the living) is thus tied to an investment in the hidden powers of the psyche and its capacity for interpsychic exchange across physical, social and psychic boundaries. In this chapter, I argue that West’s novels Harriet Hume and The Return of the Soldier join the language of modern spiritualism to an investigation of consciousness, in which characters distanced by gender, class and experience are linked intersubjectively through non-traditional channels. Jenny conjures the perspective of her shell-shocked cousin, Chris Baldry, recently returned from the war, and mediates a story of male trauma for the reader. Harriet Hume forges intimacy with her lover, Arnold Condorex, while also anticipating his deceptions via the mechanisms of telepathy. Yet, as I go on to show, the fantasies of psychic access that these two novels present, managed through female mediums and narrators who function as vicarious inhabitants of other minds, also point reflexively to the potential for unreliability consonant with modernist epistemologies. That is, the optimism about the ability to access other minds and to render

1 

Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier [1918] (New York: Penguin, 1998). References to The Return of the Soldier are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 2  Rebecca West, Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy [1929] (London: Virago, 1987). References to Harriet Hume are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 3  Although West’s characters are not actually telepaths or mediums in an explicit sense, they experience visions, appear to possess psychic powers, and describe emotional states through spiritualist imagery and metaphor. 4  Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity: Essays by Rebecca West (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 102.

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those minds transparent is tempered by a modernist sensibility that emphasises the fallibility of human perception and the limits of subjective knowledge.5

Modernism, Spiritualism and the Occult Only in the last few decades have literary scholars and cultural historians reckoned seriously with the entanglements between modernist aesthetics and popular spiritualism, which seized the imagination of authors and artists from the late nineteenth century to the period after the First World War. Writers including Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, H.D., May Sinclair, Mary Butts, W. B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot became part of a modern spiritual revival that joined aesthetic experimentation to a fascination with occult knowledges and the relation between earthly and otherworldly experience.6 Popular spiritualism peaked in the years after WWI, as a testament to a grieving populace yearning for communion with the recently dead. Jay Winter has described 1914 to 1918 as the ‘apogee of spiritualism in Europe’ and a sign of the ‘universality of bereavement in the Europe of the Great War and its aftermath’.7 Spirit mediums were called upon to reunite the living with lost loved ones and to offer reassurance that the afterlife was a desirable place. Families desperate for news from the front enjoined mediums to initiate contact with soldiers.8 The fascination with spirit communication found its way into several early twentieth-century texts, including Woolf’s short story ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919), which features an elderly man who hears spirits of the dead: ‘He was talking about spirits – the spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things about their experiences in Heaven.’ ‘[W]ith this war’, the man says, ‘the spirit matter is rolling between the hills like thunder.’9 The man goes on to describe an electrical device much like a telephone that widows can use to communicate with their husbands killed at war. Central to spiritualist practice was the idea that spirits moved among the living and could be summoned after death. But

5 

For a discussion of the populist spiritual revival of WWI, see Katherine F. Montgomery, ‘“Like a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room”: Mysticism and Modernity in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier’, The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914–1945 10, no. 1 (2014); and for their discussions of turn-of-the-century authors influenced by spiritualism and magical thinking, see Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), and Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 6  For crucial work on the relationship between modernism and spiritualism, see Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, and also George M. Johnson, Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Leigh Wilson, Modernism and Magic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, Vibratory Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 7  Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 76. 8  ‘“Smoke and Mirrors”: Spiritualism in WWI’, BBC Home Front, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/ 3DqRH2YfWsVVLVtcQqDwgTr/smoke-and-mirrors-spiritualism-in-world-war-one (accessed 16 May 2022). 9  Virginia Woolf, ‘Kew Gardens’, in Monday or Tuesday (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1921), 89.

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even in this spiritual zeitgeist there was scepticism about mediums and psychics, and whether they were frauds exploiting the bereaved for profit. The early twentieth century was also an era in which scientists and psychologists made sincere efforts to study the paranormal in the hope of better understanding the complexities of the human psyche. In the words of Leigh Wilson, ‘That some scientists were attracted to spiritualist beliefs, and that many others took them seriously enough to investigate them, lent to spiritualism a respectability that distanced it from any associations with magic.’10 Even Freud displayed a fascination with spiritual and occult phenomena, writing that ‘it no longer seems possible to brush aside the study of so-called occult facts; of things which seem to vouchsafe the real existence of psychic forces other than the known forces of the human and the animal psyche, or which reveal mental faculties in which, until now, we did not believe’.11 Embracing the potentialities of telepathy in particular, Freud acknowledged the ‘reality of telepathic communications between sensitive or emotionally connected individuals’12 and suggested that gifted mediums could sense telepathically the repressed wishes of their clients.13 Telepathy can best be understood at the intersection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular spiritualism and psychological and scientific investigations into the nature of mind and consciousness, investigations that were directed to psychic and spiritual realities that lay beyond the purview of empiricism. As Alex Owen suggests, the new spirituality was ‘at the heart of a contemporary preoccupation with the riddle of human identity and consciousness’, and was, therefore, not a rejection of, but a culturally specific extension of, turn-of-the-century psychological developments.14 Derived from the Greek words tele (distant) and pathos (feeling), telepathy purported to transmit information by circumventing the conventional sensory channels of verbal communication and physical interaction. The term was coined in the early 1880s by F. W. H. Myers, the Cambridge-educated classicist, poet and psychical researcher whose work on abnormal psychical phenomena such as trance states, apparitions, telepathy and spiritualism aimed to show that such phenomena could ‘be brought under the operation of the laws of the natural world’.15 Myers helped found the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, which aimed to extend scientific legitimacy to a range of mental phenomena previously grouped under the category of the occult. Psychical researchers attempted to bridge the gap between modern spiritualism, modern psychology and empirical science without trivialising or pathologising the first. Myers was convinced that phenomena such as somnambulism, hysteria, telepathy

10 

Wilson, Modernism and Magic, 6. Quoted in George Devereux, Psychoanalysis and the Occult (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1953), 56. 12  See Claudie Massicotte, ‘Psychical Transmissions: Freud, Spiritualism, and the Occult’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 24, no. 1 (January/February 2014): 88–102 for a discussion of Freud’s interest in telepathy and other occult ideas. 13  Sigmund Freud, ‘Psycho-analysis and Telepathy’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1922), 184–5. 14  Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 13. 15  Trevor Hamilton, Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010), 123. 11 

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and clairvoyance were not abnormal or pathological states but reflected ‘the furthest reaches of a general continuum of human potentialities’.16 In the 1880s, Myers became keenly interested in ‘thought-transference’, what he eventually called ‘telepathy’, defined as a ‘communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognized channels of sense’.17 Myers would broaden this definition to include a variety of impressions at a distance, beneath which he grouped mind reading, clairvoyance, divination and mental rapport between the living and the dead. As he writes in his landmark text Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, ‘Telepathy may thus exist between two men in the same room as truly as between one man in England and another in Australia, or between one man still living on earth and another man long since departed.’18 Although his methods were scientific, Myers reinforced the views of modern spiritualists that individual minds could be brought into rapport with other minds outside of traditional modes of sense-making, and that such rapport could initiate forms of sympathy that he notably compared to reading.19 There is no evidence that Rebecca West read the work of Myers or other psychical researchers, but she was clearly fascinated by spiritual and occult phenomena. She did not subscribe to occult or spiritual organisations, but she did attend séances and believed herself to be in possession of psychic powers inherited from her mother. She also wrote for The Freewoman, a feminist journal that featured discussions of spiritualism and the occult. More convincingly, West’s fictions are saturated with spiritual and mystical phenomena and populated by ghosts and characters who act as mediums, clairvoyants and telepaths. She was captivated by the possibilities of thought-transference, the way minds might be brought into alliance with other minds through non-traditional channels. West used telepathy and mediumship as themes and plot devices, as well as formal strategies to mediate between different kinds of discourse. Helen Sword points out that while ‘mediumistic discourse was a destabilizing, low cultural, often implicitly feminized mode of speech and writing’, it had implicit correspondences to high modernism, including a shared repertoire of formal strategies like multiple perspectives, fragmented discourse, and a manipulation of authority and passivity.20 Both telepathy and spiritual mediumship placed textuality at the centre of their practices and drew heavily upon literary practice as a metonym for the discursive authority and cultural empowerment of the medium.21 West draws on mediumship and telepathy as implicitly feminised practices and subversive modes of communication that share affinities with her own aesthetic practice and ethical and political priorities. In what follows, I explore West’s depictions of mediumship and telepathy as processes in which minds are brought into intimate contact, and which offer West figures for transcending social antagonisms predicated upon gender, class and war experience. Modern spiritual and occult circles were also arenas of self-empowerment for women, offering figures such as Annie Besant, Madame Blavatsky, Florence Farr and

16 

Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 174. F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (London: Longmans, 1903), xxii. 18  Myers, Human Personality, xxii. 19  See Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 173–4. 20  Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, x. 21  Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, 15. 17 

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Anna Kingsford leadership roles and political and intellectual influence in otherwise male-dominated societies; it is not surprising, therefore, that West grants her women protagonists enhanced psychic powers in the absence of other forms of recognition and status. Spirit mediums were not only seen as capable of communicating with the dead, they were viewed as possessing gifts of telepathy and clairvoyance. In Harriet Hume, telepathy helps West envision a form of spiritual transcendence that reaffirms the fundamental interconnection of human beings, especially across the divides of gender and class. In The Return of the Soldier, spiritual visions and telepathy offer the narrator a way to bridge the gap between war front and home front, by approaching the mind of a traumatised veteran. But whereas Harriet Hume appears optimistic about the expansive nature of consciousness and the possibilities of interpsychic rapport, The Return frames the narrator’s spiritual visions as consoling fantasies that frequently fail to yield transparency. While neither Harriet nor Jenny is a medium in a literal sense, they possess (or seem to possess) the power to read the psyches of others through visions that are decidedly mystical. By aligning West’s modernist practice with early twentieth-century investigations of spiritualism, I argue that telepathy and mediumship are as close as possible to metaphors for West’s writing, as they foreground a self-reflexivity about mediation and generate analogies between the intricate interpsychic exchanges of telepathy and those generated by textual encounters. As I have argued elsewhere, West’s telepathic modernism models a receptivity to other minds that is central to the aesthetic and feminist imperatives of her fiction.22 In their representation of the mind as porous and permeable, capable of communion with other minds, telepathy and mediumship are inherently subversive modes of exchange that collapse distances and bring subjects into intimate rapport.

Spiritual Longing in The Return of the Soldier I read West’s first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), within the context of the spiritual revival that peaked during and after WWI. It is a novel that vibrates with spiritualist imagery, from crystal balls and alchemy, to telepathic readings of other minds. At once a nostalgic wartime romance and a fictionalised portrait of war trauma, West’s novel tells the story of Chris Baldry, an upper-class English soldier, who returns from the front with shell shock. The origin of Chris’s trauma is a mystery, a formal blackout in the text; but what remains is a single traumatic symptom, an amnesia that obliterates the last fifteen years of his memory.23 We come to find out that Chris has repressed his war experience, as well as the death of his father, his marriage to Kitty, and the death of their young son, and has retreated mentally to a romanticised moment in the pre-war past when he was infatuated with a young working-class woman named Margaret Grey. Into that unstable void enters Jenny Baldry, Chris’s cousin, who attempts to comprehend his experience

22 

See Jennifer Spitzer, ‘“I Find My Mind Meeting Yours”: Rebecca West’s Telepathic Modernism’, Studies in the Novel 50, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 543–62. 23  As Wyatt Bonikowski suggests, ‘In focusing on amnesia as the primary symptom of shell shock, both Ford and West choose a symptom most suited to emphasizing the soldier’s disturbingly present absence when he returns home. His “wound” is invisible and its origin difficult to locate.’ See Bonikowski, Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 100.

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through her own eyes. As the first-person narrator of West’s tale, Jenny becomes not only a proxy for wartime experience, but a medium whose spiritual strivings and romantic yearnings converge in the effort to comprehend the alienated subjectivity of her cousin. The story hinges on this indirect presentation of Chris’s trauma, which is propelled by Jenny’s longing to gain access to the mind and ‘soul’ of her shell-shocked cousin. While critics have largely focused on West’s portrayal of war neurosis and on the psychoanalytic dimensions of West’s text, I am interested in how Jenny’s longing to commune with her cousin is cast in the language of spiritualism. Jenny’s psychic and ethical investments take the form of an imperative to approach the mind of someone injured at war, someone unable to communicate his experience directly. Her commitment to understanding her cousin’s trauma unfolds through a series of spiritual visions that, as Katherine Montgomery points out, all ‘take place in Jenny’s mind, and in her description and understanding of the world’.24 Jenny behaves alternately like a medium channelling the distant perspective of her cousin and an unreliable narrator who filters events through her own limited point of view. While West’s character Harriet Hume could play the part of a convincing telepath, offering a reliable picture of her lover’s motivations, Jenny’s mediumship is more fraught, and indeed her fantasies of untrammelled access to her cousin’s mind are undercut by a narrative discourse that is thoroughly self-conscious about its limitations. As a narrator, Jenny mediates the story of male trauma while attempting to make legible the male-centred world of war. In an early passage, she articulates her role as a woman in wartime by envisioning Chris at the front: like most Englishwomen of my time I was wishing for the return of a soldier. Disregarding the national interest and everything except the keen prehensile gesture of our hearts towards him, I wanted to snatch my cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness his wife and I now looked upon. Of late I had had bad dreams about him. By night I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of No Man’s Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head, and not til my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on his knees as he reached safety – if it was that. For on the war-films I have seen men slip down as softly from the trench parapet, and none but the grimmer philosophers would say that they had reached safety by their fall. (5) Jenny presents herself as a representative Englishwoman in her yearning to rescue her cousin from the brutalities of war, describing this instinct as a ‘keen prehensile gesture of our hearts towards him’. It is unclear whether Jenny’s vivid dreams are coloured by ‘the war-films’ she sees or whether she has a heightened sensibility that helps her visualise such details. Jenny, however, could not be further from the trenches: she is an upper-class woman on the home front, insulated from war in a ‘globe of ease’; yet she longs to access a world largely inaccessible to women – the public, action-oriented world of men (6).

24 

Montgomery, ‘Like a beautiful voice’.

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Jill Galvan argues that the narrator of a work of fiction functions as the mediator who superintends the ‘narrative path of information’ between author and reader.25 Jenny takes on the role of translating Chris’s mental state to the reader, giving his actions an emotional subtext that Chris cannot otherwise convey. As a liminal figure, Jenny is often depicted lurking, watching through windows, observing at a distance – by turns a witness, voyeur and spy. Jenny describes her mind ‘creeping from room to room like a purring cat, rubbing itself against all the brittle beautiful things’, and claims to ‘have watched people I loved in the dusk’ – presumably Chris (6, 38). Jenny mediates Chris’s relationship to other characters, while also mediating his relationship to us – narrating his psychological state, supplementing the gaps in his testimony, and offering anecdotes from his past. Her fantasies of psychic union with Chris run up against a modernist scepticism about the accuracy and authority of human insight. Although Jenny yearns for unmediated access to her cousin, her narration is continuously complicated by events in the story, and even by her own testimony. Her assertion that ‘Here we had made happiness inevitable for him. I could shut my eyes and think of innumerable proofs of how well we had succeeded’ is undermined by the revelations that follow about the death of Chris’s child, the pressure Chris felt to assume the family business, and the lack of emotional connection to his wife (6). Jenny constructs theories about Chris’s internal state that the reader is unable to confirm, for example ‘That meant, I knew, that he loved the life he had lived with us and desired to carry with him to the dreary place of death and dirt the completest picture of everything about his home on which his mind could brush when things were at their worst’ (7). Jenny’s nostalgia for a pre-war past, with Chris as breadwinner and patriarch, ‘a pleasing composition in which we would take our proper parts’, turns out to be as brittle as the glass objects that decorate Baldry Court (13). Jenny and Kitty are largely sheltered from the realities of wartime: they are upperclass women cloistered in the English countryside, ‘the impregnable fortress of a gracious life’ (58). Kitty and Jenny are left behind on the estate after their patriarch is sent to the front, and they cling stubbornly to their pre-war rituals with a ferocious denial. The news of Chris’s shell shock, delivered by the ‘vulgar’ and working-class Margaret Grey, is received as a ‘queer ugly episode’ that disorders the civilised arrangement of their lives. As a feminist, socialist and journalist, West was alert to the ways women were participating in the war effort, as nurses, ambulance drivers, journalists, factory workers and activists. West reviewed May Sinclair’s Journal of Impressions in 1915 for the Daily News, which detailed Sinclair’s seventeen-day experience as part of a field ambulance in Belgium. West called it ‘one of the few books of permanent value produced by the war’ and praised Sinclair’s ability to convey details of war that women before had never seen first hand: ‘We have been hearing of bursting shells ever since the war began and trying to visualize them, and not till now has anyone paused to tell us what they looked like.’26 In Return, West shows us how three women from different backgrounds make sense of the war once it comes home, and how Chris’s return shatters the symbolic order that has long structured their lives.

25 

Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium, 166. Rebecca West, The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 305. Also, see Bonikowski for a discussion of West and women’s wartime roles.

26 

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While figures like Sinclair and Vera Brittain viewed war first hand as nurses in the VAD or Ambulance Corps, Jenny approaches it through a vicarious identification with Chris’s experience, even purporting to feel his agony ‘like a wound in my own body’ (31). In the words of Mara Scanlon, ‘Jenny absorbs and appropriates others’ passions, and, even more strikingly, unsettles her gender identity through a zealous identification with her male cousin Chris.’27 Jenny seems to perform the role of medium, linking the non-combatant to the combatant, the home front to the war front. By relaying the perspectives and experiences of male characters via female intermediaries, The Return and Harriet Hume refract masculine anxieties about the obtrusion of women into previously male-dominated spheres – war, politics, authorship. Jenny is a liminal figure, situated on the fringes of bourgeois femininity; but as a narrator she mediates experiences otherwise unavailable to a woman of her time, directing the experience of the war through a kind of affective vicariousness. In her reading of Jenny, Debra Rae Cohen points out that Jenny’s own experience of the war is mediated by the official and unofficial propaganda disseminated to civilians during wartime, which problematises her textual authority.28 To be sure, the fantasies of psychic access these two novels present, managed through female mediums and narrators, also point reflexively to the potential for unreliability consonant with modernist epistemologies, as telepathy’s fantasy of psychic transparency exists in productive tension with modernism’s insistence on the fallibility of human perception. Jenny’s empathy for and identification with Chris do not make her a reliable reader of Chris’s interiority, and in fact she often interprets Chris through sentimental and romantic clichés that highlight her role as a reader of fictions. Jill Galvan points out that women’s association with the feminine traits of sympathy and receptivity made them appear more suited for channelling in both spiritual and technological mediums. In her words, ‘The medium was a passive instrument, well attuned to the subtle cues, sometimes described as vibrations, by which the spirits expressed themselves.’29 Such beliefs grew out of late Victorian evolutionary thinking that women had finer nervous systems, and thus a greater capacity for intuition and ‘altruistic fellow-feeling’, capacities that also made them susceptible to emotionalism and hysteria.30 Harriet and Jenny are attuned to their surroundings and susceptible to suggestion, traits that enhance their spiritual receptivity. They both supplement their precarious embodiment and tenuous subjectivity with a vicarious inhabitation of their male counterparts; their attenuated subjectivity is co-extensive with an intensification of the power to feel with and like others. In Harriet Hume, Harriet’s ethereality is crucial to aesthetic transmission, for as Carl Rollyson observes: ‘Harriet is like a work of art looking for a body in which to incarnate herself.’31 Jenny’s desire for such inhabitation expresses itself through a spiritualist discourse overlaid with sexual longing:

27 

Mara Scanlon, ‘Gender Identity and Promiscuous Identification: Reading (in) Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier’, Journal of Modern Literature 40, no. 3 (Spring 2017): 66. 28  Debra Rae Cohen, Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 80–3. 29  Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium, 30. 30  Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 216. 31  Carl Rollyson, The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West (Bethesda, MD: International Scholars Publications, 1998), 68.

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‘To see him was to desire intimacy with him so that one might intervene between this body which was formed for happiness, and this soul which cherished so deep a faith in tragedy’ (51). In Part 3 of The Return, Jenny imaginatively reconstructs Chris’s experience on Monkey Island with Margaret, turning his idealised version of the past into a site of spiritual and romantic union. Jenny calls Monkey Island a ‘Magic state’, and describes in elaborate detail a fantasy of uninterrupted pleasure, an Edenic ‘before’, that is delivered in the style of English pastoral romance (49). Although the interlude is framed as a reconstruction of Chris’s testimony about the past, Jenny keeps intruding with self-conscious framing of her limitations: ‘Again I did not say that I had seen her’ (36). Jenny offers this consoling fiction as compensation for what she imputes to Chris’s internal landscape: ‘He was lying in a hateful world where barbed-wire entanglements showed impish knots against a livid sky full of booming noise and splashes of fire and wails for water, and the stretcher bearers were hurting his back intolerably’ (42). Although Jenny feels painfully ‘the passion of exile’ and the ‘exclusion from [Chris’s] life’, and especially invisible to him as a romantic object, she comes to believe that the traumatic wounds of war can be reconciled through a spiritual union between Chris and Margaret: There were only two real people in the world, Chris and this woman whose personality was sounding through her squalor like a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room, and I was absorbed in a mental vision of them. You know how the saints and the prophets are depicted in the steel engravings in old Bibles; so they were standing, in flowing white robes on rocks against a pitch-black sky, a strong light beating on their eyes upturned in ecstasy and their hand outstretched to receive the spiritual blessing of which the fierce rays were an emanation. (47) As Katherine Montgomery has suggested, Jenny’s ‘mental vision’ of Margaret begins with the language of the séance: ‘a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room’. Indeed, the scene evokes the trance-like states mediums entered during séances. Jenny projects a spiritual tableau in which Chris and Margaret are elevated to saints and prophets, a vision of spiritual and religious redemption that also reflects Jenny’s transformed view of Margaret. While Jenny initially views Margaret as a ‘spreading stain on the fabric of our lives’, she begins to see her as a spiritual being, her saintliness revealing itself from behind a squalid surface. The vision of Margaret and Chris as the ‘only two real people in the world’, the recipients of a shared spiritual blessing, reflects not only Jenny’s triangulated passion for Chris but her longing to make whole what has been shattered. In subsequent visions, Jenny transforms the strained interpersonal dynamics of Baldry Court into a spiritual drama, in which Chris’s body and soul are at war: I suppose that the subject of our tragedy, written in spiritual terms, was that in Kitty he had turned from the type of woman that makes the body conqueror of the soul and in me the type that mediates between the soul and the body and makes them run even and unhasty like a well-matched pair of carriage horses, and had given himself to a woman whose bleak habit it was to champion the soul against the body. (65–6)

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In this analogy, women are reduced to conventional social types that reflect a Manichean division between body and spirit: in Kitty, the body has dominated the soul like a conqueror; in Margaret, the soul is elevated over the body; while Jenny is left to mediate between body and soul like a carriage driver. The cure ultimately demands reconciliation – between Chris and Margaret, between body and soul – if Chris is to avoid living like a ghost between two worlds. Jenny’s otherworldly visions reflect a gendered universe in which women play out stereotypical assignments, either as ministering angels consoling men from the horrors of war (Margaret) or as decorative objects sustaining the materialism of the British upper classes (Kitty). In a vision that follows, Jenny imagines a scene ‘somewhere behind the front’ in which a fortune teller holds up two crystal balls for Chris to peer into: He is looking down on the two crystal balls that the old man’s foul, strong hands have rolled across to him. In one he sees Margaret [. . .] as she is transfigured in the light of eternity. Long he looks there; then drops a glance to the other, just long enough to see that in its depths Kitty and I walk in bright dresses through our glowing gardens. We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces on the floor [. . .] No one weeps for this shattering of our world. (66) West introduces the popular Victorian pastime of crystal gazing, which was supposed to afford the soothsayer, often a female psychic, a vision of the future. Chris’s crystal gazing yields an image of Margaret ‘transfigured in the light of eternity’, rather than Jenny, who feels exposed as ‘material seeming’ and exiled from his love.32 West also draws on the crystal ball’s occult resonances as a dramatic metaphor for the shattering of the protected, privileged pre-war world Jenny, Kitty and Chris once enjoyed. Chris has been transfigured by his reunion with Margaret, ‘englobed in peace as in a crystal sphere’, while Jenny’s world is shattered. This vision of her own world shattering prompts Jenny to conclude that Chris must be ‘cured’. In a departure from her earlier wish to reunite Chris and Margaret in a ‘magic circle’ of bliss, Jenny determines that she must restore Chris to reality, and by extension, to the front: ‘they could not take him back to the army as he was’ (71). At the end of the novel, the women collectively reject Chris’s right to live in the sentimental fantasy of the past, and agree to rupture his amnesia by showing him his dead son’s things. Jenny’s final glimpse of Chris is once again through a window, where she declares sombrely to Kitty that Chris looks ‘every inch a soldier’, and she concludes her narration by stating ‘My spirit was asleep in horror’, rejecting a triangulated passion for Chris with a sober embrace of the real, one with cruel consequences for the soldier (90, 89).

The Telepathic Modernism of Harriet Hume Harriet Hume is another West character who performs the role of telepath, an intermediary between seemingly remote psychic and social bodies. Set shortly after WWI, 32 

The Druids were said to use crystal balls and other reflective surfaces for ‘scrying’ or divining the future. This practice was viewed as threatening to the teachings of Christianity and was rejected by the Catholic Church.

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West’s difficult and obscure Harriet Hume (1929) limns the relation between modernism and the spiritual knowledge supposedly dispelled by discourses of modernity. Subtitled ‘A London Fantasy’, the novel explores the otherworldly both thematically and formally through the figure of telepathy, which enables West’s protagonist, Harriet Hume, to bring her mind closer to that of her lover, Arnold Condorex. Telepathy not only mediates the relationship between the two people –­ revealing their inevitable entanglement ­– but offers an analogue to West’s modernist practice, as a device for illuminating the fluid, intersubjective nature of consciousness. Both Harriet Hume and The Return of the Soldier adapt the language of modern spiritualism to an investigation of consciousness, whereby characters otherwise distanced by social, political and economic circumstances are linked through occult relation. West’s interest in telepathy lies in the way it affirms the permeability of psychic boundaries. Her use of this trope illustrates not only the persistence of spiritualism within the cultural imaginary of modernism but also the affinities between spiritual practice and modernist literary form. As Helen Sword argues in Ghostwriting Modernism (2002), even the most rationalistic and sceptical of modernist authors were fascinated by popular spiritual phenomena in their full range of expression and assimilated into their art references to and representations of telepathy, mesmerism, hypnosis, séances, spiritual mediumship and automatic writing.33 In an era of declining faith in orthodox Christianity and robust investment in scientific rationalism, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers sought to channel an unseen world not strictly confined to materialist and empiricist principles. In Harriet Hume telepathy becomes a modernist metaphor, a figure for the novel’s multiple, interpenetrating narrative levels and flexible free indirect style. West’s novel tells the story of Harriet, an artist with intuitive powers, who can read the mind of her solipsistic and self-serving lover, Arnold. Arnold’s soaring political and economic ambitions often involve the manipulation of Harriet herself, and Harriet works to unsettle Arnold’s aspirations, while making him doubt the sovereignty of his own mind. If other modernist texts make formal use of the exquisite sensitivity that telepathy literalises, West’s novel is unique in combining the trope of telepathy with experimental modernist practices.34 The book’s free indirect style, interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness prose highlight the forms of permeability that Harriet’s telepathy makes possible at the level of plot. Sharing with telepathy a heightened attention to form and to the process of mediation, Harriet Hume evokes a modernist model of authorship that emphasises the author’s exquisite attunement to other minds. While interest has resurfaced in this obscure, experimental novel after decades of critical neglect, scholars have overlooked the trope of telepathy and none have situated the novel within the context of the modern spiritual revival.35 Although West’s fictions have been read alongside developments in psychoanalysis, her

33 

In Ghostwriting Modernism, Sword makes a key distinction between modern spiritualism and occultism: ‘Spiritualism is not the same as occultism, with which it is often confused; whereas the latter promises ancient, esoteric knowledge to a select group of initiates, the former is accessible to anyone who can construct a homemade Ouija board or hire a storefront medium’ (xi). 34  We can think here of the work of Woolf, Joyce, Proust and Sinclair and the intimate access we get to their characters’ thoughts, memories, dreams and perceptions. 35  My previous essay was an attempt to fill this gap in West criticism. See Spitzer, ‘I Find My Mind Meeting Yours’.

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fictional universes also unite spiritual and material concerns and frequently portray fringe states of consciousness, which suggest that she assimilated into her fictions the more open-ended theories of the psyche that pre-dated psychoanalysis. Harriet Hume solicits a nuanced reading of the historicity, metaphoricity and aesthetics of telepathy, as well as a reading of the interrelated technologies of communication developed during the decades leading up to the publication of West’s novel, including the telegraph, telephone, gramophone and radio, that formed invisible channels between physically and psychically remote bodies. Harriet Hume uses the trope of telepathy to imagine subversive modes of contact across the borders of gender and class. As spiritual mediumship became popular among working-class women who found that they could raise their status through such practices, séances became spaces in which differently classed and gendered figures converged. Harriet Hume is a New Woman figure who lives on her own, supports herself as a musician, and has romantic relationships outside the confines of marriage. Her ethereal and intuitive qualities make her attractive to Arnold in the early part of the book: ‘Of all the women he had ever known she was the most ethereal. Loving her was like swathing oneself with a long scarf of spirit’ (11). Despite Harriet’s assurance to Arnold that ‘I will not disturb the classic relationship of the sexes’, her telepathy does precisely that by challenging the sovereignty of the imperial male subject as rational agent in charge of his own mind (37). Arnold Condorex, whose name connotes his ‘scheming predatory side and his kingly, even noble qualities’,36 is driven exclusively by the desire to ‘rise in the world’: ‘It dominated him, he was its instrument’ (57). The otherwise conventional portrait of a self-serving rake who misuses a woman on the way to fulfilling his own ambitions is complicated, however, by the altered states of consciousness that permit Harriet to access her lover’s thoughts and expose his manipulative schemes. Each time the lovers meet Arnold is seduced by Harriet’s ‘infernal witchcraft’, but he swiftly moves to explain away her enigmatic abilities by denying their authority. In its representation of the mind as porous and permeable, capable of communion with other minds, telepathy is an inherently subversive mode that brings subjectivities into intimate, and sometimes dangerous, proximity. While archaic and mannered in its presentation, the universe of Harriet Hume ultimately depends upon modern spiritualist conceptions of space and time – where psychic, social and geographic distances are imagined as vast but navigable. The term ‘telepathy’ never appears in Harriet Hume; rather, ‘supernatural arts’, ‘second sight’, ‘clairvoyance’, ‘mind reading’, ‘supernatural knowledge’ and ‘occult [. . .] eavesdropping’ serve as synonyms for Harriet’s psychic powers. The novel is structured as a series of five encounters that take place over the course of twenty years in which the lovers’ physical proximity produces intimate scenes of mind reading. Harriet finds that she becomes telepathic, spontaneously, when in Arnold’s presence. Romantic encounters become eroticised psychic events that give Harriet special access to Arnold’s mind, laying bare the complex mental world of the opposite sex. It is no surprise then that Arnold’s anxieties cluster around telepathy and technology, those invisible channels of transmission that challenge his individualistic and materialist thinking and make him vulnerable to Harriet’s readings.

36 

Rollyson, Literary Legacy, 67.

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While Arnold’s perspective focalises most of the narrative, Harriet’s telepathy affords her and the reader access to Arnold’s secret motivations, which she communicates to him after the fact. Arnold’s discourse is a lengthy interior monologue full of arch confidences, self-dramatisations and obsessive thinking about his place in the world: telepathy thus becomes an ideal device for ironising the reliability of his discourse, which we come to learn via Harriet’s telepathy is full of deceit and indirection. After their first romantic interlude, Arnold observes that ‘she wore a radiance that had been but newly applied, and stood taut with a tensity derived from some galvanic force that still electrified the air about her, and had not been dissipated by time at all’, as if the enigma of Harriet’s sexuality were linked to the mysterious forces of electromagnetism (23). Attributing this transfiguration to her troubling powers, he suspects that the ‘witch like’ Harriet is ‘in league with formidable forces’ and that ‘the whole world was furtively mocking one Arnold Condorex’ (25, 23). Harriet’s transfiguration is in fact the mark of her new powers of mind; she reports: ‘I had that patch of headache here; and just as I was when we saw those children through those windows, I was in your mind. And because I was in your mind I knew what your body was doing’ (27). In this scene of telepathy, Harriet’s mind becomes a sensitive instrument capable of extending beyond the material body, of penetrating his consciousness. In the novel’s polyphonous discourse, Harriet narrates to Arnold (and therefore to us) the sequence of his thoughts after he has had them, including his assessment of her house and its objects for what they reveal of her ‘utter lack of fortune’, as well as his plan ‘to enjoy Harriet till the last safe moment and then disembarrass himself of her’ (55). Rather than dispute the accuracy of the visions this time, Arnold confirms them, which reaffirms the validity of her discourse over his: ‘It is true! Every word is true! And it is a miracle!’ (32). In this scene of modernist epiphany, both characters experience a transformed understanding of each other and their relationship that is entirely non-verbal: It struck him that they were exchanging glances of more agonized sincerity, more desperately truthful reference to their mutual regard, than they would have shared had they been parting as true lovers. Could not something be done with all this honesty, with all this acute sense of each other’s being? (58–9) Thus, while modernist narrative is typically read as destabilising the authority of omniscience offered by classic realism, Harriet Hume’s telepathy serves as a stand-in for the impossibility of the omniscient third-person narrator in modernism while also registering the persistence of the desire for omniscience. As an alternative to narrative omniscience, then, telepathy satirises this narrative impulse toward transparency while offering a compensatory fantasy for intimate interpsychic rapport in a world rendered increasingly abstract and mediated. West uses the enigmatic properties of telepathy as a resource for her modernist morality tale, whereby Harriet’s knowledge of Arnold’s motivations to rise in the world at any cost propels the persecuting machinations of his own conscience, which drive him ultimately to madness and to suicide (although the latter is left ambiguous). Harriet’s telepathy not only exposes Arnold’s schemes to abandon Harriet and dupe his political peers, but it slowly erodes Arnold’s sense of his invincibility: ‘Where had he been infected with this monstrous doubt that rising in the world was not the supreme good?’ (63). While initially awed by Harriet’s powers of mind, Arnold begins to experience her telepathy as an unwelcome invasion, as if

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such non-consensual mind reading were a form of violation or surveillance: ‘It was not humane to spy upon him so’ (28). Harriet’s ability to inhabit Arnold’s mind and to observe his bodily movements from within raises questions about selfhood, privacy and volition, and about the permeability of the boundaries between self and non-self. Arnold conjures the perils of reading and being read by Harriet, who exposes at every turn his suspect designs: ‘She knows what I am thinking! She is letting the poor fool find what solace he can in the ridiculous position of being an open book which another can read at will!’ (183). Arnold accuses Harriet of trying to ‘pick the lock of my soul’, a metaphor for psychic violation that evokes anxieties of emasculation (161). He asks Harriet: ‘Will you never weary of spying on my nakedness?’ (197). Arnold’s anxieties about being read as an open book or picked like a lock evoke the erotics of telepathy, which imagines a permeable self whose thoughts, feelings and fantasies can be rendered visible to others. As he feels the walls of his mind becoming porous, Arnold exclaims, ‘I have lost power to negotiate even with myself’ (183). In the analogy between mind and text that such metaphors create, Arnold wonders if the self is merely a text to be read and interpreted by others. If for Harriet telepathy offers intimate knowledge of the other, for Arnold it marks a terrifying dissolution of the self. The kind of intuitive connection to the other that is rooted in a connection to one’s own lived body is essential to West’s faith in narrative fiction as the medium through which such connections could be forged. For West, representations of mind reading are part of a larger aesthetic, psychological and metaphysical investigation into the permeability of consciousness and the capacity of shared consciousness to destabilise categories of class, gender, age and nationality. West draws on telepathy and mediumship to model a capacity for interpsychic rapport between distant subjects, which suggests not only a continuum between subjects but one between routine perception and the more heightened states of attunement proper to telepathy. In portraying characters in Harriet Hume whose thoughts and perceptions run parallel and frequently merge, West promotes a utopian vision of consciousness offered by telepathy ­– a capacity for interpsychic rapport between subjects divided by identity and experience. In West’s fictions, mediumship and telepathy forge connections across distances, bridging seemingly vast gaps. Such practices share affinities with the novelistic styles of nineteenthcentury realism that aimed to render accessible the inner lives of characters. Harriet Hume’s optimism about such spiritual and narrative connection is tempered in The Return of the Soldier, however, by a modernist scepticism that emphasises both the fallibility of human perspective and the perils of sympathetic identification.

Works Cited Bonikowski, Wyatt. Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination. London: Taylor & Francis, 2013. Cohen, Debra Rae. Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002. ———. ‘Sheepish Modernism: Rebecca West, the Adam Brothers, and the Taxonomies of Criticism.’ In Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Critical Approaches, edited by Bernard Schweizer, 143–56. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006. Devereux, George. Psychoanalysis and the Occult. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1953. Enns, Anthony and Shelley Trower. Vibratory Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

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Freud, Sigmund. ‘Psycho-analysis and Telepathy.’ In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18. Translated by James Strachey. 184–5. London: Hogarth Press, 1922. Galvan, Jill. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Hamilton, Trevor. Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010. Johnson, George M. Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Luckhurst, Roger. The Invention of Telepathy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Massicotte, Claudie. ‘Psychical Transmissions: Freud, Spiritualism, and the Occult.’ Psychoanalytic Dialogues 24, no. 1 (January/February 2014): 88–102. Montgomery, Katherine F. ‘“Like a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room”: Mysticism and Modernity in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier.’ The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914–1945 10, no. 1 (2014). Myers, F. W. H. Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. London: Longmans, 1903. ———. ‘The Subliminal Self, Chapter 8: “Retrocognition”.’ Proceedings for the Society for Psychical Research 11 (1895): 334–407. Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rollyson, Carl. The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West. Bethesda, MD: International Scholars Publications, 1998. Scanlon, Mara. ‘Gender Identity and Promiscuous Identification: Reading (in) Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier.’ Journal of Modern Literature 40, no. 3 (Spring 2017): 66–83. ‘“Smoke and Mirrors”: Spiritualism in WWI.’ BBC Home Front, https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/articles/3DqRH2YfWsVVLVtcQqDwgTr/smoke-and-mirrors-spiritualism-inworld-war-one (accessed 16 May 2022). Spitzer, Jennifer. ‘“I Find My Mind Meeting Yours”: Rebecca West’s Telepathic Modernism.’ Studies in the Novel 50, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 543–62. Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting Modernism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. West, Rebecca. Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy. 1929. London: Virago, 1987. ———. The Return of the Soldier. 1918. New York: Penguin, 1998. ———. The Strange Necessity: Essays by Rebecca West. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. ———. The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911–1917. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Wilson, Leigh. Modernism and Magic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Woolf, Virginia. ‘Kew Gardens.’ In Monday or Tuesday. 83–98. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1921.

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

M

ay Sinclair’s aversion to formal religion, and narrow religious morality in particular, dates from her childhood and is well documented. Suzanne Raitt paints Sinclair’s family home as one dominated by her mother’s ‘austere Northern Irish Protestantism’ and quotes a letter in which Sinclair describes her mother’s rule as a ‘cold, bitter, narrow tyranny’.1 This same ‘type’ of narrow-minded, cruel and inflexibly conformist mother recurs in Sinclair’s fiction, most notably in Mary Olivier: A Life (1919) and Arnold Waterlow: A Life (1924), and Sinclair’s own escape – which becomes a method of escape for both Mary and Arnold in their turn – from the limiting strictures of this Protestantism came through much reading in idealist philosophy. Sinclair read voraciously, particularly in idealist traditions, and in 1917 and 1922 she published her own two volumes of idealist philosophy, A Defence of Idealism and The New Idealism.2 In both volumes she draws on the wide reading of her youth, apologising in the latter work for any omission of very recent idealist thinkers: ‘for years I was satisfied with Kant and Hegel relieved by Schopenhauer and Mr. Bradley’.3 Mary and Arnold, too, read Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer. They also read Spinoza, Locke, Plato, Hume, Schwegler, Buddhist sutras and Hindu Upanishads and the Vedânta (Mary); Spinoza, Berkeley, Plato and Aristotle (Arnold). It is tempting to parse both Mary’s and Arnold’s reading journeys as only lightly fictionalised versions of Sinclair’s own youthful quest, but there are omissions. They do not read F. H. Bradley, whose most influential work Appearance and Reality was published in 1893. As Mary’s life is explicitly covered from 1865 to 1910 and Arnold’s runs a similar course (he is born

1 

Suzanne Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19. Sinclair’s mother, Amelia Sinclair, was Church of Ireland, and her father, William Sinclair, was Presbyterian. 2  Sinclair’s philosophy hasn’t been much studied beyond its connection to her fiction, but it is important: ‘If May Sinclair’s philosophical writings had been her only writings, she would be considered to be a philosopher. However, she was a prolific and highly successful novelist and is known primarily as a woman of letters.’ Mary Ellen Waithe, ‘Twentieth Century Women Philosophers’, in A History of Women Philosophers, Volume 4: 1900–Today, ed. Mary Ellen Waithe (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 316. 3  May Sinclair, The New Idealism (New York: Macmillan Company, 1922), x. References to The New Idealism are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses.

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in 1863, as was Sinclair herself) this seems odd. Sinclair in The New Idealism speaks of her ‘years of devotion to Mr. Bradley’s Absolute’.4 She was also strongly influenced by T. H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) which likewise doesn’t appear in either novel.5 We should be cautious, then, of reading the two novels as straightforward accounts of their author’s philosophical education, but a more lateral comparative reading of fiction and philosophy can be illuminating in terms of identifying some of the seeming contradictions in both. This chapter aims to do just that: in a comparative reading of A Defence of Idealism, Mary Olivier, The New Idealism and Arnold Waterlow I will follow the tangled threads of Sinclair’s thought about religion, idealism and the ‘new mysticism’ and show how she draws on each for her mature philosophy. In both Mary Olivier and Arnold Waterlow the intellectual quest to understand what knowledge is, and what is Reality, is contingent on an understanding of idealist philosophy. In both novels, too, the first step towards a greater understanding of what God is or can be is an encounter with the philosopher who influenced much idealist thought, Spinoza. For Mary, reading Spinoza is a revelation: The God of Baruch Spinoza was the God you had wanted, the only sort of God you cared to think about. Thinking about him – after the Christian God – was like coming out of a small dark room into an immense open space filled with happy light.6 It seems likely that Sinclair’s first encounter with Spinoza was similar to Mary’s, in which after a confusing conversation with some evasive adults she fetches down the Encyclopaedia Britannica from a shelf, and looks up first the word ‘pantheism’ and then ‘Spinoza’: And yet, as far back as you could remember, there had been a regular conspiracy to keep you from knowing the truth about God. Even the Encyclopædia man was in it. He tried to put you off Pantheism. [. . .] Perhaps he was a clergyman. Clergymen always put you off like that; so that you couldn’t help suspecting that they didn’t really know and were afraid you would find them out. They were like poor little frightened Mamma when she wouldn’t let you look at the interesting bits beyond the place she had marked in your French Reader. [. . .] Who would have thought that the Encyclopædia could have been so exciting?7 Mary’s first interest in pantheist thought, then, is tempered by the reflection that this is not and cannot be the kind of God that her family members and her church want her

4 

Arnold finds out that he had a little brother who died on 31 March 1863, as his mother says: ‘“three days before you were born”’. May Sinclair, Arnold Waterlow: A Life (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1924), 68; Sinclair, The New Idealism, x. 5  F. H. Bradley died in 1924, the publication year of Arnold Waterlow, which is the latest Sinclair text I consider here; T. H. Green died in 1883. Because Bradley and Green are the only two of Sinclair’s idealists who were still alive when Sinclair, Mary and Arnold were each born, and they are not mentioned in either novel, it seems likely that there is an anxiety about using their work as sounding boards for Mary and Arnold’s fictional metaphysical questioning, which is often characterised by at least playful interrogation and sometimes scornful critique. 6  May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life (New York: Macmillan Company, 1919), 100. 7  Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 100.

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to believe in. She immediately decides that pantheism must be the ‘truth’, but it is a truth that the adults around her can’t comprehend, much as her tyrannical but in this instance vulnerable mother is scared at revealing that she is not fluent at French – and scared too of the young Mary surpassing her in knowledge. Arnold is less convinced by Spinoza on a first reading, although he is just as excited. The novel reproduces long quotations from Spinoza to show precisely which sections of the Ethics Arnold is engaging with, but then: One in God. And yet—and yet—— It was all a monstrous begging of the question. Spinoza didn’t prove God’s existence, he simply took it for granted. You could only know God as thought and as extension. But if thought and extension were as infinite and eternal and necessary as God was, why couldn’t they stand on their own feet without him? Because they would fall apart without God to hold them together? But on Spinoza’s own showing they fell apart inside God, and God only knew how thought could know extension. The enthralling, torturing problem remained unsolved. Arnold was deeply moved by Spinoza and deeply unsatisfied.8 In Sinclair’s two books of idealist philosophy, she constructs a ‘new idealism’ in which the Absolute, the Thing-in-Itself, or Spinoza’s ‘substance’ approximates to the Godhead, something Sinclair seems to have wanted since, like Mary, she became enchanted by Spinoza’s pantheism and, like Arnold, she became disillusioned with its failures and omissions. In her philosophy Sinclair works towards a new understanding of what Spinoza’s God could be, and how it could be understood. Her early fascination, and frustration, with Spinoza was followed by thorough reading of Kant and Hegel and an intense interest in T. H. Green, whose Prolegomena to Ethics was included on a reading list given to her by Dorothea Beale.9 Sinclair found in Green’s idealism an intellectual framework for her instinctive rejection of her mother’s theological dogma, and in 1893 she published a commentary on Green in The New World, her first paid essay, which Suzanne Raitt characterises as an ‘endorsement of idealism as a substitute for religion’; an early attempt to establish a kind of idealist pantheism as a surrogate for the repressive and restrictive Protestantism of her childhood.10 In this essay she says: ‘Idealism offers us at least something like a satisfactory solution of the problems of knowledge, of the nature of the ethical ideal, of man’s free will and moral responsibility, of egoism as against altruism, and, lastly, of immortality.’11 These were all problems that she would go on to explore, in more detail, in Defence and The New Idealism. Next, in reading Schopenhauer, she took on, to some extent, his attitude towards religion as evil but perhaps, cynically, a necessary evil – ‘the metaphysics of the masses’, a distortion of ‘the truth’ but useful allegory: ‘for mankind absolutely needs an interpretation of life; and this, again, must be suited to popular comprehension’.12 She took on with

 8 

Sinclair, Arnold Waterlow, 150–1. Raitt, May Sinclair, 30. 10  Raitt, May Sinclair, 45. See for example T. H. Green, ‘Essay on Christian Dogma’, in Works of Thomas Hill Green, Volume Three: Miscellanies and Memoirs, ed. R. L. Nettleship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 161–85. 11  Quoted in Raitt, May Sinclair, 50. 12  Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays, ed. and trans. T. Bailey Saunders (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), 4.  9 

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fewer reservations his insistence on the importance of the ‘Will’ as correlate to the Kantian ‘Thing-in-Itself’; ‘the innermost essence, the kernel, of every particular thing and also of the whole’, which idea would prove durable for her mature philosophy.13 In The New Idealism, for example, Berkeley, Kant and Hegel are criticised in distinctly Schopenhauerian terms: ‘Observe that in each system of Idealism some fundamental element of reality escapes the net. Thus Berkeley takes little account of thought, Hegel is not serious with sense; Kant fails to correlate them: all three neglect the metaphysical and creative will’; ‘Now if it fails to establish an Absolute Consciousness carrying and covering the totality of things, Idealism is done for’ (5). Sinclair’s philosophy, then, both aims to establish a version of Spinoza’s pantheist God that is more satisfying to the intellect than the original, and works to defend and rebuild Absolute idealism. She is doing so, as she admits, against the grain of the new modes of realism, pragmatism, empiricism and logical positivism that were emerging at the time that she was writing. As W. J. Mander puts it, her attempt is to ‘formulate an idealism that could withstand the “new realism” of Russell, Whitehead, and Alexander, a position for which she had great respect and which had, she thought, successfully brought out many weaknesses of the older idealism. In particular it had taught the need to take space and time seriously and not to dismiss them as mere antinomies.’14 Sinclair was adamant that idealism, if it was to survive, must ‘take Space and Time seriously’, as new realism did (x). This idea was her novel contribution to philosophy, and it asserted idealism’s claim to primacy even as it took on board ‘realist concern with the nature of time’. Emily Thomas summarises Sinclair’s argument thus: ‘against realism, Sinclair argues the only way to account for time is to involve consciousness. Sinclair ultimately posits an Absolute consciousness, and identifies this Absolute with the universe. As she also identifies the Absolute with God, her system is a kind of pantheism.’15 This original contribution to philosophy appears in her second volume, The New Idealism. This chapter, however, is going to focus chiefly on the first volume, A Defence of Idealism, in which Sinclair is, as the title implies, more on the defensive than the offensive. It is this volume where her reservations about theology and God Him/Itself are most explicitly theorised, and it is this volume too in which Sinclair devotes a section to the ‘new mysticism’ of Evelyn Underhill, a Christian mystic who was a friend and intellectual sparring partner. Sinclair read sections of Underhill’s landmark work Mysticism (1911) in draft, and the two corresponded regularly, sending their work to one another for comment and discussion. Sinclair also dedicated Defence to Underhill, among others (as E S-M – Evelyn Stuart-Moore, her married name, which she did not use professionally). For Sinclair, I will argue, idealism on its own is not enough. Her unwillingness to give up on the idea of God, despite her distrust of religion and in particular the church she was raised in, finds only part of its rationale in the intellectual ‘quest’ for a metaphysical understanding, and she adopts a more intuitive mystical experience of Reality to inform that more intellectual enterprise.

13 

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 110. 14  W. J. Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 531. 15  Emily Thomas, ‘The Idealism and Pantheism of May Sinclair’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5, no. 2 (2019): 138.

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Sinclair begins Defence with a critique of pragmatism as a ‘method and not a philosophy’, while simultaneously acknowledging her admiration for William James from the monist’s perspective ‘who hates Pragmatism and loves the pragmatist; who, let us say, abhors William James’s way of thinking and adores his way of writing’.16 She says that her aim is to defend idealism from the ‘healthy pluralists and healthy pragmatists’ (273), but complains that pragmatism, in particular, has already set the terms of the argument along the lines that monists are ‘tender-minded’ and pluralists are ‘tough-minded’. She calls this framing of the debate ‘sheer terrorism’: of course James’s audience are going to respond, mentally, ‘tough-minded? I’ll be that!’ (xi). She feels she must rescue both pantheism and idealism from the charge of tender-mindedness, weakness and implied ill-health. Part of Sinclair’s defence, then, is a reversal of the terms: If it comes to that, what about the Pragmatic-Humanist’s God who is so tenderminded that he cannot be held responsible for pain and evil, and collapses under the sheer emotional strain of his own universe? The God of Pantheism may have his brutal moments and his moments of unbending, but his worst enemies can’t say he isn’t robust. And there is no tenderness at all about Mr. Bradley’s Principles of Logic. As for the Mr. Bradley of Appearance and Reality, if he has a fault, it is that, in the interests of his Absolute, he carries hard-headed, hard-hearted, thorough-paced scepticism to excess. By no possible manipulation of phrases can you make it appear that Mr. Bradley is even soft in places. He is, in fact, a ‘tough’ whom one would have thought few pragmatists would care to meet on a dark night. Mr. Bertrand Russell is about the only living philosopher who can stand up to him. (xii) Bradley becomes, in Sinclair’s inimitable ironic style, so logical and so hard-headed that he could be a thug in a dark alley. It’s important to Sinclair that her idealist pragmatism is perceived as a tough and resilient one, displaying, both here and in her fiction, an anxiety about the logical authority of her ideas. She was right to worry, perhaps, that as a novelist writing philosophy she would be vulnerable to criticism. This is an anxiety she was only really to conquer in the drafting of The New Idealism. In the manuscript introduction of this work she says ‘I do not imagine for one moment that my amateur idealism is watertight’ and in the published version this reads ‘I do not imagine for one moment that my own idealism is watertight’.17 She may have been quick to revise this self-identification as amateur philosopher in 1922 precisely because Bertrand Russell critiqued the earlier Defence in just these terms. Sinclair was, of course, not the only idealist to receive rough treatment from Russell on logical positivist grounds: idealism was just too vague and not scientific enough for him. His first review of Defence, which appeared in The English Review in 1917, regrets that the unscientific Sinclair is after ‘ultimate reality’ in terms of Absolutism and in his second review, in The Nation a year later, he says that he still finds it ‘difficult to admit one

16 

May Sinclair, A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions (London: Macmillan and Company, 1917), ix–x. References to A Defence of Idealism are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 17  Manuscript of The New Idealism, May Sinclair Papers, box 22, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania; Sinclair, The New Idealism, xii.

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ultimate reality, a spiritual universal’, but he realises now that Sinclair’s insistence on this comes as much from her status as artist as it does from her idealist philosophy: As an artist having a preoccupation with philosophy, Miss Sinclair’s ‘A Defence of Idealism’ defines the bond between the two interests. Artist and philosopher alike are remote from the demand for action, withal absorbed in building out of the fragmentary, illusory data of perception a choate world, which, for all their fabrications, is essentially real.18 Sinclair’s need for a ‘choate’ monist universe is thus compared to the novelist’s need to narrativise; to create order from chaos. Russell’s two reviews are in the main positive, but the rather condescending relegation of Sinclair’s philosophical endeavour to a mere ‘preoccupation’ places Sinclair’s Absolutism firmly in the category of illogical and unscientific ‘tender-minded’ amateur. Russell’s first review of Defence identifies another stumbling block for the new realist approaching Sinclair’s philosophy in good faith. He critiques in particular the more mystical aspects of her Absolutism, and her use of the word ‘Spirit’ to stand for ‘ultimate reality’. What ‘Spirit’ might be, he says, ‘no one quite knows’ and ‘[i]f Miss Sinclair knows, she keeps the knowledge to herself’.19 The word ‘Spirit’ is used most often in the section of A Defence of Idealism which deals with the ‘new mysticism’. In this section Sinclair herself worries that mysticism is in itself disreputable: Now, it cannot be denied that Mysticism is suspect. It has a bad history. In fact it has two histories, an ancient and a modern history; and it would be hard to say which of them is the worse. Mysticism goes back to the most primitive of primitive times; it is part of our ancestral heritage, of our submerged and savage past. This past is the skeleton in the monist’s cupboard; for Monism itself is involved in this ancient history. That is why healthy pluralists and healthy pragmatists will have none of it. They abhor the taint. The monist is always suspected of some mystical parti pris. He is like a man with a history of drink in his family; he cannot escape the damaging imputation. (273) Of course, as Sinclair points out, not every monist is a mystic. But Sinclair herself, unfortunately, is both a monist and a mystic. The situation is even worse when spiritualism and the occult, often conceived in a popular vernacular as ‘mystical’ practices, are taken into account: As for faith-healing, palmistry, clairvoyance, clair-audience, automatism, mediumship, and the rest, they are still mixed up with such fraud and humbug and silliness, and with persons so disgraceful, so discredited, so absurd, that it is not easy to write about them in a work that is, at any rate, trying to be serious. I feel (to be disgustingly egotistic)

18 

Bertrand Russell, ‘A Suggestive Philosophy’ (review of A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions), The Nation, 31 August 1918, 231. 19  Bertrand Russell, ‘Metaphysics’ (review of A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions), The English Review 25 (October 1917): 383.

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that any reputation I may have is already so imperilled by my devout adhesion to the Absolute that I simply cannot afford to be suspected of tenderness, or even toleration for the profession of the occult. (296) Sinclair is clearly worried here about her reputation and about the way her philosophical ‘serious’ work will be received. Her ‘devout adhesion to the Absolute’ – note here the language of faith and the implication that faith itself is not rational or defensible – is already enough ground for her philosophy to be dismissed by the more ‘tough-minded’ philosophers who she imagines – with good cause as it turns out – will be reading and critiquing her work. She simply can’t afford to get mixed up with occultists and humbugs. But why, given the risk here, include this section at all? The clue to this inclusion is in Mr Godden’s analysis of Arnold’s intellectual character, in their conversation about Spinoza: ‘Why,’ he asked Mr. Godden, ‘does he get at your emotions that way, when he leaves your intellect unconvinced?’ ‘Why? Because you’re a born mystic, Arnold; and a born sceptic. You’ll never have peace. Your mysticism and your scepticism will be fighting each other all your life long.’ Arnold insisted. ‘I’m not a mystic. I don’t know what mysticism is.’ ‘You’re a mystic all the same. Your mysticism is developed in exact proportion to your logic. Hence the trouble. To get back to Spinoza. His Substance is simply Herbert Spencer’s Unknown and Unknowable. It solves no problems.’ ‘But it isn’t unknown and unknowable. To know the world in the form of eternity is knowing God.’ ‘But can you know it in the form of eternity?’ ‘I believe you can.’ ‘That’s your religious sense again. If you see it written, “Whatever is, is in God,” the statement goes to your head like old brandy. But there’s no logic in it. If you want logic read Hegel. But you’d better read Berkeley first.’20 The ‘religious sense’ and the ‘mystic’ sense align so that for Arnold, as for Sinclair in Defence, Spinozistic pantheism is an intoxicant, and ‘there is a history of drink in the family’, as there is in Arnold’s, Mary’s and May’s own family (273). Both Sinclair and Arnold feel that they must refuse intoxication and find a logic to satisfy both the sceptic and the mystic in them. Evelyn Underhill’s mystic thought was a seductive way of reconciling those twin concerns. In Mysticism she claims that ‘Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and just in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods’, and she goes on to posit that mysticism, with its emphasis on instinctive knowledge of the Absolute, can complete the work of traditional idealism.21 Sinclair examines this claim in Defence but is uncertain about its truth, in part because she is uneasy about this projected primacy of ‘instinct’ in Underhill’s understanding of reality. She is anxious to claim, in Defence, that the

20 

Sinclair, Arnold Waterlow, 151. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (London: Methuen, 1911), 15.

21 

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quest itself is an intellectual one: ‘The quest of Ultimate Reality is as much a necessity of thought as it is a passion of the soul. And the idea of the Absolute is not primitive. It is a very late and highly “sublimated” idea’ (277).22 And yet Sinclair sets out to reconcile her sense of the mystical with her idealist philosophy. Underhill herself was also intermittently uncomfortable with the category of mysticism. As James H. Thrall points out, she aims to present ‘empirical experience’ as her data for Mysticism, but it is difficult if not impossible to be empirical about subjective experience: Her distress was further fed by the at times all too apparent disconnection between the confidence of her public statements about mysticism, and her own inner qualms. [. . .] Even as experiments with occultism and experiences with mysticism fed her growing assumption of some reality beyond the physical, she was too much of a rationalist to have doubts.23 She was also worried about mysticism’s reputation, along similar lines to Sinclair. In the preface to Mysticism she writes: it is perhaps well to say something as to the exact sense in which the term ‘Mysticism’ is here understood. One of the most abused words in the English language, it has been used in different and often mutually exclusive senses by religion, poetry, and philosophy: has been claimed as an excuse for every kind of occultism, for dilute transcendentalism, vapid symbolism, religious or aesthetic sentimentality, and bad metaphysics. On the other hand, it has been freely employed as a term of contempt by those who have criticized these things.24 If ‘mysticism’ is a contested term, then, ‘those who use the term “Mysticism” are bound in self-defence to explain what they mean by it’. Underhill offers a definition broad enough that it is attractive to an idealist pantheist such as Sinclair: ‘the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order; whatever be the theological formula under which that order is understood’; whether the formula be ‘the God of Christianity, the World-soul of Pantheism, the Absolute of Philosophy’ does not matter so long as ‘the desire is to attain’ union with that ‘order’.25

22 

Sublimation was an important concept to Sinclair and one she develops in her ‘Clinical Lectures on Symbolism and Sublimation’, I, Medical Press and Circular, 9 August 1916, 118–22; II, Medical Press and Circular, 16 August 1916, 142–5. ‘All religion, all art, all literature, all science are sublimations in various stages of perfection. Civilization is one vast system of sublimation. The houses we live in, the pavement we walk on, the steamships, trains and motor cars we travel by, chairs and tables, machinery and the products of machinery are so many instances of sublimation carried out in the concrete.’ Sinclair, ‘Clinical Lectures’, I, 119. 23  James H. Thrall, Mystic Moderns: Agency and Enchantment in Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020), 30. 24  Underhill, Mysticism, xiv. 25  Underhill, Mysticism, xiv.

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Sinclair’s characters initially desire knowledge of this ‘order’, as Mary tells her brother, ‘I’d give everything—everything I possess—to know what the Thing-in-itself is’, and Arnold discusses his thinking with the Goddens:26 He had kept it hidden from his mother. He couldn’t bear her to know that he didn’t believe in the God she believed in. He was aware that this search for truth, for the ultimate reality, was nothing more nor less than the search for God, and that he would be restless all his life until he had found him. He could only conceive God under the form of metaphysical truth. But if he told his mother that, she wouldn’t understand what he meant.27 This desire, though, is never fully satisfied by thinking and reading. The intellectual quest can never bring fulfilment. What does work, for both title characters, is direct apprehension of the Thing sought, the intuitive and mystical perception of Reality that Underhill advocated in her work. In Mary Olivier this vision is directly linked to Schopenhauer, as when she sees ‘Reality’, and, she says, ‘God’, in and through the landscape she is contemplating: ‘While the crystal flash lasted “Wille und Vorstellung,” the Will and the Idea, were not divided as they are in life; they were one.’28 In Arnold Waterlow the vision is not conceived of directly in Schopenhauerian terms but is accepted with absolute certainty as a vision both of Reality and of God: Suddenly something shifted in his brain, the wave drew back, and in an instant, a flash, everything changed. He saw the same hills, the same green fields, the same white river, but as if lifted to another level of reality, and shining with another light; light intensely still, intensely vibrating. They were no longer spread out in space and time, but they stood as if inside his mind, in another space and in another time; his mind held them, and was inseparably one with them. At the same moment he had a sense, overpowering and irrefutable, of Reality, no longer hidden behind them, but apparent in them, the strange secret disclosed; Reality breaking through, shining through all the veils of sense; Reality present before him and in him, and stretching beyond him, out of time and out of space, as it was in eternity. God was here, made visible in the hills and the green fields and the white shining river.29 This is a familiar scene to any reader of Sinclair. There is a similar one in Mary Olivier, in The Three Sisters, in The Dark Night and even in her earlier books The Divine Fire and The Creators. Reality breaks through when the characters are looking at something beautiful, usually a landscape, and often, for reasons I have yet to divine, a hawthorn tree. The vision is characterised by light which seems to be both part of the reality of the landscape and coming from beyond or above it. The new level of ‘reality’

26 

Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 243. Sinclair, Arnold Waterlow, 153–4. 28  Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 254. Mary translates ‘Vorstellung’ as ‘Idea’ here, but more recent translations often render this word (for which there is no English equivalent) as ‘Representation’ or merely ‘Presentation’. See for example Payne’s translator’s preface in Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, ix–x. 29  Sinclair, Arnold Waterlow, 272. 27 

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(with lower case r) is eventually revealed as the real Reality (upper case R) that lies behind the veil of the visible. This is in Arnold and is God, as Arnold the pantheist is a part of God. This is where Sinclair’s pantheism and her philosophy intersect, and it is not just in terms of Reality as the Absolute, glimpsed only in moments and in looking at beautiful things. This Reality is also Schopenhauer’s Will, with which, in James Thrall’s reading, Sinclair remains ‘directly aligned’ throughout her life. Schopenhauer’s philosophy, of course, is not a philosophy of the Absolute, so Sinclair here, as elsewhere, is combining traditions. Schopenhauer’s creative Will, Thrall explains, has two aspects. On the one hand it ‘carries a metaphysical, universal dimension’, as in its appearance here as Reality breaking through. Its other aspect, however, ‘operates in what might be called a more traditional mode as a volitional force, or “instinct,” that drives the action of individuals’.30 It is this twin concept of the metaphysics of the Will as Thing-in-Itself and the Will as instinct or individual energy that most attracts Sinclair, and gives her a method for thinking through the ways in which a mystical subjectivity might be reconciled to a more intellectual and abstract understanding of ‘Reality’. Thrall sees her application of the individual Will as differing in degree to Schopenhauer’s application, however. He points out that in her philosophical writings as well as her fiction she ‘emphasized the will’s expression as personal volition, and, in fact, assumed a level of conscious control that Schopenhauer presumably would deny. Schopenhauer asserts that reason, intellect, or thought serve the pleasure of the will, so to speak, rather than vice versa.’31 Sinclair develops Schopenhauer’s concept of the individual creative Will so that it is no longer just an ‘instinct’ driving the ‘action of individuals’ but is something that can be carefully and deliberately harnessed for manipulative purposes. For example, Mary deliberately calls upon the ‘Substance’, ‘Reality’ and ‘Will’ to help her to repress her desire to go on a trip to Agaye with her neighbours. Her brother is ill and her duty, as she conceives it, is to stay at home until he is better. If she can’t go away, she reasons, it is best if she doesn’t want to: She tried to think of Substance, of the Reality behind appearances. She could feel her mind battering at the walls of her body, the walls of her room, the walls of the world. She could hear it crying out. She was kneeling now beside her bed. She could see her arms stretched out before her on the counterpane, and her hands, the finger-tips together. She pressed her weak, dragging waist tighter against the bed. ‘If Anything’s there—if Anything’s there—make me give up going. Make me think about Roddy. Not about myself. About Roddy. Roddy. Make me not want to go to Agaye.’32 Mary senses a new rhythm in the room, and perceives in the room and in herself a ‘black stillness’. Suddenly she does not want to go to Agaye and the ‘prayer’, if it can be called such when its appeal is to ‘Substance’, ‘Reality’ or ‘Anything there’, has been

30 

Thrall, Mystic Moderns, 129. Thrall, Mystic Moderns, 130–1. 32  Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 260. 31 

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answered. Towards the end of Mary Olivier, too, Mary decides that as she cannot be with her lover Richard any more, she should ‘will’ herself to not want to be with him. She does so successfully, and tries to explain it to him: ‘It isn’t the thing people call willing at all. It’s much queerer. Awfully queer.’ He scoffs, but when she then decides that perhaps she can use the ‘willing’ to stop him from wanting her too – ‘Supposing you could “work” it for him, make It (whatever it was) reach out and draw him into your immunity, your peace?’ – the process is once more successful. The conclusion to Mary Olivier is a controversial one. Mary has given up her lover and willed him to give her up in turn; he has married someone else and is not happy; all Mary’s friends and relations are dead or at a distance. Mary, however, is happy. As Leslie de Bont points out, what is important here is that through the sublimation of her desire for Richard, Mary is free to pursue her ‘idiosyncratic and interactive combination of religion, research and art’.33 She’s happy because she has renounced all her ties and her desires and she can now concentrate on ‘the grace of God’, her philosophical and scientific reading and her writing of poetry. She has got to this happy place through willing – ‘If you were part of God your will was God’s will at the moment when you really willed’, she thinks to herself – and through ceasing, at least in part, to intellectualise the quest: ‘She had never been aware of it before; she had only thought about and about it, about Substance, the Thing-in-itself, Reality, God. Thinking was not being aware.’34 Arnold too goes through this process. His first conscious willing is when he is very sick with double pneumonia and he decides he must not die for the sake of his lover Effie; he ‘willed to live’. When he talks to his friend Mary Unwin about it later he says: ‘I willed for all I was worth. Half the people who die needn’t, if they’d only make up their minds not to. They just let themselves die.’ There’s no narrative commentary here so we are left with these words of Arnold’s which seem to imply he believes he has power over life and death and that only people who don’t bother to exercise their will die. Mary believes his account and encourages him to go further with his willing: ‘You can fasten on to reality by willing, so that you can never get away from it. When you’ve given yourself up. When you’ve made God’s will your will. It can be done, Arnold.’ He is hesitant, but Mary explains that in giving up his individual will he is not really giving up his agency, he is instead exchanging a ‘weaker’ will (his own) for a ‘stronger’ (God’s).35 Mary here is an Underhill type character, who suggests to Arnold that he aim for what Underhill called the ‘Unitive Life’, the ‘orthodox description’ of which she cites as ‘the life in which man’s will is united with God’ and the less orthodox description of which she divides into two parts: ‘the metaphysical mystic’ and ‘the spiritual mystic’.36 Mary, as cipher for Underhill herself, is the spiritual mystic here, and Arnold is the metaphysical mystic. Arnold eventually takes Mary’s advice, and gets access to what he has called throughout her ‘secret’: ‘He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return.’ Nothing counted but the incorruptible desire to know whether God is not or is. 33 

Leslie de Bont, ‘Portrait of the Female Character as a Psychoanalytical Case: The Ambiguous Influence of Freud on May Sinclair’s Novels’, in May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds, ed. Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 66. 34  Sinclair, Mary Olivier, 376, 378. 35  Sinclair, Arnold Waterlow, 309, 286, 288. 36  Underhill, Mysticism, 413, 415.

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He must give up himself. This was the tremendous secret. This was what he should have willed in the beginning; deliverance from the self that grieved and longed and struggled for its peace. He gave himself up now. He willed his deliverance. He stripped himself of everything save the bare will to know Reality. His will waited in the darkness, effortless and still. Quietly, before he was aware of its coming, It had come. Something stirred in the darkness; he was conscious, again, of a queer, still throbbing, subtle and strange, as if his whole being were set to a finer pitch of vibration; then stillness again; then an incredible happiness and peace, and the sense of irrefutable certainty.37 There are deliberate parallels here between Mary’s willing to give up her self and Arnold’s. Both feel a vibration or throbbing and both sink into a kind of darkness. Once unity with the ‘It’ is attained, both feel intense happiness and both feel absolutely certain that what they have experienced is real, the quotation from Spinoza’s Ethics, for attentive readers, reintroducing that intellectual doubt in order to override it. Arnold, in particular, is triumphant, and knows that in giving up his intellectualising of God, ‘his metaphysical thinking’, he has attained the real: ‘the Self of self, the secret, mysterious Will within his will’. What is striking here is the language of certainty. The intellectual doubts that both Arnold and Mary had in their youth, as they were trying to understand God through reading in metaphysics, are dissolved entirely by the subjective experience of unity of God as mystical event. This certainty is more prominent in Sinclair’s fiction than in her philosophy, although in her ‘Conclusions’ to Defence, right at the very end, she does allow herself to call the ‘moments’ when ‘adorable Reality gives itself to our very sight and touch’ an absolute ‘certainty’ (379). In The New Idealism, perhaps in part because of Russell’s criticism of Defence, Sinclair does not use the word ‘mysticism’ even once. What she does do, though, is outline her view of the third level of consciousness, beyond ‘primary and secondary consciousness’, along idealist and pantheist lines. In the final section of the book, ‘Ultimate Consciousness’, she reiterates that Mind and Will (which combine to make Spirit), indivisible as they are, are infinite. Their reality then is ‘the infinite and ultimate Self, which is God’ (299). Or in other words: Our unspiritual states will be merely subconscious states of God. On the other hand our spiritual states will be literally part of God’s living consciousness. Our hate escapes him, but our love burns in him, flame for flame. Our spiritual suffering pierces to the very heart of God. He is joined with us consciously every time that we know reality, or create beauty, or will the good. If this be so, our spiritual memories will endure in God’s consciousness; all that is immortal in us will be remembered there. God will be literally our keeper. [. . .] The religious sense discerns it as the more and more conscious coming together of God and man. The beginning is when we know ourselves and all things in God; its end when God knows himself in us. (309)

37 

Sinclair, Arnold Waterlow, 316.

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The ‘serious’ work does not come to any different conclusion to the two novels. In fact, the language of both Mary Olivier and Arnold Waterlow is echoed here in Sinclair’s claim that we unite with God, or vice versa, ‘every time that we know reality, or create beauty, or will the good’. Every vision that Mary or Arnold has, where Reality is perceived breaking through the landscape; every beautiful thing perceived or made; every willed self-sacrifice for another’s benefit is a moment of unity with the Godhead, and after death the memories of these spiritual moments will be God’s memories.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Professor Christine Battersby and Professor James Connolly for their generous and insightful feedback on drafts of this chapter.

Works Cited de Bont, Leslie. ‘Portrait of the Female Character as a Psychoanalytical Case: The Ambiguous Influence of Freud on May Sinclair’s Novels.’ In May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds, edited by Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery, 59–78. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Mander, W. J. British Idealism: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Russell, Bertrand. ‘Metaphysics’ (review of A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions). The English Review 25 (October 1917): 381–4. ———. ‘A Suggestive Philosophy’ (review of A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions). The Nation, 31 August 1918, 231–2. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays. Edited and translated by T. Bailey Saunders. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915. ———. The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1969. Sinclair, May. Arnold Waterlow: A Life. London: Hutchinson and Co., 1924. ———. ‘Clinical Lectures on Symbolism and Sublimation’, I, Medical Press and Circular, 9 August 1916, 118–22; II, Medical Press and Circular, 16 August 1916, 142–5. ———. A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions. London: Macmillan and Company, 1917. ———. Manuscript of The New Idealism. May Sinclair Papers, box 22. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. ———. Mary Olivier: A Life. New York: Macmillan Company, 1919. ———. The New Idealism. New York: Macmillan Company, 1922. Thomas, Emily. ‘The Idealism and Pantheism of May Sinclair.’ Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5, no. 2 (2019): 137–57. Thrall, James H. Mystic Moderns: Agency and Enchantment in Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism. London: Methuen, 1911. Waithe, Mary Ellen. ‘Twentieth Century Women Philosophers.’ In A History of Women Philosophers, Volume 4: 1900–Today, edited by Mary Ellen Waithe, 312–16. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.

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Part VI: Religious Space, Time and Ritual Practice

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23 Sacred Ground: Orthodoxy, Poetry and Religious Change Jamie Callison

I

n 1920, The Vision, the house journal of the Anglo-Catholic organisation the Association for Promoting Retreats (APR), printed the following request on behalf of the society: ‘Give us a Retreat House on the outskirts of every town in England. In two generations we will show you a Church revived in vision and power and a nation with a new outlook upon religion.’1 The idea of an Anglicanism diminished in ‘vision and power’ and in need of revival is in conversation with the sociological narrative of secularisation. One version of this story describes how control of several important institutions had been wrested from the churches by secular states. No longer required to interact with religious institutions as a matter of everyday life, many one-time church members drifted from their congregations, drastically reducing documented religious affiliation.2 Various accounts have sought to situate modernism within this broader story, working to overcome the often unstated assumption that modernism begins where religion ends. By drawing attention to their sustained engagement with the occult, Leon Surette has questioned what was formerly the received wisdom that modernists, with a few notable exceptions, represented the vanguard of a secular ideology.3 Pericles Lewis, crystallising a number of arguments about post-Romantic literature and the modernist epiphany, has presented modernism as an endeavour, figuratively speaking, to repurpose otherwise defunct church buildings; in this reading, modernism is not so much an agent of secularisation as at once its beneficiary and critic.4 It fills the gap left by organised religion, channelling the emotions and pursuing the concerns that were once the preserve of religious traditions. While secularisation followed an inescapable logic, the experience of those who formerly filled the pews was not forgotten. Modernist texts undertook a form of ministry. Centring her discussion on early twentieth-century depictions of angels, Suzanne Hobson, too, sees modernist literature

1 

‘Notes’, The Vision 3 (August 1920): 3. See Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 107. For a more recent view, see Steve Bruce, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3  See Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 94. 4  See Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 19. 2 

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as a feature of a changed religious landscape represented by a ‘complex and variegated pattern of belief and disbelief’; in this story, modernist depictions of the angel are simultaneously shaped by wider shifts in cultural attitudes to religion and agents of the broader process ‘by which orthodox religion slides towards [either] magical [. . .] beliefs [. . .] [or] an everyday or secular register’.5 Collectively, these scholarly formulations resist the equation of modernism with disenchantment and track the persistence of religious concerns. Their point of departure nevertheless remains the decline of orthodoxy. While critics cast the occult, religious experience and ‘magical [. . .] beliefs’ as elements of modernism’s religion, the move away from organised religion is more or less assumed. What is distinctive about the retreats outlined on the pages of The Vision, however, are the insights they provide into an orthodoxy that was itself responsive to the cultural forces to which Surette, Lewis and Hobson attend and thus in the process of transformation. During a retreat, participants would leave their day-to-day lives and travel to a retreat house, where they would engage in silent meditation and participate in organised worship. Surprisingly for an Anglo-Catholic institution, the APR thus sought to recentre religion on a mystical or reflective core in recognition of the fact that, as William Inge, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, had observed in 1906: The strongest wish of a vast number of earnest men and women to-day is for a basis of religious belief which shall rest, not upon tradition or external authority or historical evidence, but upon the ascertainable facts of human experience. The craving for immediacy, which we have seen to be characteristic of all mysticism, now takes the form of a desire to establish the validity of the God-consciousness as a normal part of the healthy inner life.6 Modern spiritual seekers required immediacy in their religion. The mediatory role of the church gives way to a direct line to the divine in the form of ‘God-consciousness’. Retreat invites such figures into the church. So formulated, the APR’s resistance to forms of secularisation otherwise assumed in modernist studies is more than a reassertion of ancient tradition in the midst of disorienting social change. Within the Church of England, the retreat was itself an experimental religious practice that sought to produce a ‘new outlook upon religion’. Orthodoxy was, to recall Ezra Pound, made new. The present chapter attends to this process of transformation. In what follows, I want first to explore the nature of APR retreats and how they might be understood as experimental endeavours, before moving on to examine the significance of the suburban retreat houses in terms of the APR’s ‘new outlook upon religion’. I go on to suggest that T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets might be usefully considered a poem of retreat insofar as it adapted religious language to reach new audiences. In presenting orthodoxy as a modernist undertaking rather than a foil to a properly modernist religion, this chapter unpicks the connections between spiritual seeking, secularisation and the

5 

Suzanne Hobson, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7. 6  William R. Inge, [Introduction to] Light, Life and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1904), lviii.

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notion of a private religion. As the connection between ‘retreat’ and ‘nation’ in the APR slogan suggests, the modified orthodoxy to which this chapter attends stubbornly insists on its public importance, and these ongoing associations helped Eliot engage a largely secular readership in an attempt to think through the potential implications of an Allied defeat during the Second World War.

Silent Protest: The Experiment of Retreat The APR retreat was suspect to many within the Church of England. One contributor to The Vision claimed that to ‘those in authority’ the movement appeared to be ‘a mere recrudescence of monastic notions unfortunately revived by the “high-church” party’.7 ‘Recrudescence’ and ‘revival’ cast retreat as a form of nostalgia for medieval Christianity, with the Latinity of the former term gesturing towards the unworldly scholarship associated with religious orders. Anglican retreat practice was, in reality, more recent. The Oxford Movement, the nineteenth-century revival of Catholic themes and religious practices in Anglican life, was the originator. The Society of the Holy Cross, led by the Ritualist Charles Lowder, began to offer yearly retreats for clerical members of this nominally secret society in the late 1850s.8 Lowder had been inspired by the societies formed by the seventeenth-century French priest Vincent de Paul and his use of Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Given Ignatius’s and Vincent’s mixing of the active and contemplative lives, the aforementioned equation of retreat with monasticism is misplaced. In time, clerical retreat became popular, even required, in dioceses sympathetic to Ritualism.9 Yet something happened to retreat over the course of the twentieth century. In 1902, retreat was a salve for priests, providing ‘frequent opportunities [. . .] [for the] strengthening of the interior life’ and serving as ‘the best safeguard the Church can have against a Priesthood barren of the gifts and power of the spirit’.10 By the mid 1930s, however, there were fifty-three Anglican retreat houses across England and the majority catered to lay participants.11 The APR slogan with which this chapter opened likewise said nothing about ministers. Instead, retreat leaders looked to the mass market: ‘The object of Retreat is to awaken and strengthen [. . .] a sense of Vocation in every class and sort of Christian.’12 The re-empowerment of the church rested on not the development of a saintly clergy but rather greater or, more to the point, a different kind of lay participation. Through the connection with the laity’s inner life, retreat would facilitate a national restoration. The key battlegrounds for this spiritual revolution were the retreat houses themselves, which were to be found on the ‘outskirts’ of towns and cities. They relied on the comparative quiet of the suburbs to sustain an environment conducive to meditation

 7 

‘A Plea for Really Modern Thought’, The Vision 35 (August 1928): 5. John Tyers, ‘Ignatian and Silent: A Brief Survey of the Development of the Practice of Retreat in the Church of England, 1858−2008’, Theology 113, no. 874 (2010): 267.  9  Tyers, ‘Ignatian and Silent’, 268. 10  Quoted in Tyers, ‘Ignatian and Silent’, 269. 11  Tyers, ‘Ignatian and Silent’, 271. 12  J. A. Bouquet, ‘Retreat and Vocation’, The Vision 31 (August 1927): 7.  8 

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and reflection, while nevertheless depending upon urban populations for the requisite volume of participants. The simplicity and quiet of the retreat house speaks to what Andrzej Gasiorek considers a ‘widely shared anti-industrial critique that called for a return to a pre-technological world’.13 Retreat stands alongside a number of utopian back-to-nature movements throughout the age of modernism, including Eric Gill’s Catholic artisanal community at Ditchling, Sussex, active in the early 1920s, and John Middleton Murry’s socialist and pacifist Adelphi Centre, which was run from the Essex farm he purchased upon retiring from literary life in London in the mid 1930s. The quiet of retreat stood opposed to unhealthy economic activity. ‘[O]ur so-called civilization gets more and more complicated, more and more noisy,’ The Vision noted in 1932; ‘it is like one of those mills where the noise of the looms makes it impossible for the workers to hear each other speak.’14 Industrial modernity drowns out the voices of those closest to us, damaging our relationships with each other and with God. Retreat turned down the volume and restored what was important. The celebration of quiet also represented a departure from Anglican institutional practice. In the early numbers of its journal The Vision, Canon Simpson, the founding editor, opposed the methods of the nascent APR to the established bureaucratic competence of the church. He argued that ‘[it is] in such things as stillness and withdrawal that our confidence must rest, precisely because they are the clear opposite of the ordinary world notions of efficiency’ and observed that ‘[t]he talk of Committees produces minutes and resolutions; the silence of retreats produces consecrated lives’.15 To meet the challenges of secularisation, the Church of England could not, or so Simpson maintained, be run like a department of the civil service. It had to develop its own distinctive methodology and practice; quiet, The Vision maintained, offered this: God is realized most directly in seclusion and quiet [. . .] Looking back upon the old days it seems, indeed, strange to many of us now that we should have come to rely so exclusively as we did upon organisations, clubs, missions, – upon everything in short that is not quiet – for the deepening and extending of our Christian faith and life.16 In a world where Anglicanism was an option that vied for attention against different denominations, other religions and ultimately no religion at all, the Church of England could not rely on the mere habit of a churchgoing public. Indeed, modernity is often characterised by broken conventions, shifting habits and ruptures of collective memory. Given the commitment it required and the intensity of the experience itself, the APR saw retreat as a means of ‘deepening and extending [. . .] Christian faith and life’ in a way that might stand up to the cultural transformations unleashed by modernity. The quiet of retreat was not a mere by-product of the location of retreat houses, but a deliberately selected style. The APR practised silent retreats rather than making

13 

Andrzej Gasiorek, A History of Modernist Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 446. Evelyn Underhill, ‘The Need of Retreat’, The Vision 49 (January 1932): 4. 15  ‘Stillness, Vision, Service’, The Vision 5 (April 1920): 15; ‘Retreat and Progress’, The Vision 7 (August 1921): 3. 16  ‘Retreats for Children and Young People’, The Vision 10 (May 1922): 9. 14 

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use of religious conferences as some suggested. When T. S. Eliot, writing to a correspondent shortly after his baptism in 1927, expressed the need for ‘the most severe [. . .] the most Latin, kind of discipline, Ignatian or other’ he was gesturing towards a vibrant element of Anglo-Catholic practice.17 He would go on mostly silent visits to the Society of the Sacred Mission’s theological college at Kelham, Nottinghamshire, throughout the 1930s and attend organised retreats with the Society of St John the Evangelist, otherwise known as the ‘Cowley Fathers’, in Oxford and at Nashdom Abbey in Buckinghamshire.18 A typical APR retreat was undertaken at a dedicated retreat house and included communal church services and a number of short addresses from the director designed to inspire reflection.19 Aside from the addresses, practical announcements and the liturgies, the retreats were conducted in silence. The Ignatian formula nevertheless underwent wide-ranging modification. Originally, the Spiritual Exercises afforded Ignatius’s religious society, the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits, a way of discerning God’s plans. Over the course of a four-week period of silence and structured reflection, Jesuit retreatants categorised their concerns, separating their own wishes from a deeper underlying sense of mission, and left committed to a particular course of action.20 As a voluntary practice rather than a distinctive feature of communal life, APR retreats competed with conventional leisure activities for potential retreatants’ time. Aware that a calendar determined by economic rather than religious concerns left many few opportunities beyond the customary for religious matters, the APR developed flexible arrangements to enable those with limited leisure to participate. The weekend retreat was one such experimental form. The content of the retreat, too, had less to do with discerning a particular religious call and was more concerned with recovery and spiritual sustenance. It enabled retreatants to dedicate an extended period of time to religious observation. Ideally, the confrontation with silence triggered a reordering of priorities, which enabled retreatants to depart with a new sense of conviction. It was this deepened, inner faith – striking a parallel with the craving for spiritual immediacy that defined spiritual seeking – that the APR hoped would stand up to secularisation. It marks a form of orthodoxy in which emphasis falls upon neither ritual observation nor doctrinal adherence, but rather a process of inward identification. While retreat was merely one element of a religious life, the APR’s priorities present a striking contrast to the view of Anglo-Catholicism in the popular imagination as fussily concerned with ritual observances.

Serious Houses: Retreat and Heritage One striking feature of The Vision under the editorship of Miles Sergeant from the mid 1930s until the outbreak of the war was that the journal carried advertorials for specific retreat houses, involving photographs and a short description of the

17 

T. S. Eliot to William Force Stead, 10 April 1928, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot, Hugh Haughton and John Haffenden, 9 vols to date (London: Faber and Faber, 1989−), vol. 4, 128. 18  Barry Spurr, ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T. S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2010), 152–3. 19  Alan H. Simpson, Short Retreats for Beginners: A Handbook for Conductors (London: Association for Promoting Retreats, 1931), 51. 20  John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 37–50.

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house. Accompanying a photo depicting the chapel at the House of Mercy, Horbury, Yorkshire, for instance, the text explains that the house ‘stands in a very large and beautiful garden’ and notes that ‘Horbury is only three miles from Wakefield, and buses run frequently, so it is easy of access’. The weekend retreats were ‘very popular’ in the summer and, the copy advised, ‘people write to book their rooms months beforehand’.21 The House of Mercy was, in the world of the APR at least, a must-visit location. The relationship between retreat and tourism was recognised by commentators in The Vision. One contributor asked, ‘are we so poor that we can afford a holiday but not a Retreat?’, and the advertisements urged prospective visitors to combine the two, positioning The Vision in certain respects as a holiday brochure.22 A national or at least regional system of spiritual provision that existed largely outside diocesan structures came into view, even though initially retreat houses had been founded to meet the needs of given dioceses and came under the oversight and protection of the local bishop.23 These spaces, however, fell outside of or functioned as a supplement to the parish system, though The Vision was always keen to stress the benefits that returning retreatants bestowed on the life of the parish. Twenty years into the movement, a marketplace for retreats had been established and its business was conducted on the pages of The Vision. The challenge the APR and its members faced was not only finding a way to adapt Ignatian spirituality to the modern schedule, but also attracting would-be retreatants. As the history of pilgrimage shows, the conjunction of religion and tourism is by no means new, but the connection is newly resonant in the context of secularisation. Philip Larkin, for instance, assumes a connection between all three terms in his poem ‘Church Going’, which Pericles Lewis considers both paradigmatic of and a bookend to his approach to modernism and religion.24 The poem opens when its speaker, while on a break from a bicycling tour, enters an empty church for a quick visit. The deliberate flatness of the language at the outset, including the reference to the absence of a service as ‘nothing going on’ and the altar as ‘the holy end’, establishes the speaker’s hesitancies towards organised religion.25 To call this scepticism is misleading because that would imply some level of conviction; in Lewis’s reading, ‘superstition, belief, and disbelief all belong to a dead past’ and the verse hums with the ‘belatedness’ of religion.26 Lewis evokes ‘Church Going’ for not only this literary portrait of disenchantment, but also the turn the poem takes at its midpoint. Even while anticipating their falling ‘completely out of use’, the speaker finds significance in churches, describing the one he visited in these terms: A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies.27

21 

‘The House of Mercy, Horbury, Yorks.’, The Vision 72 (October 1937): 9. ‘Holidays and Change of Air’, The Vision 27 (August 1926): 7. 23  ‘Waiting upon God’, The Vision 15 (August 1923): 2. 24  Lewis, Religious Experience, 1–22. 25  Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’, in The Complete Poems, ed. Archie Burnett (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), 35, ll. 1, 6. 26  Lewis, Religious Experience, 1. 27  Larkin, ‘Church Going’, 37, ll. 55–7. 22 

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‘Serious’ in the sense of ‘weighty, grave, important’ is distinct from the appellations more common of churches such as ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’.28 The final stanzas are contiguous with the speaker’s initial secular mindset insofar as that which remains is attentive to ‘our’ concerns and has nothing to do with God. ‘Serious’ nevertheless speaks to a remodelled purpose for the church; it becomes, after the death of God, a memorial, at once necessary and important, to the human spirit, honouring our ‘compulsions’ and representing human hopes, dreams and ‘destinies’. While Larkin expresses ‘some skepticism toward the possibility that literature can take over the “power” left behind by organized religion’ given the aforementioned tonal flatness of the poem, ‘Church Going’ nevertheless recognises that religious change was afoot and capitalises on what would otherwise be lost, continuing work that in Lewis’s view had been initiated by the modernists. The modernists ‘sought to offer a new understanding of the sacred in their own texts’, he contends, ‘and in so doing they created a modern form of sacred text, charged with the meaning and power that seemed to them to have evacuated the church buildings’.29 The retreat, nevertheless, reorientates Larkin’s engagement with the secular. For the poem’s speaker, the church visit represented the opportunity to rethink the role churches play in our lives. Tourist visits rather than religiously engaged attendance open up new opportunities. Comparable acts of rewriting were not lost on Christian apologists. One way of thinking about the brochure-like qualities of the mid-1930s numbers of The Vision is as a call upon the tourist impulse to reimagine religious devotion. The development of a system of retreat houses, for instance, parallels contemporary work in heritage preservation and the religious and the tourist impulse often merge in accounts of retreat. In 1921, The Vision published a report of a retreat at Leiston Abbey, Suffolk (a site now stewarded by English Heritage): The ruins of S. Mary’s Abbey made a perfect setting for the Retreat held there the first week in September. The ideal those master-builders of old sought to express in perfect form and the vision which inspired their work both remain and are still for us, although the fabric is broken, the delicate traceries gone and windows and arches stand open to the sky [. . .] The spirits of those who had worshipped in that old building with its thatched roof in days long gone seemed very near and made an atmosphere beyond description. As we knelt in expectant silence awaiting the Message we had brought thither to hear we felt that truly we were upon holy ground. The loveliness of our surroundings, the perfect weather, the brilliant sunshine and moon-lit evening, the deep sense of peace and the silence broken only by robins and martins all helped us to realize more fully the joy of life which was the subject of the conductor’s first address.30 Far from representing a purgative silence, this partially broken quiet is filled with delight in nature and a connection with historical religious worship. The description of the aforementioned service amidst the ruins in terms of the religious fullness of the natural world is responsive to aspects of Romantic literature. In sketching out

28 

Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘adj.2 (3a)’, accessed 10 September 2021. Lewis, Religious Experience, 1, 19. 30  ‘A Retreat at S. Mary’s Abbey, Leiston, Suffolk’, The Vision 8 (November 1921): 7–8. 29 

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a pre-history to the modernist epiphany, M. H. Abrams, for instance, cites William Wordsworth’s early work, which, he argued, included ‘encounters when a natural or human object unexpectedly shows forth a meaning beyond propositional statement’.31 Wordsworth’s poetry explores a form of religious experience, recording and probing a material spirituality whereby objects reveal non-propositional knowledge. This potential rival source of religious insight is, in the description of the service, carefully incorporated into the Mass. The ‘Message we had brought thither to hear’, the celebration of the Mass, is enlivened by the presence of nature – ‘[t]he loveliness of our surroundings, the perfect weather, the brilliant sunshine and moon-lit evening, the deep sense of peace and the silence broken only by robins and martins’ – which calls to mind, perhaps, God’s creative power. The service becomes a thanksgiving for the ‘joy of life’. The ruins also called to mind past worshippers. The ‘spirits of those who had worshipped in that old building’ seemed ‘very near’. While present-day churches may be emptying, the modern faithful could reassure themselves by populating, via acts of memory and imagination, these modern scenes with illustrious personages of the past who had worshipped there. For Anglo-Catholics, it was particularly exciting to worship in an abbey ruined during the Reformation. The service re-enacted a recusant drama, putting participants in touch with the religious history from which denominational factionalism had cut them off. Insofar as this account appears in an official Anglo-Catholic organ, the service might well be considered an exemplification of orthodoxy, and yet it is a strikingly different version to that featured in recent writing on modernism. For figures like Eliot, G. K. Chesterton and Mary Butts, orthodoxy incorporated a worldview that insisted on mediation in place of directness; the communal over the individualistic; and the traditional rather than the idiosyncratic.32 It was in other words what Andrzej Gasiorek and Stephen Schloesser have described as a form of anti-modernism, which is often understood in terms of the capacity of modernity to engage in self-critique.33 Most strikingly, perhaps, orthodoxy often valorised forms of Christian integralism, the notion that the political and economic organisation of a society should be shaped by religious principles.34 Throughout continental Europe in the 1920s, James Chappel explains, the ‘central fact of Catholic intellectual life’ was ‘a sweeping rejection of the modern world of church-state separation, capitalist economies, liberal democracy, and the nation-state’.35 As a result, Catholic intellectuals ‘idealized the Middle Ages as an

31 

M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 390. 32  See T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, ed. Ronald Schuchard, 8 vols, Project MUSE, https://about.muse.jhu.edu/muse/ eliot-prose, 5: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934−1939, ed. Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard and Jayme Stayer, 15−55; Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Bodley Head, 1908); Mary Butts, ‘The Heresy Game’, The Spectator, 12 March 1937, 466−7. 33  See Gasiorek, History, 444−5; Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 12 (see also 141−72). 34  See Erik Tonning, ‘Old Dogmas for a New Crisis: Hell and Incarnation in T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden’, in Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, ed. Erik Tonning, Matthew Feldman and David Addyman (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 236–59; Adam Schwartz, The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 1–29. 35  James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 23.

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era of political and economic virtue’.36 In his 1927 Clark Lectures, Eliot concurred, presenting Dante’s work as a perfect synthesis of thought and feeling, and thus adding a psychological acuity to the perceived virtues of medievalism.37 At other times, social thinkers held up the state of England in the sixteenth century as a model to be imitated. For L. C. Knights, writing in F. R. Leavis’s journal Scrutiny, ‘the economic organization from which the bulk of Elizabethan social morality derived was that of the small, local community in which “human problems can be truly perceived” – an organization, then, that was not merely “economic” – not merely determined by “economic” motives.’38 Orthodoxy contains or even tames some of the most dangerous forces of modernity by virtue of its systematic status. It integrates and orders other spheres of activity, setting itself in opposition to what Charles Taylor calls the non-hierarchical ‘immanent frame’ of secular society.39 There was inevitably an asceticism to this politico-religious project. It demanded that ‘men and women [. . .] sacrifice their petty “personalities” and opinions to an impersonal order’, as Terry Eagleton has recognised.40 Indeed, Stephen Kern has shown how, for a range of modernist authors, Christianity enticed interest by promising a form of unification outside, over and above the fragmentary and the idiosyncratic.41 Eliot was likewise concerned with questions of authority and hierarchy. In his essay on Dante, he observed that ‘the advantage of a coherent traditional system of dogma and morals like the Catholic [. . .] [is that] it stands apart, for understanding and assent even without belief, from the single individual who propounds it’.42 This systematic outlook assumes a universe that is not flat and accessible to all, but rather graduated; the individual ‘assent[s]’ to the dogma and morals that come from above or from before. Retreat continues some of these themes. While centred on a complex interior practice, retreat is nevertheless a very public undertaking. Participants travelled to retreat houses to go on retreat together and later shared their experiences with their parishes. This is, however, mixed with a sensitivity to natural beauty and a feeling for human history. The retreat represented an attempt at accommodation with the cultural forces that had led would-be parishioners to long for what Inge called ‘God-consciousness’. Challenging Lewis’s claim that, for modernists, churches became museums recording forms of experience rapidly facing extinction, the dynamics of the retreat movement demonstrate the ways in which the museum or the heritage sector more broadly could be harnessed in an attempt to invigorate the life of the church.43 If, then, the religion of modernism is shaped by reaction to secularisation, the reactions discussed under this heading must also include forms of orthodoxy that not only resist modernity outright, but also betray its influence. 36 

Chappel, Catholic Modern, 27. See T. S. Eliot, ‘The Clark Lectures: Lectures on the Metaphysical Poetry of the Seventeenth Century with Special Reference to Donne, Crashaw and Cowley’, in Complete Prose, 2: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926, ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard, 653. 38  L. C. Knights, ‘Shakespeare and Profit Inflations’, Scrutiny 5 (1936): 54. 39  Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 38–9. 40  Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 34. 41  See Stephen Kern, Modernism after the Death of God: Christianity, Fragmentation, and Unification (London: Routledge, 2017), 1–21. 42  T. S. Eliot, ‘Dante’, in Complete Prose, 3: Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927–1929, ed. Francis Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli and Ronald Schuchard, 718. 43  Lewis, Religious Experience, 1–22. 37 

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Little Gidding: History, Memory, Religion ‘Little Gidding’, the Anglican religious community formed in the seventeenth century by Nicholas Ferrar on a site just outside of Cambridge and most widely known from one of the poems collected in Eliot’s Four Quartets, serves as a backdrop to the sectarian conflict explored in Rose Macaulay’s historical novel They Were Defeated, first published in 1932. The novel concerns itself with the religious tensions in Cambridge in the run up to the English Civil War. It examines how these political and religious themes informed interpersonal contact, juxtaposing the treatment the young, scholarly, creative female character, Julian, receives at the hands of two poets: the withdrawn, devoted metaphysical poet, Abraham Cowley, and the urbane, caddish cavalier, John Cleveland. While Cleveland’s seduction is the immediate cause of Julian’s tragic death at the novel’s close, the coldness and abstraction of Cowley’s behaviour and his eventual instruction of Julian in philosophy also come in for criticism, with one of the novel’s more worldly characters observing that Cowley had no time for women ‘[e]xcept they be constantly at prayer like his friends at Little Gidding’.44 The otherworldliness of Ferrar’s community, combined with Cowley’s ability as a male college fellow to move freely from withdrawn devotion to engaged university debate, recalls at once the jibe about retreat being ‘a mere recrudescence of monastic notions [now] unfortunately revived’ and feminist concerns about the devaluation of women’s work and, indeed, women themselves, in the religious privilege conferred upon silent reflection.45 In this guise, then, ‘Little Gidding’ stands at a far remove from experimental retreats discussed earlier. The historical example afforded by ‘Little Gidding’ was nevertheless important to the APR. In an essay printed in The Vision and outlining the history of retreat in England, the Little Gidding community demonstrated that, while the APR retreats were experimental in design and reach, there were clear precedents in Anglican history.46 The purpose of this essay stands apart from much of the work of The Vision, which typically concerned itself with the APR’s attempts to adapt retreat in order to better facilitate individual religious journeys, to enliven parish life, and to build up both the church and the nation through new forms of religious commitment. Worried about traditionalists drawing attention to the novelty of the endeavour, or else their wishing to use retreat as an opportunity to engage in religious instruction, the APR also argued that the mass provision of silent retreat represented a necessary adaption of an existing tradition rather than an outright innovation.47 Retreat is at once old and new, traditional and idiosyncratic, orthodox and heterodox. These possibilities inform the role of religious history in Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’. Throughout the poem, Eliot establishes parallels between present-day religious actions and those drawn from the nexus of concerns that interested Macaulay too. Reflecting on a visit to the titular site in Cambridgeshire, Eliot’s speaker, for instance, says: ‘You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.’48 In keeping with the article on the precedents for

44 

Rose Macaulay, They Were Defeated [1932] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 278. See Grace M. Jantzen, ‘The Legacy of Evelyn Underhill’, Feminist Theology 4 (1993): 94. 46  J. W[areham], ‘Retreats and the Centenary’, The Vision 53 (November 1933): 3–4. 47  See, for example, Underhill, ‘The Need of Retreat’, 5; J. Wareham, ‘What a Retreat Really Is’, The Vision 47 (July 1931): 6. 48  T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot: The Annotated Text, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 2 vols (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), vol. 1, 202, ll. 45–6. 45 

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retreat, these lines can be parsed such that present-day prayers are authorised or inspired by history. In the confusion of modern life, finding time or the commitment necessary for such acts is difficult, but these exemplars guide action in the present. Elsewhere, however, Eliot is less sanguine about England’s religious past: If I think, again, of this place, And of people, not wholly commendable, Of not immediate kin or kindness, But some of peculiar genius, All touched by a common genius, United in the strife which divided them49 Eliot’s ‘United in the strife which divided them’ characterises much of the action of Macaulay’s novel, and ‘not wholly commendable’ might well apply to her cast of characters from Cleveland to Cowley. The poem likewise emphasises the work of the speaker in making connections between the time periods: ‘If I think, again’. The gap between the now and the then, between the present act of worship and what preceded it, may well be greater than what is first recognised. Returning to ‘You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid’, the poem assumes synonymy between ‘kneel’ and ‘prayer’; the former describes the pose in which the latter often takes place. Yet kneeling is undertaken in other contexts too. One might kneel in order to bestow honour on a respected personage or following a dramatic event, the shock of which drives one on to one’s knees. This in turn widens the resonance of these lines. Is the speaker or his addressee praying at a site long dedicated to prayer or are they undertaking a prayer-like (or prayer-lite) activity at this place where up to now prayer had always been valid? In requesting or, indeed, crying out for the return of the faithful and fruitful prayer that appears impossible today, the lines are closer to Larkin’s ‘serious house’ than they would otherwise appear. The relationship between these options recalls the description of the aforementioned rite amidst the ruins at Leiston Abbey. In this, the history of the Abbey, the rich heritage that attracted and continues to attract tourists not otherwise mindful of prayer, was incorporated into the act of worship itself. Here the ‘common genius’ of not only those in and around the community’s founder, Ferrar, but also those who, like the speaker and the audience he addresses, live in Britain in a time of turmoil, is part of both the poem and whatever it is that happens while the ‘[y]ou [. . .] kneel[s]’. In service of her challenge to understandings of religious participation centred on institutional membership, the sociologist of religion Danièle Hervieu-Léger has argued that the ‘future of religion’ is bound up with the problem of ‘collective memory’ amidst a modernity that valorises change and assumes a certain redundancy. Hervieu-Léger goes on to describe the recollection of the past as an ‘essentially religious act [. . .] which gives meaning to the present and contains the future’.50 In keeping with this logic, the APR, and by extension Eliot, used cultural elements that typically fell outside the remit of religion narrowly conceived to reimagine how individuals, defiantly secular or committedly religious, might engage with religious tradition.

49 

Eliot, Four Quartets, in Poems, vol. 1, 206, ll. 20–5. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Simon Lee (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 125.

50 

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In Eliot’s case, as I outline in more detail below, Hervieu-Léger’s connection between religion and memory enables Four Quartets to offer consolation to even the secular-minded in the face of wartime defeat. The close of ‘Little Gidding’ confronts this situation with soaring rhetoric that interweaves voices from earlier quartets: Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always– A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.51 The allusion to Julian of Norwich in ‘All shall be well’ takes its place within the ‘grandest possible’ narrative that the mystic develops about sin and suffering, namely ‘that everything that has happened and ever will happen – whatever the outcomes – will fit with everything’s being “wel[l]”’.52 Taken out of the theological context of Julian’s ‘[r]estless inquiry’, the phrase may appear flippant, insufficient or even in bad taste to an unsympathetic observer.53 ‘How can that be true in the face of all this destruction?’ a reader might be led to ask. And yet the allusion gestures towards a body of religious thinking – alludes to a longer view and a sense of a greater plan – that might provide a measure of comfort when little else could. The phrase is at once hopeless and full of hope; Eliot’s caution resurfaces in his unwillingness to venture the latter without the protection of the former. This is a theodicy that can always be shrugged off. The balancing act between the two turns on an interpretation of ‘when’ in ‘All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded’ (my italics). Without the aforementioned doubleness of the allusion, Eliot’s ‘when’ would be heard as a simple relative: ‘All [. . .] shall be well’ when these particular conditions (the tongues, the knot, the fire and the rose) are met. In this normative vision, ‘when’ firmly excludes ‘if’; the speaker, like an assured prophet or practised soothsayer, explains to his audience, using a rhetorical, public style of writing, that the burning of the bombed-out city will inevitably – in the long run or at a deeper, more permanent level of reality – be transformed, signified here by the Christian symbols of the inverted crown and the rose. From this perspective, the close of Four Quartets is dogmatic, which is a term that veers between the imposition of ‘dogmas or opinions in an authoritative, imperious, or arrogant manner’ and is merely ‘consisting of dogma’.54 Eliot, sometimes known as the ‘Pope of Russell Square’, had to do with both senses of the word and there are hints of arrogance in his assured anticipation of the transformation. 51 

Eliot, Four Quartets, in Poems, vol. 1, 209, ll. 36–46. Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 46–7. 53  Turner, Julian, 11. 54  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘dogmatic, adj. (4b & 2)’, accessed 10 November 2020. 52 

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A commitment to dogma and doctrine need not, however, become imperious. Anthony Domestico, for instance, notes that The Criterion treated Karl Barth’s work as an exemplar of a ‘living theology’; that is, ‘not just theology that affects, and is affected by, lived experience’ but also – and perhaps counter-intuitively, given Barth’s unwavering insistence on the primacy of revelation – ‘theology that acknowledges its own provisional nature’.55 The softer, more self-aware perspective helps us hear ‘when’ differently. It functions as a ‘reference to a future time’ and thus a form of strained hope.56 Instead of dictating to a despairing country that ‘All [. . .] shall be well’ so long as one accepts some basic doctrinal principles – a notion at a far remove from what Julian understood herself to be doing – the voice becomes gentle, conciliatory, striving for common ground. The speaker positions himself alongside the reader, and together in solidarity the speaker and reader look out at the burning city. Both parties wait and watch for a transformation that they are all too well aware might never come. The poem attempts to console while recognising the impropriety and futility of imposing dogmatic demands on a populace living in a changed world. This allusion transforms medieval mysticism into a form of cultural heritage akin to the ruined abbey discussed earlier. Clearly, for those who subscribe to Julian’s theodicy, ‘Little Gidding’ ends on a metaphysical note. Earlier in Four Quartets, Eliot had tried to convey contemporary wartime events in a metaphysical register only to dismiss his efforts. Perhaps here, for the religiously minded reader at least, it finally comes off. For a reader like Larkin’s bicyclist, Eliot’s religious allusiveness works not spatially, from earth to heaven, but temporally, from the present back through the past to produce what Hervieu-Léger called the ‘essentially religious act’ of memory, while also looking to the future in hope. Merely recollecting the religious wars of the seventeenth century fills the present with significance that the intensity of the wartime Blitz experience, the focus on the immediate threat of explosions and the need to stay safe, risks emptying out. This moment of fullness, what Eliot elsewhere called a ‘lifetime burning in every moment’, is rich with the past, present and future; the history that helped make prayer ‘valid’ in the here and now is envisioned as not a form of authoritarian sanction akin to what Roger Luckhurst describes as Eliot’s ‘disciplinarian religious belief that curtails the radicalism of modernisms’, but rather a sense of religious community with the living and the dead.57 Institutional religions underwent a series of modernisations in the twentieth century. This is, perhaps, most striking in what is known as Anglican or Roman Catholic modernism, which, as one practitioner explained, assumed the ‘possibility of a synthesis between the essential truth of [. . .] religion and the essential truth of modernity’.58 Fundamentalist resistance to, alongside orthodoxy’s integralist critiques of, modernity are also responses to such processes, even if in each the value assigned to modernisation is different. As part of this broader process of change, the perspective of individual

55 

Anthony Domestico, Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 29–30. 56  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘when, adv. (conj. and n.) (4b)’, accessed 10 November 2020. 57  Eliot, Four Quartets, in Poems, vol. 1, 191, l. 23; Roger Luckhurst, ‘Religion, Psychical Research, Spiritualism, and the Occult’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 444. 58  George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), 5.

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believers shifted, too, in various ways, from the recognition that to practise one particular religion is also to refuse the option of no religion or of other religions, to the requirement for a fuller, more authentic engagement with one’s chosen religion. The retreat, as I have argued throughout, reflected the mystical impulses at work within this new religious outlook. Yet, it was initiated by the APR, an organisation rooted in Anglo-Catholicism, which was associated, in the popular imagination at least, with an emphasis on the outward markers of Christian observance, particularly in matters of ritual and worship. Nevertheless, under the leadership of the APR, retreat continued as a reflective practice undertaken in silence and thus avoided becoming merely a forum for adult religious education. As such, retreat not only remained open to different constituencies within the Church of England, but also became a genuinely ecumenical undertaking. This chapter suggests that Four Quartets betrays a similar openness. Like the APR, the poem is clearly conversant with aspects of the Christian tradition, but it assembles these elements in new ways in order to speak to an audience far broader than its sources might suggest were possible. Going beyond the mere assertion of a religious orthodoxy, Four Quartets reimagines that orthodoxy and confers upon it a new purpose. Retreat and Eliot’s relationship with it helps to re-situate modernism and religion. While writing on this topic has often concerned itself with the sociological narrative of secularisation, recent post-secular theory, for instance, has pursued the changes associated with the emergence of the secular back far earlier in time, whether that be to medieval nominalism, the Reformation or the Enlightenment.59 The grander pedigree has allowed the secular to do more conceptual work; to become, that is, not merely a relatively late process largely independent of and outside orthodoxy, but a principle at work within orthodoxy itself, reshaping and remaking it. The emphasis placed here on the mystical, the need for a religion to minister to the creative and emotive life, in the form of retreat is one such emergent theme. The relationship between modernism and religion does not, then, begin after the end of institutional religion. The transformation of orthodoxy is as important to the story of modernism and religion as the rise of new religions and no religion alike.

Works Cited Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971. Anonymous. ‘Holidays and Change of Air.’ The Vision 27 (August 1926): 4–7. Anonymous. ‘The House of Mercy, Horbury, Yorks.’ The Vision 72 (October 1937): 8–9. Anonymous. ‘Notes.’ The Vision 3 (August 1920): 1–3. Anonymous. ‘A Plea for Really Modern Thought.’ The Vision 35 (August 1928): 1–5. Anonymous. ‘Retreat and Progress.’ The Vision 7 (August 1921): 1–3. Anonymous. ‘A Retreat at S. Mary’s Abbey, Leiston, Suffolk.’ The Vision 8 (November 1921): 7–8. Anonymous. ‘Retreats for Children and Young People.’ The Vision 10 (May 1922): 9–13.

59 

See, for example, Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Luce Giard, trans. Michael B. Smith, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 2015), vol. 2, 1–22; Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 1–26.

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Anonymous. ‘Stillness, Vision, Service.’ The Vision 5 (April 1920): 14–17. Anonymous. ‘Waiting upon God.’ The Vision 15 (August 1923): 1–3. Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967. Bouquet, J. A. ‘Retreat and Vocation.’ The Vision 31 (August 1927): 6–10. Bruce, Steve. Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Butts, Mary. ‘The Heresy Game.’ The Spectator, 12 March 1937, 466−7. Chappel, James. Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Chesterton, Gilbert K. Orthodoxy. London: Bodley Head, 1908. de Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Edited by Luce Giard. Translated by Michael B. Smith. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 2015. Domestico, Anthony. Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. Edited by Ronald Schuchard. 8 vols. Project MUSE, https://about.muse.jhu.edu/muse/eliot-prose (accessed 17 May 2022). ———. The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Edited by Valerie Eliot, Hugh Haughton and John Haffenden. 9 vols to date. London: Faber and Faber, 1989−. ———. The Poems of T. S. Eliot: The Annotated Text. Edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. 2 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 2015. Gasiorek, Andrzej. A History of Modernist Literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. Religion as a Chain of Memory. Translated by Simon Lee. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Hobson, Suzanne. Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Inge, William R. [Introduction to] Light, Life and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages. London: Methuen, 1904. Jantzen, Grace M. ‘The Legacy of Evelyn Underhill.’ Feminist Theology 4 (1993): 79–100. Kern, Stephen. Modernism after the Death of God: Christianity, Fragmentation, and Unification. London: Routledge, 2017. Knights, L. C. ‘Shakespeare and Profit Inflations.’ Scrutiny 5 (1936): 48–60. Larkin, Philip. ‘Church Going.’ In The Complete Poems. Edited by Archie Burnett, 35–7. London: Faber and Faber, 2013. 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, 2010. Macaulay, Rose. They Were Defeated. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Schloesser, Stephen. Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Schwartz, Adam. The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005. Simpson, Alan H. Short Retreats for Beginners: A Handbook for Conductors. London: Association for Promoting Retreats, 1931.

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Spurr, Barry. ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T. S. Eliot and Christianity. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2010. Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Tonning, Erik. ‘Old Dogmas for a New Crisis: Hell and Incarnation in T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden.’ In Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, edited by Erik Tonning, Matthew Feldman and David Addyman, 236–59. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Turner, Denys. Julian of Norwich, Theologian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Tyers, John. ‘Ignatian and Silent: A Brief Survey of the Development of the Practice of Retreat in the Church of England, 1858−2008.’ Theology 113, no. 874 (2010): 267−75. Tyrrell, George. Christianity at the Cross-Roads. London: Longmans, Green, 1910. Underhill, Evelyn. ‘The Need of Retreat.’ The Vision 49 (January 1932): 3–7. Wareham, J. ‘Retreats and the Centenary.’ The Vision 53 (November 1933): 3–5. ———. ‘What a Retreat Really Is.’ The Vision 47 (July 1931): 3–6.

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24 Liminal Spaces and Spiritual Practice in Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison Elizabeth Anderson

Introduction

S

patiality has become increasingly important to modernist studies (as to literary studies more broadly), but space in terms of religious practice is under-researched in the field. This chapter considers the intersection of liminal spaces and ritual practices in a diverse body of texts from Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison. Following an increasing interest in ideas of the everyday within modernist studies, this chapter explores how these writers illustrate the ways ritual is not tied to transcendence, but known in relation to familiar places and experience. Kathleen Stewart describes the practices, places and connections of daily life as refrains that allow us to live, contributing to the worlding of the everyday. Although Stewart does not class her ‘refrains’ as rituals, their repetitive, deliberate nature aligns them with ritual.1 Ritual allows the accumulation of affect to inhere in particular places and practices. Goodison, Hulme and Mitchison have different religious positionings themselves, but all engage with religious tropes and traditions in their work. The chapter engages with a variety of ritual modes, from Mitchison’s imagined reconstruction of ancient history to Hulme’s evocation of Māori traditions, to Goodison’s invocations of Jamaican syncretism. Rivers, shorelines, mountains and the built environment become places for ritualised encounters that speak to the intersection of transcendence and immanence, of alterity and recognition that forms the particular modes of spirituality in this work. These writers themselves have somewhat liminal positions in relationship to modernist studies, although all of them have engaged with the stylistic and genre innovations associated with literary modernism. Their work contributes to a broader and more nuanced understanding of the workings of religion in modernism. This chapter, then, is in dialogue with other work in the field that attends to cross-cultural readings of spiritual traditions, as called for in Susan Stanford Friedman’s invitation

1 

Kathleen Stewart, ‘Afterword: Worlding Refrains’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 339.

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to ‘juxtapos[e] writers from different parts of the world who emerged out of different religious cultures in the context of larger social and political conditions’.2

Placed Ritual In his book More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (2011), Manuel A. Vásquez traces the turn to materiality in the study of religion, focusing on embodiment, practice and emplacement. This work is particularly helpful in drawing together the concerns of this chapter’s exploration of ritual in modernist texts. Vásquez’s work can be situated in the discipline’s turn to lived religion, against the discipline’s historic privileging of doctrine or sacred texts. Vásquez argues for a non-reductive materialist stance, which refuses the Durkheimian view that religion is purely socially constructed yet also resists a supernatural view of the sacred. He avoids this dichotomy by, for example, his reading of Lefebvre’s take on absolute space as ‘a matter of transcendence within history, the paradoxical insertion of u-topia (a place that is a non-place in the ordinary sense) by emplaced bodies’.3 This gives us an understanding of how the sacred can be found within the everyday.4 Place has received significant attention in religious studies, long before what we might call the spatial turn across the humanities. Vásquez traces this back to Émile Durkheim’s work in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), in which he develops an understanding of religion as concerned with the boundaries between the sacred and the profane. However, Vásquez critiques Durkheim along with later scholars for being insufficiently materialist in their approaches and, most significantly, not attending to environment in their formulations of place. He argues that a materialist analysis of religious emplacement must always attend to ecology and the ways in which the wider environment shapes the agency of subjects, again refusing the dichotomy of social construction and materialist approaches: ‘Sacralization of a place is a complex process that cannot be reduced to geophysical properties afforded to the believer. Nor can it be understood as a purely social and semiotic act. It is rather an interplay among multiple materialities: social construction and the environment afford each other.’5

2 

Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison’, in The New Modernist Studies, ed. Douglas Mao (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 93. My work is also situated in the expanded temporal frame advocated by Friedman, among others; see Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Madelyn Detloff, The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 3  Manuel A. Vásquez, More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 284. 4  A more theological approach to a material formulation of transcendence can be found in the work of Mayra Rivera, who argues that ‘God is irreducibly Other, always beyond our grasp. But not beyond our touch’, with a relational transcendence that can be found ‘within creation and between creatures’: Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 2. For further discussion of material mysticism and the everyday sacred, see Elizabeth Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1–7 and Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 71–7, 89–113. 5  Vásquez, More Than Belief, 317.

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Vásquez draws on the work of Thomas Tweed and Tim Ingold to refine a Heideggerian dasein, or being-in-the-world, that considers the enmeshed agency of human persons and wider ecology.6 Tweed emphasises the importance of place in the practices of religions as he uses the terms ‘crossing’ and ‘dwelling’ to indicate different aspects of religious impulses: ‘Religions [. . .] involve finding one’s place and moving through space.’7 Tweed’s work emphasises a dynamic view of place that impacts on human agency. However, Vásquez and Tweed neglect the philosophies of Indigenous knowledges that express a fuller view of being-in-the-world in terms of a dynamic understanding of place as lively, agentic and relational.8 In As We Have Always Done (2017), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explores how sovereignty is intertwined with subjectivity: both are formed in relation: ‘[M]y nation is not just composed of Nishnaabeg. It is a series of radiating relationships with plant nations, animal nations, insects, bodies of water, air, soil, and spiritual beings in addition to the Indigenous nations with whom we share parts of our territory.’9 These networks of relation are not only spatial but also temporal, shaping a worldview in which (non-linear) time and place are interconnected: ‘My Ancestors are not in the past. The spiritual world does not exist in some mystical realm. These forces and beings are right here beside.’10 Writing in a similar vein, Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts uses the term ‘Place-Thought’ to indicate the intelligent agency at work in the land: ‘Place-Thought is the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.’11 These dynamic views of place as shaping agency and more-than-human subjectivity are crucial for indicating the complex dynamics at play when we consider ritual’s role in materialist understandings of religion. The focus on embodied practice brings us directly to ritual. Catherine Bell consistently argues for the legibility of spaces and rituals. She advances a performance view of ritual, which focuses on the production of meaning in the context of embodied action: As symbols, geographic places are thought to be more than mere arbitrary sites where something important happens or happened in the past. Somehow the distinctive landscape, interiors, or the events that transpired there serve to imbue the site with a significance that can evoke emotional associations for those who visit there.12

 6 

Vásquez, More Than Belief, 289, 318. Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006), 74.  8  For a critique of how anthropology and related disciplines in the Western academy have failed to account for Indigenous knowledges in their theorisations of culture and relational ontologies, see Zoe Todd, ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word for Colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 4–22.  9  Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 58. 10  Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 192–3. 11  Vanessa Watts, ‘Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!)’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 21. See also Vine Deloria Jr, God Is Red: A Native View of Religion [1973] (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003), 121. 12  Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 262.  7 

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Bell’s work resonates with accounts of sacred space that emphasise the layers of memory and history: ‘Memory embedded in place, however, involves more than simply any one personal story. There are the wider and deeper narrative currents in a place that gather together all those who have ever lived there.’13 What is neglected in these descriptions of meaningful place is the sense of liveliness or agency of the environment itself. Scholars like Bell and Sheldrake emphasise human action and interpretation over and against the agency of the places themselves, in interaction with (human-) being-in-the-world. Bell privileges the symbolic aspects of place, effectively neglecting materialities and their agencies and downplaying embodiment. In the analysis of the interplay of ritual and place in the literature that follows, I rely on a performative view of ritual but aim to attend more fully to the complexities of a lively ecology. Before I turn to the texts that are my primary concern in this chapter, I want to say a brief word on interpretation. As I have just outlined, many religious studies scholars lean towards an understanding of ritual, and religion more broadly, as analogous to texts and ready for interpretation or decoding: ‘It is appropriate to think of places as texts, layered with meaning. Every place has an excess of meaning beyond what can be seen or understood at any one time.’14 Some scholars, following Durkheim, will see rituals as reducible to social constructions and others, following Mircea Eliade or theological traditions (like Sheldrake), will ground their interpretations in a sense of ineffable transcendence or the supernatural. Vásquez critiques these approaches as flattening the significance of the material reality of embodied religious practice. As Vásquez reminds us, ‘texts are always the result of (and we always meet them through) practices of production and consumption’.15 For literary scholars the text analogy for ritual (and, indeed, place) can be quite productive, but we must not lose sight of its materiality. In approaching interpretation of religion in literary texts, we face the materiality of the text itself: its form, the manner of its production and consumption, its various contextual histories. Yet texts also engage with external materialities and offer representations of, for example, embodied practices in particular places. This doubling, text as text and the representations offered by texts, is important for our interpretation (itself an embodied practice).

Naomi Mitchison Like many of her generation and class (e.g. Virginia Woolf), Naomi Mitchison (née Haldane) was raised in an agnostic intellectual household. Yet while she resisted theism and the religious cultures of her own day, she was endlessly fascinated by the human quest for meaning and the ways in which ritual contained and expressed emotion and created community.16 These concerns are evident across her substantial written oeuvre, from her early novels, stories and plays of the 1920s to the late story cycle Early in Orcadia (1987). In her historical fiction, Mitchison was intent on exploring societies on the cusp of change or those in which heterogeneous elements mingled. Perhaps her best-known novel, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) explores the interconnections

13 

Philip Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory and Identity (London: SCM Press, 2001), 16. Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred, 17. 15  Vásquez, More Than Belief, 255. 16  Her letters and journals during her time on the Highland Council display frequent exasperation with the Presbyterian churches for hampering community development. 14 

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between barbarian Marob (a small community on the Black Sea), Greece (fraught with political, military and class conflicts) and Hellenic Egypt. Cultural interchange is near constant, if somewhat slower than in modern times. The ritualised death of the king who sacrifices his life for his people is evident in the dramatic penultimate chapter of Spring Queen and in the more subtle references to Tariq’s death as Corn King, ‘now he has turned into a god, he has become part of the year’.17 Mitchison clearly takes this trope from Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which gives extensive attention to the death of gods/ kings. However, the emotional centre of the novel lies with the female characters and their engagements with ritual and magic. Jane Harrison’s attention to ritual and affect (over myth and belief) and her feminist approach resonate deeply with Mitchison’s text. There is less evidence that Mitchison read Jane Harrison than Frazer, yet it is hard to imagine that she would have been unfamiliar with Harrison given her interest in ritual and ancient Greece. The significance of the Cambridge Ritualists in the development of literary modernism in English and Irish writing is familiar ground for modernist scholars; however, as classicists, they are often left out of accounts of the history of religious studies.18 Contemporary accounts of the history of the discipline tend to go back to Durkheim and a sociological approach or early anthropologists such as Tylor. I want to briefly investigate potential connections between the early twentieth-century work of Jane Harrison, in particular, and more recent (materialist) formulations of religious studies outlined above. Harrison drew on archaeology and Greek art as well as texts in her study of ancient ritual. She argued that ritual came before mythology and so studying what the Greeks did in relation to sacred traditions would give a greater understanding of their religion as a whole than a focus primarily on myth.19 In her focus on action, Harrison also attends to the emotion that may surround collective movement. Affect has a central role in Harrison’s work, particularly in her attention to ancient ritual’s contemporary relevance: So long as people believed that by excited dancing [. . .] you could induce the coming of Spring, so long would the dromena [. . .] be enacted with intense enthusiasm. [. . .] [T]hese rites repeated year by year ended [. . .] in the mental creation of some sort of daemon or god. [. . .] In place of dromena, things done, we get gods worshipped. [. . .] So the dromenon [. . .] wanes, the prayer, the praise, the sacrifice waxes. Religion moves away from drama towards theology, but the ritual mould [. . .] is left ready for a new content.20

17 

Naomi Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen [1931] (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1990), 654. Shanyn Fiske, ‘From Ritual to the Archaic in Modernism: Frazer, Harrison, Freud, and the Persistence of Myth’, in A Handbook of Modernist Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 173–84; Carrie J. Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 16–17. 19  Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), a5. 20  Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, ed. Herbert Fisher et al., Home University Library of Modern Knowledge (London: Williams & Norgate, 1913), 137–40. Contemporary scholarship has been critical of the Cambridge Ritualists’ search for origins and their developmental models of the relationship between art and ritual. However, I would argue that the turn to performance in ritual studies suggests that the connection itself is vital, although I share the opinion that the quest for origins is unnecessary; Bell, Ritual, 7–8; Richard Schechner, Performance Theory [1977] (New York: Routledge, 1988), 6. 18 

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Harrison’s emphasis on ‘the thing done’, her focus on archaeology and objects as well as texts, and her interest in affect all lend themselves to the materialist turn championed by scholars such as Vásquez. Although clearly Harrison is working in a nineteenthcentury mode of scholarship that has significant differences to contemporary thought, the resonances between them are instructive for modernist scholars interested in the contemporary relevance of early twentieth-century cultural production. Spring Queen explores the tension between two different cultures and associated worldviews, the Greek and the tribal Marob. The contrasts are often described as intellect and reason versus emotion and magic, but the complexities around the socialist regime and its demise in Sparta make this contrast too simplistic. What is striking is that for the titular characters from Marob, Tarik and Erif Der, their sense of self changes dramatically depending on where they are. Mitchison particularly marks how Erif Der cannot work her magic in the same way in Greece as she does in Marob. Enchantment, ritual, embodiment and the natural world are interconnected in her culture in a way that contrasts with other cultures of the time. The liveliness of place and its relation to the sacred is clearly demonstrated in Erif Der’s encounter with the worship of Isis in Alexandria (where she travels to accompany the exiled Spartans). With the annual flooding of the Nile, the Egyptians dress in fresh linens, cast fruit, grain and cake into the river and wade in themselves, first with solemnity and then in greater frolic: ‘Isis had wept and the Nile was beginning to rise, and all would be well with next year’s corn.’ In this annual festival, the river itself has agency as the people come ‘to bless and be blessed by the waters’.21 The importance of Isis, even though she takes up a small place in the narrative, gives a counter-weight to the death cult of the sacrificial king. It is life that is important to Isis, as she mourns Osiris but is also instrumental in his resurrection.22 In Hellenic Egypt Isis is linked with Thoth, the god of wisdom, writing and the dead. She is seen as a later manifestation of the earlier goddess Ma’at, the goddess of truth who presides over cosmic order, the cycles of nature, fertility and justice.23 After the public ritual at the river, Erif Der accompanies an Egyptian woman to the temple of Isis, where they participate in the devotion and sacrifice to Isis (the rites contain a play – here we see a nod to Harrison’s connection between drama and ritual) and Erif Der senses a connection between herself as Spring Queen/Corn Goddess of Marob and Isis. This cross-cultural connection is enabled by Erif’s emotional connection to both the community of Egyptian women and the women of Marob.24

Keri Hulme Keri Hulme’s the bone people (1984) holds an unsettled place in the canon of contemporary literature from Aotearoa New Zealand, in keeping, perhaps, with its unsettled

21 

Mitchison, Spring Queen, 515, 516. Kurt Seligman, Magic, Supernaturalism and Religion [1948] (New York: Random House, 1971), 42. 23  Alastair Hunter, Wisdom Literature (London: SCM Press, 2006), 99–101; Seligman, Magic, Supernaturalism and Religion, 42. 24  Mitchison may well have picked up the characterisation of Isis as corn goddess from Frazer: James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion: A New Abridgement from the Second and Third Editions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 387–8. Modernist engagement with the feminine divine opens a space for female agency and remaking sacred traditions, as is evident in writers such as H.D., Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston, among others. 22 

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(and unsettling) characters.25 The text has received both praise (most notably winning the Booker Prize) and criticism. Numerous critical appraisals have considered the role of violence in the text, attendant political and cultural allegories and its formal complexity. The story centres around Joe’s adopted, white son Simon, whom Joe subjects to intense physical abuse. Kerewin initially intervenes, but in a moment of anger enables Joe’s abuse, which leads to the fracture of the threesome. The final section of the novel involves healing quests for both Joe and Kerewin, who must find ways to resolve their cultural alienation (both of them admit early in the text, ‘the Maoritanga has got lost in the way I live’), and the three are reunited at the text’s close.26 Much criticism of the novel involves objections to this romantic ending or questions the authenticity of the text’s engagement with Indigeneity. However, analyses of the text that critique the novel’s final sections tend to flatten the nuances at play in Hulme’s layering of mythic resonances with material and prosaic actions, aesthetic and affective exploration and a recourse to the reciprocity (‘commensalism’ in Hulme’s words) so important to Māori philosophy.27 Hulme’s experimental prose that blends realism with the mythical or spiritual aligns with similar explorations of postcolonial trauma, ritual and place such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). The novel is saturated with a strong sense of place and there are numerous instances of place-based ritual across the text: the land and sea are active participants in the ritual work of the novel, as well as in its structure and style. There is an intimate connection between places and persons throughout the text; the tower that forms Kerewin’s home figures her thwarted creativity and isolation, while the bareness of Joe’s house reflects his grief and lack of connection. The Moerangi bach where she takes Joe and Simon is connected to her family and is a place of truthtelling and reckoning. It is the first place in the text where we encounter invocation, ritual and a deep sense of belonging: She’s standing on the orangegold shingle, arms akimbo, drinking the beach in, absorbing sea and spindrift, breathing it into her dusty memory. It’s all here, alive and salt and roaring and real. The vast cold ocean and the surf breaking five yards away and the warm knowledge of home just up the shore [. . .] ‘I am back!’ she calls in a high wild voice, ‘I am here!’ The wind blows more strongly it seems [. . .] Kerewin cries aloud with joy. ‘O Thou art beyond all good but truly this land and sea is your dwelling place . . .’28 The wind and the waves respond to Kerewin’s presence and then Joe joins her, exclaiming ‘Tihe mauriora!’, which Kerewin in turn repeats to Simon, sealing the moment with hongi and hugs.29 In this passage the text’s layering of Māori and

25 

In my discussion of the novel, I follow the originally published title with lower case format; in my references I use the capitalisation of the Penguin edition. 26  Keri Hulme, The Bone People [1984] (New York: Penguin, 1986), 62. 27  Manuka Henare, ‘Tapu, Mana, Mauri, Hau, Wairua: A Mäori Philosophy of Vitalism and Cosmos’, in Indigenous Traditions and Ecology, ed. John A. Grim (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 197; Hulme, The Bone People, 434. 28  The Bone People, 163. 29  A formal greeting, translated by Hulme as ‘I salute the breath of life in you’: The Bone People, 163, 447. A hongi is a traditional Māori greeting in which noses are pressed together, breath shared.

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European culture is explicit as the biblical cadences of Kerewin’s chant meet Joe’s Māori greeting (the Bible itself is obviously not a European text but one that is mediated through Europeanised Christianity in this context). The importance of place for ritualised expression of affect and meaning that is set up in the novel’s opening chapters is emphasised more pointedly in the final sections. The novel can be read as a romance, with its circular structure, but here we have a circle with a difference, that is, a spiral. The spiral, with its resonances of growth, is important to the novel in many ways, but perhaps most obviously in the choice Kerewin makes to rebuild her tower as a spiral house, with multiple rooms to house her reunited and expanded family. Philip Steer suggests that ‘the novel’s concluding vision of a restored community shaped by the spatial logic of the spiral offers an indigenous model of the incorporation of difference that brokers a localized rapprochement between modernism and postcolonialism’.30 Steer argues that the modernist literary effects in the novel are subsumed into a larger framework that privileges Indigenous ways of being and forms of expression. The novel’s structure emphasises temporal modes (the repetition of the day and the year) and yet Hulme repeatedly emphasises space in addition to time as a significant organising motif. The cultural explorations in the novel tend to be spatial and even when time is invoked – as for consideration of past history – it tends to be expressed through spatial images. In considering the role of intertextuality in the novel, Steer indicates that interweaving multiple cultural inputs is crucial to the novel’s dynamism: ‘Kerewin’s polyvocal speech typifies a postcolonial language politics that eschews a retrogressive quest for decolonization through purification in favor of multiplicity and complexity.’31 Steer picks up the metaphor of the net from Māori writer Paula Morris, who uses it to convey how Māori culture can incorporate Pakeha elements without losing its identity: ‘But the sweep of our net is broad, and it stretches back to the beginning of time. It can never be cast aside.’32 Steer compares the net with the spiral, both able to appropriate foreign elements and give them a new shape and definition. I want to take Steer’s analysis of the spiral motif further by considering how it relates to ritual and place. The text’s spiral structure indicates how tradition is put to use in creation of the new (again, there is a paradox here as the spiral is a most traditional motif).33 As is written in the prologue (itself titled ‘The End at the Beginning’), ‘New marae from the old marae, a beginning from the end’, space and time are interconnected.34 Process and change are emphasised through the prologue: ‘all together they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great. Together, all together, they are the instruments of change.’35 Although some critics point to differences in Hulme’s presentation of Māori cultures as distinct from

30 

Philip Steer, ‘Modernism and Māoritanga: Rereading the Cultural Politics of Modernist Appropriation in the bone people’, in Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present, ed. Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 280. 31  Steer, ‘Modernism and Māoritanga’, 284–5. 32  Paula Morris quoted in Steer, ‘Modernism and Māoritanga’, 290. 33  Henare, ‘A Mäori Philosophy’, 198. 34  Hulme, The Bone People, 3. 35  Hulme, The Bone People, 4.

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pre-colonial times, Hulme’s focus on the complexities of tradition and change resonates with a worldview in which creation itself is ‘dynamic movement’: ‘at the heart of this view of the creation process is an understanding that humanity and all things of the natural world are always emerging, always unfolding.’36 Hulme is less interested in purity or authenticity than she is in cultural palimpsests that unfold meaning within interlocking sacred stories.37 The repetition in the prologue of walking on asphalt underlines the importance of movement and the repetition indicates the ritualised nature of this movement, as the asphalt signals modernity and the space of a town (in contrast to the more rural spaces that dominate the majority of the novel). Stewart’s ‘worlding refrains’ can be seen in the repetitions of simple practices. Sacred journeys, often, though not exclusively, through walking, are rife throughout the text, from the trio’s trip to Moerangi, where the truth of Joe’s abuse of Simon is first laid bare, to Kerewin’s and Joe’s healing journeys in the final section. These journeys take Kerewin and Joe through a host of South Island rural locations and back to the text’s opening location of Taiaroa. Both Joe’s and Kerewin’s scenes of healing and restitution in the novel’s final section involve ritualised labour. Before Kerewin can rebuild her tower home into a new, more expansive, inclusive and communal place, she undertakes another rebuilding project: that of the marae near her family baches at Moerangi. This is a small incident in the plot’s wider sweep, often overlooked by critics, but I argue for its importance in the densely symbolic mythic section. Kerewin describes the project in her diary: I started rebuilding the Maori hall because it seemed, in my spiral fashion, the straightforward thing to do. It didn’t take long for curious locals to drift round to find out who I was and why I was playing with their relic. [. . .] On the Saturday, a few came by to help prop up bits of four by two and handle up the tin. [. . .] And on Friday, they came with the new door, and the windows we’d decided to order. They came with a keg, and blankets, and mattresses, and guitars, and two blankeyed sheep that were promptly converted to mutton. They came with gallons of glorious rainbows, a tin of paint from everyone’s shed. They came with a surplus of song and willing hands. And on Sunday [. . .] I’m singing with the rest inside the tight sweet hall that’s got a heart of people once more. The prayers and the hallowing will be done this coming Sunday, and, glory of glories, the old gateposts from the old marae, each with their own name, will be re-erected.38 Hulme includes numerous small details about the rebuilding project that show the material process of making an inclusive space that draws Kerewin herself back into community through the work of her hands (and the deployment of her financial resources). Hulme uses words from the Christian tradition, ‘relic’, ‘hallowing’, ‘glory

36 

Henare, ‘A Mäori Philosophy’, 198. Bonnie Roos, ‘Complicity: New Zealand’s Modernization and the Postcolonial Trickster of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People’, in Behind the Masks of Modernism: Global and Transnational Perspectives, ed. Andrew Reynolds and Bonnie Roos (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), 174. 38  Hulme, The Bone People, 431–2. 37 

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of glories’, for a place (the marae) and a ritual (erecting the gateposts and making the space sacred) that are distinctly Māori. The gateposts are named; they are distinct persons living in relation to the tribe. For both Kerewin and Joe the labour they enact draws together the material, the affective and the spiritual. Likewise, it draws together the text’s realist and mythic elements. In the text we see sacred objects and sacred spaces; the two are often intimately related, perhaps most powerfully in the concluding scene where Joe buries the mauri. Joe’s journey takes him to the home of a kaumatua (an elder) who has been the guardian of a stone, held within an ancient, great canoe (which brought the Māori to Aotearoa), which holds a mauri (life force).39 Joe cares for the elder, Tiaki Mira, and takes on the role of guardianship following Tiaki’s death. The pool that holds the canoe and stone is alive: ‘the water is pale green and milky, as though it contains lime dust in suspension. [. . .] It’s like ten thousand tiny bubbles bursting on his skin, a mild electrical current, an aliveness.’40 The pool is buried by an earthquake and this gives Joe the impetus to take the stone and return to the site of Kerewin’s tower, now rebuilt as a spiral, ‘studio and hall and church and guesthouse, whatever I choose, but above all else, HOME’.41 He places the stone on the ground where it sinks into the earth, signifying the spiritual power of the ancestors and the land itself as alive and capable of regeneration. In this process Joe serves time (via a Pakeha justice system) for his abuse of Simon, suffers serious injury, and labours to care for Tiaki in his illness and death. As for Kerewin, Joe’s healing journey also involves labour, ritualised in repeated motions of physical caretaking. In her reading of the various masking strategies at play in the novel, Bonnie Roos argues that the text demands active readers who may recognise their own complicity with global violence and injustice and who will be unsatisfied with the ambiguous ending: ‘I suspect Hulme hopes that we, like Kerewin, are unsatisfied with the ending and are willing to begin unearthing it.’42 This active reading and textual excavation hinges on how ‘the novel reminds us that narrative fragmentation and negative space can be deliberately meaningful, rather than a product of art for art’s sake’.43 I would argue that the reader is also invited into the ritualised labour that characterises the novel, demanding attention to a lively ecology and more-than-human community. This novel is one that is very conscious of itself as text.44 The doubleness that I mentioned earlier in this chapter invites the reader to grapple with a complex, multifaceted, polyvocal text that alternately draws the reader in and fends them off.

39 

Hulme, The Bone People, 363; Henare, ‘A Mäori Philosophy’, 208. In line with Hulme’s presentation of Indigeneity as polyvocal, Raylene Ramsay reads the Polynesian canoe as ‘less a pure (essentialist) concept or traditional artefact than a cultural and historically changing “hybrid”’; Raylene Ramsay, ‘In the Belly of the Canoe with Ihimaera, Hulme and Gorodé: The Waka as a Locus of Hybridity’, International Journal of Francophone Studies 11, no. 4 (2008): 563. 40  Hulme, The Bone People, 367. 41  Hulme, The Bone People, 434. 42  Roos, ‘Complicity’, 176. 43  Roos, ‘Complicity’, 179. 44  The history of the novel’s publication, including Hulme’s firm rejection of editorial guidance, its eventual publication by the feminist Spiral Collective, who scrabbled for funding, and the low initial print run, gives the book a certain metatextual mythology of its own. For more detail on the bone people’s publication history see Sarah Shieff, ‘The Bone People: Contexts and Reception, 1984–2004’, in The Pain of Unbelonging: Alienation and Identity in Australasian Literature, ed. Sheila Collingwood-Wittick (Amsterdam: Brill, 2007), 145.

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Lorna Goodison The bulk of this chapter has focused on the exploration of ritual in prose fiction (although the lyrical nature of Hulme’s prose often approaches poetry). In this final section, I want to give a brief consideration of lyric poetry, and how this form may give us different insights into the nexus of ritual, place and writing. I turn to the Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison, whose poetry for many decades has explored an intricate and profound relationship with emplaced ritual. There are multiple strands across her oeuvre that speak to the concerns of this chapter: a complex layering of history and geography, religious syncretism, embodied experience and sacred practices within domestic space. Goodison has written of being consistently ‘drawn to poems that contain what I call medicine’ and her poetics reveals a complex, varied and deep engagement with Caribbean religious traditions.45 Hugh Hodges argues that Goodison’s ‘belief in the power of words’ is rooted in a belief in the connection of all things, ‘so healing in a song puts healing into the world’.46 Jamaican religious cultures include rich syncretist traditions, such as Pocomania and Rastafari that blend Christianity (frequently Protestant and Pentecostal traditions) with West African Indigenous religions or modern conceptions of Pan-Africanism.47 The Bible is Goodison’s most frequent intertext, with numerous poems exploring biblical narratives, figures and imagery, particularly the language from the prophets and psalms that has filtered into hymnody. However, Goodison’s engagement with religion reaches far beyond biblical texts in her exploration of music, healing rituals and the impact of environment on spirituality. Goodison regularly points to the way geography inflects Christianity within the Caribbean, as in a poem invoking Mary, the mother of Jesus: ‘Our Lady Star of the Sea / Our Lady of Banana Walks / Our Lady of stately palm trees’.48 Star of the Sea, Stella Maris, is an ancient title for Mary, but bananas and palm trees are a less common attribution. Environment is indicated in Goodison’s work in numerous details. Vásquez argues that scholars need to pay closer attention to the way environment shapes understanding of sacred space: ‘Ecology is central in any fully materialist reading of religious emplacement. [. . .] Affordances play an important role in determining the kinds of places that consistently become sacralized, become storied, charged with powerful memories and emotion that set them apart from other places.’49 We can trace this in myriad ways in Goodison’s work. A resonant example is the Blue Mountains, which appear across her work as a site of inspiration, love and grief. They are the place of her mother’s burial and a touchstone for her identity when she is living in Michigan, where the mountains are known by their absence. Much of Goodison’s work displays this doubly diasporic con-

45 

Lorna Goodison, Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures (Brighton: Myriad Editions, 2018), 23. Hugh Hodges, ‘Start-Over: Possession Rites and Healing Rituals in the Poetry of Lorna Goodison’, Research in African Literatures 36, no. 2 (2005): 20. 47  For more on religion in Jamaica see Ennis Barrington Edmonds, Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 129–31; Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 48  Lorna Goodison, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2017), 554. 49  Vásquez, More Than Belief, 317. 46 

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sciousness, as a Jamaican abroad who also attends to the diasporic condition of Black Jamaicans forcibly removed from their homelands in West Africa through the transAtlantic slave trade. Such explorations are constitutive of an identity that has a complex relationship to place: ‘To announce a diaspora is not simply to express authentic origins but to actually press them into existence. Evoking distant origins by locating oneself “in diaspora” is itself a kind of founding act.’50 In Goodison’s poetry, journeys are imagined and spiritual as well as physical. Divination, dialect and manifold interpretations take both writer and reader on interior journeys in ‘Heartsease I’, while in ‘Heartsease III’ the community is gathering to sing, make music and make a healing balm that will drive out evil. Mercy that spans the island from sea to mountain is invoked and trees are planted.51 Heartsease is a small town in Jamaica known as a scene of religious revivals and the place name resonates with the emotional valences of rest and restoration. Many of Goodison’s poems focus on domestic environments, and how the work they contain also partakes of sacred ritual. In a striking instance of the personal being political, Goodison writes of the bedspread of Winnie Mandela that was seized because it was made in the colours of the flag of the African National Congress.52 The bedspread was made by a community of women: They wove the bedspread and knotted notes of hope in each strand and selvaged the edges with ancient blessings.53 Goodison connects the making of the bedspread with other acts of care, binding up wounds and attending to the bodies of the dead. Acts of care, especially feeding loved ones and care for the dead, feature frequently in Goodison’s work, a trope that resonates with the ritualised labour in the bone people. These acts are frequently communal, as in ‘From the Book of Local Miracles, Largely Unrecorded’ where a poor widow with no food puts a stone in water to boil; one by one her neighbours bring small offerings of meat and vegetables and finally soup is made.54 Grief is never entirely absent from these reflections, as the speaker’s mother notes that widows always have salt. The bodily results of mourning, tears, act to flavour the food that is required for ongoing life. In ‘In City Gardens Grow No Roses as We Known Them’ Goodison explores sacred moments found in city living, where trees and other plants grow in bedraggled courtyards, women cook for their families after working long hours in the homes of the wealthy, and the smell of mint reveals a passing angel: ‘But the poet heirs of Joseph / are duty-bound to sing, / dream and interpret’.55 Goodison frequently returns to the role of the poet as witness, or griot, to it all.

50 

Paul Christopher Johnson, Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 9. 51  Goodison, Collected Poems, 116–17. 52  Goodison, Redemption Ground, 35. 53  Goodison, Collected Poems, 89. 54  Goodison, Collected Poems, 187–8. 55  Collected Poems, 157.

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In his analysis of the relationship between poetry and prayer, Jahan Ramazani argues that poetry has a greater degree of self-consciousness than prayer: ‘Poems incorporate the performativity of prayer but stand outside and inspect it [. . .] [Poetry] is a ritual-like act that has been self-consciously aestheticized.’56 This aesthetic distance gives prayers and other rituals expressed within poetry a doubleness that pulls both towards and against devotion. Ramazani argues that postcolonial poems written in English can be close to prayer yet ‘put devotional speech acts under inspection, interrupt them with poetic devices such as enjambment, or dialogically juxtapose discrepant religious systems’.57 While Goodison’s poetry does these things, more particularly, it emphasises prayer as always part of embodied and emplaced rituals that reference many elements aside from language. As we have seen, her poetry emphasises not only the language of prayer (petition, praise, lamentation, etc.) but also the embodied, sensory nature of ritual and the social, built and natural environment in which it takes place. Her poetry that is closest to prayer is often embedded in longer lyrics that describe the social and environmental context as well as the direct words of the speaker. Her poems speak communities and landscapes. However, within these longer lyrics, invocation has an important place. She frequently uses repetition in an echo of the call and response style often found in the spirituals of the African diaspora.58 In ‘From the Bard’s Book of Common Prayer’, the speaker searches for a place that is conducive for creative longevity. The line ‘Clear for even me a leasehold space / fit to send down roots’ is repeated three times in a row. Then, lest the reader (or the deity) has not got the message, she adds ‘(Repeat eleven thousand times)’.59 The order to repeat reminds the reader that the lines between poetry, ritual and incantation continually shift. Goodison’s poetry is often declarative, enacting rituals as well as describing them.

Conclusion This chapter has explored some of the ways that modernist writers engage with emplaced ritual. In examining a diverse set of texts, we can see that the terms of modernist engagements with religion and ritual are complex and varied. In the works explored above, emplaced ritual forms an empowering locus for explorations of identity, poetic authority and affect. Rituals, particularly those around acts of communal care, set in motion new modes of being for the marginalised or dispossessed. A range of genres, from poetry to prose, allow reflective engagement with these embodied traditions and nurture reinvention. When we attend to voices that have tended to be excluded, from academic discourses or canon formation, we uncover ways of writing ritual that, rather than mourning lost worlds, build bridges to new ones. The texts considered here expand our ideas of modernist engagements with home, sacred space and landscape. They invite us into a lively process of ritual creation in our literary

56 

Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 132–3. 57  Ramazani, Poetry and its Others, 182. 58  For a discussion of repetition inspired by spirituals in African American poetry, see Ramazani, Poetry and its Others, 159. 59  Goodison, Collected Poems, 471.

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encounters. Texts don’t just represent ritual and place, but are themselves rituals and places, insisting on their own modes of material being.

Acknowledgements Quotations from Lorna Goodison, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2017) are reprinted by kind permission of Carcanet Press, Manchester, UK.

Works Cited Anderson, Elizabeth. H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ———. Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Bell, Catherine. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Deloria Jr, Vine. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. 1973. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003. Detloff, Madelyn. The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Edmonds, Ennis Barrington. Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Fiske, Shanyn. ‘From Ritual to the Archaic in Modernism: Frazer, Harrison, Freud, and the Persistence of Myth.’ In A Handbook of Modernist Studies, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, 173–91. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion: A New Abridgement from the Second and Third Editions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. ———. ‘Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison.’ In The New Modernist Studies, edited by Douglas Mao, 88–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Goodison, Lorna. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2017. ———. Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures. Brighton: Myriad Editions, 2018. Harrison, Jane Ellen. Ancient Art and Ritual. Edited by Herbert Fisher et al. Home University Library of Modern Knowledge. London: Williams & Norgate, 1913. ———. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903. Henare, Manuka. ‘Tapu, Mana, Mauri, Hau, Wairua: A Mäori Philosophy of Vitalism and Cosmos.’ In Indigenous Traditions and Ecology, edited by John A. Grim, 197–221. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Hodges, Hugh. ‘Start-Over: Possession Rites and Healing Rituals in the Poetry of Lorna Goodison.’ Research in African Literatures 36, no. 2 (2005): 19–32. Hulme, Keri. The Bone People. 1984. New York: Penguin, 1986. Hunter, Alastair. Wisdom Literature. London: SCM Press, 2006. Johnson, Paul Christopher. Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Mitchison, Naomi. The Corn King and the Spring Queen. 1931. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1990. Preston, Carrie J. Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry and its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Ramsay, Raylene. ‘In the Belly of the Canoe with Ihimaera, Hulme and Gorodé: The Waka as a Locus of Hybridity.’ International Journal of Francophone Studies 11, no. 4 (2008): 559–79.

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Rivera, Mayra. The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007. Roos, Bonnie. ‘Complicity: New Zealand’s Modernization and the Postcolonial Trickster of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.’ In Behind the Masks of Modernism: Global and Transnational Perspectives, edited by Andrew Reynolds and Bonnie Roos, 158–79. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. 1977. New York: Routledge, 1988. Seligman, Kurt. Magic, Supernaturalism and Religion. 1948. New York: Random House, 1971. Sheldrake, Philip. Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory and Identity. London: SCM Press, 2001. Shieff, Sarah. ‘The Bone People: Contexts and Reception, 1984–2004.’ In The Pain of Unbelonging: Alienation and Identity in Australasian Literature, edited by Sheila Collingwood-Wittick, 143–63. Amsterdam: Brill, 2007. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Smith, Theophus H. Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Steer, Philip. ‘Modernism and Māoritanga: Rereading the Cultural Politics of Modernist Appropriation in the bone people.’ In Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present, edited by Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses, 277–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Stewart, Dianne M. Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Stewart, Kathleen. ‘Afterword: Worlding Refrains.’ In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 329–53. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Todd, Zoe. ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word for Colonialism.’ Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 4–22. Tweed, Thomas A. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006. Vásquez, Manuel A. More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Watts, Vanessa. ‘Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).’ Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 20–34.

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25 Finnegans Wake, Modernist Time Machines and Re-enchanted Time Gregory Erickson

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or Max Weber, the ‘disenchantment’ of the Western world – the process that led to what he saw as modern secularism – begins as far back as ancient Jewish thought, with Hebrew prophets such as Isaiah proclaiming ‘idols’ as powerless stones. For over 2,000 years, this theory proposes, magic gradually but progressively leaked out of the Western world. Many twentieth-century thinkers agreed that this long period of secularisation, beginning with the departure from magic, would conclude with the inevitable end of ‘religion’. More recent thinkers, however, have argued that ‘enchantment, no less than disenchantment, appears inherent to human consciousness’, often pointing to a kind of postmodern ‘re-enchantment’ and a return of magical thinking.1 In this chapter, I propose that modernist texts can reveal forms of magical re-enchantment through time travel. By building on H. G. Wells and Albert Einstein, working through short passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and his handwritten Notebooks, and ending with Dracula and the physical ruins of Whitby Abbey, I will think about how ideas travel through time, how texts and scriptures recreate and destroy, and how actual physical ruins enact, dramatise and inspire these time-travelling narratives. This process involves a reframing of what ‘modernism’ was and is. As Sarah Cole argues, ‘scholars of modernism have largely missed or misread Wells’, and we might make a similar point about Stoker; we need to find different ways to put authors like Joyce, Wells and Stoker into conversation, and one way to do this is to rethink our shifting relationship to time.2 Material and imaginative spaces like Whitby Abbey and the fading and rapidly decaying Finnegans Wake Notebooks encourage us to think about not only what once was, but also what will be and what will not be in the future. While the dream of time travel is a modern phenomenon, trying to understand the complexities of time has long been tied to theology and religion. Augustine asked in the fifth century: ‘What was God doing before he made heaven and earth [. . .] how can there be a true eternity in which an act of will occurs that was not there before?’3 Augustine’s answer, that ‘there was no time, therefore, when you [God] had not made

1 

David Morgan, ‘Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment’, in Re-Enchantment, ed. James Elkins and David Morgan (New York: Routledge, 2009), 12. 2  Sarah Cole, Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 32. 3  Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 11.10.12.

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anything, because you had made time itself’, comes right out of modern physics.4 For Augustine, the three dimensions that we perceive as real – past, present and future – are actually only one, the present, in which the past survives as memory and the future as anticipation. (Joyce expresses a similar point in Ulysses: ‘Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.’5) Augustine realised the difficulty of the idea that God could decree eternally that there should be a finite creation of a few thousand years. Since creation had a beginning in time, it also will have a dramatic end in time. If, therefore, time has no significance for God, how can God eternally determine a finite period of creation? What lies outside this frame? In 1905 – the year of Einstein’s first paper on special relativity – sociologist of religion Henri Hubert wrote that ‘time is a necessary condition of magical and religious acts and representations’.6 Like Weber, Hubert was one of several researchers in the school of Émile Durkheim that represented a new influential approach to studying religion by bringing it into the realm of the social sciences and out of belief-based theology. Hubert’s use of the word ‘time’ here is intended to offer a more stable concept than magic or religion, an idea that was simultaneously being challenged by Einstein. In the social science literature of this period, ‘magic’ was often seen as non-modern, non-Western, and as a remnant of ‘primitive thinking’. Magic was understood in opposition to both science and religion.7 Contemporary religious studies scholar Randall Styers positions modern magical beliefs and practices as spaces that articulate the ‘boundaries of modernity’ and act as a ‘buffer between religion and science’.8 Although in some ways our concept of time has not advanced beyond Aristotle or Augustine – who both wrote either that time doesn’t exist at all or that it is impossible to understand – beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, humans began to imagine time as something fluid that one could travel through. In H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), his unnamed Traveller tells of a journey through time to the year 802,701 ad, a date so far in the future that ‘all the old constellations had gone from the sky’.9 It is a world that he initially sees as a peaceful paradise populated by innocent, vegetarian, childlike creatures. He only gradually realises, through the remnants of lost civilisations on the surface and the dangers beneath, that the truth is something much darker – a dangerous world where literal underlings feast upon the surface creatures. At one point in his wanderings, he discovers a building that he recognises as a type of museum, long ago abandoned and forgotten: a ‘latter-day South Kensington’ (73). As he explores galleries of dinosaur bones and strange forgotten machines, he enters a room where he finds the ‘decaying vestiges of books’, with only tattered rags, faded blank pages and warped boards remaining. This bookless future, as

4 

Augustine, Confessions, 11.14.17. James Joyce, Ulysses [1922] (New York: Vintage, 1986), 97. 6  Henri Hubert, Essay on Time: A Brief Study of the Representation of Time in Religion and Magic [1909] (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 45. 7  Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 14. 8  Styers, Making Magic, 21–2. 9  H. G. Wells, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man [1895] (New York: Signet Classics, 1984), 68. References to The Time Machine are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 5 

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Sarah Cole writes, is a ‘deeply dystopic scene of loss’,10 but the Traveller himself, instead of pondering the loss of knowledge or the ‘futility of ambition’, thinks of the waste of labour that all the useless rotting paper testifies to. Before he leaves the museum, however, he does think wistfully of his own long-lost and now meaningless publications and stops to write his name upon a stone idol. The Traveller’s act of leaving his name implies his desire to leave a mark – to fight against a world that is demonstrating its inevitable decay in front of his eyes. In looking at ideas of time from the years 1895–1915 (1905 and 1915 being the years that Einstein published on special and general relativity), what is perhaps most significant is how popular culture, literature and physics seem to discover ideas like time travel, alternative histories and parallel universes together. Wells did not accurately predict Einstein’s physics, but both thinkers destabilised how the public thought about time and space. ‘Scientific people’, as the Traveller explains at the beginning of the novel, ‘know very well that Time is only a kind of Space’ (5). When Wells wrote The Time Machine in the 1890s, it was possibly the first time anyone had put the words ‘time’, ‘travel’ and ‘machine’ together. It was – as much as we can ever say anything is – a new idea. Just a few years after The Time Machine, Einstein’s rethinking of time came ‘to stand for the irresolvable break between modern physics and all earlier framings of time and space’.11 Or, in the words of Wells’s Traveller, ‘there is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it’ (4). Wells’s speculation turned out to be scientifically prescient and, within decades, a version of his concept was widely accepted in theoretical physics, which then moved into philosophical thinking. In 1920, philosopher Samuel Alexander wrote, ‘we have only just begun in our speculation to take Time seriously and to realize that in some way or other Time is an essential ingredient in the constitution of things [. . .] What is time?’ he asked, and then proposed the idea that ‘time machines may help us understand’.12 Ruined museums, libraries and churches have been popular subjects in literature and visual art for centuries, but within the span of just a few decades they came to inhabit a historical imagination that also included time machines, aeroplanes, theoretical physics and the destruction of famous libraries and cathedrals in the First World War. After the war, imaginative writers who depicted ruins had new realistic images with which to point to a future time when further institutions would be in ruins. From the library at Louvain to Reims Cathedral to the ruins of Whitby Abbey, destructions of famous structures were featured in newspapers, and debates were staged over if and how they should be rebuilt. These events led to a dialectic in the relationship between time and religion – often a more secular view that draws a distinction from a more magical or superstitious past, but also a future that collapses in with a past in which everything is finite, including the divine. In Andreas Huyssen’s 2006 ‘Nostalgia for Ruins’, he writes of ‘a strange obsession with ruins’ that developed as ‘part of a much broader discourse about memory and trauma, genocide and war’.13 This new imagination sees ruins as a 10 

Cole, Inventing Tomorrow, 49. Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), 14. 12  James Gleick, Time Travel: A History (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), 14. 13  Andreas Huyssen, ‘Nostalgia for Ruins’, Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006): 7. 11 

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‘palimpsest of multiple historical events and representations’.14 But this new imagination also involved a rethinking of the idea of time, and while the reimagining of time has been linked to technology, train schedules and the theory of relativity, it is also inextricably tied to ideas of narrative, myth and religion. For Henri Hubert, writing just before the war, magical or religious events are ‘situated in a time-environment that is relatively abstract and detached from things that endure’.15 A more postmodern perspective is given by Huyssen when he writes that ‘the present is an age of preservation, restoration, and authentic remakes, all of which cancel out the idea of the authentic ruin that has itself become historical’.16 For Charles Taylor – a philosopher who has influentially defined for many scholars what our ‘Secular Age’ is – ‘unlike our ancestors, we tend to see our lives exclusively within the horizontal flow of secular time’.17 But do we really?

Newton Sings in Heaven: Reading the Finnegans Wake Notebooks In 2019, I spent several weeks at the University at Buffalo researching their extensive James Joyce Archives, especially his handwritten Finnegans Wake Notebooks. The Wake Notebooks are the main primary source of Joyce’s reading, planning and thinking during the years that he was working on Finnegans Wake (1923–38). Stored in boxes in the University at Buffalo Poetry Collection, the physical Notebooks are selectively brought out and carefully paged through only by a curator. While I was able to see and touch some of the Notebooks, others are too fragile to ever be brought out for viewing and will soon be put into ‘dead storage’. The Notebooks are filled with short phrases and words, many almost undecipherable, written in pencil with various entries crossed out with coloured crayon, mostly red, some blue and green. As several generations of Joyce scholars have confirmed, the crossed-out passages were used in early manuscripts of the novel, but the colours seem to have no pattern. I was in Buffalo to research a book I was writing on Christian heresy and James Joyce. My days in Buffalo were spent jogging on snowy roads in the morning, staring at digital scans of the Notebooks during the day, and binging on the television time travel drama Outlander in the evening – a combination of ideas, experiences, texts and narratives that led to new ways of thinking about my research. The first step started with the idea of approaching the Notebooks as recreating a type of alternative ‘scripture’ that, like reading biblical apocrypha, the Gnostic Gospels or the ruins of a medieval monastery, forces us to see a text as a multidirectional discourse across history and through destruction and reconstruction, rather than as a synchronic or teleological text. Instead of source-hunting and genetic work, I decided to accept the accidents and the effects of time, and study the Notebooks as objects in themselves. I used them to help me think about the role of texts in shaping ideas about time, history, scripture and reading. This process also mirrors the way we read Finnegans Wake itself, where one word or one

14 

Huyssen, ‘Nostalgia for Ruins’, 8. Hubert, Essay on Time, 48. 16  Huyssen, ‘Nostalgia for Ruins’, 20. 17  Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 59. 15 

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passage moves out through interpretation to comment on all the others or on the book itself. This shift in reading, studying and interpretation is what I will focus on here: looking at the Notebooks as visual art and as poetry. As scripture. As decaying objects. As time travel portals. The Notebook labelled VI. B. 14 is a small, green travel notebook, written in Joyce’s hand. Joyce used it to record research notes on his travels to Brittany in 1924, and much of it focuses on local legends, history and myth, as well as notes on saints, religious narratives and the heresy of Pelagianism. Brittany was – in the words of the editors of the published facsimile – ‘a land that had very little to do with current reality [. . .] a misty legendary land that no longer existed, and to some extent a land that had never existed’.18 Since ‘miscegenation fascinated him more than pure origins’, Joyce’s ‘research’ was more on superstition and folk tales than on authenticity.19 In the Municipal Library of Saint-Malo, he took notes from a booklet of a lecture entitled Les Pierres bretonnes et leurs légendes (Breton Stones and their Legends). (Fitting to this chapter, the library was destroyed during the Second World War, and copies of the volume are now rare.) On the fourth page, in the middle of a set of notes on ancient stone circles and a megalithic monolith in Erdeven, Joyce playfully writes Ein stein, a pun that refers to both the scientist and the German for ‘one stone’ (ein stein) or monolith. While there has been no direct connection to the Wake found on this page – full of references to local legends and saints – it felt like a different way to connect and divide religion, magic and science. It was also a reminder of the Scottish time travel stones I was seeing in my evening episodes of Outlander. The name ‘Einstein’ appears in the Notebooks at least one other time, in VI. B. 1, a Notebook from earlier in the same year, where Joyce is reading J. B. S. Haldane on the future of science. Haldane is mostly known publicly today for his quote ‘the universe is not only queerer than we imagine; it is queerer than we can imagine’. Haldane’s book is expanded from an essay and a presentation to the Cambridge Heretics Society in 1923. In this lecture, he claims Einstein as the central thinker of his time. While it is not possible to discern through these notes what Joyce’s interests in this book were, at the bottom of a page he writes: Columbus Newton Einstein

sing in heaven

Joyce seems to be commenting on a Haldane passage on the practical consequences of Einstein’s discovery that ‘space, time, and matter are shades of the fifth dimension’, as well as Haldane’s quote that ‘A prophet who can give signs in the heavens is always believed’.20 What Joyce does add here, other than changing signs to sing, is the name Columbus, who is not in the Haldane original. These two small changes – intentional or not – shift this short passage from the history of science to an odd meditation

18 

James Joyce, The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo, VI. B. 14, ed. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer and Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 5. 19  Joyce, Finnegans Wake Notebooks, VI. B. 14, 5. 20  J. B. S. Haldane, ‘If You Were Alive in 2123 A.D.’, The Century Magazine 106, no. 5 (August 1923): 551.

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on magic, historiography and poetry. Why is it that Newton ‘sings in heaven’ and what would that sound like? Or are all three men singing together, and then why add Columbus to the trio? Other references to time and science in that same Notebook add further layers, including fragments such as my particles may travel thousands of years lightyear / will arrive yesterday Both these entries blur the lines between time and space where material travels through time and where we locate distance as a point in time. These entries also conflate science, history and religion, and hint at the ways Finnegans Wake merges space and time. Our interpretive strategy here mimics the way the Wake itself works within the history of scripture and time. In other words, even this short, non-linear reading of the Notebooks is a reading that resists traditional logic and unidirectional narratives and histories.

Sketching the Ruins of St Paul’s Finnegans Wake is a book that is both inside and outside of time; it is set in one time and all times; it is a novel in which time can flow with you, pass by or stand still. At several points in the Wake, time is a subject of lecture-like passages. Woven into one of these ‘lectures’ on time is a famous section that tells the fable of the ‘Mookse and the Gripes’. A passage with multiple references to various religious schisms, rifts and heresies, there is suddenly a shift in tone and we read of a ‘broken-arched traveller from Nuzuland’, a reference to a famous passage in historian T. B. Macaulay’s 1840 essay on the recently translated History of the Popes by Leopold von Ranke.21 In his essay, Macaulay writes of a traveller from New Zealand standing on the ‘broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s’.22 While the Protestant and Whiggish Macaulay is imagining the possible ‘undiminished vigour’ of a still powerful Roman Catholic Church, Joyce’s look into the future of London finds in the ruins of St Paul’s an echo of past ruins: religions and texts lost to time. A bridge is obviously a place to view two places or perhaps two times at once, and both Joyce and Macaulay emphasise the viewpoint from above as one outside of time. Peter Galison speculates that it was from a similar vantage point that Einstein first began to think of his theory of time, standing on a hill in Switzerland where he could see two different city clocks set far apart. Michele Besso recalled that when Einstein excitedly told him of his realization [. . .] he pointed to one clock tower in old Bern and to another (the only one) in the nearby town of Muri. Since it is the only vantage point from which both might have been visible, Besso and Einstein must have been standing on the hill.23 As Einstein would shortly conclude in his famous 1905 publication, there is no one moment – no single point in time – that is the exact same for everyone: there is no such thing as a

21 

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake [1939] (New York: Penguin, 1999), 156. T. B. Macaulay, ‘Ranke’s History of the Popes’, Edinburgh Review 72 (October 1840). 23  Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, 254. 22 

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universal now. In other words, there is no one Newtonian cosmic clock, no clock of God. Einstein’s former teacher Hermann Minkowski took the ideas even further in a lecture on ‘Space and Time’ in 1908, referring to time and space as ‘mere shadows’ and concluding that our perceived reality is a projection and our sense of time an illusion.24 A century after T. B. Macaulay’s initial essay, his descendant, Rose Macaulay, wrote a famous book entitled Pleasure of Ruins, where she finds our fascination with ruins to be religious in nature: the ascendancy over men’s minds of the ruin of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis [. . .] less ruin-worship than the worship of a tremendous past.25 But what if our gazing at ruins brings us not into a ‘stupendous past’ but to an inevitable future; is there something religious in the imagination of a future world of crumbling buildings and disintegrating books? A world without people? On the first page of her introduction, R. Macaulay ponders what the appeal of ruins is. Is it, she asks, ‘admiration for the ruin as it was in its prime’, is it a ‘morbid pleasure in decay’, or is it a ‘mystical pleasure in the destruction of all things mortal and the eternity of God’?26 But what happens to this mystical pleasure if we add God to all things? When God, too, like all living beings, matter and ideas, like all buildings and bridges and clocks, is reduced to decay, ruin and non-existence? The idea of incompleteness and loss contained within the metaphor of a bridge is used by Joyce in chapter 2 of Ulysses, a chapter thematically organised around the impossibility of writing history. In this chapter, as Stephen teaches an uninspired history lesson to uninspired students, one student answers a question about the Greek leader Pyrrhus with the word ‘pier’. Stephen asks him what a pier is. ‘A kind of bridge,’ the student answers. ‘Yes,’ Stephen responds, ‘a disappointed bridge.’27 History, this passage suggests, is not a bridge, not a material or visible connection back to some recoverable past; it is, instead, only a pier, a nod or a suggestion in a direction, without any conclusive physical connection. History read this way is a kind of writing that never reaches its subject – only a gesture toward some external and impossible ‘truth’. A page in the Wake Notebooks seems to ponder a similar idea of history and bridges: continent of Big Things floods reveal history why bridge things winding roads avoid fallen trees28

24 

Gleick, Time Travel, 82–3. Rose Macauley, Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), 40. 26  Macauley, Pleasure of Ruins, xv. 27  Joyce, Ulysses, 20–1. 28  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake Notebook VI. B. 6, University at Buffalo, The Poetry Collection, James Joyce Collection. 25 

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As remarked before, the norm has been for Joyce scholars to trace the words in the Notebook back to the sources (books, places, people) that Joyce was using and to then trace the words forward as they grow, develop, change (and then often disappear) through the subsequent drafts of Finnegans Wake. So while, as far as I know, none of these lines have been traced to a source text or connected to any of the manuscripts or published versions of Finnegans Wake, they work as a visual poem on the randomness of trying to write about or construct a stable version of history. To write about such broad histories – to claim a shard of permanence – in the face of a reality that is about lack of connection, about decay and destruction, can seem like an imaginary ‘continent of Big Things’. The word ‘big’ – especially in Joyce’s handwriting, but also in the context of the Wake – also suggests bog: the wet muddy grounds of layers of peat in which thousands of years of history are buried and preserved. The next lines, ‘Floods reveal / history’, point to how it is often destruction that reveals the past – accidents unearthing long-buried scriptures, for example, or the rot that exposes long-lost medieval paintings under Reformation whitewash. As Stephen seems to know in chapter 2 of Ulysses, there is no way to ‘bridge things’ when we are talking about history, so why even try? Here again, we see the role of time and the role of decay in understanding scripture and literature. Much of Finnegans Wake is about letters, books and manuscripts that are found, lost, translated and deciphered. In a section that perhaps most directly discusses this process of books, time, decay and history, Joyce writes: if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signes (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations.29 The passage indirectly suggests the move from pre-history to printing and written history. Like the Wake’s famous letter dug from a dung heap, the ‘book’ or ‘claybook’ here seems to be another model of Finnegans Wake itself. The word ‘allaphbed’ combines alphabet and riverbed, two ways that ‘history’ is captured and preserved. It also points to ‘Alph’, a river (even a ‘sacred river’ in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan). ‘Alph’ echoes ALP – the matriarch of the Wake who is associated with water, rivers and time – so this ‘claybook’, this riverbed, is a sacred text or scripture as well as a river of time. It also suggests the Alps, and so it comes back to Joyce’s comment that ‘time the river and the mountain’ are the real heroes of his book; in this passage they are literally woven back into the book as a container that, like a riverbed, is a container of all the history that passes over it. As Joyce writes elsewhere in the Wake, ‘if there is a future in every past this is present’.30 And yet, in another Wake passage we read: Your genus its worldwide, your spacest sublime! But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time? In the name of the former and of the latter and their holocaust. Allmen.31

29 

Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 18. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 496. 31  Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 419. 30 

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In other words, past, present and future, all humans (‘Allmen’) end in oblivion. Father and Son lead to a holocaust instead of a holy ghost. Notebooks will be kept in storage and digitised, monastic ruins are restored, cathedrals are rebuilt, but it is all nothing in the future. Finnegans Wake as an apocalyptic symbol of the end of scripture is an idea that the infamous death-of-God theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer was fascinated with throughout his life. For Altizer the ‘apocalyptic ending’ of Christendom is in itself a ‘renewal of an original apocalyptic ending, and therewith the renewal of apocalypse itself’.32 In other words, the end of civilisation, the death of God, even the end of religion, must be understood within Christian thought, an idea that Altizer often located in the works of Joyce. Writing or scripture finally ends in Finnegans Wake, for this is a text in which a written or writable language has wholly disappeared as such, and disappeared to make way for or to awake that primal and immediate speech which is on the other side of writing or text, and on the infinitely other side of that writing which is Scripture or sacred text.33 This scripture is not one of immanence and materialism, but is instead asserted through its fragility, which is where Altizer connects it to his ‘nihilistic theology’ of a dying and absent God that can yet be transcendent. As Samuel Beckett wrote in a letter, ‘more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at things (or the Nothingness) behind. Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved?’34 Beckett’s use of the word ‘terrible’ here is what interests me: he finds the implied permanence of writing to be its danger, but words – whether they are written in sand, printed on paper, or etched in stone tablets by the finger of God – eventually all decay. Like destroyed but still-remembered devotional art, buried and rediscovered codices and plates, and fading, rotting, but temporarily digitally preserved notebooks, the truth is always disappearing and fading away; for thinkers like Altizer (and perhaps Beckett) this is what makes it sacred. For us – early in the twenty-first century – the concept of time and history has again changed. We’ve read Joyce’s Wake and Wells’s The Time Machine; we’ve thought about modernist time – from Leopold Bloom’s pocket watch to the god-like presence of Big Ben in Mrs Dalloway to the train schedules of Marcel Proust; we’ve studied the way that the brain processes memories of trauma; we’ve inherited the scientific ideas of Einstein and Stephen Hawking; and we’ve watched the time travel drama in Harry Potter, Doctor Who and Outlander. We acknowledge – in our fiction and in our theoretical scientific musings – the possibility of time travel and parallel universes. Time – although we don’t organise our lives this way – is fluid, it goes both directions, and we travel through it, via art, religious ritual, memory or architecture as time machines.

32 

Thomas J. J. Altizer, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir [1985] (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 177. 33  Thomas J. J. Altizer, History as Apocalypse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 237. 34  Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: John Calder, 1983), 171–2.

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Reality in the Fourth Dimension When Wells’s Traveller tries to explain the nature of time and reality, he asks, ‘Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?’ and then concludes that for a body to be ‘real’ it must have ‘extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration’ (4). The idea of a fourth dimension was not a new one for the readers of Wells’s fiction. In Victorian England, the fourth dimension was used as a space for all sorts of unexplained phenomena outside of the ordinary or the traditional; a ‘hideaway for the mysterious, the unseen, the spiritual’.35 By the early twentieth century, the fourth dimension was even more a subject of popular science. A particularly Wellsian issue of a 1908 Scientific American had an essay on ‘The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained’. In the same issue, there was an article on the first successful trial of a ‘new American aeroplane’ (‘a heavier-than-air machine that was able to fly at the first attempt’),36 in which there was a full page of physical details and measurements including a description that sounded like Wells’s time machine: ‘It carried a light bicycle wheel on its front end as a flywheel, while the 6-foot propeller was mounted directly on the rear end of the crankshaft.’37 The issue also had an early piece on water and canals on Mars that speculated on the possibility of sustaining human life there.38 In the article on the fourth dimension, the author explains the concept with plain language, diagrams and basic mathematics, while yet making the bold claim that ‘it would be absurd, however, to limit reality to what we can picture or represent to ourselves’. In the conclusion the author turns more toward speculation: So, then, we may very well argue that the existence of a fourth dimension may be a fact. If such a dimension exists, it would be possible for us to pass into it and become immediately invisible to those conscious as we now are of but the three dimensions. For passing into the fourth dimension, we should pass out of our present world.39 When he says that we will ‘pass out of our present world’ it is not clear whether the author means we pass into a different world or dimension altogether or just pass out of the present, the specific moment in time we imagine we somehow inhabit. The article was written at a moment in history when Einstein was blurring the separation of time and space, and the next century of science fiction and physics would grapple with that exact question. In Finnegans Wake, the fourth dimension is referred to as ‘fourdimmansions’, or perhaps ‘four dim mansions’, a pun that appropriately connects Victorian occultism and modern physics with the misty castles of the past.40 We might even trace it back to the phrase ‘our dim mansions’ in an 1846 short story by M. G. Sleeper in The Columbian

35 

Gleick, Time Travel, 9. ‘The First Successful Trial of a New American Aeroplane’, Scientific American 98, no. 12 (21 March 1908): 200. 37  ‘The First Successful Trial’, 200. 38  S. A. Mitchell, ‘Water Vapor on Mars’, Scientific American 98, no. 12 (21 March 1908): 201. 39  J. Springer, ‘The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained’, Scientific American 98, no. 12 (21 March 1908): 202. 40  Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 367. 36 

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Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, titled ‘Eleanor D’Estella’. Sleeper’s story opens with dark towers standing in a fifteenth-century Spain, where ‘tall crosses [. . .] increased its air of austerity and gloom’. In the apartment of the lady abbess, a nun tells her departing pupil that she has but ‘flitted through our dim mansions like a dove’.41 An article preceding Sleeper’s story in the same volume and written by ‘an amateur’ makes the opening claim that they ‘doubt the assumption of superiority of one age over the other’ and that since mankind walks ‘but in a circle’ the ‘old exploded mystery of witchcraft has been revived’.42 Connecting Joyce to this short story is a blurring of genetic research and random literary wandering that mimics the process of reading. We have now drifted back through Finnegans Wake, to a forgotten literary journal of the 1840s, to late medieval Spain and the very magic and stone circles Joyce was taking notes on in 1924, and through which Outlander’s Claire Beauchamp was time travelling in my evening television watching in Buffalo in 2019. Outlander is a romance time travel historical drama about a World War II nurse who travels through magic stones to eighteenth-century Scotland, where she falls in love and marries. Although she eventually returns to the twentieth century, where she lives for twenty years with her original husband and becomes a doctor, she then chooses to go back to the past to be with her eighteenth-century husband. Despite the magical/mystical time travel, the show rarely touches on religion, but for one episode, after five seasons of time travel, sex, moral difficulties and violence, the show does turn to religion. The episode opens with Claire – during her time in late twentieth-century Boston before returning to the past – sitting in a church alone. This scene is the first in season 5 where Claire is seen inhabiting a time outside of the eighteenth century; the narrative effect is one of a ‘flashback’ to the present. The cantor sings: All glory and honour is yours For ever and ever. . . The irony is obviously intentional. Claire knows time travel is possible, so what does ‘forever’ even mean to her? As Claire kneels at the altar, her voiceover talks of putting herself in the hands of a ‘being she can’t hear, can’t see, can’t even feel’. The show has rarely shown Claire put her faith in a Christian God, and we immediately wonder just to whom or what she is referring. As we see a montage of scenes from different points in her life, we hear her thoughts: Time is a lot of things that people say God is There’s the pre-existing and having no end There’s the notion of being all powerful Because nothing can stand against time43

41 

M. G. Sleeper, ‘Eleanor D’Estella’, The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine 6 (1846): 225. ‘A Panegyric: On Witchcraft, Mesmerism, and Cheap Literature’, The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine 6 (1846): 209. 43  Outlander, season 5, episode 5, ‘Perpetual Adoration’, dir. Meera Menon, written by Diana Gabaldon, Ronald D. Moore and Alyson Evans, aired 15 March 2020, on Starz. 42 

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Isaac Newton, whose theories of time held up until Einstein, would agree with Claire’s equating of time with God. Newtonian time had a divine grounding. He insisted that time was ‘absolute’ and that it flows uniformly. For Newton, space was the ‘sensorium of God’, and absolute, true, mathematical time divinely existed in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external. It took much of his life for even Einstein to completely break from this viewpoint of time, but as he wrote, just weeks before his death, people ‘who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion’. In a break from Newton’s monotheistically influenced divine Time, we now realise there is no time, but only times.

Our Dim Mansion: Dracula and Whitby Abbey A couple of weeks after I returned from Buffalo, I travelled to England and Ireland for research and for a Dublin conference celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake. In between visits to the British Library, York Minster, Trinity College and Kennedy’s pub, I took a two-hour bus ride from York across the spectacular moors of the Brontës to the seaside town of Whitby and the ruins of its famous medieval abbey that sit on the cliffs overlooking the sea. It’s a short walk from the bus station to the stairs leading up to the ruins and to the still-functioning parish church on top of the hill surrounded by tombstones. For many visitors, the Abbey and Whitby are known because of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, much of which is set there. Stoker’s research notes, currently in the Rosenbach Library, show that he walked through its graveyard jotting down names, some of which appear in Dracula.44 It is the elevation of the Abbey over the water and the town that gives the landscape much of its drama. On an August night in 1890, Stoker stood on this cliff and looked down at the town, writing in a notebook: Lights scattered town & up river Esk – black line of roof on left – near Abbey House – sheep & lambs bleating – clatter of donkeys; hoofs up paved road: Band in pier loud waltz. Salvation Army in street off Quay neither hearing each other we hearing both.45 Like Einstein’s view from the hill or Joyce and T. B. Macaulay’s traveller’s vision from London Bridge, the perspective is different from the cliffs of Whitby. Stoker is able to hear the sounds and the music at once – a form of simultaneity that his vantage point allows. In chapter 6 of Dracula, Mina – also looking down from the churchyard next to the ruins of the Abbey – has the same thought just after hearing the clock strike nine: ‘Neither of the bands hears the other, but up here I hear and see them both.’46 Mina describes the scene in her journal: Right over the town is the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which is the scene of part of ‘Marmion’, where the girl was built up in a wall. It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits.

44 

Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller, eds, Drafts of Dracula (Victoria, BC: Tellwell, 2019), 168–9. Eighteen-Bisang and Miller, Drafts of Dracula, 118. 46  Bram Stoker, The New Annotated Dracula, ed. Leslie S. Klinger (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 127. References to Dracula are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 45 

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There is a legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows. Between it and the town there is another church, the parish one, round which is a big graveyard, all full of tombstones. This is to my mind the nicest spot in Whitby, for it lies right over the town, and has a full view of the harbour and all up the bay [. . .] It descends so steeply over the harbour that part of the bank has fallen away, and some of the graves have been destroyed. (117) In this passage, Stoker suggests a series of contradictions and oppositions that help us start looking at what these kinds of sites do in our literary and visual imagination. The women in this passage, as they are throughout Dracula, are both pure and dangerous (a fallen nun walled up for breaking her vows and a ‘white lady’). There is non-linear typology working in this passage. The window that the white lady looks out of echoes the window that Dracula will later look out of, and the conflicting powers in this scene blend the legendary with the superstitious, the Catholic with the Protestant. The little parish church may be Church of England, yet both the vampire and his power and the power of good against him come out of what is seen as a superstitious Catholic past. Finally, we get the hint of peaceful nature; yet this ‘nicest spot’ from which Mina looks out over a crumbling, decaying cliff sits, as we will find, on the grave of a suicide, on earth that will soon crumble into the sea, bringing down a bank of consecrated soil and the skeletons of long-dead bodies. Whitby Abbey, as all the guidebooks will tell you, was a Benedictine abbey overlooking the North Sea in North Yorkshire, built in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; these various stages can be seen in the ruins today in the different architectural styles of the walls and windows. But the Abbey has older roots: a previous religious site, called Streoneshalh, was founded by Saint Hild (or Hilda) in 657 ce. The name suggests an even older beginning, as the name Streoneshalh is thought to signify Fort Bay or Tower Bay, which is a reference to a Roman settlement that perhaps previously existed on the site. Streoneshalh was laid waste by Danes in successive raids between 867 and 870 and remained desolate for more than 200 years before later Christian structures were erected. The time travel characteristics of this site start early. You will often read that the name refers to Eadric Streona, but this is highly unlikely for chronological reasons: Streona died in 1017, so the naming of Streoneshalh would have preceded his birth by several hundred years. The ruins we see today date from the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, the collapse of the south transept in 1736, and the tower falling in the 1830s, to a World War I bombing in December 1914 – the presence of ruins on this site was always already there. To further research Whitby is to find yet another layer of history woven into literature and memory. In a 1779 history of the Abbey, Lionel Charlton writes: our abbey keeps continually mouldering away, and has within these fifty years past gone greatly to decay, but never did it receive so rude a shock as from a storm of wind which happened on the night of December 2nd, 1763 [when the whole western wing fell] [. . .] Enough of the abbey yet remains to make it an excellent sea-mark. But it will not continue for so many ages, the whole being in so ruinous a condition that in another hundred years it must be entirely reduced to a heap of rubbish.47 47 

Lionel Charlton, The History of Whitby and Whitby Abbey: Collected from the Original Records of the Abbey, and Other Authentic Memoirs, Never Before Made Public (York: A. Ward, 1779), xvii.

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By 1905 – post-Wells’s Time Machine, post-Dracula, and the same year that Einstein proclaimed that time was not an absolute, and that Joyce threw his autobiographical first novel into a fire never to be read – this perspective of the inevitability of ruin and rubbish had changed considerably. In 1905 Ralph Adams Cram writes of the Abbey before its destruction as ‘perfect’ and ‘strong, sure, masterly’, adjectives which set up the tragic fall that is Cram’s theme. Cram describes Whitby from the beginning as the ‘very haunt of terror and dismay’.48 As Cram describes it, after the dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s, Whitby, unlike many other locations, was ‘left to a lingering death. [. . .] the fabric of the church itself was never destroyed by man’ and ‘the great church, one of the many glories of mediaeval England, was left to slowly crumble into dust’.49 For Cram, the Abbey has an atmosphere of ‘gloom surround[ing] the gaunt ruins’. Cram also has a very specific take on nature, painting it as the antagonist to the Abbey: the ‘fierce onslaughts of the wind’, the ‘screaming of the sea birds’ and the ‘long and barren reaches of harsh moor’ combine to ‘create an atmosphere of forlorn depression that is quite unusual among the abbeys, and quite unjustified by recorded history’. The photographs in his book show a bleak building ‘where the winds have gnawed at will’.50 This is the Whitby of Dracula, but not the Whitby of English Heritage – nature as enemy, rather than the romantic and harmonic partnership of nature and ruined stone of the nineteenth-century Tintern Abbey of Wordsworth or J. M. W. Turner’s drawings of St Mary’s in York. Ruins are, in the words of Georg Simmel, a place where ‘the will of the spirit and the necessity of nature issues into real peace’, and where ‘the soul in its upward striving and nature in its gravity are held in balance’.51 Cram also placed the blame for destruction on more recent postReformation human activity. St Mary’s (the parish church near the Abbey) was ‘once a fine twelfth century building, now hideously desecrated and made ridiculous by seventeenth and nineteenth century abominations’,52 a description very different from one from our own century’s English Heritage Guidebook that describes it as an ‘extraordinary interior’ of ‘labyrinth complexity’,53 or from ‘hard to believe and impossible not to love’ by twentieth-century British historian of architecture Nikolaus Pevsner.54 For Cram, it is more tragic that the Abbey wasn’t destroyed all at once by humans, but instead ‘perished by sheer neglect’, or was pulled down for material throughout the eighteenth century, the real ‘dark ages’ of England.55 He warns: ‘at any time all that remains may sink in final destruction, and the last vestiges of another national monument will be lost to England forever.’56 Simmel points to the moment when a building breaks as the point where the ‘balance between nature and spirit, which the building manifested, shifts in favor of nature’.57 But buildings, texts, all materials are breaking before they are ever finished;

48 

Ralph Adams Cram, The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain (New York: James Pott & Company, 1905), 54. Cram, The Ruined Abbeys, 54. 50  Cram, The Ruined Abbeys, 55. 51  Georg Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, The Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1958): 379. 52  Cram, The Ruined Abbeys, 55. 53  English Heritage Guidebooks: Whitby Abbey (Bristol: English Heritage, 2010). 54  Nikolaus Pevsner, Yorkshire: The North Riding [1966] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 392–3. 55  Cram, The Ruined Abbeys, 59. 56  Cram, The Ruined Abbeys, 60. 57  Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, 380. 49 

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one moment does not precede the other, it only appears to. Where Simmel finds a unity in the ruins returning to nature, I see a plurality in an imaginative time travel that exists in the past and the future. Our viewings of these sacred ruins are simultaneously moments of reading, conversations with multiple voices, acts of negotiating iconoclasm, communal interpretations, and imaginings of history against the orthodox grain. Yet, as Einstein showed us, true simultaneity is impossible, and our attention flicks from one way of reading to another. When you climb the famous 199 steps to gaze upon the ruins of Whitby Abbey, several possible visions emerge as you near the top. You might nostalgically imagine the ruins as a working medieval monastery. Perhaps, like a romantic painter or poet, you are inspired by the contrast of fallen religion and ascending nature in the plants and crumbling walls. You might listen to the recorded tour where the voices of eighth- or sixteenth-century ‘monks’ guide your walk. Or maybe, as a reader of Dracula, you imagine Mina writing in the cemetery behind St Mary’s parish church, while a vampire, drawn to the consecrated soil, peers out at her through the remains of a medieval window. The Protestant Stoker perhaps presented this balance of good and evil as an analogy for the balance of superstition and power represented by Whitby; other writers of his time, however, found in the Abbey evidence of a pure religion tragically lost. For Cram, ‘their memory remains, and will endure forever; this alone persecution was powerless to destroy’. History obliterates memory, but this site contains both. Memories change too, just as much as objects. Material is not solid; narrative is uncertain. Yet part of the appeal of monastic ruins is also their futuristic and post-apocalyptic resonance, and there is a twenty-first-century energy in Whitby as a space of counterculture. If you visit the Abbey, you find packs of people young and old embracing various strands of subculture from Goth to Steampunk – subcultures that intentionally mix times and histories. This is most visible in the Whitby Goth Weekend that features bands with names such as Vampire Killers and The End Times, but – like the energy of spontaneous spoken-word performances of Finnegans Wake at the Burning Man festival – these encounters represent actual negotiations with and constructions of history.58 These alternative and counter-cultural movements create identities based in non-linear history and a type of time travel, which they practise and represent. Whitby Abbey – from its murky beginnings to its hip postmodern present – has been an example of historical and material mutability. People continue to use the Abbey and its surroundings because of its shape-shifting and time-shifting properties. Goths and Steampunks may seem neo-medieval or neo-historical in ways that don’t seem historically responsible, but the same is true for medieval restorations of past centuries, and no doubt our own. In each case, these actions are more important as exercises in imagining past and present than in recovering some monolithic (ein stein) past. The familiar point here is that each generation creates the Whitby that it needs – reshaping and reconstructing (sometimes literally) the structure of the Abbey to fit its own imagination. From Dracula to Turner to English Heritage, the tensions implicit in these descriptions – between nature and man, magic and religion, the undead and dead, and in the plural natures of reality – are tensions we still find ourselves attempting to understand and where monastic ruins continue to play an important part. But what I am interested in are ways in which buildings or structures – our heritage sites – are used

58 

These Finnegans Wake readings at Burning Man are part of a project by filmmaker Gavan Kennedy.

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both in our literature and in lived experiences as time machines, travelling forward as well as back. Depictions, descriptions, illustrations and material have always been in flux, as has the practice of reconstructing the Abbey. To look at Whitby Abbey in the context of the modern world is – like reading Dracula, or Finnegans Wake and the Wake Notebooks – to always be in a world of deferred meaning and time slippage. A place like Whitby Abbey becomes our vehicle for time travel, but also a tool for understanding the way time, history and religion function in a work like Finnegans Wake. There is a direct relationship here to how we create meaning out of texts, and looking at Whitby Abbey directly echoes our New Zealander viewing the future ruins of St Paul’s, Einstein standing on a hill and reinventing time and space, and my reading practices of the Joyce Notebooks in Buffalo.

Time Travel and Re-enchanted Reading Because so many of our time travel fantasies are rooted in old mythologies, magics and documents we might assume that the idea has been around forever. But, as historian of science James Gleick writes, ‘Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era.’59 As Gleick puts it, ‘perhaps the blinders have come off and we are finally evolving, as a species, an ability to understand the past and the future for what they are. We have learned a great deal about time, and only some of it from science.’60 ‘Time travel fiction’, writes David Wittenberg, is a ‘narratological laboratory’ in which ‘many of the most basic theoretical questions about storytelling, and by extension about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity, are represented in the form of literal devices and plots, at once both convenient for criticism and fruitfully complex’.61 We are perhaps more easily able to comprehend an endlessly fragmented self, unreliable self-narration, the questioning of free will, and – by extension – parallel realities and universes than could the early readers of Wells. We are also – and this is my main point – more willing to put ourselves within these narratives, and yet, at the same time, can imagine a privileged reader’s God’s-eye perspective above it all. Like Macaulay, Stoker and Einstein, we can see the merging of time and space and past and future. We, in other words, also experience time differently as we engage with these narratives; we participate in creating new meanings about time. Like Wells’s Traveller, our viewer from London Bridge, and Mina and Stoker on the cliffs of Whitby, we imagine our endings, our world without people, our empty futures. Like Altizer and Beckett we might find a way to see these endings as sacred or religious. And we too may stop to scratch our names on sacred objects that exist in a past and a future, and that occasionally, just for a flicker, we can see as simultaneous.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Leigh Wilson, Cathryn Piwinski and Eugene Vydrin for invaluable suggestions, edits and ideas as I worked on this chapter.

59 

Gleick, Time Travel, 6. Gleick, Time Travel, 25. 61  David Wittenberg, Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), xx. 60 

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Works Cited Altizer, Thomas J. J. History as Apocalypse. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. ———. Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir. 1985. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. London: John Calder, 1983. Charlton, Lionel. The History of Whitby and Whitby Abbey: Collected from the Original Records of the Abbey, and Other Authentic Memoirs, Never Before Made Public. York: A. Ward, 1779. Cole, Sarah. Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Cram, Ralph Adams. The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain. New York: James Pott & Company, 1905. Eighteen-Bisang, Robert and Elizabeth Miller, eds. Drafts of Dracula. Victoria, BC: Tellwell, 2019. Einstein, Albert. Relativity; The Special and General Theory. Translated by Robert W. Lawson. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1920. English Heritage Guidebooks: Whitby Abbey. Bristol: English Heritage, 2010. ‘The First Successful Trial of a New American Aeroplane.’ Scientific American 98, no. 12 (21 March 1908): 200. Galison, Peter. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. Gleick, James. Time Travel: A History. New York: Vintage Books, 2016. Haldane, J. B. S. ‘If You Were Alive in 2123 A.D.’ The Century Magazine 106, no. 5 (August 1923): 549–66. Hubert, Henri. Essay on Time: A Brief Study of the Representation of Time in Religion and Magic. 1909. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999. Huyssen, Andreas. ‘Nostalgia for Ruins.’ Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006): 6–21. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. 1939. New York: Penguin, 1999. ———. Finnegans Wake Notebook VI. B. 1. University at Buffalo, The Poetry Collection, James Joyce Collection. ———. Finnegans Wake Notebook VI. B. 6. University at Buffalo, The Poetry Collection, James Joyce Collection. ———. Finnegans Wake Notebook VI. B. 14. University at Buffalo, The Poetry Collection, James Joyce Collection. ———. The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo, VI. B. 14, edited by Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer and Geert Lernout. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002. ———. Ulysses. 1922. New York: Vintage, 1986. Macauley, Rose. Pleasure of Ruins. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953. Macauley, T. B. ‘Ranke’s History of the Popes.’ Edinburgh Review 72 (October 1840): 227–58. Mitchell, S. A. ‘Water Vapor on Mars.’ Scientific American 98, no. 12 (21 March 1908): 201. Morgan, David. ‘Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment.’ In Re-Enchantment, edited by James Elkins and David Morgan, 3–22. New York: Routledge, 2009. Outlander. Season 5, episode 5, ‘Perpetual Adoration’. Directed by Meera Menon. Written by Diana Gabaldon, Ronald D. Moore and Alyson Evans. Aired 15 March 2020, on Starz. ‘A Panegyric: On Witchcraft, Mesmerism, and Cheap Literature.’ The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine 6 (1846): 209–14. Pevsner, Nikolaus. Yorkshire: The North Riding. 1966. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Simmel, Georg. ‘The Ruin.’ The Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1958): 379–85. Sleeper, M. G. ‘Eleanor D’Estella.’ The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine 6 (1846): 225–31.

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Springer, J. ‘The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained.’ Scientific American 98, no. 12 (21 March 1908): 202. Stoker, Bram. The New Annotated Dracula. Edited by Leslie S. Klinger. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Styers, Randall. Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Wells, H. G. The Time Machine and The Invisible Man. 1895. New York: Signet Classics, 1984. Wittenberg, David. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

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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.

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Part VII: Global Transitions and Exchange

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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.

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26 Global Seekers in The Quest: A Case Study of an Occult Periodical’s Worldly Religion Mimi Winick

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ometime between 1909 and 1930, if you were living within reach of the British postal service and were curious about religion in a serious but not orthodox way, you might find yourself perusing a copy of The Quest: A Quarterly Review, a relatively inexpensive yet substantial periodical edited by the gentleman scholar of Gnosticism G. R. S. Mead (1866–1933).1 While the Quest Society disavowed any specific religious affiliation, it was shaped by late Victorian occultism, and especially Theosophy and its corporate body the Theosophical Society, of which Mead had been a high-ranking member. Theosophy was the most prominent among a wide array of late Victorian occult religious movements. The Theosophical Society, founded in New York by the Russian emigré Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the American Henry Steele Olcott, claimed to unite all religious traditions, and, moreover, religion, philosophy and science more broadly, in one perennial, universal wisdom tradition.2 In a sense the Quest Society out-Theosophied Theosophy: by disavowing a specific occult affiliation, it could be even more open, heterodox and syncretic than Theosophy itself. At the same time, it pursued a recognisably Theosophical or more broadly occult project of investigating the ‘truth’ about religion – in the sense of insights about the ‘scholarly study of religion’

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On The Quest and how it compares to other occult periodicals of the era, see Mark Morrison, ‘The Periodical Culture of the Occult Revival: Esoteric Wisdom, Modernity and Counter-Public Spheres’, Journal of Modern Literature 31, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 1–22. On occult periodical culture of the fin-de-siècle, see Christine Ferguson, ‘The Luciferian Public Sphere: Theosophy and Editorial Seekership in the 1880s’, Victorian Periodicals Review 53, no. 1 (2020): 76–101, and Elsa Richardson, ‘Stemming the Black Tide of Mud’, in The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947, ed. Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford (Milton: Routledge, 2018), 110–28. On Mead, see Nicholas and Clare Goodricke-Clark, G. R. S. Mead and the Gnostic Quest (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2005). In addition to editing The Quest, Mead was also editor of the Theosophical journals Lucifer (with Annie Besant) from 1893 to 1897 and the Theosophical Review from 1907 to 1909. 2  On Theosophy, see Joy Dixon, The Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Gauri Viswanathan, ‘In Search of Madame Blavatsky: Reading the Exoteric, Retrieving the Esoteric’, Representations 141, no. 1 (2018): 67–94; Julie Chajes, Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Mead was secretary to Blavatsky and in 1907 was a frontrunner to be president when he resigned in protest of a scandal involving Society leadership.

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as well as ‘spiritual wisdom’. Among other similar (more and less occult) periodicals of the period, such as The New Age and The Dial, The Quest stands apart for its particularly deep and extensive engagement with so-called Eastern religions and its publication of writing by a wide range of scholars, especially scholars of religion. If you found yourself among the ‘more general public seriously interested’ in its spiritual project whom the journal’s mission statement addressed, you might fill out the subscription card (Figure 26.1) tucked into your issue, or, if you were near London, attend one of the meetings of the Quest Society, during which scholars, artists, writers and clergy gave lectures, many of which were subsequently printed as articles in the society’s journal (Figure 26.2).3 As this chapter argues, these ‘Seekers’, as The Quest referred to its community of writers and readers, created a self-consciously modern concept of religion that encompassed Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and other religious traditions and which could be accessed not only through specifically religious practices, but also through literary and aesthetic practices, and even the periodical form of The Quest itself.4 If you were a white woman, you might feel this organisation was especially hospitable – not only were white women prominent among its contributors as writers and lecturers, but the subscription card specifically made room for female honorifics. Moreover, you would notice that other women must be regular attendees, since the meetings’ flyer requested them to ‘kindly remove their Hats at the Lectures’. If you were not a Christian, you might feel similarly welcomed, noting the prominence of non-Christian clergy among the contributors, as well as, more broadly, the large number of non-clergy authors and lecturers discussing non-Christian religions. If you were not from Britain at all, you might be cheered to note contributors from India, Japan, China, the far western US and many countries in Europe. (Women were an exception to this: female contributors, including those who wrote on non-Christian religions, were generally white, European and Christian.) Among the various contributors were writers who were already, or soon to become, prominent authorities on religion, including the Austrian Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, the British scholar of Buddhism Caroline Rhys Davids, the British Egyptologist and witchcraft expert Margaret A. Murray, the German-Israeli scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, the Irish Catholic modernist Father George Tyrell, the British writer on mysticism Evelyn Underhill, and the British writer on medieval literature and comparative religion Jessie L. Weston. Finally, if you are today someone interested in the literary and aesthetic movement of modernism as it flourished between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries, you might notice other familiar names among the contributors to this periodical

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The location of Society events in East London and especially its association with John Watkins’s bookshop place it in a milieu characterised by what Steven Sutcliffe calls ‘A “quest culture” [. . .], structured by the role of the “seeker,” the social institution of “seekership,” a supply of exotic religious authorities, and a new concern with “mystical” experiences and “occult” exploration’ (51). Sutcliffe notes specifically how occult bookshops ‘functioned as contact points, even ritual venues, in a common “seekership” culture’ (67). See Steven Sutcliffe, ‘The Origins of “New Age” Religion between the Two World Wars’, in Handbook of New Age, ed. Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis (Boston: Brill, 2007), 51–75. 4  The Quest’s editorial copy refers to it as ‘a Society of Seekers’ in the inside page facing the front cover of, for example, The Quest 2, no. 3 (April 1911).

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and its meetings, including W. B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore, and perhaps their lesser-known peers, including Yone Noguchi, Algernon Blackwood, Fiona Macleod and Arthur Machen. While some of these figures were known for their interest in heterodox religion, other prominent modernists among The Quest’s authors or lecturers, such as Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, were not.5 The Quest is thus the site of a number of startling juxtapositions from the perspective of academic humanities scholarship and especially modernist studies today. Such juxtapositions include modernism and religion itself, still sometimes seen as a paradoxical pairing, despite decades of work on the engagement of modernist writers and artists with religion in heterodox and orthodox forms.6 Another juxtaposition is between the journal’s equal emphasis on esoteric – that is, secret or hard to understand – religion and its hospitality to the ‘general public’.7 This chapter considers an additional juxtaposition: an ideal of worldliness that appears linked to its putative opposite, spiritual transcendence, while being equated not only to immanence but also to a cosmopolitan, global perspective. These juxtapositions appear paradoxical in light of a familiar formulation about religion in modernity: that it is either private and spiritual or public and institutional. Recent work in the humanities and social sciences has shown that the familiar historical and theoretical narrative on which this cliché rests – the so-called classic secularisation thesis which defines modernisation as a process of secularisation in which religion recedes from the world – is, first, empirically untrue, and, second, itself a literary creation that has shaped modern cultural and aesthetic practices.8 Indeed, as a narrative about what defines modernity, it has long defined literary and aesthetic modernism itself.

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For Lewis and The Quest, see Sarah Victoria Turner, ‘“Spiritual Rhythm” and “Material Things”: Art, Cultural Networks and Modernity in Britain, c.1900–1914’ (PhD diss., Courtauld Institute, University of London, 2009), 272–83. 6  Earlier studies include Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981); Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993); Timothy Materer, Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Leon Surette and Demetres Tryphonopoulos, eds, Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996). 7  On this paradox regarding periodical culture, see J. Barton Scott, ‘Miracle Publics: Theosophy, Christianity, and the Coulomb Affair’, History of Religions 49, no. 2 (November 2009): 172–96. 8  For a particularly cogent review of this conversation in the context of literary studies, see Kevin Seidel, ‘A Secular for Literary Studies’, Christianity and Literature 67, no. 3 (2018): 472–92. See also Michael Kaufmann, ‘The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession’, New Literary History 38, no. 4 (2007): 607–28; William McKelvy, W. Clark Gilpin, Colin Jager, Ruth Clayton Windscheffel and Joshua King, ‘Forum: The Sacralization of Literature in the Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Prose 39, nos 1–2 (Spring/Fall 2012): 17–71; Charles LaPorte, ‘Victorian Literature, Religion, and Secularization’, Literary Compass 10, no. 3 (2013): 277–87; Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003); José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy’, PMLA 123, no. 2 (2008): 466–76; Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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But it was not the only story about religious change told in the modernist era. In The Quest what we might call a ‘spiritualisation’ story emerges. This narrative presents modernisation as a process of spiritual intensification within the worldly spheres of art, knowledge and politics that occurs on a global scale, transcending specific national or regional religious traditions. Such a spiritualisation story shares with the classic secularisation thesis universalising claims (e.g. this is the process of modernisation, everywhere), while changing the nature of those claims: modernisation is not the decline of religion, but its transformation (and, moreover, purification and amelioration) into spirit. In The Quest’s spiritualisation story, the apparent paradoxes of modernism vs religion, esoteric religion vs public accessibility, and spiritual vs worldly resolve. The Quest thus presents religion in modernity not as either private and spiritual or public and institutional, but as spiritual and public – as global as well as worldly. Further, The Quest offers a specific twist on the idea of individual spiritual experience, conceptualising it as sustained rather than fleeting. The Quest makes cameo appearances in studies of modernism, but it has yet to be the subject of sustained analysis.9 This chapter aims to offer a sense of how this understudied but important periodical illuminates modernism and religion, and to provide a jumping-off point for future work on The Quest and its community and the questions about modernism, religion and the ‘global’ they raise.10 It aims too to suggest avenues for future work on related periodicals and communities, some of which are well known but less often discussed with regard to religion, and others which remain more obscure. This chapter thus joins, and echoes the call for, a collaborative effort in art history, literary studies and religious studies to redefine modernism as a project engaged with modernising, rather than merely jettisoning, religion. Such a project builds on and extends the recognition of new canons of early twentieth-century modernist work, especially writing by women and non-European writers whose engagement with religion has been taken by literary critics as a sign of their insufficiently modernist, and even modern, bona fides.

Modern Religion I: Sustaining Spiritual Experience in The Quest The Quest was centrally engaged with modernising religion ­– or, more exactly, asserting that a certain kind of transhistorical ‘spiritual’ religion was particularly suited to, and increasingly prominent within, the modern world. The community around The Quest regarded itself as modern, with contributors concerned with authors they deemed, for example, ‘the most modern of the modernists’ – as a reviewer describes May Sinclair in 1918.11 They further regarded their approaches to inquiry as ‘essentially modern’ in combining serious engagement with religion and science.12

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Its fullest analysis heretofore has been in Surette’s and Tryphonopoulos’s work, cited above. There is also a discussion of The Quest in Turner, ‘Spiritual Rhythm’. 10  The Quest is available in well-preserved print runs at Houghton Library, Harvard University, and at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Many issues are also available on the website of the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals, http://iapsop.com (accessed 3 October 2021). 11  The Quest 9, no. 2 (January 1918): 336. 12  The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 181.

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But The Quest’s contributors were aware of competing narratives of modernity, including secularisation stories that described religion in modernity as in decline or irrelevant. Indeed, the classic secularisation thesis itself was so familiar as to be ‘a bland assertion’ in one 1910 article.13 The Quest’s contributors largely responded to such claims with a complementary yet distinct claim that while religion in its more ‘traditional’ or ‘institutional’ forms might be less prominent in modernity, the spiritual essence of religion was increasingly active, in personal experience and in world affairs.14 The account of spirituality as a worldly force in modernity is the dominant form of spiritualisation narrative in The Quest. In a 1915 essay, for instance, the journal’s editor G. R. S. Mead asserts that the world is experiencing a simultaneous secularisation of religion and spiritualisation as the essential spiritual ‘element’ of religion becomes more clearly defined. In this process, Mead writes, ‘Religion would thus be naturally secularised and the life of the world as naturally spiritualised’.15 A frequent contributor, Jessie L. Weston, concurs in an essay later that year, writing that The Quest’s ‘Seekers’ seemed to agree that ‘[s]urely the most marked feature of this 20th century has been the insistence upon the reality of spiritual force, the recognition of the operative and moulding power of unseen energies’.16 Other contributors refer to ‘the spiritual Renaissance of the XXth century’, to ‘a still “newer” mysticism than the “new mysticism” of the post-Renaissance days [. . .] being born among us to-day’, to ‘the great spiritual forces that direct our world work’.17 Spirituality was thus linked in The Quest to a sense of political action in the world. The journal’s articles on the Great War offer a vivid example of its idea of worldly spirituality. During the war years, several contributors wrote of the spiritual dimensions and meaning of the war. Weston’s 1915 article on the war, ‘The Soul of France’, frames it in spiritual terms: it is ‘no ordinary conflict, but rather [. . .] the setting free of tremendous elementary forces [that constitute] the culmination of a stage in world-evolution’, a description that invokes occult theories of history that regard the world as evolving through spiritual stages.18 In keeping with the sense among Quest Seekers that modernity was a broadly spiritual age, Weston regards her view not as exclusively occult; she locates support for her claims not only in ‘uncharted outlying tracts where “spiritualism” and “occultism” are at work’, but also in mainstream views, such as ‘the philosophy of Bergson, with its recognition of vital as opposed to material energy; or in the domain of science [where] everywhere elements, the very existence of which would fifty years ago have been generally denied, are now admitted to be potent factors in human development’.19 For Weston, the war offers particularly compelling evidence of the spiritual modernity she finds increasingly vivid around her.

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W. F. Cobb, ‘The Nature of Culture’, The Quest 1, no. 2 (January 1910): 206–7. G. R. S. Mead, ‘An Approach to the Religion of the Spirit’, The Quest 6, no. 2 (January 1915): 250. 15  Mead, ‘Approach’, 251. 16  Jessie L. Weston, ‘The Soul of France’, The Quest 6, no. 4 (July 1915): 754. 17  ‘Review of Studies in Mystical Religion (1909) by Rufus M. Jones’, The Quest 1, no. 2 (January 1910): 381; W. R. Boyce Gibson, ‘The Philosophy of Rudolf Euken’, The Quest 1, no. 2 (January 1910): 342; Bernard S. Arnulphy, ‘The Oceanic Origin of Life’, The Quest 1, no. 3 (April 1910): 504. 18  Weston, ‘Soul’, 754. 19  Weston, ‘Soul’, 754–5. 14 

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Weston’s view of the war as a spiritual battle as well as a material one contrasts with a more familiar sense of the Great War catalysing a sense of spiritual bankruptcy, especially among writers and artists. This latter sense is exemplified by modernist poetry written during the war by soldiers such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and after the war perhaps most famously in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Intriguingly, The Waste Land constructs its account of modern spiritual malaise with explicit reference to Weston’s most famous work, From Ritual to Romance (1920), suggesting the entanglement of projects around The Quest with better-known high modernist works. While there has been much discussion of Eliot and Weston, the relationship of the milieu of The Quest more broadly to The Waste Land – which would include Quest author Ezra Pound’s active role in editing the poem – offers scope for future research. While in the wake of the war spiritual malaise and emptiness seemed to mark the dominant discourse of modernism and modern letters more broadly, The Quest stayed constant in its view not only of the increasing potency of spiritual forces in the world, but also of the accessibility of fulfilling spiritual experience to individuals.20 A review in The Quest of work by that great theorist of a disenchanted modernity Max Weber suggests how even theorists readers today associate with secularisation narratives could be read as affirming spiritualisation narratives.21 The reviewer sees Weber offering an optimistic view – ‘glad tidings’ – against ‘the inveterate prejudice of materialism’ and beyond the ‘belief that their sufferings under the unbearable pressure of modern economic conditions on the spiritual development of mankind are inevitable and beyond hope of remedy’.22 The reviewer thus sees even in Weber a view of spiritual modernity akin to Weston’s 1915 claim that spiritual ‘elements, the very existence of which would fifty years ago have been generally denied, are now admitted to be potent factors in human development’. One remedy for modern pressures on ‘spiritual development’ touted in The Quest was the pursuit and achievement of ‘spiritual experience’. This term had multiple meanings in The Quest, though its most distinctive is the one Mead grants to it as a sustained condition, in opposition to discrete ‘abnormal happenings’. Mead professes agnosticism as to the existence of ‘abnormal happenings’ – they ‘may or may not occur’; rather, he defines spiritual experience as an enduring state, characterised by ‘balance’ and ‘understanding’ of ‘the great truths and great powers which are hidden all around us’. Moreover, it is ‘a state of freedom’.23 In this way, Mead positions a life of spiritual experience as modern according to an Enlightenment framework in which to be modern is to be free, and to be in bondage is to be stuck in a backward, premodern condition.24 Mead’s distinct definition of ‘spiritual experience’ is bolstered 20 

The constancy of The Quest’s position suggests that the argument that World War I led to an increase in heterodox spirituality, as with accounts of Spiritualist séances to contact deceased soldiers, does not apply to this community. 21  R. E., ‘Review of Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Religions-Soziologie’, The Quest 13, no. 4 (October 1922): 134–5. 22  R. E., ‘Review of Gesammelte’, 134. 23  G. R. S. Mead, ‘On the Nature of the Quest’, The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 38–9. 24  For recent discussions of this idea in the context of heterodox religion as a modern phenomenon, see J. Barton Scott, Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), and Emily Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

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by Evelyn Underhill in a 1910 issue. Underhill similarly defines mystical experience not as aberrant or fleeting, but as a development of something normal and indeed universal: it is ‘[l]ess [. . .] an abnormal experience—a religious or psychological freak—and more [. . .] the development of a sense, an intuition, which lies deep in every conscious Self; the intuition, that is to say, of transcendent reality’.25 Moreover, as a ‘development of a sense’, it can be cultivated; it is not merely a matter of accident or grace. In these definitions, Mead and Underhill follow the influential logic of the Society for Psychical Research, which largely regarded psychical or ‘spiritual’ phenomena as a manifestation of the ‘supernormal’ (or what appears in The Quest’s mission statement as the ‘supranormal’) rather than the supernatural.26 While Underhill and Mead distance their particular conceptions of ‘mystical’ and ‘spiritual’ experience from discrete ‘abnormal’ phenomena, other contributors to The Quest dwell on such phenomena. Yet, in keeping with Mead’s approach, they do so while bringing them ‘within the immediate consciousness of’ the journal’s readers, the better to pursue Mead’s ideal of spiritual experience as a sustained condition that can be achieved through specific practices. In this way, even accounts of something approaching individual or private spiritual experience have, in The Quest, a communal, public function. They become data in the journal and fodder for its aim to bring together ‘Seekers’ who collaboratively ‘note the results of specialized work in all departments of religion, philosophy, and science, and [. . .] apply the same to the deeper and more vital needs of the human soul’, while also ‘add[ing] their own experience to the sum-total, and thus [. . .] enrich[ing], intensify[ing], and beautify[ing] human life’.27 In these ways, The Quest presents the writing and reading practices of its Seekers in and around the journal as a means of cultivating the spiritual experience it celebrates. In The Quest, such scholarly practices are means of experiencing transcendence, just as mediation, yoga or prayer might be. For example, in 1913 Jessie Weston published in The Quest her account of a vision experienced by some children in France in 1871, which she had recently heard in a sermon given by one of the witnesses.28 Like Mead, she professes to be agnostic about whether the vision was abnormal or even supernatural – ‘Whether the children actually beheld “a beautiful lady,” or whether they were the witnesses of some brilliant celestial phenomenon, which the “suggestion” of their elders translated for them into this particular form, it is impossible to say’ – but holds to the reality of ‘a remarkable

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Evelyn Underhill, ‘A Note upon Mysticism’, The Quest 1, no. 4 (July 1910): 742. Frederic W. H. Myers coined this term in The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 1885, defining it as characteristic of ‘phenomena which are beyond what usually happens—beyond, that is, in the sense of suggesting unknown psychic laws’; ‘Automatic Writing’, The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 3 (1885): 30. It was coined expressly in opposition to the supernatural, which referred to unusual phenomena that were seen to exist outside of natural law. In contrast, the laws of the supernormal are analogous to, and indeed extensions of, natural law. The supernormal exists on a continuum with the normal: in the realm of the supernormal, unusual phenomena do not need to be explained away by rational explanations; rather, they are, in theory, explicable by rational explanation themselves. The unusual is thus rationalised without losing its status as strange. The supernormal is at once natural and unusual; normal in kind, and strange in degree. For excellent histories and discussions of this concept, see Owen, Place, and Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 27  Inside page facing the front cover of The Quest 2, no. 3 (April 1911). 28  Jessie L. Weston, ‘The Madonna of Pontmain’, The Quest 4, no. 2 (January 1913): 329–34. 26 

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spiritual manifestation’ occurring either way. Weston reconstructs this vision through combining her transcription of the sermon with documentary evidence from her original research. Ultimately, she finds the vision to be ‘a well-attested record’.29 In this essay, Weston demonstrates a particular way of describing spiritual phenomena in a scholarly frame that both recounts an anecdote of a discrete experience – a vision of the Madonna – and contributes to a model of sustained spiritual experience marked by, in Mead’s terms, ‘an inner recognition of the great truths and great powers which are hidden all around us’.30 Here, the transcendent experience is not so much located in the original vision, but in the scholarly discussion of it that encourages such ‘inner recognition’ of ‘hidden’ truths. This relationship between discrete, abnormal experiences and a more enduring state of ‘spiritual experience’ manifests across most issues of The Quest, which feature many accounts of apparently abnormal experiences in sketches and poems. These include reprinted poems by W. B. Yeats, such as ‘The Mountain Tomb’, as well as original pieces, such as E. R. Innes’s ‘An Innocent in Hades’, which offers an account of a vision.31 These shorter literary pieces reflect the mission statement’s aim to include ‘works of inspiration and the creative imagination’ while inviting ‘all who desire to aid in the Quest, to add their own experience to the sum-total, and thus to enrich, intensify, and beautify human life’. They contrast with the dry, realist anecdotes of Spiritualist and psychical literature, instead featuring self-conscious aesthetic qualities, often in a decadent style.32 In appearing regularly in each issue of The Quest between scholarly essays, they function at a larger scale like Weston’s account of the vision of ‘The Madonna at Pontmain’: each literary account of an abnormal experience is connected to the other in a collection, and further related to the reflective essays on religion, science, and literature and art, so that they become evidence of the ‘great truths and great powers which are hidden all around us’ that, through the framing of The Quest as a periodical, are ‘brought within the immediate consciousness of’ the community of Seekers. In this way, the periodical form itself, in connection with The Quest’s editorial commitment to aesthetics, fosters the sustained spiritual experience Mead celebrates. In several essays reflecting on the origins of the journal and its related society, Mead further suggests how The Quest’s collaborative, ‘seeking’ approach is itself a practice that encourages the kind of sustained condition of ‘spiritual experience’ he endorses. The choice of the title for the journal and society, as Mead explains in the opening essay of The Quest’s inaugural issue, is meant to convey this particular practice. In ‘On

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Weston, ‘Madonna’, 333. Mead, ‘Nature’, 38–9. 31  W. B. Yeats, ‘The Mountain Tomb’, The Quest 4, no. 3 (April 1913): 1; E. R. Innes, ‘An Innocent in Hades’, The Quest 1, no. 3 (April 1910): 536–47; Jessie L. Weston, ‘The Ruined Temple’, The Quest 8, no. 1 (October 1916): 127–39. 32  The Quest thus embraces an approach indebted to Spiritualism and the Society for Psychical Research in presenting spiritual experiences as a kind of data. Both Spiritualists and SPR investigators into Spiritualism published collections of anecdotes as data to support the reality of Spiritualist phenomena such as contact with the spirits of deceased people, clairvoyance, etc. But The Quest differed from both the SPR and Spiritualist accounts by emphasising the aesthetic qualities and value of their anecdata. Where Spiritualist and SPR publications are fairly if severely characterised by the novelist Vernon Lee as ‘flat, stale, and unprofitable’, accounts of abnormal phenomena in The Quest are presented in more ornate rather than realist literary styles. Vernon Lee, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales [1890] (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2006), 38. 30 

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the Nature of the Quest’, Mead introduces The Quest’s project by defining questing as a specifically spiritual mode of inquiry. This method of inquiry assumed an animate world: it considers the phenomena into which it inquires to be ‘living, vital’; it does not seek mastery over – e.g. ‘to dominate’ or ‘to acquire’ – inert matter, but rather seeks cooperation with the ‘soul’ of objects of inquiry. It contrasts with ‘research’, which Mead believes implies becoming a master of material science. For Mead, the ideal of the ‘quest’ encompasses but exceeds ‘research’, including ‘all that is best in research and all that is most desirable in mysticism, and a host of other things as well’. Such questing promises to lead not only to knowledge, but to ‘wisdom’. In Mead’s account, wisdom is an intuitive, ‘spiritual’ knowledge – a ‘subtle, spiritual, instant power to understand the soul of things’ that is connected to ‘the creative power of deity’. Wisdom is also practical and engaged with the world: it is the power ‘to apply this understanding ever to immediate opportunity’.33 The central methodology Mead recommends for such constructive questing and the seeking of wisdom is comparison: ‘we would specially commend the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science in their bearing on the nature of experience.’ Comparison, according to Mead, leads to knowledge of ‘things internal and eternal’, rather than exclusively of things ‘external and changing’.34 In other words, comparison promises access to eternal, transhistorical, universal truths, rather than merely contingent, local, ephemeral information. In this way, the practice of comparison in The Quest in particular fosters the kind of sustained ‘spiritual experience’ Mead endorses.

Modern Religion II: Global Spiritual Transcendence in The Quest Comparison not only supports sustained spiritual experience in The Quest, but also structures the journal’s version of a global transcendence of specific religious traditions. Following the logic in which comparison illuminates ‘eternal’ truths by finding a unity or commonality behind ‘external’ phenomena, contributors to The Quest engage in a familiar practice of comparing different accounts of spiritual experiences across religious, philosophical and aesthetic contexts to illuminate the truth or value of a more general spiritual experience. The Quest’s Seekers understood such approaches to yield ‘the demonstration of a real spiritual unity underlying all experience’.35 For example, the Irish scholar of Celtic studies Maud Joynt compares the experiences of ‘Buddhists or Christians, poets or philosophers or pantheists, Paul or Plotinus, Teresa or Boehme, Dante or Wordsworth or Tennyson’ to posit them as examples of ‘those who – perhaps only once, perhaps but for a few moments – have attained to the level of existence in the spirit’.36 This comparative approach is similar to projects such as Theosophy, academic comparative religion of the kind pursued in James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), all of which were direct influences on various contributions to The Quest. For example, Theosophy claimed to identify a universal wisdom

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Mead, ‘Nature’, 34, 31, 37. Mead, ‘Nature’, 35. 35  A. M. G., ‘Review of Scientific Idealism by William Kingsland (Rebman, 1909)’, The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 181. 36  Maud Joynt, ‘Where There Is Nothing, There Is God’, The Quest 1, no. 2 (January 1910): 225. 34 

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tradition through comparative analysis of religious traditions, knowledge traditions and spiritual phenomena. Some readers of Frazer’s foundational text of comparative religion approached his project in a similar way, taking his ostensibly ironic account of similarities among varied religions not as evidence for the mythic rather than historical origins of Christianity, but rather as evidence for a universal religion encompassing but exceeding Christianity. Joynt references James specifically, and her approach is clearly indebted to James’s approach of collecting first-person accounts of religious experiences and from these deriving more abstract, systematic, transcendent categories of religious experience.37 In keeping with The Quest’s emphasis on spiritual experience as a sustained state, Joynt’s approach invokes brief, discrete spiritual experiences – experiences that occurred ‘perhaps only once, perhaps but for a few moments’ – as signs of a more enduring spiritual reality: ‘the level of existence in the spirit’. But this is not necessarily unique to The Quest: comparison sometimes appears to work to similar effect in the Theosophical and even Frazerian approaches, which collate discrete examples to suggest universal enchantments. As the varied examples here of James, Frazer and Theosophy suggest, comparison could yield different kinds of truth. Fundamentally, comparison as practised in The Quest often seemed to promise a theory that revealed the ultimate relation of all ‘the great religions of the world’ as sharing a common origin – as ‘derived from one source and [. . .] really phases of one continuous development’.38 Sometimes this common origin was Feuerbachian, located in putatively universal, natural characteristics of humans; other times, it was occult, and in this context, often divine, located in an originary religious tradition that had fragmented over time. In the context of religious studies and the medieval grail legend, a topic hotly debated in the pages of The Quest from its first issues through to 1922, some, such as the occultist and amateur scholar A. E. Waite, held comparison to yield the truth that spiritual ecstasy was a universal human experience, and not a sign of the transmission of a ‘secret doctrine’ of ecstatic religious tradition.39 By contrast, his colleague and combatant Jessie L. Weston held that comparison yielded evidence for exactly this latter claim. Whether it revealed a naturalistic or divine origin for spiritual experience, such comparative analysis usually emphasised the distinct contexts of the phenomena being compared. This manifested in The Quest in two main ways: (1) comparisons that maintained distinctions among religious traditions while finding specific instances of common ground, and (2) comparisons that dismissed the specifics of particular traditions in favour of revealing a previously hidden unity that attests to a superior, transcendent truth about religion. In the first case, contributors to The Quest compared what were coming to be called ‘world religions’ with the aim of introducing a less Eurocentric perspective, either by emphasising a sense of a cosmopolitan point of view that encompassed but was not limited to a European perspective, or by emphasising the perspectives of people from outside Europe.40 Generally, The Quest emphasised

37 

Joynt, ‘Where There Is Nothing’, 225 n. 1. K. C. Anderson, ‘The Sign of the Cross: A Study in the Origins of Christianity’, The Quest 1, no. 4 (July 1910): 665. 39  Arthur Edward Waite, ‘The Romance of the Holy Graal’, The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 106. 40  On ‘world religions’, see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 38 

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such perspectives on religion in order to propose a ‘modern’ understanding of religion as sharing common ‘spiritual’ ground or simply ‘spirit’ across the globe. For example, a collaboratively written essay from the first issue features responses to the question ‘Quaeritur: Can any Great Religion admit the Spiritual Equality with itself of the other Great Religions?’ by contributors whose names signal perspectives shaped by a range of regions and religious traditions within and beyond Europe, including South Asian, East Asian, Jewish, Christian and Anglo, and Islamic: C. C. Maccra, MA; K. G. Gupta, CSI; Prof. S. Uchigasaki; C. G. Montefiore, MA; Rev. W. F. Cobb, DD; Rt. Hon. Syed Ameer Ali, PC. In addition to emphasising this global perspective in headline essays such as this one, The Quest demonstrated such a perspective in its smaller-scale components.41 For example, the final section of the journal, ‘Notes’, which features brief notices of recent publications, attends to research about a variety of religions as well as publications by authors based in nations outside Europe. The ‘Notes’ in the first volume of The Quest features British scholar J. Rendel Harris’s discovery of ‘the earliest known Christian hymn-book’ alongside recent work by French scholar E. Blochet on ‘Islamic mysticism’, an article on Buddhism in the ‘new Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics’ edited by British scholar Dr James Hastings, and a note about ‘Recent Studies in Magic’ including reference to a study by E. Doutte, ‘Professor at “L’Ecole Superieure des Lettres” of Algiers’, published in ‘Alger, Jourdan’, 1909.42 In addition to featuring the writing and research of scholars from outside Europe and Western religious traditions, The Quest at times features specific criticism of what one contributor termed another writer’s ‘uncompromising occidentalism’.43 Such criticism is evident, for example, in two essays in the first volume of The Quest: E. B. Havell’s ‘The Ideals and Philosophy of Indian Art’ and a review by Jagadish Chandra Chatterji of Max Arthur Macauliffe’s The Sikh Religion (1909). In the review, Chatterji compares Macauliffe’s perspective unfavourably to that of a ‘Hindu student’ treating the same subject. While the Hindu student ‘no doubt has equally preconceptions of his own’, he, unlike the European in Chatterji’s account, ‘is quite willing that these should be tried in the court of reason’. Havell in his essay warns, in a related move, that ‘if we apply Western analytical methods to the exegesis of Asiatic aesthetics, we shall never form any just or clear conception of them until we have learnt to discard all our Western prejudices’. At stake is his claim that ‘Indian idealism’ is ‘the key to the understanding not only of all Asiatic art, but that of the Christian art of the Middle Ages’. Havell not only specifically criticises ‘Western prejudices’ in the context of ‘Asiatic art’, but argues that such ‘occidentalism’ leads to a misapprehension of specific Christian art traditions, too.44 Such criticisms of ‘occidentalism’ co-exist in The Quest with familiar forms of Orientalism and Eurocentrism. Indeed, while the journal hosts this critical review, the review does not disqualify the work being criticised from being endorsed by The Quest: a note following the review tells readers that ‘an article on The Sikh Religion

41 

W. F. Cobb, ‘Culture and the Church’, The Quest 1, no. 3 (April 1910): 505–23. The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 192, 194, 195, 197, 198. 43  Edmond Holmes, ‘Professor Euken and the Philosophy of Self-Realization’, The Quest 5, no. 3 (April 1914): 402. 44  Jagadish Chandra Chatterji, ‘Review of The Sikh Religion by Max Arthur Macauliffe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909, 6 Vols)’, The Quest 1, no. 4 (July 1910): 774; E. B. Havell, ‘The Ideals and Philosophy of Indian Art’, The Quest 1, no. 4 (July 1910): 686, 687. 42 

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by Macauliffe will appear in the October issue of The Quest’.45 Similarly, at times The Quest features opinions that variously seem to undermine and affirm white supremacist concepts. For example, in a 1910 essay, Otto Rothfeld, a British member of the Indian civil service, explicitly rejects what he calls ‘the figment of race’ in anthropology, arguing that this discipline of knowledge has reified this category into a vector of prejudice: ‘The most fatal of anthropological abstractions has been that of race.’46 Elsewhere in the issue, there are objections to Rothfeld’s claims: ‘Notes’ concludes with Mead writing in the anonymised editor role, with reference to another work, that ‘[t]here thus seems to be more in the idea of “race” than Mr. Rothfeld would have us think’.47 Notably, in rejecting the concept of ‘race’, Rothfeld rejects a central element of comparativist logic: ‘a race always latent in and identical under the varying differences of attribute, yet existent only in its attributes’ is a flawed concept belonging to ‘obsolete metaphysic’ not ‘science’.48 In other words, he argues that inferring a stable ‘underlying’ essence through the comparison of ‘varying differences of attribute’ – as those do who claim a spirit of religion or spiritual tradition underlying various different religious traditions – is illegitimate. The entanglement between the comparative method and the concept of race is not only formal, as discussed just above, but also historical: as historians of anthropology in particular have shown, the comparative method, though applied in disciplines ranging from archaeology to law to zoology in the long nineteenth century, was particularly central in those disciplines most explicitly concerned with concepts of race.49 In The Quest, this history is apparent in the relationship between the application of the comparative method and the sense that peoples, cultures, religions and aesthetic traditions understood as ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ were utterly different, even oppositional. By the beginning of the twentieth century, such differences were often framed in terms of ‘race’. As we have seen, while The Quest features a notable scepticism of this category, it is also no exception to this general trend. The assumption of an oppositional relationship between East and West is central to the second main dynamic of comparison in The Quest, in which contributors compare different religious traditions or discrete experiences tied to particular religious,

45 

The Quest 1, no. 4 (July 1910): 777. Otto Rothfeld, ‘The Figment of Race’, The Quest 1, no. 3 (April 1910): 402. 47  ‘Notes’, The Quest 1, no. 3 (April 1910): 600. 48  Rothfeld, ‘Figment’, 407. 49  On comparison and race in anthropology and comparative religion, see Peter Pels, ‘Occult Truths: Race, Conjecture and Theosophy in Victorian Anthropology’, in Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions: Essays towards a More Inclusive History of Anthropology (History of Anthropology vol. 9), ed. R. Handler and G. W. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 11–41; Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion (London: Duckworth, 1975); George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). On comparison and race in comparative philology, see Siraj Ahmed, The Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundations of the Humanities (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017). More broadly, Alexander Weheliye argues that practices of comparison reaffirm racist human hierarchies. See Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2014). J. Barton Scott too finds imperialist and racist logics structuring comparison, specifically in the context of ‘comparative religion’ (Spiritual Despots, 8). 46 

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philosophical or aesthetic traditions, with the result of positing an ‘underlying unity’. A sense of the dramatic revelation promised by such comparisons is suggested by how the Jewish Austrian scholar Robert Eisler compares Orphism, which he construes as a Western tradition of ancient Greece, to ‘parallel traditions in India’ to better explain some of its tenets.50 Such comparisons in the context of The Quest appear to contribute to a celebration of global transcendence of specific religions in favour of a universal spirit of religion or spiritual tradition – or in the words of a reviewer in a 1910 issue (likely to be Mead himself), to ‘a more truly universal appreciation and deeper realisation than ever before of the nature of the mystery that reveals itself in man’s communion with God the world over’.51 The drama of this revelation is connected to the sense of difference among the phenomena being compared. In other words, in the usual course of the world, certain phenomena are apparently so dissimilar that to find something common to them is to effect something significant. As we can see in The Quest, the dynamic of revelation associated with such commonalities is often invoked against a background featuring oppositions between East and West. The effect of claims to find commonality across such oppositions is thus ambivalent: on the one hand, such claims can be understood as affirming a commonality of human nature and culture that rejects such (often hierarchical) divisions; on the other hand, the revelation of unity seems to be most powerful when those hierarchical divisions are present to mind. The comparative method yields its most potent effects by simultaneously invoking and transcending such divisions. To appreciate and realise this universal revelation of unity behind such divisions was a central part of Mead’s sense of ‘spiritual experience’. While Mead does not make this explicit, scholars of religion have since observed that the comparative method itself seems to catalyse this spiritual experience of global transcendence. In his discussion of the history of the comparative method in religious studies, the scholar of religion Jeffrey Kripal argues that the method constitutes ‘a radical mystical practice [. . .] of universalism, assimilation, and cultural transcendence’ that demonstrates the inescapably spiritual dimensions of the modern scholarly study of religion itself.52 The Quest offers a vivid instance of such a practice, pursued earnestly and as a self-consciously modernising project.

Conclusion: The Spiritual Experience of Worldly Religion in and beyond The Quest The Quest’s periodical form contributes to this comparative spiritual practice. As we have seen in Rothfeld’s critique of the anthropological reification of ‘race’, even as The Quest features some notable coherences – for example, being edited by Mead for

50 

Robert Eisler, ‘Orpheus – The Fisher. I’, The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 125 n. 2. ‘Review of The Synoptic Gospels edited and with an Introduction by C. G. Montefiore (London, Macmillan, 1909, 2 vols)’, The Quest 1, no. 4 (July 1910): 779. 52  Kripal offers a history of this method as emerging simultaneously and through direct exchanges among figures in nineteenth-century Bengal, Britain and New England. See The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26. Such exchanges informed a project such as The Quest, and specifically shaped the thinking of many of its Seekers. 51 

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the duration of its publication – it presents contrasting viewpoints. Arguably, these contrasts operate like the religious and national distinctions emphasised and then transcended in the journal’s comparative religions discourse, allowing readers to indulge, in another example of contrasts, what the modernist theologian Father George Tyrell dismisses and The Quest more often celebrates as ‘our instinctive craving for unity’.53 At times, this transcendence can look like cosmopolitanism, like liberalism, or like perennialism. Across these versions of transcendence in The Quest, the journal presented a global scale of transformation that featured a model of religion that was specifically worldly: it framed religious experience as a major ‘force’ in art, society and world-historical events. Moreover, it made religious experience legible in the public sphere of a periodical intended to reach, as per its mission statement, the ‘more general public’. This worldliness of religion further coincides with the depiction of religion as worldly in the sense of ‘global’. The ‘global’ emphasis is evident not only from a focus on what were then coming to be called ‘world religions’ or the affiliations of contributors who hailed from countries outside of Europe and North America, but specifically from a perspective beyond the ‘occident’. The Quest thus counters views of religion as inherently provincial and private. The global literary and scholarly community constituting The Quest remakes religion as at once spiritual and worldly, resolving an apparent paradox that would see religion in modernity as either private and spiritual or public and institutional. The involvement in The Quest of prominent modernist writers such as Yeats and Pound further counters the idea of modernism as a secular and even secularist movement. More specifically, The Quest suggests how a certain kind of scholarship as spiritual practice flourished in other modernist-era aesthetic, intellectual and theological circles that overlap but exceed this periodical and its community of ‘Seekers’, from what the scholar of religion Bruce Lincoln calls the ‘reorchestration of world mythologies’ in T. S. Eliot’s canonical The Waste Land (1922) to the deployment of classical scholarship in Hope Mirrlees’s lesser-known long poem Paris (1920).54 The reader interested in the literary and aesthetic movement of modernism between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries might be thinking of additional instances of literary texts that feature a comparative approach and scholarly aesthetics that stage and then transcend global distinctions.

Works Cited A. M. G. ‘Review of Scientific Idealism by William Kingsland (Rebman, 1909).’ The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 181. Ahmed, Siraj. The Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundations of the Humanities. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017. Anderson, K. C. ‘The Sign of the Cross: A Study in the Origins of Christianity.’ The Quest 1, no. 4 (July 1910): 665–84. Arnulphy, Bernard S. ‘The Oceanic Origin of Life.’ The Quest 1, no. 3 (April 1910): 489–504. Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003.

53 

George Tyrell, ‘The Divine Fecundity’, The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 20. Bruce Lincoln, Apples and Oranges: Explorations in, on, and with Comparison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 3.

54 

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Casanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Chajes, Julie. Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Chatterji, Jagadish Chandra. ‘Review of The Sikh Religion by Max Arthur Macauliffe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909, 6 Vols).’ The Quest 1, no. 4 (July 1910): 770–7. Cobb, W. F. ‘Culture and the Church.’ The Quest 1, no. 3 (April 1910): 505–23. ———. ‘The Nature of Culture.’ The Quest 1, no. 2 (January 1910): 206–7. Dixon, Joy. The Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Eisler, Robert. ‘Orpheus ­– The Fisher. I.’ The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 124–39. Ferguson, Christine. ‘The Luciferian Public Sphere: Theosophy and Editorial Seekership in the 1880s.’ Victorian Periodicals Review 53, no. 1 (2020): 76–101. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Gibson, W. R. Boyce. ‘The Philosophy of Rudolf Euken.’ The Quest 1, no. 2 (January 1910): 334–46. Goodricke-Clark, Nicholas and Clare. G. R. S. Mead and the Gnostic Quest. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2005. Havell, E. B. ‘The Ideals and Philosophy of Indian Art.’ The Quest 1, no. 4 (July 1910): 685–704. Holmes, Edmond. ‘Professor Euken and the Philosophy of Self-Realization.’ The Quest 5, no. 3 (April 1914): 402. Innes, E. R. ‘An Innocent in Hades.’ The Quest 1, no. 3 (April 1910): 536–47. Jager, Colin. The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Joynt, Maud. ‘Where There Is Nothing, There Is God.’ The Quest 1, no. 2 (January 1910): 216–27. Kaufmann, Michael. ‘The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession.’ New Literary History 38, no. 4 (2007): 607–28. Kripal, Jeffrey. Authors of the Impossible. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. ———. The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. LaPorte, Charles. ‘Victorian Literature, Religion, and Secularization.’ Literary Compass 10, no. 3 (2013): 277–87. Lee, Vernon. Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales. 1890. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2006. Lincoln, Bruce. Apples and Oranges: Explorations in, on, and with Comparison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. McKelvy, William, W. Clark Gilpin, Colin Jager, Ruth Clayton Windscheffel and Joshua King. ‘Forum: The Sacralization of Literature in the Nineteenth Century.’ Nineteenth-Century Prose 39, nos 1–2 (Spring/Fall 2012): 17–71. Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions: Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Materer, Timothy. Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Mead, G. R. S. ‘An Approach to the Religion of the Spirit.’ The Quest 6, no. 2 (January 1915): 250–70. ———. ‘On the Nature of the Quest.’ The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 29–43. Morrison, Mark. ‘The Periodical Culture of the Occult Revival: Esoteric Wisdom, Modernity and Counter-Public Spheres.’ Journal of Modern Literature 31, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 1–22. Myers, F. W. H. ‘Automatic Writing.’ The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 3 (1885): 1–63.

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‘Notes.’ The Quest 1, no. 3 (April 1910): 600. Ogden, Emily. Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pecora, Vincent P. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pels, Peter. ‘Occult Truths: Race, Conjecture and Theosophy in Victorian Anthropology.’ In Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions: Essays towards a More Inclusive History of Anthropology (History of Anthropology vol. 9), edited by R. Handler and G. W. Stocking, 11–41. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. R. E. ‘Review of Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Religions-Soziologie.’ The Quest 13, no. 4 (October 1922): 134–5. ‘Review of Studies in Mystical Religion (1909) by Rufus M. Jones.’ The Quest 1, no. 2 (January 1910): 381. ‘Review of The Synoptic Gospels edited and with an Introduction by C. G. Montefiore (London, Macmillan, 1909, 2 vols).’ The Quest 1, no. 4 (July 1910): 777–9. Richardson, Elsa. ‘Stemming the Black Tide of Mud.’ In The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947, edited by Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford, 110–28. Milton: Routledge, 2018. Rothfeld, Otto. ‘The Figment of Race.’ The Quest 1, no. 3 (April 1910): 401–15. Scott, J. Barton. ‘Miracle Publics: Theosophy, Christianity, and the Coulomb Affair.’ History of Religions 49, no. 2 (November 2009): 172–96. ———. Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Seidel, Kevin. ‘A Secular for Literary Studies.’ Christianity and Literature 67, no. 3 (2018): 472–92. Sharpe, Eric J. Comparative Religion. London: Duckworth, 1975. Stocking, George W. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and the Occult. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. ——— and Demetres Tryphonopoulos, eds. Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996. Sutcliffe, Steven. ‘The Origins of “New Age” Religion between the Two World Wars.’ In Handbook of New Age, edited by Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis, 51–75. Boston: Brill, 2007. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Turner, Sarah Victoria. ‘“Spiritual Rhythm” and “Material Things”: Art, Cultural Networks and Modernity in Britain, c.1900–1914.’ PhD diss., Courtauld Institute, University of London, 2009. Tyrell, George. ‘The Divine Fecundity.’ The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 13–28. Underhill, Evelyn. ‘A Note upon Mysticism.’ The Quest 1, no. 4 (July 1910): 742–52. Viswanathan, Gauri. ‘In Search of Madame Blavatsky: Reading the Exoteric, Retrieving the Esoteric.’ Representations 141, no. 1 (2018): 67–94. ———. ‘Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy.’ PMLA 123, no. 2 (2008): 466–76. Waite, Arthur Edward. ‘The Romance of the Holy Graal.’ The Quest 1, no. 1 (October 1909): 90–107. Weheliye, Alexander. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2014. Weston, Jessie L. ‘The Madonna of Pontmain.’ The Quest 4, no. 2 (January 1913): 329–34. ———. ‘The Ruined Temple.’ The Quest 8, no. 1 (October 1916): 127–39. ———. ‘The Soul of France.’ The Quest 6, no. 4 (July 1915): 754–60. Yeats, W. B. ‘The Mountain Tomb.’ The Quest 4, no. 3 (April 1913): 1.

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

O

n 19 September 1923, T. S. Eliot received a letter from a Mr Stanley Rice, Indian civil servant and Orientalist, who offered to write an article for The Criterion on ‘the artistic influences of Asia on Europe and of Europe on Asia’ with a focus on the ‘cult of Tagore’. Although this proposed article did not appear in The Criterion, Eliot’s letter to Rice, explaining his ‘position’ regarding the ‘scholarly presentation of the Eastern world’, is elucidative of his lifelong interest in the religio-philosophical tradition of India and of its role in his interpretation and formulation of European culture, for which The Criterion was an important organ: Such an article as you suggest would either fit in admirably with the design of the review or else, if treated in another way, would absolutely contradict it; and it is therefore only fair that I should explain to you the position of the paper. I am myself, having dabbled in Oriental philosophy, very keen on the scholarly presentation of the Eastern world to occidental Europe which knows so little about it. But I am very much opposed to certain forms of Oriental influence which seem to me conducive of hysteria and barbarism. You will have noticed [that] Eastern ideas or rather paraphrases and corroborations of Eastern ideas, have been creeping into Western Europe through the gate of Germany. As the Germans are a very hysterical race they always select the most hysterical and unwholesome aspects of Oriental art and thought and within the last few years they have turned more toward the East [. . .] The effect of this, if the influence permeates Western Europe, will be to relax our hold on those European traditions without which I believe we would relapse into a state of barbarism [. . .] My friend Herman Hesse [. . .] is an example of the sort of orientalisation which I fear [. . .] Now the standpoint of the Criterion is distinctly Aristotelian and in a sense Orthodox. As for Tagore, I cannot read at all but his work in translation seems to me a miserable attenuation of the robust philosophy of early India.1

It is apparent from these comments that for Eliot Oriental art and thought can be ‘hysterical’ and that there is a fundamental difference between the hysterical Orient and

1 

The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 229–30.

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the sober European tradition, which stands at risk of being destroyed by such influences from the East. The overwhelming focus of Eliot’s prose of the 1920s is on the merits and demerits of romanticism and classicism in relation to both the literary and the religious traditions of Europe. Eliot advocates a classicist aesthetics whilst relegating romanticism to the realm of chaos, emotionalism, hysteria and rank individualism. The foundation of classical Europe is perceived to be under continuous threat from non-classical, that is, romantic influences from both within and outside of Europe. It is obvious from his letter to Rice that the ‘cult of Tagore’ in Europe was one other such deleterious influence. What is atypical about Eliot’s observation, however, is the evaluation of the ‘unwholesome’ route of ‘hysterical Germans’ through which the Orient is transmitted to the Occident. Such an assessment leads us not only to question whether the form of Oriental art and thought entertained in Europe, having arrived via Germany, is hysterical because it has been tarnished by such an aspect of German sensibility, but, further, to question whether this Germanic Orient, consisting of ‘paraphrases [. . .] of Eastern ideas’, is, therefore, not an authentic but an adulterated Orient. What Eliot’s letter implies is that the India Europe presumes to know, which it celebrates, at times venerates, and frequently dismisses as mystical and irrational, is a German invention. Eliot, in his desire to shelter Europe from ‘unwholesome’ influence from the East, does not jettison the Orient. He states that Rice’s investigation of the influence of Asia on Europe, from a certain standpoint, will ‘fit in admirably’ with the ‘position of the paper’. On the other hand, Eliot makes it clear that a study of the Orient represented by Rabindranath Tagore will not fit in with the Aristotelian position of The Criterion. Tagore’s work is set in opposition not only to The Criterion and, therefore, the European tradition, but also to the philosophy of ancient India which Eliot considers to be the authentic Indian tradition. Tagore is thus identified with that tradition of ‘paraphrases and corroborations of Eastern ideas’ invented by Germans. Hysterical Germans and an effeminate Tagore represent, that is, a ‘miserable attenuation’ of that ‘robust philosophy of early India’, the form of Oriental thought which receives Eliot’s approval. Eliot by this distinction shuts the gates that lead to a hysterical and effeminate Orient. The gate between Aristotelian Europe and a robust and, we might add, masculine ancient India is, however, left open. It is the confluence of these two traditions which, Eliot implies, fits in ‘admirably’ with the position of The Criterion, as in The Waste Land where the voices of Buddha, Christ and St Augustine intermingle and are collated into a single, continuous sermon. Although Eliot hints at a connection between the philosophy of ancient India and the Aristotelian principles which signify an authentic European tradition, his letter points also to a discernible anxiety of Oriental influence, the fear of a too easy confluence of traditions and cultures which, Eliot feels, should remain distinct. Eliot’s assessment displays neither the adulation that Tagore received from Yeats and Pound, nor the racist undertones of D. H. Lawrence’s dislike of the Bengali poet.2

2 

On 24 May 1916, D. H. Lawrence wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell, ‘these Hindus are horribly decadent and reverting to all forms of barbarism in all sorts of ugly ways. We feel surer on our feet, then. But this fraud of looking up to them – this wretched worship-of-Tagore attitude – is disgusting.’ The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore, 2 vols (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 451.

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Eliot’s appraisal echoes instead the views of Irving Babbitt who, along with Paul Elmer More, ‘occupied’ for Eliot, as Kearns notes, ‘the place of religious companions or sages’.3 Eliot’s introduction to a literary aesthetics and religious experience where emotion is balanced by thought took place at Harvard University under the guidance of Irving Babbitt, whose influence remained even as Eliot distanced himself from Babbitt’s humanism. As early as 1908, Babbitt had formulated an interpretation of classicism and romanticism that echoes throughout Eliot’s work. In Literature and the American College, he talks of ‘the perfect harmony that Socrates had attained between thought and feeling’.4 He refers to romanticism as the ‘period of unconscious, of confused emotional unity’ and classicism as the ‘period of clear and conscious intellectual distinctions’.5 Babbitt endorses the classical ‘insistence on restraint’ over the disorderly ‘spontaneous play of impulse and temperament’, symbolised by Rousseau. He furthermore states that the Rousseauists have broken not only with classical tradition but also with the Christian tradition, especially that which was upheld by the ‘more austere type of Christian’.6 Babbitt, one of the leading Buddhist scholars of his age, equated classical sensibility and mental discipline with Buddha, Christ and Aristotle. He was also at pains to position Tagore’s work outside of the classical tradition of India. By 1923, the ‘cult of Tagore’ was well established in the world. As Babbitt observed, Tagore was the pre-eminent ‘interpreter of India, not merely in the Occident, but in the Orient itself’.7 Yet his international followers rarely saw the multifaceted nature of his work, which ranges from the pragmatic to the romantic, from the political to the mystical. Though we do not find references to Tagore’s poems in Eliot’s work, it is highly likely that Eliot was familiar with the English translation of Gitanjali, for it was that work which catapulted the Bengali poet to the role of celebrated world poet. However, we can claim with certainty that Eliot was familiar with the series of lectures that Tagore delivered at Harvard University, at the behest of James Woods, in 1913. Eliot was at that time a student not only of Harvard University but also of James Woods, whose philosophy class was the primary audience of the lectures.8 Tagore’s sojourn in America in 1913 came after a period of intense and violent nationalist politics in his native Bengal. The first Partition of Bengal in 1905 was vehemently opposed by Tagore and many of the songs that he composed during that period, from 1905 to 1911 when the partition was rescinded, defined the Swadeshi (self-rule) movement of those years. The relationship between the English and Bengalis, always fraught with a degree of mutual distrust and dislike, was at its worst during those years. Yet by 1907, disturbed by the communal riots that spread throughout Bengal, Tagore

3 

Cleo McNelly Kearns, T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 143. 4  Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908), 23. 5  Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 107. 6  Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism [1919] (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1966), 44, 48. 7  Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership [1924] (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1979), 187. 8  Krishna Dutt and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad Minded Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 173.

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was disillusioned by the politics of nationalism. He felt that Swadeshi politics, far from achieving unity, had pitted communities against each other, leading to violence and disunity. The lectures that Tagore delivered at Harvard University in 1913, published in 1915 as Sādhanā: The Realisation of Life, are significant in the sense that these are his first works written in English and, more significantly, inaugurate his desire, as has been noted by Michael Collins, to ‘reach communion with the West’.9 Tagore’s reception in the West, although redolent of Oriental exoticism and misinterpretation of his complex views to fit the mould of the Eastern sage, is nonetheless significant for through such ‘interaction between colony and metropole [. . .] key concepts of modernity [. . .] are created and recreated’.10 Within such an interaction the Saidian model of an imperial West that wholly dominates the production of knowledge and controls the flow of influence from the West to the Orient is found wanting. Tagore’s presence at Harvard is not, as Collins notes, ‘a peripheral colonial encounter’ and should not be assessed within the ‘rigid and reductive binaries of “self” and “other”, “Orient” and “Occident”’.11 Whilst I am in agreement with Collins’s assertion that the binary of West and the rest is an obstacle to our understanding of Tagore’s role as an emissary of India, it is also salutary to observe that Tagore’s first lecture is structured by his belief in a ‘rigid’ and ‘reductive’ binary of the Occident and India. The opening lecture begins with the statement that the ‘civilisation of ancient Greece was nurtured within city walls’ whilst the ‘birth’ of Indian civilisation was ‘in the forests’, creating in the Indian mind an abiding awareness of man’s spiritual connection to the natural world. Tagore establishes a stark difference between the forest-dwelling hermits of India and the ‘brick and mortar’ world of Western civilisation: The west seems to take a pride in thinking that it is subduing nature; as if we are living in a hostile world where we have to wrest everything we want from an unwilling and alien arrangement of things. This sentiment is the product of the city-wall habit and training of mind.12 Consequently, Tagore elaborates on a wholly ‘spiritual’ India which draws its religious insight from its ‘kinship with nature, its unbroken relation with all’. Tagore envisions an India which shunned imperialistic aggrandisement and forsook material wealth: ‘The ideal that India tried to realise led her best men to the isolation of a contemplative life, and the treasures that she gained for mankind by penetrating into the mysteries of reality cost her dear in the sphere of worldly success.’ The West, on the other hand, is ‘determined to despoil and grasp everything by force’.13 Tagore presents a materialistic

9 

Michael Collins, Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World: Rabindranath Tagore’s Writings on History, Politics and Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 39. See also Fakrul Alam, ‘The English Writings: An Overview’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 158–88. 10  Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 7. 11  Collins, Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World, 6, 15. 12  Rabindranath Tagore, Sādhanā: The Realisation of Life (New York: Macmillan Company, 1915), 6, 7. 13  Tagore, Sādhanā, 8.

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and mechanical West that is diametrically opposite to spiritual India. Such an interpretation of the West did not impress Babbitt, and he exasperatingly observed that for Tagore a ‘federation of the states of Europe [. . .] would [. . .] be only a federation of steam-boilers’.14 The underlying philosophical foundation of Tagore’s lectures is, of course, the Upaniṣads which form part of the monotheistic tradition in an otherwise pantheistic Hindu tradition. In these texts, unlike in the earlier Vedas, we encounter an unchanging Ultimate Reality (Brahman) as the foundation of the ever-changing, variegated and transient nature of phenomenal reality. In the Upaniṣads, the world of phenomena is an illusion (māyā) and the individual ego which observes this world is also illusory. The perception and experience of the individual ego in the phenomenal world is impermanent and unreal, like the experiences of the dream state. Beneath the constantly changing phenomenal self lies the eternal Self of man, atman, which is unaffected by experiences of the individual ego. Atman does not experience māyā; not being subject to time and space, atman neither dies nor is reborn; it eternally is. Atman is Brahman, the Ultimate Reality from which emanates the world of phenomena. In the lectures, Tagore unambiguously addresses Brahman as God, though the conventional monotheistic interpretation of a divine being does not easily fit with the Upanishadic concept of Ultimate Reality. Tagore’s insistence on such an interpretation is no doubt the result of a profound influence of the Brahmo Samaj, which was not only the most prominent religious and socio-political organisation of the Hindu elites of colonial Bengal, but also a defining symbol of the Bengali Renaissance.15 Social reformers of the Renaissance such as Ram Mohun Roy (1772–1833), Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846) and his son Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), grandfather and father respectively of Rabindranath, were involved in defining an authentic Bengali identity which encompassed all aspects of life, from religion to sartorial habits. Since their search for authenticity often involved an adaptation of Western ideals, the Bengali Renaissance is a potent confluence of East and West. Brahmoism consisted of the rejection of that which was most disapproved of by the English rulers, the polytheistic aspect, and its adherent rituals, of Hinduism. Brahmoism thus sought to refashion Hinduism into a monotheistic religion, but, here rejecting the Western tradition, did not wholly accept the Christian framework of the rulers. Although the influence of Unitarianism was profound, the Bengali Renaissance reformers recovered instead a more ancient and authentic tradition of monotheism in the Upaniṣads, and refashioned Brahman as the supreme deity. Thus, Tagore’s vision of Indian religion and spirituality, far from being untainted by Western civilisation, is one that was forged within that ‘interaction between the colony and the metropole’. In his lectures Tagore repeatedly invokes the supreme God of the Upaniṣads: ‘I bow to God over and over again who is in fire and in water, who permeates the whole world, who is in the annual crops as well as in the perennial trees.’16 Modern man, overly entangled in materialistic gains, finds it difficult to establish that communion

14 

Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 187. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 35–75. 16  Tagore, Sādhanā, 13. 15 

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with nature through which God can be experienced. Tagore, however, is optimistic that the ‘measureless gulf’ between our material self and the eternal Self can be bridged, that ‘the meeting-ground of the finite and infinite’ is not an impossibility. The question that animates the lectures is concerned with the manner in which we can apprehend the infinite in the finite. As Tagore asks his audience, ‘Can this God be abstracted from the world?’17 He answers this question through numerous quotations from the Upaniṣads, and uses simple, sensuous language, avoiding the complexities of Upanishadic doctrines and abstractions, whilst referring to fables and parables. Tagore’s answer is simple: ‘The vision of the Supreme One in our soul is direct and immediate intuition, not based in any ratiocination.’ It is a mystical, ineffable awareness that cannot be made the object of rational thought but can be apprehended through ‘intuition’. Tagore fortifies this view with a quotation from Taittirīya Upaniṣad: ‘From Brahma words come back baffled, as well as the mind, but he who knows him by the joy of him is free from all fears.’18 The apprehension of Brahman is, therefore, an emotional awareness rather than the result of logical reasoning. As Partha Chatterjee noted, the celebration of Hindu spirituality by the intelligentsia of colonial Bengal was an assertion of ‘the sovereignty of the nation over the domain of spirituality’.19 It is also important to keep in mind that such a view of India’s spiritual prominence was not only readily accepted in the West but was in actuality formulated in the West. It is here that Eliot’s assertion of the inauthenticity of Tagore’s views comes into effect. The belief in an Indian tradition that is defined by the doctrine of ineffability is, Matilal observed, a Western ‘misunderstanding that Indian philosophy is invariably mystical’.20 This is not to state that Indian philosophers did not believe in the ineffability of Brahman, but that the discussion of such ineffability was carried out by various schools of philosophy in the most analytical of languages. As Matilal explains: [The] elaborate discussion of the doctrine of ineffability is couched in the highly technical language of an Indian logician. It can be summarized as follows: The ‘ground’ for applying a word to denote an object is, according to the Indian semanticist, a quality or property of that object. A denoting word can be said to be ‘grounded’ in the quality of the object it denotes. Thus an object COW is denoted by the word ‘(a) cow’ because it has the quality of cow-ness. But since Brahman lacks any quality, no word can be used to denote Brahman. In other words, Brahman is ineffable because it is devoid of all qualifications, all characteristics. Words like ‘Brahman’ and ‘The Ultimate Reality’ only indicate what is, in principle, ineffable.21 Thus ‘ratiocination’ of the ineffable was the preferred method by which Indian philosophers developed their systems of thought. For Tagore, the authentic philosophers 17 

Tagore, Sādhanā, 24, 25, 14. Tagore, Sādhanā, 24, 88. 19  Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 48. 20  Bimal Krishna Matilal, ‘Mysticism and Reality’, in The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal, ed. Jonardan Ganeri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31. 21  Matilal, ‘Mysticism and Reality’, 22. For a discussion of the tradition of Indian logic and Western misinterpretation, see Jonardon Ganeri, ‘Indian Reason and the Colonisation of Reason’, in Indian Logic: A Reader, ed. Jonardon Ganeri (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001), 1–25. 18 

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of the Indian tradition are the mythical seers of the Upaniṣads. This however is not the entirety of the philosophical system of India but only its beginning. Unlike Tagore’s assertion that the ‘apprehension of truth in our soul is immediate and through direct intuition’,22 classical philosophers of India were wholly suspicious of intuition and knowledge derived from direct experience. ‘They clothed their doctrines in a technical (logical) vocabulary that’, as Matilal explains, ‘presupposes a thorough-going and systematic training in logic and the pramāṇa-śāstra (epistemology or the study of the means of knowledge).’23 Eliot’s assertion that Tagore is not representative of ancient India is a result of his familiarity with a religio-philosophical tradition that values analysis over ineffability, logic over intuition. To return to Matilal: The business of most classical philosophers of India was solid and down-to-earth philosophic argumentation, not the creation of mystical illusion or poetic descriptions of mystical experiences. Even the ineffability doctrine was defended and criticized by both proponents and opponents with serious and sophisticated reasonings. It is unfortunate that in a modern discussion of Indian or Oriental mysticism, these texts usually go unnoticed or unrecognised.24 Tagore’s celebration of emotional intuition is therefore a highly selective view of India. Eliot, on the other hand, points to texts which represent an analytical Indian tradition, antithetical to the romantic, sensual and mystical India of the popular European imagination. To understand Eliot’s complex attitude towards India and his fear of an alien influence which is ‘conducive of hysteria and barbarism’ we need to turn to the Clark Lectures. Delivered in Trinity College, Cambridge, a year before his religious conversion, the 1926 lectures point to an important phase in Eliot’s career. The eight lectures mark the transition from the early critical and creative works to the Eliot of The Idea of a Christian Society and Four Quartets. The lectures provided a novel interpretation of metaphysical poetry by expanding its domain beyond the poetry of seventeenthcentury England. Donne and his contemporaries are presented by Eliot as the second variation of a larger metaphysical tradition whose first and most perfect representatives are the Italian poets of the trecento: Dante, Cavalcanti, Guinicelli and Cino; while the nineteenth-century French poetry of Baudelaire and Laforgue is presented as the last variation of the metaphysical style of writing. Just as in his letter to Rice, Eliot identifies an ‘unwholesome’ route through which damaging Oriental influences enter Europe. In the Clark Lectures Eliot takes the romantic influence further back to medieval Spain and the threatening presence of the Moor. As I have discussed elsewhere, in these lectures Eliot positions Spain outside of classical Europe, for its religious tradition defined by Jesuitism was unduly influenced by ‘Moslem orders flourishing in Spain in Ignatius’ time’. Both Jesuitism and ‘Moslem

22 

Tagore, Sādhanā, 25. Bimal Krishna Matilal, ‘The Logical Illumination of Indian Mysticism’, in The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal, ed. Jonardan Ganeri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 40. 24  Matilal, ‘Mysticism and Reality’, 31. 23 

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orders’ are, unsurprisingly, ‘non-Aristotelian’ and are a form of ‘spiritual haschisch, a drugging of the emotions’. Donne’s attraction to not only Jesuit thought but also the philosophy of Maimonides and Averroes is another route through which the wrong form of influence enters Europe. St Ignatius and Donne, Eliot informs his audience, ‘are as much [. . .] romanticists as Rousseau’.25 Dante, on the other hand, is placed within the Aristotelian tradition of St Augustine and Richard of St Victor. The world of Dante that we encounter in the Clark Lectures, however, appears to have undergone a form of cultural cleansing, for Eliot deliberately ignores the impact of Muslim/Arabic thought in medieval Europe. Contrary to Eliot’s positioning of it ‘outside of the Graeco-Roman classical tradition’, Spain, during the Middle Ages, was the centre of classical studies and was responsible for the revival of Greek philosophy in medieval Europe. As Christopher Dawson, a regular contributor to The Criterion and, like Eliot, engaged in the study of European cultural identity, argued, ‘Christendom recovered its share of the inheritance of Greek science and philosophy’ from Muslim Spain.26 Although it is possible to attribute Eliot’s dislike of the Arabic tradition to the fear of losing European cultural authenticity through an Eastern contamination, his brief reference to India in the Clark Lectures problematises such an interpretation. In describing, in those lectures, the mysticism of Richard of St Victor, Eliot offered his Cambridge audience an unanticipated reference. He states that the treatise of Richard of St Victor, the Benjamin Major, ‘bears some resemblance – no doubt wholly coincidental – to the classification of some Indian mysticism’. This form of mysticism, Eliot informs his audience, ‘is wholly impersonal – as impersonal as a handbook of hygiene – and contains no biographical element whatever; nothing that could be called emotional or sensational’.27 That Eliot should praise the objective, impersonal and direct style of writing of medieval theologians, who according to Eliot had a profound influence on Dante’s style of writing, is to be expected, for such stylistics were an important aspect of high modernism. But what is intriguing about the above statement is the reference to India. From the lectures it is not obvious why Eliot felt the need to draw a sudden parallel with the Indian system; nothing that he had stated earlier prepares the audience for this comparison, and having aroused the audience’s interest he does not elaborate on this parallel tradition, leaving them to work out the possible reasons for and implications of the remark. Through this casual reference, though, Eliot appears to establish a link between Indian philosophy and classical European philosophy. When Eliot refers to mystical systems of medieval Europe and India, he has in mind an austere, masculine and, above all, rational form of mysticism; that ‘robust philosophy of early India’ which he refers to in his letter to Rice. To have aligned India, however tangentially, with such a form of mysticism would have challenged the prevailing image of Indian mysticism as a form of emotional intuition.

25 

T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 76, 106, 84. For a discussion of Eliot’s interpretation of the influence of Arabic thought in Europe, see Mafruha Mohua, ‘T. S. Eliot and Dante: A European Anxiety of Romantic Contamination’, in T. S. Eliot, Dante and the Idea of Europe, ed. Paul Douglass (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 159–66. 26  Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity [1932] (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1945), 168. 27  Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, 102.

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It was Babbitt who introduced Eliot to a rational Indian intellectual tradition. Eliot’s assertion that the ‘“influence” of Brahmin and Buddhist thought upon Europe, as in Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Deussen, had largely been through romantic misunderstanding’28 echoes Babbitt’s argument that Western interpretation of India is antithetical to the intellectual discipline of the Hindu-Buddhist tradition: When Whitman speaks of the ‘mystical deliria’ of the senses he uses the word mystical in a sense, one would scarcely need point out, that would have seemed to Buddha sheer madness. The primitivistic revery that is at the basis of the mysticism of a Novalis or a Whitman cannot, like genuine meditation, be regarded as a form of action. It results rather from a dissipation of attention, a relaxation of one’s grip on the world of spiritual values and even on the facts of the natural order; so much so at times as to suggest that it has its source in actual physical debility.29 Babbitt’s description of the mysticism of Whitman and Novalis (‘mystical deliria’, ‘dissipation of attention’) is not unlike Eliot’s description of the mysticism of St Ignatius as a form of ‘spiritual haschisch, a drugging of the emotions’. In both mysticism is dismissed by restraint, asceticism and discipline. During the early phase of his academic career Babbitt’s interpretation of India was to a degree continuous with that of the American transcendentalists. He was particularly impressed with Emerson’s understanding of the concept of ‘inner check’: ‘If one wishes to get at the true spirit of ancient India one needs to reflect on the definition of the divine as the “inner check” which so struck Emerson when he came upon it in Colebrooke’s essay on the Vedanta.’30 In Babbitt’s work ‘inner check’ was, as Robert Bloom has noted, a ‘pivotal term’,31 although it is important to observe that Babbitt, unlike Emerson, interprets ‘inner check’ not from a Vedantic but from a Buddhist point of view. For Babbitt, inner check signifies the discipline and restraint through which the individual can transcend the ‘flux and disintegration and relativity of the natural’. It is a form of intellectual discipline which, he believes, is opposed to romanticism. ‘The Oriental definition of God as the inner check’, said Babbitt, ‘would have never occurred to Rousseau.’32 In opposing the philosophy of Rousseau, the progenitor of romanticism, with the philosophy of India, Babbitt promotes a rational and non-romantic India. In fact Babbitt, as his friend and fellow humanist More explained, disappointed by Emerson’s elevation of ‘enthusiasm above judgement, of emotion above reason, of spontaneity above discipline, and of unlimited expansion above centripetal control’, qualities which he ascribed to romanticism, would eventually retract his high opinion of Emerson.33 Babbitt’s attraction to the ‘clarity’ and ‘hardness’ of the

28 

T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 41. Babbitt: Representative Writings, ed. George A. Panishas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 108. 30  Irving Babbitt, ‘Interpreting India to the West’, in The Spanish Character and Other Essays (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), 151. 31  Robert Bloom, ‘Irving Babbitt’s Emerson’, The New England Quarterly 30, no. 4 (December 1970): 451. 32  Irving Babbitt, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912), 357. 33  Paul Elmer More, Shelburne Essays: A New England Group and Others (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 82. 29 

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Pali canon of Buddhism was, as More observed, continuous with his disapproval of romanticism and with his classicist agenda: From the beginning, Babbitt was drawn to the Buddhistic side of Hinduism rather than to the Brahmanic, and to the Pali language, in which the most authentic record of Buddha’s teaching is preserved, rather than to the Sanskrit. There was something in this corresponding to his classical taste in works of the imagination and to his rejection of romanticism. Primarily what attracted him to the Pali texts may have been the clarity and concreteness of the style.34 Babbitt’s appreciation of the ‘concrete’ style of Pali texts is of a piece with Eliot’s praise of the impersonal Indian mystical texts. Like Eliot, Babbitt places Tagore within the company of the romantic dreamers who indulge in ‘anarchic impressionism’: [T]he affinity of Tagore appears, not with the ancient sages of his own land, as he would have us believe, but with our Rousseauistic dreamers. One may oppose to the effeminacy of a Tagore or Bergson and to all those, in either East or West, who seek to attain ‘vision’ at the expense of analysis, the example of Buddha who has claims to be regarded as the ultimate Oriental. For Buddha supreme ‘vision’ coincided with a supreme act of analysis.35 Babbitt believes that authentic India can be found in the austere and ascetic traditions of Vedic and Buddhist India. What, in Eliot’s mind, is the misinterpretation of India is an outgrowth of the misinterpretation of the nature of European identity. The mystical and irrational Orient is the invention of those Europeans who are situated outside the medieval Latin world, the authentic source of European classicism: If everything derived from Rome were withdrawn – everything we have from Norman-French society, from the Church, from Humanism, from every channel direct and direct, what would be left? A few Teutonic roots and husks. England is a ‘Latin’ country.36 Germany and Spain, failing to identify and align with the rational world of medieval Europe, gravitate towards an Orient which promises, instead, mystical deliria. The recognition, however, that Latin Europe is the fount of European identity should, also, lead to the greater recognition and valuing of the qualities of askesis, restraint and impersonality which lie at the heart of the tradition of ancient India. There is, however, a crucial similarity between Tagore’s perception of religious experience and Babbitt’s humanism. Just as Tagore celebrates the underlying unity of all religious systems and shuns the divisive politics of nationalism, Babbitt too identifies a common humanism in the teachings of Buddha, Confucius and Christ. Babbitt

34 

Frederick Manchester and Odell Shepard, eds, Irving Babbitt: Man and Teacher [1941] (New York: Green Wood Press, 1969), 328. 35  Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 188. 36  T. S. Eliot, ‘Notes’, The Criterion 2 (October 1923): 105.

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believed that nationalism should always be ‘tempered by internationalism’, and his academic aim was to put ‘Confucius behind Aristotle and Buddha behind Christ’.37 Eliot, on the other hand, was wary of such a universal perspective. He promotes instead a rooted and specific religious adherence. In the Clark Lectures Eliot bemoans the disorderly, intellectual environment of seventeenth-century England, exemplified by Donne’s undisciplined reading habit. Donne’s inability to restrain himself within a single, overarching system of belief resulted in what Eliot terms the catabolic tendency of his poetry. In contrast to the disciplined nature of Dante’s mind, a result of his faith in one coherent system of thought represented by the philosophy of medieval theologians, Donne indulged in a hybrid system that lacked unity. In the lectures Eliot makes it clear that seventeenthcentury England lacked a unified religious sensibility and that Donne’s intellectual eccentricity is a symptom of such an absence. Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism is of course the most concrete example of locating himself within a single overarching system of a religion. In the Clark Lectures Eliot aligns this inability to adhere to a specific belief system to a form of intellectual indiscipline and romanticism. His conviction in the importance of adhering to a specific religious system also animates much of the philosophical speculation of Four Quartets. His assertion of religious faith bound by a specific Church goes against the modernist perception of the church as an ‘absent centre’ which, as Pericles Lewis discusses, fails to ‘unite the community’. The heroes of modernist texts, like Lewis Lambert Strether of Henry James’s The Ambassadors, often visit grand cathedrals not in the role of worshippers but as curious tourists, trying to comprehend the ‘sacredness of the Church [and] its rituals’. ‘Alienated from the religious proceedings they witness’, the modernist heroes’ attempt to understand the function of the church ends in failure. The ‘aura of sacredness’ which was once accessible to all members of society is no longer an actual experience for them, but only an idea which lacks flesh. They, therefore, turn away from these enigmatic places of worship and seek other forms of sacredness.38 In ‘Little Gidding’ Eliot appears to address these lone and disenchanted modern tourists: If you came this way, Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more Than an order of words, the conscious occupation Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.39 37 

Babbitt, Literature and the American College, 187; Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 273. Pericles Lewis, ‘Churchgoing in the Modern Novel’, Modernism/modernity 11, no. 4 (2004): 686, 672, 679. For a comprehensive discussion see Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 39  The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 192. 38 

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Such tourists are often curious about the worshippers in the church; their intention, to some extent, is to verify the possibility of the religious life or practice. They ultimately fail, however, to understand what Max Weber once described as the ‘prophetic pneuma’, for they do not participate in the social rituals of religion, but stand as outsiders. As Manju Jain has shown, during his study of Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl Eliot came to the realisation that social phenomena ‘cease to exist when regarded from a purely external standpoint’.40 As Eliot states in one of his Harvard papers, ‘in order to know we must begin with faith’.41 The modernists are haunted by the ‘image of the church as container of a sacred essence’.42 Eliot’s description of the church of Little Gidding is, however, devoid of such intrinsic mystery. It is merely the place where, for those who are willing to kneel and pray, for those, in other words, who are willing to participate in the ritual of worship, ‘prayer has been valid’. The sacred essence would be recognised only by those who were willing to believe and belong. The act of faith is not, though, an individual achievement; it is the achievement of a community. Hence Eliot’s choice of the church of Little Gidding, the place where Nicholas Ferrar in 1625 created the ideal community of Christians. Religion, for Eliot, is a social and communal construction. The importance of belonging to a specific religion is the focus of Eliot’s preface to Thoughts for Meditation, an anthology of devotional writings selected by Nagendranath Gangulee, son-in-law of Tagore. Here Eliot stresses the importance of maintaining religious boundaries. In the introduction to the book, Gangulee, echoing the thoughts of Tagore, states that the experiences of the mystics ‘over-ride barriers which divide men of divergent religious faiths’, for such experiences are ‘basically the same’ in all religions.43 Eliot agrees that the experience of the mystic is universal, that the ‘contemplatives of religions and civilizations remote from each other are saying the same thing’. This statement regarding the universality of mystical experience is, however, qualified by Eliot’s conviction that such an experience would be impossible without participation and belief in a particular system of faith: I am aware [. . .] that there are readers who persuade themselves that there is an ‘essence’ in all religions which is the same, and that this essence can be conveniently distilled and preserved, while every particular religion is rejected. Such readers may perhaps be reminded that no man has ever climbed to the highest stages of the spiritual life, who has not been a believer in a particular religion or at least a particular philosophy; and that the authors who are presented in this volume, would all have repudiated the suggestion that their religion and philosophy did not matter. It was only in relation to his own religion that the insights of any one of these men had its significance to him, what they say can only reveal its meaning to the reader who has his own religion of dogma and doctrine in which he believes.44

40 

Manju Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 125. 41  T. S. Eliot, ‘Report on the Relation of Kant’s Critique to Agnosticism’, Harvard Manuscript, 1913, John Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge. 42  Lewis, ‘Churchgoing in the Modern Novel’, 671. 43  N. Gangulee, ed., Thoughts for Meditation (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 18, 17. 44  T. S. Eliot, ‘Preface’, in Gangulee, Thoughts for Meditation, 13–14.

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Eliot’s preface points to a path that takes the reader away from that of the editor of the book. Whereas Gangulee offers an experience which transcends creed, doctrine and nation, Eliot refutes such border-crossing universalism and reminds the reader of the impossibility of such a transcendental point of view. Eliot’s refutation might have surprised Gangulee: it does not seem to accord with the sensibility of the poet of The Waste Land who reminds the reader that the ‘collocation’ of Buddha and St Augustine, ‘representative of Eastern and Western asceticism’, is not accidental, but deliberate. His stance also appears to be at variance with the convergence of different religious traditions in Four Quartets. The sense of mysticism which pervades the garden in Four Quartets reaches its zenith with Eliot’s vision of the lotus, a quintessential symbol in Hindu-Buddhist tradition of the perfect state of spiritual being: Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality.45 The light revealed in the dry pool is a reference to the Gospel of St John. The ‘heart of light’, however, emanates from the lotus, for the surface glitters as the lotus rises out of the dry pool. Here is another collocation of the religious traditions of the East and West; a relation is established between Christ as the Logos and the state of being embodied in the lotus. We are made aware that something important has occurred with the appearance of the lotus, and that the eviction from the garden is in some way related to the incomplete understanding of the knowledge signified by the vision of the lotus. The reality that humankind fails to comprehend lies within that vision. If the ineffable vision of the lotus signifies the perfect state of spirituality, what is the significance, then, of faith in a ‘particular religion’? Is the lotus an affirmation of Gangulee’s interpretation of the experiences of saints as ‘basically the same in all religious faiths’? Eliot believes that ‘mystical experience happens to many men’ and that such an experience, which leads to ‘a temporary crystallization of the mind’, is a form of ‘communion with the Divine’.46 This experience, however, is essentially private and cannot form the basis of a theological system. In an article on Donne, Eliot clearly indicates the difference between the theological and the mystical points of view: ‘[Donne] was rather the theologian, or rather the student of theology, and the preacher, than the mystic. In all his religious writing there is little sign of that privacy so characteristic of the mystic, that assurance of experience incommunicable.’47 Eliot,

45 

Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 172. T. S. Eliot, ‘The “Pensees” of Pascal’ [1931], in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 405. 47  T. S. Eliot, ‘Rhyme and Reason: The Poetry of John Donne’, Listener 3, no. 62 (19 March 1930): 503. 46 

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throughout his work, reiterates the inexpressible quality of mystical experience which, he says, is ‘accompanied by the realization that you will never be able to communicate it to anyone else, or even by the realization that when it is past you will not be able to recall it yourself’.48 For Tagore and Gangulee such a profound experience of ‘communion with the Divine’ is deemed to be adequate foundation of religious experience. For Eliot, on the other hand, the transition from mystical experience to religious practice is not immediate. Although the immediate experience of the saints is the same, the cognitive apprehension of that experience is informed by specific religious systems, and therefore that immediate experience, far from being universal, becomes relative to specific religious points of view. The intuitive experience of the Divine is therefore not synonymous with religious experience. The attempt to understand and communicate the experience of mystical illumination can be realised only through the acceptance of the limitations of existing systems of theology. Through this process of filtration, however, the experience of mystical illumination is altered; it ceases to be an inexpressible moment and becomes an event formulated by specific religious dogma. The moment in the rose garden, that vision of the lotus, rising to the surface of the dry pool, is a moment of mystical experience. That experience, however, does not lead to an understanding of the meaning behind the vision of the lotus. It is in Little Gidding, within that ideal community of Christians only, that the ‘incommunicable experience’ of the rose garden can be understood. Eliot at different times, then, uses the religio-philosophical tradition of India to serve different agendas. At times his purpose is to restrain the undisciplined indulgence in an anarchic celebration of non-European religious traditions. This is an attitude that he considers to be ‘dangerously close to that of those universalists who maintain that the ultimate and esoteric truth is one, that all religions show some traces of it, and that it is a matter of indifference to which one of the great religions we adhere’.49 It is this distrust of the universalist point of view that comes across in his disagreement with Gangulee’s attempt to universalise the mystical experiences of saints. Yet, in 1937, in his defence against accusations by Nancy Cunard, W. H. Auden and others of the Communist camp, who felt that the ‘equivocal attitude’ of Eliot – his ‘paradoxical’ and ‘ironic detachment’ – indicated an implicit support for General Franco,50 Eliot would turn to the Bhagavad Gita to explain his stand on neutrality: ‘The balance of mind which a few highly civilized individuals, such as Arjuna, the hero of the Bhagavad Gita, can maintain in action, is difficult for most of us even as observers, and, as I say, is not encouraged by the greater part of the Press.’51 Although Eliot is sceptical of Gangulee’s attempt to portray a universal mystical experience, he is confident that his stance on the Spanish Civil War can be seen as parallel to that of Arjuna’s state of being in Kurukshetra: the cultural alterity of India is not an obstacle. In fact the ‘balance of mind’ of Arjuna appears to be reminiscent of Eliot’s description of the classical sensibility of a Virgil or Dante. This, of course, is the confluence of the Indian analytical religio-philosophical tradition with the Aristotelian tradition of classical Europe that Eliot refers to in his response to Rice.

48 

T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), 145. T. S. Eliot, ‘Preface’ to The Need for Roots (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), ix. 50  Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 51. 51  T. S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion 16 (January 1937): 290. 49 

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Works Cited Alam, Fakrul. ‘The English Writings: An Overview.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, 158–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Babbitt, Irving. Babbitt: Representative Writings. Edited by George A. Panishas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. ———. Democracy and Leadership. 1924. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1979. ———. Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908. ———. The Masters of Modern French Criticism. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912. ———. The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910. ———. Rousseau and Romanticism. 1919. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1966. ———. The Spanish Character and Other Essays. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1940. Bloom, Robert. ‘Irving Babbitt’s Emerson.’ The New England Quarterly 30, no. 4 (December 1970): 448–73. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Collins, Michael. Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World: Rabindranath Tagore’s Writings on History, Politics and Society. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Dawson, Christopher. The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity. 1932. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1945. Dutt, Krishna and Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad Minded Man. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Eliot, T. S. After Strange Gods. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. ———. ‘A Commentary.’ The Criterion 16 (January 1937): 289–93. ———. The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. ———. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–1925. Edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. ———. ‘Notes.’ The Criterion 2 (October 1923): 105. ———. ‘The “Pensees” of Pascal.’ 1931. In Selected Essays. 402–16. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. ———. ‘Preface’ to The Need for Roots. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951. ———. ‘Report on the Relation of Kant’s Critique to Agnosticism.’ Harvard Manuscript, 1913, John Hayward Bequest, King’s College Library, Cambridge. ———. ‘Rhyme and Reason: The Poetry of John Donne.’ Listener 3, no. 62 (19 March 1930): 502–3. ———. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London: Faber and Faber, 1933. ———. The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. Ganeri, Jonardon. ‘Indian Reason and the Colonisation of Reason.’ In Indian Logic: A Reader, edited by Jonardon Ganeri, 1–25. Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001. Gangulee, N., ed. Thoughts for Meditation. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. Jain, Manju. T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Kearns, Cleo McNelly. T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Lawrence, D. H. The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Edited by Harry T. Moore. 2 vols. New York: Viking Press, 1962. Lewis, Pericles. ‘Churchgoing in the Modern Novel.’ Modernism/modernity 11, no. 4 (2004): 669–94.

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———. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Manchester, Frederick and Odell Shepard, eds. Irving Babbitt: Man and Teacher. 1941. New York: Green Wood Press, 1969. Matilal, Bimal Krishna. ‘The Logical Illumination of Indian Mysticism.’ In The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal. Edited by Jonardan Ganeri. 38–64. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. ‘Mysticism and Reality.’ In The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal. Edited by Jonardan Ganeri. 3–37. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Mohua, Mafruha. ‘T. S. Eliot and Dante: A European Anxiety of Romantic Contamination.’ In T. S. Eliot, Dante and the Idea of Europe, edited by Paul Douglass, 159–66. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. More, Paul Elmer. Shelburne Essays: A New England Group and Others. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921. Tagore, Rabindranath. Sādhanā: The Realisation of Life. New York: Macmillan Company, 1915. van der Veer, Peter. Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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

C

onstantine Cavafy was neither a religious nor a mythological poet in the traditional sense of these terms. A Greek Orthodox Christian, Egyptiote Cavafy attended liturgies (albeit not regularly), keenly read ecclesiastical history and hagiographies of saints, sages and miracle-workers of all faiths, and, as a young writer, mounted a spirited attack on Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) for its critique of monotheistic religions and misinterpretation of Byzantine history. Yet, he was mostly silent on any religious feelings he might have had, and his mature depictions of religion are often underwritten by irony and anxiety about the abuse of religion for political causes. A few valuable studies have attempted to read Cavafy’s poetry and prose through the lens of the ‘religious attitudes’ discernible in his opus, notably, his interest in modern mysticism and esotericism, revived Gnosticism, and the lives of Early Christian Fathers.1 However, most scholars have conceded that the weight of ‘Cavafy persona’ – that multi-layered, observing-ironic-emotive voice that dominates his poetry – is such that it renders any ‘genuine’ religious affect hard to discern, and that the scrutiny of the poet’s theological viewpoints leads only to a ‘well-informed but rather inconsistent set of conclusions’.2 When Cavafy engages religion, it is less as a religious poet than as a poetic record-keeper of religious expression and its effects on the believing and the non-believing. Noting the deification of the poet-seer and of the labour of creative (re)production in his opus, some scholars have identified Cavafy’s ‘true religion’ precisely in his commitment to aesthetic record-keeping. ‘Although religion, morality [. . .] are treated ironically and are often repudiated in Cavafy’s poetry,’ Gregory Jusdanis writes, ‘aesthetics is never questioned and is venerated with religious conviction.’3 At least one 1 

The only recorded exception comes from an early letter to his brother John Cavafy, where Constantine, then living as an evacuee in Istanbul, denounces secularism (24 October 1882); cited in Diana Haas, Le problème religieux dans l’oeuvre de Cavafy: Les années de formation (1882–1905) (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1996), 13. For a range of scholarship, see Evangelia Papachristou-Panou, Το χριστιανικό βίωμα του Κ. Π. Καβάφη: δοκίμιο (Athens: Iolkos, 1974); Yiannis Dalas, Ο ελληνισμός και η θεολογία στον Καβάφη (Athens: Stigmi, 1986); Vassilis Adrahtas, ‘Cavafy’s Poetica Gnostica in Quest of Christian Consciousness’, Modern Greek Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 11 (2003): 122–33. Biographically, see Robert Liddell, Cavafy: A Critical Biography (London: Duckworth, 1974). 2  Adrahtas, ‘Cavafy’s Poetica Gnostica’, 122. 3  Gregory Jusdanis, The Poetics of Cavafy: Textuality, Eroticism, History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 85–6.

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commentator and fellow writer labelled this belief position an ‘ascetic Epicureanism’.4 As it happens, the tension between askesis (of intellectual work/creative production, of religious piety; and, metonymically, the figure of the hermit) and the erotic pulls of the body (of inherent human licentiousness, of morphology of Beauty, of creative production again; metonymically, the figure of the mystic) is also the most mercilessly scrutinised theme in Cavafy’s poetry. I honour this wealth of scholarship on Cavafy and religion but note the variety of inconsistent conclusions it produced. Cavafy is hard to compartmentalise, I suggest, because his engagement with religion was rooted in his own lived experience and interest in the experience of others (including temporally distant others); and experience, we know, is messy. I notice a different positionality and task for the poet-seer in his output: as a participant-observer. Complementing his effort to reconceive aestheticascetic experience as an ontology, and in line with his self-appointment as a recorder of human experience in history, Cavafy was a forceful (if sometimes dubitably informed) amateur-ethnographer and amateur-historian of religion.5 He was particularly intrigued by interfaith reciprocities, cross-pollination of religious and mythic frameworks, their sedimentation in lived and recorded memory, and the ways interreligious exchanges could be deployed aesthetically; more interested in these hybridities, I maintain, than in any religion or mythology by itself. Further, Cavafy’s poems – palimpsests of successive mythic, historical and religious texts across more than twenty centuries – articulate the varied models of belief-knowledge production, structure of beliefaffects, and everyday practices and interreligious exchanges in one specific region: the stretch from Antioch to Alexandria, his home town. He obsessively returns to the key moments of transition and transformation of communities and belief systems in this region – those in which the Egyptian belief system interacted with the ancient Hellenes’ beliefs and practices, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and, further, the transitional moment in which he himself lived, where the varied models of belief and unbelief interacted and attached themselves to the political future of Egypt. Studies of modernism, religion and myth often focus on the individual modernist’s engagement with a particular belief system (e.g. modernist Catholicism, theology of ontological uncertainty) or their interest in comparative religion (late nineteenthcentury syncretism), treating these as distinct responses to contemporary history. In this chapter I use Cavafy to engage a complementary set of questions: the modernists’ compulsion to take stock of different belief systems and their interrelation over the longue durée; their examination of the effects that belief transitions have on the embodied experiences of those living through them; and their efforts to explore the ideological and representational challenges of lived syncretism. The last is a particular

4 

Nikos Kazantzakis, Journeying: Travels in Italy, Egypt, Sinai, Jerusalem, and Cyprus (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), 74. 5  A cautionary note must be made on Cavafy as a historian (of religion, culture, politics). While an admirable portion of his poetry concerns historical events, persons and legends, and his poems, by dint of their precision and palimpsestic referencing, often project an aspiration to factual veracity, Cavafy is neither historian nor historical poet. He was little concerned with the questions of objectivity and quandaries of historical causes and consequences, of single and multiple events, and significance hierarchies. But his attention to the history of the everyday and the unseen facets of official history makes him, we shall see, a new breed of poet of history.

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interest of mine. When modernist scholars engage syncretic phenomena, like anthroposophy or revival of Gnosticism, they (often rightly) treat them as variants of an essentialising ‘natural religion’ or attempts to establish an aestheticised world theology, and, unwittingly, deprive them of those experiential particulars – gestures, material forms, traditions, customs and patterns of behaviour – through which a religion is mediated and performed in particular settings and particular literary chronotopes. Thinking through the performance of hybrid belief systems and cultural identities in moments and spaces of transition, like early twentieth-century Alexandria, and with the help of Cavafy’s poetry, I aim to shift the focus towards these neglected areas.

Religion and Interreligion Claims to perpetuity and purism form the heart of many religions and mythologies. For this reason, scholars of religion have a natural tendency to explore religion as a belief system that exists, as systems do, somewhat abstractly, outside time; a system that can therefore be most usefully examined at the level of ideas and principles and the predetermined flows of tradition deemed to be expressive of these ideas and principles. When transposed on to the interpretation of artworks, this stance translates into a hunt for the traces of religious ideas and principles in creative texts. Such an approach is not only valid but also necessary. Yet, it often occludes the historicity and operation of a religious or mythological framework as a living system; troublingly, it favours religious tradition and conceptualisation over religious participants’ agency.6 The scholarship on modernism and religion occasionally falls prey to conceiving the history of religion as free from human agency, too: it privileges the discussion of the conceptual content of religions and their blends over the ethnographic practices and experiences modernists may have been enmeshed in – rites, rituals, sights, sounds and smells of the places of worship.7 This lack of focus on the everyday history of religious interaction leads to another problem. Because of the unwarranted assumption that each system is homogeneous, a loaded record of religious clashes, and overreliance on the official annals of ecclesiastic histories, it is easy to assume that religious systems fully replace each other or that they subsist independently from or in an eternal conflict with each other. Cavafy scholarship is no exception. His opus has been routinely interpreted within the conceptual parameters of a homogeneous religious framework (Greek Orthodox Christianity), even when the actual theme, tone and language make such focalisation questionable. Cavafy’s texts themselves, however, consistently probe what seemingly monolithic conceptual principles and grand historical occurrences (e.g. the destruction or building of a temple or a bishop’s behaviour) mean for ordinary people, and what existential and psychological effects exposure to interreligiosity has on believers and their leaders. They paint a picture of religion not as a conceptual

6 

Marilyn Robinson Waldman, Olabiyi Babalola Yai and Lamin Sanneh, ‘Translatability: A Discussion’, Journal of Religion in Africa 22, no. 2 (1992): 159–72. 7  This is so, irrespective of the known fact that, for many modernists, it was precisely the experiential content of a religion that influenced their practice and sometimes led to their engagement with religious activities. Instances abound, as seen, for example, in the chapters by Anderson (on ritual in women’s writing), Callison (on retreats) and Vetter (on H.D.) in this volume.

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system but as an experiential and emplaced practice. Ethno-anthropologically understood, this vision is correct: a community’s religion or belief system is a complex of practices, dispositions, charismatic roles and traditions materialised through actual gestures in an actual place, or places; this is how a religion is made ‘recognizable, sensible, indigenous, and authoritative’.8 Understood in this way, a religious complex necessarily lives and interacts, within the same place or at different places, with other practices, dispositions, charismas and customs. With or without the approval of its authorities, on the ground, a religious complex is based on and nurtured by syncretism. Tellingly, the contemporary notion of syncretism derives from the nineteenthcentury assessments of the Hellenistic culture in the Middle East and Egypt.9 Although the term was initially used neutrally, syncretism quickly became a contentious category, often taken to imply ‘inauthenticity’ or a contamination or corruption of a notionally ‘pure’ religion by symbols and meanings belonging to other traditions. Noticeable in this interpretation of syncretism is the urge to treat discrete contents in a religious amalgam hierarchically and belittle the impact of, especially, indigenous cultures and local belief systems – a tendency that originates in, Charles Stewart writes, European anxieties about racial, cultural and linguistic purity, reinvigorated in the nineteenth century by the emergence of ethnically diverse states in North America.10 The same context, however, gave birth to the ascription of affirmative meanings to syncretism, in particular, among early modernist thinkers and artists, espousal of a synthetic, natural, ‘personal religion’ (William James’s 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience is a well-known monument to this endeavour). It is this type of syncretic imagination that begat neo-Gnosticism and anthroposophy and fuelled the insouciant mixing of diverse, even incompatible, belief systems in the texts of modernists as different as Mina Loy, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, H.D. and Andrei Bely. Concerned with channelling disparate manifestations into a system of correspondences, this kind of syncretism also paradoxically relieved some purists’ anxieties: pursuits of ‘natural’, ‘personal religion’ honouring a common transcendence flatten out the heteroglossia inherent to syncretic social compositions and tone down the difference in religious custom, behaviour, robe, expression. Syncretic belief forms like theosophy presented themselves as whole, coherent, authentic and superior to other religions precisely on the grounds of their synthesising capacity, sometimes transmogrifying from hyper-syncretistic systems into anti-syncretic behaviours. Yet, syncretism could be understood in a different way, too. Already in 1933 phenomenologist of religion Gerardus Van der Leeuw observed that syncretism was, in fact, a practical feature of all religions.11 All religious forms, David Frankfurter writes more recently, involve endless ‘bricolages, combinations and recombinations  8 

David Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), xiv.  9  As often referenced, the contemporary notion of syncretism derives from Johann Gustav Droysen’s description of the Hellenistic culture as ‘the east and west mixture of people’ in Geschichte des Hellenismus, 2 vols (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1836), vol. 1, vi. 10  Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw, ‘Introduction: Problematizing Syncretism’, in Syncretism/AntiSyncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis, ed. Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw (London: Routledge, 1995), 16. 11  Gerardus Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, trans. J. E. Turner [1933] (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), 609.

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of symbols, conducted in the home and the workshop, at the shrine and by the ritual expert’.12 On this view, syncretism emerges as an emplaced practice of living in the world, one that accounts for present and past patterns of sociability, transfers of meanings, questions of political power and symbolic capital, and cross- and inculturation that happens both systematically and haphazardly. It encompasses the ways in which a religion ‘lives’ syncretically and is acted out through a complex grid of knowing or unwitting agents, within an area or across areas and real or imagined communities.13 An agency-based, emplaced perspective on syncretism is illuminating. It reveals that seemingly archaic religious elements often persist not as survivals of a bygone religious expression but as strategically implemented building blocks for the new religion;14 that religious bricolages may signal cultural survival and resistance to colonial hegemony;15 that amalgamation can be consciously utilised to authorise an emerging social group or political entity (as in, for example, the incorporation of ancient Greek beliefs into Greek Orthodox Christianity, nationalist discourse and new folklore during the Greek independence war, 1821–29);16 and, of specific relevance to Cavafy, that syncretism presents not a corruption of religion by ‘inferior’ indigenous elements but a multidirectional process of social interpenetration where equally valued agents interact and reshape each other across long time-spans.

Recombining Powers and Names of Gods: Alexandria, Egypt, the Longue Durée How did these categories – religious pluralism, interfaith reciprocities, syncretism, interpenetration of belief systems – operate as material gestures within the real and imaginary landscape in and about which Cavafy was writing? Egypt has a long history of the interanimation and crossbreeding of peoples, customs, belief systems and everyday religious practices. Ancient Near East peoples migrated intensely, transporting with them beliefs and deities, and the Egyptian polytheistic system was itself mobile: popular religion often contested the institutionalised Pharaonic practice, individual deities rose, waned and intertwined to create new gods and goddesses (for example, Amun-Ra), iconographies or their bans. The belief territory was further heterogenised in the period of the fourth century bc to the seventh century ad, when ancient Egyptian beliefs and marginalised religious and folkloric practices, like the cult of Isis, came to interact closely with imperially imported Greek and Roman polytheistic religions as well as solidifying Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the Hellenistic era, these processes engendered self-consciously syncretic forms like Gnosticism and Manichaeism, and created hubs of religious interaction, like Cavafy’s home town, Alexandria (founded in 331 bc), where ‘priests, intellectuals, artists and prophets creatively assimilated 12 

Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt, 15. Stewart and Shaw, ‘Introduction’, 16. 14  Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt; Stewart and Shaw, ‘Introduction’. 15  Some modernists used their ‘lived syncretism’ strategically to create the processes of organic ‘interculture’; see James Clifford (on Aimé Cesaire), The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 14–15. 16  On these efforts, see Charles Stewart, ‘Syncretism as a Dimension of Nationalist Discourse in Modern Greece’, in Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism, ed. Stewart and Shaw, 127–44. 13 

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deities of different heritages through iconography and new languages of invocation’.17 Alexandria has been the place of constant imperial, cultural and religious interactions – bellicose, amicable or ‘judiciously integrative’, as Cavafy describes them in ‘In 200 bc’ (1931) – ever since.18 Coptic Christianity took a distinct shape there, admixing the components of Pharaonic, Jewish, Arabic and Zoroastrian religious practices, which proved incompatible with the dogmas of the Council of Chalcedon (651); and, while the majority of the city became Muslim following the conquest in 641, it remained a site of complex and organic poly-religiosity.19 Interreligious exchanges peaked again in the nineteenth century, when economically revived Alexandria attracted new cohorts of migrants – regional peasants, Nubians, French, Italians, English, Greeks. . . The last group included one Petros Cavafy, a successful merchant from Constantinople and father of Constantine. During Constantine Cavafy’s lifetime, Alexandria thrived as a site of transpatialisation: a patchwork of more than twenty jurisdictions/capitulations, the city had ‘many authorities but no hegemon’.20 As such, it experienced rapid economic and infrastructural development as well as an ample share of destruction, imperial imposition and bottom-up contestations, all intimately linked to the history of Cavafy’s family. Following the ʿUrabi revolt and the bombardment by the British naval forces in 1882, much of Alexandria, including the Cavafys’ home, was destroyed, and the family spent the following three years as refugees in Istanbul; Cavafy renounced his British citizenship in a quietly belligerent move. Meanwhile, interreligious tensions both escalated and softened. Alexandrine religious communities interacted not only at the places of worship, but also, and more intimately so, in cafés, open-air cinemas, trams, public parks like the Mahmudiya canal, food and drink stalls, and even brothels. Will Hanley has argued that such sites and the quotidian activities that ordinary people performed there constitute true, vulgar Alexandrian cosmopolitanism (contrasting with the romanticised elite cosmopolitanism), and, significantly for my discussion, Hala Halim has linked this Alexandrian conviviality to the long-standing tradition of syncretism and interfaith reciprocities in the region.21 (It seems fair to add, though, that such sites of conviviality were also used to advance religious intolerance.) This dynamic interreligious environment is captured well in the multifaceted categorisation of the 1907 Egyptian census, according to which the city had Muslims, Orthodox Copts, Catholic

17 

Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt, 15. On the history of the region, see William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, 6th edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2016), esp. 76–96 and 184–205. 19  Patriarch Dioscorus’s rejection of the Chalcedonean definition of Christ as possessing two natures led to the excommunication of Oriental Orthodox Christian churches from the rest of Christianity. On interreligious exchanges in Alexandria during the Ayyubid and Ottoman empires, see Salah Ahmad Haridi, AlJaliyyat fi Madinat al-Iskandariyya fi al-‘Asr al-‘Uthmani (Giza: ‘Ain li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Buhuth al-Insaniyya wa-l Ijtima‘iyya, 2004), 20–1ff. 20  Will Hanley, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 17. Cyrus Schayegh defines the process of transpatialisation as an intense socio-spatial intertwinement of regions, authorities and religious cultural currents associated with urban spaces in the Middle East in the period 1850–1950; Schayegh, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 2. 21  See Hanley, Identifying with Nationality, 31–2; Hala Halim, Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 13–14. 18 

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Copts, Protestant Copts, Catholic Christians, Protestant Christians, Orthodox Christians, Oriental Christians, Jews and other religions (including traditional Egyptian polytheistic belief as well as contemporary religions, for example Bahá’í).22 This was, then, Cavafy’s home-space. And this home-space and its contemporary and long-span history determined, in the way the prefigured matter does, the organisation and mode of utterance through which Cavafy chose to address religion.23

Religious Ethnographies Diana Haas has rightly identified in Cavafy’s early religion-related output ‘an ethnographic element’.24 His essays ‘Masks’, ‘Romaic Folk-lore of Enchanted Animals’, ‘Persian Manners’ and ‘Fragment on Lycanthropy’ (c. 1882–84) showcase this impulse, and Cavafy’s unpreserved essay ‘Prayers’ must have been of a similar mould. Here, the depiction of ornaments, environment and performances of rites like baptism and funeral and the effect they have on participant-observers takes precedence over the complex matters of religious feeling and theological concerns. Thus Cavafy’s 1885 poem ‘Nichori’, describing, in loving detail, the sights, smells and sounds of the town of Yeniköy (Nichori), zooms in on the Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God Koumariotissis, not so much to relay the particular content of religious experience as to claim that, in that fragrant, vivid environment, prayers, too, must be more effective – they ‘win a different grace’.25 For Haas, this stage is a preamble to Cavafy’s subsequent deeper engagement with mysticism. I would rather describe this ‘element’ as a formative and enduring strategy that, simultaneous with his examination of sensual syncretic mysticism and ardent reading of lives of saints and sages, led Cavafy, gradually, into anthropological psychology. This ethno-anthropological-psychological perspective, enriched by passion for history and historiography, remained, as far as the matters of religion are concerned, the dominant framework for Cavafy’s poetry and prose. He continued to explore the ‘external elements’ of the life of the church – its labara, silver vessels, ecclesiastic vestments, chants, incense smell, rhythm of priest’s movement – in a lived synaesthetic fashion in poems such as ‘In Church’ (1912) and ‘Manuel Comnenus’ (1915) and included ethnographic details in poems as late as ‘Following the Recipe of Ancient Greco-Syrian Magicians’ (1931). The reason for Cavafy’s interest in these ‘exterior’ elements of belief is that, put anthropologically (and not without deeper relation to Orthodox Christian theology), these elements are the lived faith. Wizārat al-Mālīyah, Egypt, The Census of Egypt, Taken in 1907 (Cairo: National Printing Department, 1909). Noticeable, too, in this British-sponsored census is the all-encompassing nature of the category ‘Muslim’ (90 percent of the population) and maximum precision given to other categories. 23  The widely held belief that Cavafy was more invested in creating a mythic city than in living in or describing a real one has recently been challenged by several scholars, including myself. Cavafy’s Alexandria was not, I emphasise in the context of this discussion, an abstract platform for phantasies (even when it nourished them or when they coagulated in a poetic metaphor), but a living, active and interreligiously charged site. 24  Haas, Le problème religieux, 14. 25  C. P. Cavafy, ‘Το Νιχώρι’ (1885), Onassis Cavafy Archive (OCA), https://cavafy.onassis.org (accessed 25 May 2022). Unless specified otherwise, all references to and quotations from the poems in Greek come from the OCA. C. P. Cavafy, ‘Nichori’, in Complete Poems (hereafter CP), trans. Daniel Mendelsohn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 252. 22 

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This anthropo-ethnographic impulse does not attach itself only to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Cavafy’s opus. Cavafy represents, with varied levels of sophistication and understanding, rites and rituals across the religious and ritual spectrum in past and contemporary Egypt, and is particularly interested in sites and behaviours that, by dint of shared historical affect, appeal to different ethnicities and religious groups. Cavafy’s under-discussed 1892 poem ‘Sham El Nessim’ is a case in point.26 This tightly structured, eight-stanza poem is set in an open space area in contemporary Alexandria, but its semantic and emotive centre is an ancient festival that materially syncreticises religions. Sham El-Nessim is a spring arrival festival celebrated around the spring equinox since the Third Dynasty of the Old Kingdom (about 2,700 bc), when it was an occasion to give food offerings to gods, notably in the form of salted fish. In early Christianity, the spring festival rituals got attached to Easter time, and, after the Muslim conquest, the festivities were fixed to, specifically, the Monday after the Coptic Easter, on which day it has been celebrated ever since by all Egyptians. The two identical stanzas encircle the poem and confirm the meaning of this ‘festival of breeze’ for Egyptians of all beliefs: they juxtapose the everyday ordeal of ‘bitter’ ‘tyrant sun’ that dries and wears out their home, Misr’/Misiri (Egypt), and the gay, bibulous, breezy challenge to this death-bringing heat – a challenge that transforms, if only for a day, pallidity into colour. The contrast between the sounds, smells and sights of Sham ElNessim and arid Misiri also permeates the middle section which describes the revellers congregating from all sides of the city, their jovial but occasion-honouring poise, and the festivities. The poem records the gradual building of the belief that the duly performed festival rites – such as decorating eggs, preparing food offerings (fiseekh, salty, dried grey mullet fish, symbolising preservation of resource), feasting, chanting/singing and dancing (a local habitus that, whilst criticised by both Islamic and Christian thinkers, was sustained in Egypt as the vehicle to embed religion) – would attract Ptah, the ancient Egyptian god of creativity and craftsmanship. Ptah, in turn, will bring with him ‘magic blossoms’, ‘myrrhs that emanate obscure aromas’, and inspiration for the moganny (public singer) to reconnect the meaning of the festival with participants by singing popular Arab ballads.27 Not only the festival but also its name testifies to the accretions of belief systems. In the early Egyptian language, the festival was known as Shemu or Shamo (‘renewal’), and in the Coptic language (the last vernacular stage of the Egyptian language, spoken from about 200 ad and almost extinct by the seventeenth century), this name got phonetically transliterated into ‘tshom ni tshom’, or ‘tshom ni sime’, which means ‘garden meadows’. As Arabic became prevalent in Egypt, the name of the festival again phonosemantically transformed into ‘sham el-nessim’, which means ‘smelling the breeze’ or

Constantine Cavafy, ‘Sham El Nessim’ (‘Σαμ ελ Νεσίμ’, 1892; repudiated), in C. P. Cavafy, Apokērygmena Poiemata kai Metafraseis, 1886–1898, ed. G. P. Savvides (Athens: Ikaros, 1983), 23–5, and CP, 206–8. Cavafy published little in official print, but instead circulated some poems among friends and acquaintances, printed individually on broadsheets or in pamphlets. In addition to these, there are also poems that Cavafy chose not to disseminate/publish (referred to in scholarship as ‘hidden’), poems he rejected in later years but did not destroy (‘repudiated’), and ‘unfinished’ poems. The exact meaning of Cavafy’s decision to classify poems in one way or another – including labelling some of them ‘repudiated’ yet preserving them – is still a subject of debate. 27  CP, 207. 26 

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‘whiff of the breeze’ in Arabic. Well aware of this linguistic odyssey (and at least three religious frameworks under which it unfolded), Cavafy makes language peripatetics into a distinct strategy in ‘Sham El Nessim’. He strategically transliterates Arabic into Greek in a few crucial invocations: that of the country, affectionately invoked as ‘our Misiri’ (the transliteration of Arabic ‘Misr’’ for Egypt into Greek ‘Misiri’, rather than using the Greek word ‘Aigyptos’), that of the ‘sweet’-voiced moganny (public singer), and the name-subjects of his ballads.28 Some translations and the ensuing heteroglossia are less noticeable, though, as they cut across the discourses, diversified rhythms and line lengths, all passionately wrapped up in consistently long rhyme. For example, the fragments of the popular and high Arabic Egyptian phraseology make it into the interior dialogue between Greek katharevousa (high or formal Greek) and demotiki (demotic Greek) unfolding in the poem, as in the pairing of the adjective ‘glad/ gladsome’ and ‘Sham El Nessim’, or the adoption of adjectival proper noun phrases from Arabic ballads (‘flighty Fatma’, ‘harsh Eminah’, etc.). Similarly, the rhythm of Egyptian folkloric idiom is translated into the sudden intrusions of the fifteensyllable beat characteristic of the Greek popular song in the stiff diction and pace of lofty Greek katharevousa. Materialising syncretism in language and form in this way draws attention to the variety of Egyptians – Muslims, Jews, Christians, pagans – whose agency (that is, active participation in the festival) is crucial in bringing about a renewal. To corroborate these possibilities, amid the mythic promises, a real site of renewal is mentioned: ‘dreamy, azure Mahmudiya’ Canal, built between Alexandria and the Nile by Alexandrians themselves to facilitate the supply of water and food to the city in the mid nineteenth century.29 Cavafy seems to have had special affection for the Mahmudiya landscape, but for him, like other turn-of-the-century Alexandrians, the canal also harboured material and metaphoric significance: it brought life-giving waters to the city, and reminded its inhabitants of the mighty river Nile, itself often imagined as the physical and symbolic site of transcending and synthesising religions.30 Cavafy was the child of nineteenth-century syncretism, yet he also saw around him an almost unmanageable diversity of religious articulations interacting daily and across long periods to generate both competing systems and amalgams. By trying to capture the latter in ‘Sham El Nessim’ and later poetry, Cavafy challenges not only purist religious

28 

Haas has commented on Cavafy’s use of the phrase ‘our Byzantinism’ in his 1912 poem ‘In Church’ to signal his affection for Byzantine culture. Haas’s interpretation has been cogently criticised for missing Cavafian irony in the use of ‘our’ (see Cornelia Tsakiridou, ‘Hellenism in C. P. Cavafy’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 21, no. 2 (1995): 115–29). However, the oral ballad scaffolding, transliteration strategies and the site-specificity of the much earlier ‘Sham El Nessim’ suggest that ‘our’ is indeed used to impart affection and foster participatory thinking here. See, also, Stratis Tsirkas, Ο Πολιτικός Καβάφης (Athens: Kedros, 1971), 83; Halim, Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism, 109–10. One of the reasons Cavafy might have repudiated ‘Sham El Nessim’ later would be precisely its one-dimensionality and lack of ironic distancing. 29  CP, 206. The building of the Mahmudiya Canal was one of Ottoman/British ruler Muhammad Ali’s major accomplishments. It transformed Alexandria into the trade, transport and cultural centre of the region. 30  The ancient Egyptian cult of the Nile subsumed many different religious cults and was supported and even elevated to the official status by Roman authorities. Its persistence throughout the Christian and Islamic periods may be due to the ubiquity of the worship; David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 64. F. T. Marinetti associated Cavafy’s poetic idiom specifically with Mahmudiya in his remembrances of the poet, in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘Il poeta Greco-Egiziano Cavafy’, in Il fascino dell’Egitto (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1933), 131–8.

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worldviews but also the abstracting tenets of late nineteenth-century syncretism. With its focus on a shared ritual that transcends but also feeds on to various religious practices in his home-place, ‘Sham El Nessim’ stands out as a visible example of Cavafy’s ethnographic impulse and appreciation of syncretic rituals. Why did Cavafy become a proponent of lived syncretism in 1892? His previous output often foregrounded the antitheses between religions, mostly Christianity and Islam; repudiated early, many of these texts display a misguided understanding of both religious principles and adherents’ behaviours that Cavafy would later recant. The decade 1882–92, glossed earlier, changed both Cavafy and Egyptian politics. In 1892, the poet obtained a salaried position as muwazzaf (low functionary) in the Third Circle of the Department of Irrigation. His job entailed handling papers and conducting exchanges with a diverse population in various languages, with specific focus on agriculture and water supply (indeed, the operation of Mahmudiya itself). Like many Alexandrians, Cavafy became critical of the British colonial government and tried to imagine an independent future Egypt and his own position in such circumstances. Greeks residing permanently and transgenerationally in Egypt, Cavafy included, started identifying themselves by the syncretic term ‘Egyptiotes’ (‘Greek Egyptians’) precisely in 1892.31 Egyptiotes feared that independence would be delivered by the mono-religiously fanatic rather than the ‘judiciously integrative’ and that the promotion of the discourse of integration was an existential necessity. Somewhat stilted and ornate, ‘Sham El Nessim’ is hardly the most complex or sophisticated of Cavafy’s poetic addresses to lived syncretism, but it tells an important story about a particular moment in the history of early twentieth-century Alexandria, where the accreted experiences of religious interaction and competition dominated the public sphere and interreligious activities like Sham El-Nessim gave shape and tone to everyday life. This contemporary context, I argue, profoundly informed Cavafy’s poetic practice and inspired him to chronicle and explore meanings of religious interaction across the longue durée history of the area.

Transitions and Amalgams in the Longue Durée ‘Sham El Nessim’ also provides an early signal of Cavafy’s lifelong interest in rituals and customs as both the guarantees of the continuity and sustainability of a community and the memory traces of its hybridisation over the longue durée. Cavafy had a strong interest in long-span history, which he reportedly believed was governed by ‘religious sentiment’ no less than by economic forces.32 Cavafy’s ‘historical poems’ often represent political-imperial transformations through religious accords and tensions as played out by agents on the ground. He was particularly attracted by those transitional moments when paradigm shifts happen, and the surrounding historical time-space is rippled. The rendition of these moments creates a poetic world of ‘the twilight zones’, ‘an area 31 

The first recorded use of the term ‘Egyptiotes’ appears in an anonymous article in Greek, signed by ‘Ulysses’, in the Egyptian journal Omonoia (15/27 June 1892). It has been widely hypothesised that Cavafy himself wrote the article and coined the term, but no material evidence has ever been produced. On the development of the identity of Egyptiotes, see Marios Papakyriacou, ‘Formulation and Definitions of the Greek National Ideology in Colonial Egypt (1856–1919)’ (PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 2014), 352–7. 32  Cavafy, quoted in Liddell, Cavafy, 124–5.

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marked by blending, amalgamation, transition, alteration, exceptions’, populated by figures – minor or major, historical or fictional – that epitomise transitions.33 To shed light on interreligious relationships within this world, Cavafy, like his unacknowledged Hellenistic precursor, Apuleius, chooses to write with a polyphonic ‘desultoriae scientiae stilo’, strategically appropriating different viewpoints and idioms/ languages.34 He makes minor historical agents into touching monads and places them in the (ethnographic) position of observer-participants in an intensely interreligious context, where followers of different religions can live in the same household, or be lovers or close friends, and one may be exposed to various religious traditions without requesting special access. Such figures are commonly tasked with viewing a religion from the outside, as in the case of the unnamed non-Christian speaker of ‘Simeon’ (1917, unpublished), who sets aside a pressing work-related issue to contemplate the effects that the hagiography of Saint Simeon has had on him. Even more frequent than these demonstratives of interreligious understanding are Cavafy’s depictions of those who are collateral victims of transition, pained by the effort to reconceive their own or their loved ones’ identity in purist terms or through a lens of a single religion. These aching negotiations are often formally represented through the device of life-death breach, in which the loved one’s identity is reassessed posthumously with distinct repercussions for the living. Such are, for example, the cases of the mourning Lanes, an indigenous Egyptian boy who rejected his own visual (re)representation as a Greek hero (‘Tomb of Lanes’), and Myres, a boy whose ‘Christian life’ was invisible to his group of friends and lovers (‘Myres: Alexandria in 340 A.D.’).35 Cavafy’s poignant ‘Priest at the Serapeum’ homes in on the necessity of interreligious understanding for the affective life of individuals and communities: its two tight stanzas relay a zealous Christian’s attempts to reconcile the profound pain he feels after his father’s death and the circumstance that the latter was a priest of the cult of the Graeco-Egyptian god Serapis, serving at the Serapeum temple at Rhakotis (Alexandria) – a temple which, the reader should be aware, was destroyed by Christians in 391 in a well-known instance of interreligious street-violence.36 The rulers who embody the models of knowledge production and structure of affects attendant to religious interaction also abound in Cavafy’s poetry. Of these, perhaps the most memorable is Queen Zenobia (Bint-Zabbai, c. 240–c. 274 ad), the subject of an unfinished 1930 poem by Cavafy.37 In the poem Cavafy adopts the view

33 

George Seferis, On the Greek Style: Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism, trans. Rex Warner and Th. D. Frangopoulos (Toronto: Little, Brown, 1966), 152. 34  Apuleius writes in Metamorphosis, or The Golden Ass: ‘iam haec equidem ipsa vocis immutatio desultoriae scientiae stilo quem accersimus respondet’; ‘this very changing of language [involving changes of voice and style] corresponds to the type of writing we have undertaken, which is like the skill of a circus rider [jumping from one horse to another]’ (Apuleius, Met. 1.1). The same source contains the locus classicus of syncretism, the Neoplatonic Hymn to Isis (Met. 11.5). 35  ‘Λάνη τάφος’ (1916/18); ‘Μυρης· Aλεξανδρεια του 340 μ.X.’ (1929). 36  ‘Ιερεύς του Σεραπίου’ (1926); CP, 133. The Serapeum temple was closed on the orders of Constantine in 325, but it remained a site of pagan worship and was eventually destroyed in violent riots by either a Christian mob or Roman soldiers in 391. 37  The handwritten draft of ‘Zenobia’ (‘Η Ζηνοβία’, 1930) is preserved in OCA (https://cavafy.onassis.org/ object/4crf-dqgx-xckc); CP, 386.

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of Zenobia as a level-headed and integrative ruler of the multicultural, multi-religious Palmyrene Empire, particularly protective of religious groups marginalised by Rome. Zenobia herself is likely to have followed the Palmyrene paganism, where the pantheon of Semitic gods, led by god Bel, was worshipped; but the Manichaeans claimed her as their own and St John Chrysostom declared her Jewish. The debates around Zenobia’s religious identity were particularly intense in the first decades of the twentieth century when emergent nationalisms in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon started affiliating themselves with distinct religious traditions. The significance of her court in the development of Middle Eastern intellectual history and heritage and her tragic end (the Palmyrene Empire was recaptured by Rome in Aurelian’s campaign and the queen was apprehended and probably publicly displayed/shamed by the Romans) made Zenobia an attractive figure for religious leaders, politicians and writers alike. In the few poignant lines of the poem, set at the height of the Palmyrene Empire when Zenobia claimed independence from Rome, Cavafy puts these appropriations centre stage. The poetic voice warns that many will attempt to ‘create a genealogy’ for the wise queen Zenobia and claim her for their religious or political aims; the worst are those forfeiters of history who wish to ‘absolve her’ of her identity as an ‘Asiatic woman’. A distinct poetic mandate is readable in those few lines: to rescue from misappropriation the historical figures and behaviours that embody the possibilities of material religious syncretism and peaceful interreligiosity. Less sympathetic yet more intense was Cavafy’s treatment of Julian the Apostate. Julian is the subject of eleven of Cavafy’s poems (plus an embryonic draft), written at various points in his career. A general, a philosopher, a cultured emperor and a prolific writer, Julian was baptised and raised Christian, but play-acted Christianity for at least ten years before coming out as a pagan and, in a campaign marked by both puritanism and declamatory tolerance, imposed a version of rigid, highly administrated Neoplatonic polytheism on the newly Christianised empire. Julian’s revival of paganism was ascetic and exacting, and it gained him ardent enemies; he was killed in the Battle of Samara by a Christianised Roman soldier in Persian service.38 Scholars often gloss Cavafy’s dislike for this historical figure, yet there is little doubt that Julian also fascinated Cavafy. The poet, who derived most of his knowledge about Julian from Gibbon’s negative account, shared with Julian an interest in Neoplatonic mysteries, theurgy, astrology, and magic, Iamblichus, and the life of Maximus of Ephesus. Cavafy’s strong unease with the emperor’s treatment of other religions, in particular Christianity, speaks out, however, in the sarcastic voice in poems like ‘On the Outskirts of Antioch’ and ‘Julian and the Antiochians’ that relate Julian’s excessive and ultimately ineffective actions, made more brutal and absurd by his preaching tolerance.39 Julian’s duplicitous religious performance provided Cavafy the psychologist with a minefield of thought; poems like ‘Julian in Nicomedia’ and ‘The Bishop Pegasius’ probe closely the emperor’s strategies of self-concealment and their motivations, including hybrid identifications

38 

On Julian’s life, see Rowland B. E. Smith, Julian’s Gods: Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian the Apostate (London: Routledge, 1995). On various accounts of Julian’s death, see David S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, ad 180–395 (London: Routledge, 2004), 518. 39  ‘Εις τα περίχωρα της Αντιοχείας’ (1932–33) focuses on Julian’s order to remove the bones of the third-century bishop Babylas buried near the temple of Apollo at Daphne; ‘O Ιουλιανός και οι Αντιοχείς’ (1926) explains, with double-edged irony, why the Antiochenes preferred Christianity to Julian’s austere paganism.

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and the possibility of Julian’s homosexuality.40 The most overdetermined of Cavafy’s Julian poems, ‘The Rescue of Julian’, considers the impact that the early childhood trauma of seeing his family executed had on Julian’s later behaviour, including his curious ability to forget that, as official historiography records it, Christian priests rescued him. Here, an unexpected, ambivalent insertion reminds us of the power of religious politics and casts doubt on the account of Julian as it has come to us: ‘Still it’s absolutely essential for us to say that / this information comes from a Christian source.’41 Taken together, the twelve Julian poems seem to reprimand the emperor not because he chose paganism over Christianity (and certainly not because of Cavafy’s own Christianity), but because play-acting itself is ethically problematic and duplicitous performance is painful – a subject of personal significance for Cavafy.42 Julian’s greatest sin when it comes to matters of religion, however, appears to be something else: namely, his failure to realise that, in any case, ‘gods are deathless’ (‘Remembrance’); that, ‘just because we’ve torn their statues down, / and cast them from their temples, / doesn’t for a moment mean the gods are dead’ (‘Song of Ionia’).43 Taking as an example Egyptian religious transformations from the first to the seventh century ad, Frankfurter has convincingly argued that, even in cases of institutionalised religion transfers or hegemonic impositions, some elements of one complex may continue through – and often by means of – new religious or institutional idioms: rites continue under different names, deities get a makeover or synthesise with other deities, beliefs exist in parallel and covert or sanctioned interaction and interpenetration.44 Appreciating these processes of bricolage, combination and recombination (as opposed to officially instigated raptures and purist overturns like Julian’s), Cavafy was profoundly interested in interreligious continuities and the mutation of deities on the ground. Some of his most enigmatic poems recount the various ways in which deities translate into each other across a long time (getting compacted into a monotheistic figure or expanded into a polytheistic group) while maintaining significance for ‘Ο Ιουλιανός εν Νικομηδεία’ (1924); ‘Ὁ Ἐπίσκοπος Πηγάσιος’ (1920). Julian’s homosexuality is unrecorded but, as a ruler, he was more welcoming towards homosexuals than Constantine and his sons. In entertaining the possibility of Julian’s homosexuality, Cavafy may have relied on his reading of Julian’s positive portrayal of Marcus Aurelius in Caesares. 41  ‘Ἡ διάσωσις τοῦ Ἰουλιανοῦ’ (1923, unfinished); CP, 369. To complicate matters further, Cavafy reassures the reader that, ‘historically speaking, there’s nothing that seems / incredible: the priests of Christ rescuing an innocent Christian child’, yet he closes the poem enigmatically: ‘If it’s true—could this be what the very philosophical / Emperor was also referring to when he said / “let there be no memory of that darkness”?’ (CP, 369). The ‘darkness’ in this line may refer to the trauma of execution, but Cavafy’s syntax also suggests that the Christian priests’ rescue of the six-year-old itself constitutes ‘darkness’. The reader is plunged into urgent questioning: did Julian experience the act of mercy by Christians as a source of shame, or did he think of their effort to save ‘a Christian child’ (as opposed to any child) as dishonest; or did, more alarmingly, something happen to him during the rescue that cast the saving act as dark or shameful? 42  Here I agree with John Phillipson, C. P. Cavafy: Historical Poems (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2013), 584; pace G. W. Bowersock, ‘The Julian Poems of C. P. Cavafy’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 7, no. 1 (1981): 89–104. 43  ‘Remembrance’ (‘Μνήμη’, 1891/1896, renounced) was revised into ‘Thessaly’ (‘Θεσσαλία’), then into ‘Song of Ionia’ (Ιωνικόν, 1911); CP, 230; 44; modified translation. The chiselling work excised the 1896 line ‘the gods are deathless’ (‘Δεν αποθνήσκουν οι θεοί.’), but Cavafy specified its implications: ‘Γιατί τα σπάσαμε τ’ αγάλματά των, / γιατί τους διώξαμε απ’ τους ναούς των, / διόλου δεν πέθαναν γι’ αυτό οι θεοί.’ Gods are repeatedly described as ‘deathless’ in the Iliad, but Cavafy does not deploy the Homeric Greek here. 44  Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, esp. 1–50. 40 

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the ordinary people, so that they may appear, unexpectedly and unexplainedly, with ‘the joy of incorruptibility in [their] eyes’, in a street that leads into the red-light district long after their time (‘One of Their Gods’).45 I shall return to the translation of deities later, but here let me add that Cavafy’s poetic interpretations of religious continuities are most often anchored to, or indeed focalised through, amalgamated subjectivities – an identity-position that the poet deemed in dire need of acknowledgement. Cavafy’s 1912 ‘Dangerous Things’ lays bare this project. One of the most richly layered, emotionally charged and unsettling of Cavafy’s ‘historical poems’, the poem is also typical of Cavafy’s strategy to connect moments of belief transition to our embodied experiences, identity choices and political behaviours. These include mystical (frequently erotic) experiences that reorganise everyday life through an appeal not to major ontologies but to minor and mundane syncretic transcendences. Formally introduced with a Homeric-biblical opening ‘Said Myrtias: . . .’, ‘Dangerous Things’ relays, over fifteen lines with strong beat yet little rhyme, the impassioned first-person, demotic locution of ‘a Syrian student / in Alexandria during the reign / of the Emperor Konstans and the Emperor Konstantios; / part heathen, part Christian’, self-reasoning that the ascetic pursuit of his studies would enable him to enjoy sensual delights in balance.46 The poem, these lines explicate, is set during the uneasy double reign of the sons of Constantine the Great, Constans and Constantius, in the fourth century ad, when the Roman Empire’s adopted Christianity became more proscriptive, and just before Julian’s coming to power. This setting and his ‘part-and-part’ religious identity make Myrtias, an ordinary youth of the time, comparable to Julian, even, potentially, his double; but they are in fact exact opposites. Myrtias aspires to resolve his dilemma by continuous transitions rather than break-ups – he will jockey from one belief system and set of values to another and back to suit his bodily, affective and intellectual needs, in hope that such behaviour will stabilise the extremes of the ascetic and the erotic into a balanced existence. Myrtias’ unique belief inter-positionality affords him, the poem implies, the surplus of experiential vision which allows him to understand, bridge and crossbreed (or perhaps just deceive himself he is doing so) two contrastive behaviours and the belief systems and ideologies that underpin them. His compromise may be paradoxical, dangerous, ‘impure’ and self-deceptive, but it is experientially, and so also historically, necessary.47 While the poem ostensibly stages the tension between pagan and Christian values and may delude (and have deluded) readers into an easy alignment of a set of values and a particular religion, this staging is fickle and unclear. Pointedly, Cavafy eschews any clues as to which of the two parts of Myrtias’ religious identity – paganism or Christianity – is to be credited for his erotic indulgences or his ascetic excesses. The

‘με την χαρά της αφθαρσίας μες στα μάτια’ in ‘Ένας Θεός των’ (1899/1917); CP, 65. ‘(Σύρος σπουδαστής / στην Aλεξάνδρεια· επί βασιλείας / αυγούστου Κώνσταντος και αυγούστου Κωνσταντίου· / εν μέρει εθνικός, κ’ εν μέρει χριστιανίζων)·’ in ‘Τα Επικίνδυνα’ (‘Dangerous’, or ‘Dangerous Things’, or ‘Dangerous Thoughts’, 1912); CP, 37. 47  This argument is perched precariously over the evident dominance of sensual imagery in the poem. See the purposefully repetitious three-liner at the midpoint in the poem: ‘to enjoyments I’ve dreamed of, / to the most audacious erotic desires, / to the lascivious impulses of my blood’ (‘στες απολαύσεις τες ονειρεμένες, / στες τολμηρότερες ερωτικές επιθυμίες, / στες λάγνες του αίματός μου ορμές, χωρίς’); CP, 37. 45  46 

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work of alignment, or a realisation of the non-alignment, is then up to the reader; it’s a dialogic provocation of a kind that Cavafy often plants deep in his poetry, one that casts the reader into the position of an active agent. This provocation is not exacting, and Cavafy does not presage its outcomes: en route the reader may realise their own embeddedness in a certain set of meanings, behaviours and religious texts; or they may not. The reader may also opt to ascribe the poem’s ambiguity to the poet’s personal and professional tribulations as captured in those numerous notes in which Cavafy dissects the trials of the austere and the sensual. This is a valid proposition. Yet, if the trials of askesis and eros were the only focus of the poem, why would Cavafy mark religious identity, and religious identity in flux, so prominently in ‘Dangerous Things’? First, it merits reiterating that, in Cavafy’s opus, religious identity is consistently presented as a vital component of the spectrum of subjectivity, and, by extension, the crucial aspect of material history. Second, Myrtias’ hybrid religious identity is intrinsically linked to the poem’s provocation to the reader. For, how one perceives Myrtias’ ‘part-and-part’ position depends on one’s own positionality: it appears most disquieting to those that, like ‘appropriators’ of Queen Zenobia, aspire to reinscribe Myrtias’ identity as purely one or the other – a cohort that may include, Cavafy’s ironic wager has it, not only the overt proponents of religious and political purism of his and subsequent eras, but the agent-reader, too. Myrtias, as written down by Cavafy, vehemently rejects categorisation; his identity, explained in the characteristically charged Cavafian parenthesis, is both divided and unitary – just as the focused use of enjambment, followed by a summary of his ‘part’ identities, suggests. Anthropologically and politically, Myrtias, then, is a paradigmatic embodiment of those often-uncomfortable manoeuvring positions in which the subjects living within or between religions find themselves.48 Here, Mendelsohn observes, Myrtias is a skilful player: it is as if he ‘profits’ from that uncertain, transitional moment in the history of religion.49 As often in Cavafy’s poetry, however, what appears to be successful self-management at present may be disclosed as ‘dangerous’ behaviour by later history. On this interpretation, ‘Dangerous Things’ is all about morphology of exchange: its mode is an exploration into whether compensatory behaviours may bring about the successful realisation of a hybrid identity, including an amalgam religious identity. Such realisation is vitally important for the poet. Cavafy’s preferred word to describe identity was ‘κράμα’ (mixture, amalgam), a word that also happens to echo ‘συγκρητισμός’ (syngkretismos), as first recorded in Plutarch’s Moralia and derived from the ancient Greek ‘συγκρασις’ (‘syngkrasis’, ‘mixing together’, the prefix ‘syn’ meaning ‘with’ or ‘together’, and the word ‘krasis’ meaning ‘mixture’).50 Mixtures and amalgams, Cavafy appreciated early, are normative to religions (as they are inherent to culture as a whole), whereas ‘purity’ is less frequent and often invented.51 The Cavafy sets up a similar dilemma for an interreligious subjectivity in his ‘Of the Jews (50 ad)’ (‘Των Eβραιων (50 μ.X.)’) but does not leave the resolution unknown. 49  Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘Introduction’, in CP, xxxiv. 50  Plutarch, ‘On Brotherly Love’ [Peri Philadelphias], in Moralia (Ἠθικά), 490b; trans. Frank Cole Babbitt et al., 16 vols, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927–2004), vol. 7. For Plutarch’s specific use, related to but also distinct from today’s meanings of the word, see Stewart and Shaw, ‘Introduction’, 3–4. 51  Paul Christopher Johnson, ‘Syncretism and Hybridization’, in The Oxford Handbook for the Study of Religion, ed. Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 754–71. 48 

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force of that invention and the rigidity with which it is pursued in a community often determines the individual’s behaviour and strategies of adjustment and defence; one such example is Myrtias’ belief in the economics of compensation. The title of the poem deserves to be reread in this light. At a psychological-anthropological level, these ‘things’ or ‘thoughts’ might be ‘dangerous’ because they entail the potentially unmanageable excesses of contrastive behaviours. They are certainly ‘dangerous’ in the newly monolithic, religion-purifying historical context, and will continue to be so, we infer, when, after the rule of Constans and Constantius, Julian seizes power. Unless he adopts the cunning self-concealment strategies of Julian himself, Myrtias will be the victim of the history of religious-political purisms. As the tensions between purism and syncretism, at the levels of principles and behaviours, accrue in long history, and the purist impulse often wins (or so it appeared to Cavafy, worried by the sudden rise of exclusionary, often religion-backed nationalisms, in Egypt, Greece and elsewhere), who is, then, to promote syncretism and amalgams in the moments of transition? How can one do it without endangering oneself in exclusionary environments? To answer these questions, I would like to close with a brief reading of another poem, ‘For Ammonis, Who Died at 29, in 610’, which treats the subject of religious cohabitation through the activities of creation and translation.52 This poem was written in 1917, the year of another Egyptian census. Its design reflecting the ambition to inculcate affiliation by nationality in multi-ethnic Egypt, the 1917 census subsumed religion under the category of nationality and produced obfuscating guidance on how to record it. Featuring an absurdly expanded repository of nationalities (one of the subcategories listed being ‘Egyptiotes’), the census also occluded some religious communities, noticeably the Copts.53 Through a temporal transposition into Byzantine Egypt, ‘For Ammonis. . .’ celebrates this whirlpool of identifications, while strategically drawing attention to the Copts. The title positions the action at the threshold moment in Egyptian and world history: it coincides with Mohammed’s first vision and the beginning of his career as a prophet, and it narrowly precedes the conquest of Alexandria by the Sassanian Persian king Khosrau II in 616 and the subsequent conquest by the Muslim Rashidun Empire in 639–641, as well as the Council of Chalcedon in 651. Appearing in the form of dramatic monologue (a genre, favoured by Cavafy, where a directive/advice is given to a silent interlocutor), ‘For Ammonis. . .’ relates a request that a group of Copts, or at least Coptic language speakers, pose to their Coptic or Jewish poet-friend Raphael: to write a tombstone epitaph in Greek celebrating the life of another poet, Ammonis.54 Raphael is advised to ‘pour his Egyptian feeling’ into ‘a foreign language’ (‘ξένη γλώσσα’, repeated twice), that is, Greek.55 Here Greek is constructed as the imperial language that is good enough for decorous epitaph-writing but inadequate for expressing emotions and their assumed site-specific qualities; the group’s vernacular – presumably Coptic Egyptian – may be better suited to the task if only sanctioned. The contextual background for the poem is the gradual

‘Για τον Αμμόνη, που πέθανε 29 ετών, στα 610’ (1917), CP, 71; translation slightly modified. Egyptian Government, Ministry of Finance, Statistical Department, Taʻdād sukkān al-quṭr al-Miṣrī lisanat, 1917 (Cairo: Government Press, 1920–21). 54  Phillipson, C. P. Cavafy, 665–6; Halim, Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism, 91. Phillipson argues Raphael is Jewish; Halim argues that the entire inner circle comprises the Copts with limited knowledge of Greek. 55  ‘Το αιγυπτιακό σου αίσθημα χύσε στην ξένη γλώσσα.’ 52  53 

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loss of the Coptic language and the occlusion of indigenous means of expression by an imperial tongue. Thus set, the poem is imbued with lived syncretism and a deep history of religious interaction, disclosable in the coded choice of names. Raphael (Rafa’El) is the name of one of the three archangels venerated across religions. Strongly associated with Jewish tradition, Raphael is also a prominent saint in the Roman Catholic Church (where his patronage includes that of lovers and messengers) and, less so, in Greek Orthodox Christianity; as Arabic (Isrāfīl), he is also a venerated archangel in the Islamic tradition, influentially present in the everyday life of Muslim communities in Egypt and Syria.56 Finally, Angel Raphael is particularly venerated in the Coptic Church: the Copts and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church commemorate with a feast day his miracle on the occasion of the dedication of a church on an island off Alexandria in the late fourth to early fifth century ad.57 The name of the lamented poet, Ammonis, presents the Hellenised version of Amun. It is the name of the chief Egyptian (and Nubian) deity Amun (‘the hidden one’), later Amun-Ra (‘the hidden sun’), often depicted as a human male wearing a crown with two tall plumes or a green ram with curved horns/a sun disk. Amun-Ra was also worshipped in Libya, Nubia and Greece, where he was fused with Zeus (as Zeus Ammon; Alexander the Great claimed to be his son), and had a major influence on the Abrahamic religions.58 In the Cavafian universe, we have seen, deities endure and they can appear in our everyday long after the peak of their religion. Might it be that Amun-Ra himself strayed into the lives of the group about which Cavafy’s poem speaks, left a lasting imprint, and then disappeared, or died in its worldly youth form, only to be reincarnated, or manifested, in another? If that is so, then the commissioned poem must be read as an offering that will ensure his reappearance, his continued ‘deathless’ existence, potentially translated into other deities and religious forms. The emphatic request that the language in the epitaph resonates widely supports this possibility. Prayers, hymns and spells to Amun-Ra, appearing inscribed in epitaphs since 2,300 bc, have as their common feature a metatextual reflection on the obligation to use exquisite craftsmanship yet site-specific language to propagate Amun’s role as both a god of creation and a god of fertility. Similarly, Raphael’s mandate is to deploy ‘all [his] craftsmanship’ to convey emotions in ‘a foreign language’ while ensuring that the verses ‘contain something of [their] life within them, / so the rhythm and every phrase declare / that an Alexandrian writes of an Alexandrian’.59 The praise of Ammonis, like that of Amun-Ra, must be superior in form and demonstrative of deep tradition, but it should also reflect the life or circumstances of those who utter it, which,

56 

1 Enoch 9: 1; Tobit 12: 17–20; and Babylonian Talmud. The unnamed angel in Quran 6: 73, who stands ready to sound the trumpet on the Day of Resurrection, is considered to be Raphael. 57  As recorded in the fourteenth-century Ethiopian Synaxarion (Synaxarium Aethiopicum, Pagumen 03, Feast on September 8), a new church was discovered to have been built on the back of a whale, but Archangel Raphael steadied the whale by his spear so that the church could stand. The legend is recorded in Alban Butler’s Lives of Saints (1756–59), which Cavafy may have consulted. 58  Amun was the tutelary deity of Thebes during the Eleventh Dynasty. With the political rise of Thebes, Amun came to be fused with the sun god Ra, and became the chief national deity, worshipped throughout Egypt. 59  Όμως την μαστοριά σου όληνα τη θέμε τώρα. / Σε ξένη γλώσσα η λύπη μας κ’ η αγάπη μας περνούν. / Το αιγυπτιακό σου αίσθημα χύσε στην ξένη γλώσσα. // Pαφαήλ, οι στίχοι σου έτσι να γραφούν / που νάχουν, ξέρεις, από την ζωή μας μέσα των, / που κι ο ρυθμός κ’ η κάθε φράσις να δηλούν / που γι’ Aλεξανδρινό γράφει Aλεξανδρινός.

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in the Alexandrian context, entails echoing across languages and identities, and, in Cavafy’s own project, making homoerotic mourning public. What does one make of all this onomastic religious criss-crossing and quest for a locally expressive language? Burying someone, adorning graves, remembering in rites, writing epitaphs (first recorded in ancient Egypt but developed to an elegiac form by ancient Greeks), using polyphonic language – these are everyday communal experiences that, while embedded in specific religious traditions, also stretch across them. Attracting social management, these experiences are also, in some fundamental way, unappropriable, therefore, the points of resistance. McKinsey notes that the poem also presents a metapoetic statement on the challenges faced by ‘technicians of the word living and writing during periods of foreign domination [like Cavafy’s own], with its attendant pressures on linguistic practice’.60 Significantly, though, the protagonists navigate this situation dexterously, using the forces of translation and (re)combination to put forward the vision of a writing and living practice that keeps different cultural and religious traces in dialogue. The concluding line in the poem suggests that such practice is, in fact, what it means to be an Alexandrian. Raphael’s prospective poetic achievement will not only justify but also publicly validate cross-affiliations, including religious affiliations, in Alexandria, and memorialise them in deep time at a site available to all. To reflect on what it means to live at the site of cohabitation and hybridisation across the longue durée is, of course, a challenge Cavafy – an Alexandrian – posed to himself. Complemented by Cavafy’s belief in the power of the poetic word and informed by his daily exposure to interreligiosity, this mandate may be summarised as follows: to think deeply and express passionately, with as little ideological compromise as possible, not discrete dogmas and systems but lived experiences of religions and their interactions in transitional moments in history, as they impact real human beings in actual situations.

Heuristic Remarks, after Cavafy The interest in belief system interactions and inter-positionalities appears in the texture of artworks in especially pronounced ways in the sites with a long history of cultural crossbreeding and at those times when the ripples of conflicts and cooperations are most intensely felt, often due to recent political and epistemological raptures. It is easy to recognise early twentieth-century Alexandria in this description and to place Cavafy’s specific interest in inter-positionalities within this context. However, it may be useful to spell out, in closing, that religious pluralism in fact dominates more global modernist sites than is usually acknowledged. Fostered by transpatialisations that occurred at multiple global sites from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, and supported by demographic shifts, travel and technological inventions, religious pluralism may indeed constitute one of the historical and anthropological dominants of modernism, and, as such, requires scholarly interpretation. The same applies to the question of cross-pollination of religions, hybrid religious identities and syncretic religious frameworks. Global modernists were intensely

60 

Martin McKinsey, Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), 123.

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aware of their various inter-positionalities, including fluctuating or hybrid belief identities, and modernist scholarship has long recognised and included heterogeneity and ‘inbetweenness’ into its primary heuristic categories. It may come as a surprise, then, that scholars still tend to focus on belief system hybridity in modernist texts as a curiosity or anomaly rather than a pervading phenomenon. The contested terrain of polyreligiosity and religious syncretism itself is a likely source for this disjunct between what we know about modernism and how we treat it in practice. Yet, the main reason why the discussions of modernism and religion do not consider site-specific religious pluralism and syncretic trends nearly as much as their contextual dominance requires lies in the relative lack of attention to the site-specific ethnographic elements in the experiences of religious practices more generally. My discussion of Cavafy suggests that focusing on the plurality and everyday interpenetration of belief frameworks at a modernist site may bring palpable benefits to scholars. The chief among these include an improved understanding of how modernists were able to use emplaced religious practice(s) and artefacts for aesthetic effects, regardless of whether they believed in their ontological premises; how their depiction of religious rites and types of behaviour helped them debate identity and belonging; and how the site-specific religious pluralisms both fuelled their syncretic imagination and help them build their own hybrid identities. For, ‘we’re a mixture here’, Cavafy pointedly reminds us.61

Works Cited Adrahtas, Vassilis. ‘Cavafy’s Poetica Gnostica in Quest of Christian Consciousness.’ Modern Greek Studies (Australia and New Zealand) 11 (2003): 122–33. Bowersock, G. W. ‘The Julian Poems of C. P. Cavafy.’ Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 7, no. 1 (1981): 89–104. Cavafy, Constantine. Apokērygmena Poiemata kai Metafraseis, 1886–1898. Edited by G. P. Savvides. Athens: Ikaros, 1983. ———. Complete Poems. Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. ———. Onassis Cavafy Archive. https://cavafy.onassis.org (accessed 25 May 2022). Cleveland, William L. and Martin Bunton. A History of the Modern Middle East, 6th edn. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2016. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Dalas, Yiannis. Ο ελληνισμός και η θεολογία στον Καβάφη. Athens: Stigmi, 1986. Droysen, Johann Gustav. Geschichte des Hellenismus. 2 vols. Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1836. Egyptian Government, Ministry of Finance, Statistical Department. Taʻdād sukkān al-quṭr al-Miṣrī li-sanat, 1917. Cairo: Government Press, 1920–21. Frankfurter, David. Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. ———. Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Haas, Diana. Le problème religieux dans l’oeuvre de Cavafy: Les années de formation (1882–1905). Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1996. Halim, Hala. Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

‘Είμεθα ένα κράμα εδώ·’; ‘In a City of Osrhoene’ (‘Εν πόλει της Οσροηνής’, 1916–17); CP, 68.

61 

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Hanley, Will. Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Haridi, Salah Ahmad. Al-Jaliyyat fi Madinat al-Iskandariyya fi al-‘Asr al-‘Uthmani. Giza: ‘Ain li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Buhuth al-Insaniyya wa-l Ijtima‘iyya, 2004. Johnson, Paul Christopher. ‘Syncretism and Hybridization.’ In The Oxford Handbook for the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, 754–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Jusdanis, Gregory. The Poetics of Cavafy: Textuality, Eroticism, History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Kazantzakis, Nikos. Journeying: Travels in Italy, Egypt, Sinai, Jerusalem, and Cyprus. London: Little, Brown and Company, 1975. Liddell, Robert. Cavafy: A Critical Biography. London: Duckworth, 1974. McKinsey, Martin. Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. ‘Il poeta Greco-Egiziano Cavafy.’ In Il fascino dell’Egitto, 131–8. Milan: A. Mondadori, 1933. Papachristou-Panou, Evangelia. Το χριστιανικό βίωμα του Κ. Π. Καβάφη: δοκίμιο. Athens: Iolkos, 1974. Papakyriacou, Marios. ‘Formulation and Definitions of the Greek National Ideology in Colonial Egypt (1856–1919).’ PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 2014. Phillipson, John (and C. P. Cavafy). C. P. Cavafy: Historical Poems. Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2013. Plutarch. Moralia. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt et al. 16 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927–2004. Potter, David S. The Roman Empire at Bay, ad 180–395. London: Routledge, 2004. Robinson Waldman, Marilyn, Olabiyi Babalola Yai and Lamin Sanneh. ‘Translatability: A Discussion.’ Journal of Religion in Africa 22, no. 2 (1992): 159–72. Schayegh, Cyrus. The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Seferis, George. On the Greek Style: Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism. Translated by Rex Warner and Th. D. Frangopoulos. Toronto: Little, Brown, 1966. Smith, Rowland B. E. Julian’s Gods: Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian the Apostate. London: Routledge, 1995. Stewart, Charles and Rosalind Shaw, eds. Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. London: Routledge, 1995. Tsakiridou, Cornelia. ‘Hellenism in C. P. Cavafy.’ Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 21, no. 2 (1995): 115–29. Tsirkas, Stratis. Ο Πολιτικός Καβάφης. Athens: Kedros, 1971. Van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology. Translated by J. E. Turner. 1933. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938. Wizārat al-Mālīyah, Egypt. The Census of Egypt, Taken in 1907. Cairo: National Printing Department, 1909.

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Part VIII: Queer[y]ing Religion

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29 ‘It was really rather fine to be suffering’: Radclyffe Hall at the Queer Intersection of Masochism and Martyrdom Jennifer Mitchell

I

n 1928, Beresford Egan’s illustration St Stephen was published in The Sink of Solitude, a parody of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness of the same year. The caricature of Hall sharply dressed in her ‘signature sombrero’ and nailed to a cross portrays her as a dramatically crucified Christ, which, as Richard Dellamora explains, ‘exposed the conflated identification within [The Well] of Christ, Stephen Gordon, and the author as redemptive martyr and victim’.1 This portrayal of Hall – which her long-term partner described as ‘vile, obscene, and blasphemous’2 – magnified the already overt connections between queer identity and (religious) suffering that underscore much of the novel.3 A traditional Bildungsroman, The Well follows Stephen’s life from before her birth, when she was still just a masculine ideal in the minds of her parents, through a somewhat idyllic childhood and then through the trials and tribulations of a complicated queer adolescence and adulthood. Born into a financially secure family, Stephen’s subsequent struggles are primarily tied to her gender and sexual identity, manifest first in her mother’s discomfort with her and later reappearing in various amorous contexts. Stephen’s understanding of romantic (and eventually sexual) love and desire are tinged with sacrifice and suffering as a kind of personal ideal, one that cannot escape its religious implications.4 Accordingly, while there is no shortage of criticism that puts the novel in conversation with the biblical allusions scattered across it, this chapter is a more focused examination of Stephen’s reliance on Christian mythologies in light of the queer masochistic potential inherent

1 

Richard Dellamora, Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 204. 2  Una Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hammond, 1985), 104; emphasis added. 3  As Sally Cline explains, Hall ‘never considered her lesbian identity as in conflict with her Catholic practice’ and, as a result, ‘she saw Egan’s cartoon as nothing less than blasphemy’. Sally Cline, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (New York: Overlook Press, 1997), 280. 4  Terry Castle suggests that Stephen is ‘prone to a kind of sickly, regurgitant religiosity’. Terry Castle, ‘Afterword’, in Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, ed. Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 399.

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in this idealised martyrdom, especially considering Hall’s own complicated relationship with and approach to Christianity.5 Religious references and imagery surface throughout the novel, with Stephen comparing herself or being compared to various biblical figures during particularly significant or traumatic moments in her life. Her earliest crush on the housemaid is framed as Christlike in its reverence for physical suffering and emotional torment, while her discovery of her father’s collection of sexological texts after his sudden death culls a heavy-handed comparison to Cain. These formative experiences help shape Stephen’s cultivation of suffering as a means of self-worth and, through it, the capacity for pleasure and empowerment. Such suffering is simultaneously self-sacrificing and self-aggrandising – one of the seeming paradoxes of masochism, in fact – which invites a reading of Stephen’s masochistic tendencies as intimately connected to religious martyrdom. Finally, Stephen’s positioning at the novel’s close is messianic, potentially bringing salvation to generations of queer people to come through both her writing and her sacrifices.6 As Ed Madden explains, the novel itself is ‘a kind of gospel of inversion featuring a lesbian messiah’, in terms of both its protagonist and its author.7 For Madden, The Well is predicated on a particular equation: ‘Lesbian/Cain/Christ’, alluding to the most significant, albeit covert, triangle in the novel.8 Whereas Stephen becomes part of triangulated relationships throughout The Well – competing with one of Collins’s suitors for her attention, rivalling Angela Crossby’s awful husband in virtually every way, and finally pitting herself against her once beloved friend, Martin, as adversaries for the affections of Mary Llewellyn – the triangle that Madden identifies is key to understanding perhaps the two most significant facets of Stephen’s identity: her queerness and her religious masochism. Madden’s equation is also progressive: Stephen realises her own queerness first, identifies it with the mark of Cain, and then, at the novel’s close, fully realises her capacity for martyrdom, when she chooses tragic and painful self-sabotage in the name of inverts everywhere.

Sexology and the Masochism-Martyrdom Connection In ‘The Well of Loneliness, or The Gospel According to Radclyffe Hall’, Ed Madden frames Hall’s novel within two distinct albeit interconnected – at least for Hall herself – discourses: 5 

While there may be a substantive body of work dedicated to both Hall’s relationship with religion and the religious references that appear in the novel, there is, perhaps surprisingly, a gap in scholarship about Hall relative to modernism and religion more broadly. Mentioned briefly in Ellis Hanson’s Decadence and Catholicism, Hall is often a cursory consideration in books on the subject, like Pericles Lewis’s Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. 6  Jean Bobby Noble reads Stephen’s identification with Christ in terms of a specifically male masochistic subjectivity, going so far as to refer to Stephen as ‘he’ throughout her reading of Hall’s protagonist, claiming that the idea of Stephen-as-Christ speaks to both the ‘performative disidentification with the female body and [aggressive] reidentif[ication] with wounded masculinity’ and a faith-based ‘transcendence’ in which the ‘trans’ body must ‘transcend the limitations of the body as the ground of identity and [. . .] must live by a “faith” in the ability to privilege spirit, or subjectivity, over materiality’. Jean Bobby Noble, Masculinities without Men: Female Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), 62–3. 7  Ed Madden, ‘The Well of Loneliness, or The Gospel According to Radclyffe Hall’, Journal of Homosexuality 33, nos 3–4 (1997): 164. 8  Madden, ‘The Well of Loneliness’, 169.

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The Well of Loneliness rests, perhaps uneasily to some readers, at the intersection of two different discourses [. . .] One language is that of the Bible, which provides names, symbols, and resonant syntax, reflecting Hall’s own devout faith and her conversion to Catholicism in 1912. [. . .] her other primary discourse in the novel [is] the language of turn-of-the-century sexology, the pseudomedical and pre-Freudian study of sexuality which attempted to formulate a biological and congenital definition of same-sex desire or ‘inversion.’9 I will turn to the question of both Hall’s personal religiosity and the text’s religiosity shortly, but Hall’s own interest in sexology, the late nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific study of human sexuality, is apparent on virtually every page of the novel. The sexological category most often put in conversation with Hall and her protagonist is sexual inversion and Hall, tellingly, is also associated with British sexologist Havelock Ellis, who wrote the ‘Commentary’ accompanying The Well, in which he explains ‘one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us to-day’.10 Yet Hall’s explicit familiarity with other sexological tracts is obvious later in the novel when Stephen discovers one of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s books in her father’s study. While it is Krafft-Ebing’s work on inversion, ‘probably his Psychopathia Sexualis’, that Stephen comes across then, it is his theory of masochism that holds particular significance for my purposes.11 According to Krafft-Ebing, who identified and classified it in the late nineteenth century, masochism designates the pleasure that arises from experiencing pain, while sadism corresponds to pleasure from inflicting it; named after their literary forebears, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade respectively, masochism and sadism have been regularly and often unquestioningly coupled, both historically and theoretically. Of the two, sadism has been closely linked to male sexual aggression and, as a result, was predictably more justifiable and understandable within a heteronormative patriarchal matrix. Consequently, masochism has long been relegated to the feminised sphere of taxonomied behavioural patterns, which for women may have been deemed acceptable, even desirable, but for men was pathologised as deviant. By the time Hall was working on The Well of Loneliness, this bifurcated understanding of masochism as a primarily male perversion and simultaneously a core characteristic of femininity was part of contemporaneous sexological and psychoanalytical discourses in Germany and the United Kingdom; as Heike Bauer reminds readers, ‘Radclyffe Hall was well informed about the sexuality debates of her time’.12 In Masochism in Modern Man, psychoanalyst Theodor Reik develops his theory of martyrdom and masochism, delineating between religious martyrdom and a ‘private martyrdom [. . .] that has its delight and its torment, and an unreligious attitude of saintliness’ that is directed toward a ‘single person only’.13 Reik eventually points specifically to the definitive pious relationship with Christ – one in which Christ

 9 

Madden, ‘The Well of Loneliness’, 165–6. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness [1928] (New York: Anchor Books, 1990). References to The Well of Loneliness are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses. 11  Cline, Radclyffe Hall, 228. 12  Heike Bauer, ‘Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis as Sexual Sourcebook for Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness’, Critical Survey 15, no. 3 (2003): 24. 13  Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, trans. Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrud M. Kurth (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941), 327. 10 

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is everything and self is nothing: ‘Christ’s very life and death becomes the glorification of suffering and its conquest.’14 In both cases, pain is ‘self-punishment’, which ‘constitutes an access to [. . .] otherwise forbidden satisfaction’.15 The long history of suffering as both the means and the proof of religious devotion, from the eroticised disavowals of medieval mystics to the ‘fasting and penitential exercises’ of ‘saints, ascetics, and monks’, renders their co-existence, even co-dependence, obvious.16 The connection, then, between devotion and suffering – between being devout and paying for that devotion in pain and penance – is long-standing; according to Reik, ‘the circuit of sexual excitement – anxiety, suffering, increase of excitement, and increase of suffering – is responsible for the orgiastic character of masochism’.17 Perhaps most importantly, though, ‘instead of satisfying the masochistic appetite, suffering whets it’, meaning that the emphasis on gratification delayed indefinitely – suffering intentionally begetting suffering, in fact – is a quintessentially masochistic ideal.18 It is through Stephen’s extreme identification with suffering that the increasing intensity of her narrative aligns with the increasing intensity of her self-worth and purpose. As such, when this masochism is grounded in religious devotion, in an idealised identification with Christ, it begins to look like martyrdom; when the ‘abuse and pain’ that define martyrdom intensify, the martyr’s desired end of feeling close to, perhaps even joined with, God intensifies as well.19 For the purposes of this chapter, I am relying heavily on ‘masochristianity’, the term that Amanda Paxton coins in Willful Submission: Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry: ‘a Christian tradition of gratifying self-denial, be it in the form of asceticism, self-imposed suffering, or ultimate self-sacrifice’.20 Masochristianity, then, designates the performance of courtly love with its ‘humility’ and ‘abjection’ now turned toward God.21 Further, ‘[t]he courtly and the Christly, the pleasurable and the painful, meet in the mystic’s desire to merge – through identification and sexual union – with the body of Christ.’22 Throughout the novel, Stephen diligently, even aspirationally, performs the role of the committed courtly suitor, willing to subject herself to all sorts of torments as proof of her worthiness. For Havelock Ellis, the connection between courtship and suffering is long-standing: ‘Alike to suffer pain and to inflict pain is an incidental if not essential part of courtship.’23 Paxton’s definition of masochristianity interweaves the discourses of both religious masochism and courtly love, a perfect connection for Stephen, who occupies the lane of the religious masochist and, to use Reik’s terminology, the social one; yes, Stephen’s masochism

14 

Reik, Masochism, 347. Reik, Masochism, 352, 350. 16  Reik, Masochism, 357. 17  Reik, Masochism, 415. 18  Reik, Masochism, 415. 19  Stuart L. Charmé, ‘Religion and the Theory of Masochism’, Journal of Religion and Health 22, no. 3 (1983): 227. 20  Amanda Paxton, Willful Submission: Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 10. 21  Paxton, Willful Submission, 24. 22  Paxton, Willful Submission, 25. 23  Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 3 [1927] (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2006), 204. 15 

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is framed in Christian terms and her suffering is described using expressly religious rhetoric, but the way she enacts said masochism often involves a desired individual, not (just) God. And as Ellis Hanson notes, ‘the enormous popularity of Roman Catholic iconography among masochists and fetishists’ is telling ‘because it demonstrates not only how sexuality exploits religion but also how religion exploits sexuality’.24 This dialogic connection is as paramount to my argument here as it is to Hall’s work in The Well of Loneliness. Hanson continues to list the various apparatuses, connected to ‘a certain deployment of sexual secrets and revelations’, that Catholicism relies on: ‘a system of repression, punishment, confession, sublimation, displacement, and fetishization’.25 All of these mechanisms work on and through Stephen over the course of the novel, suggesting that her masochism is deeply and intentionally connected to her own religiosity. Finally, I would be remiss to ignore one of the most fascinating aspects of Radclyffe Hall’s own relationship with religion. An ‘unusual convert’, Hall was raised in the Church of England but turned to Catholicism in 1912 after seeing a play ‘featuring a fallen nun who is redeemed by a statue of the Madonna’.26 According to Joanne Glasgow, Hall had no real difficulty reconciling her own lesbian desires with her deep Catholic devotion: ‘never in all the years to follow [her conversion] did Hall once express a conflict between her religion and her sexual behavior. Her faith was deep and fervent and permanent’, much like her sexuality.27 Indeed, as Glasgow further articulates: To plead for understanding for inverts, even to insist that they are made by God as they are and so are not to be condemned, is not for Hall a radical or subversive stance. It was rather a profoundly Catholic stance. She so believed that her views upheld the established order and added to the great harmony that God’s love promised to all that she could still be vulnerable to deep shock at the attacks on her. Her lesbianism was not anti-Catholic or anti-Christian. It was simply a part of her God-given nature.28 Despite Glasgow’s certainty here, readers cannot ignore Hall’s apparent preoccupation, perhaps even obsession, with suffering religious figures and their capacity for redemption, which continued throughout her life, with many of her works – from Adam’s Breed (1926) to The Sixth Beatitude (1936) – focusing either directly or indirectly on

24 

Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 21. Hanson, Decadence, 22. 26  Joanne Glasgow, ‘What’s a Nice Lesbian Like You Doing in the Church of Torquemada? Radclyffe Hall and Other Catholic Converts’, in Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revision, ed. Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 245. 27  Glasgow, ‘What’s a Nice Lesbian Like You’, 246. Glasgow argues that the misogyny that prevents the Catholic Church from attending to sex acts between women actually helps facilitate the ease with which Hall seems to personally accept her sexual identity. Richard Dellamora, though, describes Hall as a devout albeit at times embattled Roman Catholic. Richard Dellamora, ‘The Well of Loneliness and the Catholic Rhetoric of Sexual Dissidence’, in Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, ed. Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 115. 28  Glasgow, ‘What’s a Nice Lesbian Like You’, 247. 25 

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trials, torment and martyrdom.29 Despite Hall’s apparent comfort in and commitment to her religion, the religious valorisation of suffering that is at the core of The Well of Loneliness is undeniable and it applies to Hall as an individual and, like her protagonist, as the representative of a queer collective; even the 1985 review of Michael Baker’s biography of Hall is entitled ‘A Martyr to Sex and Literature’.30 Ultimately, Hall’s relationship to Christianity and Catholicism is messily complicated and those messy complications extend to her protagonist throughout The Well.31

A Big Crush for a Little Christ From her first appearance in the novel, Stephen Gordon is rendered immediately parallel to Christ by virtue of her Christmas Eve birth. Since her parents were convinced that she was going to be a boy, Stephen is also sort of ‘accidentally’ a girl. The early manifestations of that gendered difference, the tension between the anticipated boy and the surprise girl, are tied to her perceived disinterest in and unwillingness to be seduced by typically feminine things like ‘soft dresses and sashes’ (20), her affinity for athleticism and the outdoors, and her infatuation with Collins, the maid – all of these characteristics that sexologist Havelock Ellis associated specifically with congenital inversion. As I previously mentioned, Ellis’s famous ‘Commentary’, which accompanied The Well, attests to the novel’s ‘completely faithful and uncompromising form’ in its focus on ‘certain people—who, while different from their fellow human beings, are sometimes of the highest character and the finest aptitudes’. As his theories of inversion are woven throughout Hall’s book, Stephen truly becomes the prototypical female invert and The Well can be (and has been) read as a case study in inversion. Stephen’s first experience of expressly queer romantic desire, at age seven, is for Collins, the family’s second maid, whom Jane Rule describes as ‘a stupid dishonest creature’.32 By introducing Stephen’s interactions with Collins as part of her ‘urgent necessity to love’, distinct from her adoration of her father who ‘was part of [Stephen] herself’, Hall presents Stephen’s desire for the ‘florid, full-lipped and full-bosomed [. . .] young girl of twenty’ as inevitable, intense and, significantly, new (17, 16).

29 

In The Master of the House (1932), her first novel after The Well and its ensuing obscenity trial, Hall takes up a ‘strange study of the life of Christ as a young man’. As Hall was subsequently painted a queer pariah or a queer martyr after the trial, it makes sense that she would turn immediately to a historical figure with the same capacity for sacrifice. Vera Brittain, Radclyffe Hall: A Case of Obscenity? (London: Femina, 1968), 80. 30  Thomas Mallon, ‘A Martyr to Sex and Literature’, New York Times, 8 September 1985, section 7, 3. 31  Todd Avery’s reading of Lytton Strachey provides a particular model for how to investigate the intersection of queerness, modernism and religion. Avery explains: ‘Strachey understood how religious beliefs had helped to shape the world that he inhabited; he studies those beliefs; and however much he may have wished that fog of superstition to have evaporated in the sun of rationality, he believed that the legitimation of alternative sexualities and the achievement of a new sexual ethic demanded a serious critique of an abiding Christian moralism [. . .] This was an opportunity for sharp social and ethical critique. But Christian discourse and iconography also offered the opportunity for ethical self-work, and for a richly symbolic self-transformation.’ Todd Avery, ‘Nailed: Lytton Strachey’s Jesus Camp’, in Queer Bloomsbury, ed. Brenda Helt and Madelyn Detloff (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 173. 32  Jane Rule, ‘Radclyffe Hall (1975)’, in Palatable Poison, 85.

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Everything about Collins enthralls Stephen, from her ‘pretty blue eyes’ to the ‘alluring’ sound of her voice (17). When Collins finally kisses the younger girl, ‘Stephen stood speechless from a sheer sense of joy’, and suddenly the world for Stephen is refracted: ‘she knew nothing but beauty and Collins’ (18). From the moment of Stephen’s first romantic awareness of Collins, she ‘entered a completely new world, that turned on an axis of Collins [. . .] full of constant exciting adventures; of elation, of joy, of incredible sadness’ (18). Within the co-existence of this joy and this sadness is the earliest manifestation of Stephen’s masochistic tendencies; the interconnectedness of such duelling and oppositional experiences – elation, joy, sadness – forms the backbone of Stephen’s masochistic association of pain with pleasure, of ‘passionate love’ with ‘agony as well as exaltation’.33 This ‘moment of Stephen’s sexual awakening’ speaks both to Stephen’s capacity for queer love and to her attraction to suffering as the means of its expression.34 As her days with Collins ‘resembled a swing that soared high above the tree-tops, then dropped to the depths’, Stephen, ‘clinging to the swing’, becomes accustomed to equating sexual and romantic desire to such extreme polarities (19). Stephen’s ‘notion of love’, as Emily S. Hill points out, ‘is already co-mingled with pain’, early evidence of Stephen’s developing masochism.35 Perhaps because the model of romantic love that her parents provide has no visible undercurrent of pain, Stephen, as her obsession with Collins escalates, is drawn to religious imagery as a way of proving her devotion and worthiness. When Collins is hurt, suffering from ‘water in me kneecap’, Stephen is quick to imagine herself as a saviour figure, willingly embracing Collins’s pain: ‘I’d like to be awfully hurt for you, Collins, the way that Jesus was hurt for sinners’ (21). In this way, Stephen imitates and attempts to embody Christ’s own suffering as proof of her courtly devotion to her beloved. Because Jesus does not miraculously afflict Stephen with ‘housemaid’s knee’, Stephen works diligently to cultivate her own knee pain, kneeling on the hard floor, declaring that ‘it was really rather fine to be suffering’ (22–3). Collins practically disappears from the narrative here, emphasising the significance of the experience of pain for Stephen. Indeed, Stephen’s zealous appeal, begging Jesus to allow her to suffer in Collins’s place, is described as a ‘veritable orgy of prayer’ (22–3), what Sally R. Munt explains as ‘a juvenile foreshadowing of Hall’s brazen, blasphemous, future figuration of Stephen as Christ’.36 Munt also suggests that ‘there is enough affection in Hall’s description [here] to suggest that Stephen’s fervent masochistic tendencies are to be viewed with amusement’, though I take Stephen’s masochism more seriously.37 Yes,

33 

Brittain, Radclyffe Hall, 62. 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): 361. 35  Hill, ‘God’s Miserable Army’, 366. 36  Sally R. Munt, ‘The Well of Shame’, in Palatable Poison, 202. 37  Munt, ‘The Well of Shame’, 207. It might also be useful here to point to Madelyn Detloff, who connects the queer butch tendency toward suffering to particularly gendered masculinity: ‘It is not the masochistic aim that is troubling in this formation, but the suggestion that it forms the kernel of Stephen’s “invert” subjectivity, a kernel that will unfurl inevitably according to its preprogrammed course, until the heroic, scarified, sacrificial, desiring, and imploring masculine invert fully emerges at the end of the novel.’ Madelyn Detloff, ‘Gender Please, without the Gender Police: Rethinking Pain in Archetypal Narratives of Butch, Transgender, and FTM Masculinity’, Journal of Lesbian Studies 10, nos 1–2 (2006): 97. 34 

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these are the words of a child enthralled, but, since they become the emotive foundation of many of Stephen’s adult relationships, they cannot simply be dismissed as fleeting and absurd. Importantly, as Heike Bauer notes, this early example of Stephen’s attempt at romantic courtship is fundamentally ‘unequal’: Stephen’s desire is based on a somewhat narcissistic martyrdom: while she seems to despise the other woman, her object of desire, she appears to superficially submit to and suffer for her demands. Stephen herself directs this martyrdom that is the extent to which she suffers and the form this suffering takes. Through the selfconducted martyrdom, Stephen nourishes the feeling of her own superiority.38 Bauer’s reading reiterates the connection between masochism and agency; Slavoj Žižek explains, ‘masochism [. . .] is made to the measure of the victim’, meaning that the masochist directs the action that cultivates and satisfies their own masochistic desires.39 Such a claim builds on Gilles Deleuze’s formative work on masochism, in which he carefully elucidates that a masochist, because of the necessary centralising of their own fantasies, could never ‘tolerate a truly sadistic torturer’.40 At this early point in the novel, Stephen uses her suffering as proof of her own subjectivity, never pausing to really consider Collins, who, despite being the potential cause of Stephen’s sexual and romantic development, proves ultimately inconsequential as an individual; rather it is the idea of Collins – of a woman that Stephen could mentally, emotionally and physically worship – that proves telling for Stephen’s future. Collins is clearly unworthy of Stephen’s devotion, initiating a pattern that Stephen is doomed or perhaps compelled to repeat, as well as reminding readers that for the masochist, the indefinite delay of true satisfaction is both a means to an end and an end in itself. As Stuart Charmé, writing on martyrdom, makes clear, the masochist ‘believes that voluntary sacrifice and submission are ways to express unshakable love and loyalty [. . .] The more suffering [the masochist] is willing to tolerate, the greater his love must be.’41 Although Stephen never explicitly identifies as a masochist at any point in The Well, her early affection for Collins – and the way in which Stephen physically performs a kind of romanticised suffering – becomes a core part of her understanding of love. By immediately connecting her own attraction to and affection for Collins to religious doctrine on suffering and Christ, young Stephen sets the stage for her future romantic entanglements. The intimate connection between religious sacrifice and masochistic pleasure, then, contextualises and foreshadows Stephen’s later self-sabotage.

A Marked Discovery Despite the feelings of discomfort that she seems to inspire in her mother, Stephen has a reasonably pleasant childhood, at least until the sudden death of her father: 38 

Bauer, ‘Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis’, 28. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing’, in The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality [1994] (New York: Verso, 2005), 91. 40  Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, in Masochism [1967] (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 40. 41  Charmé, ‘Religion and the Theory of Masochism’, 222. 39 

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‘Deprived [. . .] of companionship of mind born of real understanding, of a stalwart barrier between her and the world, and above all of love—that faithful love that would gladly have suffered all things for her sake, in order to spare her suffering’, Stephen enters the second part of the novel notably less supported by those left around her (121). Even in its description of what Stephen has lost, the narrative equates love with suffering; certainly that suffering is different to what Stephen experiences relative to Collins, but that emphasis on suffering proves significant. Helpless and feeling a desolate loneliness for probably the first time in her life, Stephen is determined to stay and dedicate herself to Morton in her father’s place. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that when Stephen loves, much like her father before her, she loves with her whole heart. Enter Angela Crossby, the married femme – some might even add fatale to that designation – who turns Stephen into a virtual caricature of the ideal courtly suitor; Angela, though she will later plead innocence in a way that disenfranchises and devastates Stephen, initially encourages her affection and even flirts back. Predictably, though, Angela enjoys the privilege and security that comes with her marriage, even as she complains to Stephen that her husband is ‘not much of a man but he’s better than nothing’ (149). Although Stephen’s feelings for Angela run deeper than her youthful crush on Collins, readers are reminded of Stephen’s propensity to connect love with suffering: ‘She loved deeply, far more deeply than many a one who could fearlessly proclaim himself a lover. [. . .] those whom nature has sacrificed to her ends [. . .] are sometimes endowed with a vast will to loving, with an endless capacity for suffering also, which must go hand in hand with their love’ (146). Here, the narrative attributes Stephen’s association of love and suffering to ‘nature’, suggesting that queerness has some inherent capacity for and link to suffering, foreshadowing both Stephen’s discovery of her father’s sexology library and her ultimate tragic sacrifice at the novel’s close. Stephen’s masochism, then, is framed in terms of its capacity for glory: ‘she would gladly have given her body over to torment, have laid down her life if need be, for the sake of this woman whom she loved. And so blinded was she by those gleams of glory which the stars fling into the eyes of young lovers, that she saw perfection where none existed’ (146). Despite the acknowledgement that Angela does not deserve Stephen’s love and devotion, Stephen is too entranced by both the depth of her feelings and the woman herself to see the impending crisis in their relationship: Stephen is romantically and emotionally unencumbered while Angela is married, which suggests their future is likely to be bleak. When Stephen’s insecurity gets the better of her and she demands the ‘truth’, Angela successfully distracts her with a kiss and Stephen, forgetting her demands, declares ‘such words as lovers have spoken ever since the divine, sweet madness of God flung the thought of love into Creation’ (176). This explanation reflects Stephen’s dramatic fawning over Angela, which increases in intensity over the course of their flirtation and which Angela seems to relish, at least until it turns into an unmanageable problem. Once Stephen asks Angela for more than she can reasonably give – ‘just to feel you beside me when I wake up in the morning’ (192) – their relationship reaches a breaking point. Devastated when Angela doesn’t call on her, Stephen writes a letter filled with ‘the pent-up passion of months, all the terrible, rending, destructive frustrations’, which, of course, provides ample evidence of the ‘awful mess’ that Angela attempts to explain to Ralph (196, 197). In enlisting her husband’s help to rid her of Stephen, in claiming her own innocence in the face of ‘that sort of degenerate creature’, Angela

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definitively denies the relationship that she had previously encouraged (197). Although she once used Ralph’s awfulness to endear herself to Stephen, Angela’s sudden but predictable turn back to her husband reveals her attachment to the privilege of having a male-identified partner and a state-sanctioned marriage.42 After revealing Stephen’s ‘quite mad’ affection for her, Angela witnesses Ralph’s cruel plan to ‘hound [Stephen] out of the county [. . .] and with luck out of England’ (198). Readers can condemn Angela for ‘this great betrayal’, but Ralph reminds her (and us) that his vindictive plan for Stephen is exactly what it would have been for Angela herself, if he ‘thought that there’d ever been anything between [them]’ (198). Ralph’s involvement leads to what might be considered the second tragedy of the novel: Stephen’s expulsion from her beloved childhood home. By sending Lady Anna a letter that articulates his own ‘deep repugnance’ at the insinuated improper encounters that led to Stephen gifting Angela ‘two costly presents’, Ralph practically ensures Anna’s subsequent disavowal of her daughter (199). During that official rejection, wherein Anna calls Stephen ‘unnatural [. . .] a sin against creation’, Stephen responds by claiming that she inherited her right to love from her father: ‘As my father loved you, I loved. As a man loves a woman, that was how I loved—protectively, like my father. I wanted to give all I had in me to give’ (201). Stephen’s appeal is deep and deeply felt; her pleas to her mother also function as the most explicit acknowledgement of her own inversion: ‘If I loved her the way a man loves a woman, it’s because I can’t feel that I am a woman’ (201). This adamant embracing of masculinity and maleness – what Anna calls ‘these unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body’ (201) – invites readers to once again compare Stephen Gordon to her father, once her staunchest advocate. That connection continues when, ‘by some strong natal instinct, Stephen went straight to her father’s study’ (202). Having now, in remarkably quick succession, been rejected by both her lover and her mother, Stephen is filled with a ‘new loneliness of spirit [. . .] an immense desolation’ (203). As she contemplates a life without Morton, Stephen longingly touches objects that once belonged to her father before turning to his ‘special book-case’, which she ‘had never examined’ (204). This inexplicably instinctive turn toward something private of her father’s speaks directly to Stephen’s search for connection – a reminder of the intense link between father and daughter as well as her desperate longing for the affections of someone worthy. Of course, what she discovers on these secret bookshelves is knowledge about herself and a damning realisation that her father possessed that knowledge and never shared it with her: ‘Then suddenly she had got to her feet and was talking aloud—she was talking to her father: “You knew! All the time you knew this thing, but because of your pity you wouldn’t tell me”’ (204). This discovery is as enlightening as it is heartbreaking; the kinship Stephen has previously felt with her father, even after his death, reinforces the power of the secret that has been withheld. Stephen is quick, though, to turn from her own circumstances to that of the collective to which she has suddenly discovered she belongs: ‘Oh, Father—and there are so many of us—thousands of miserable, unwanted people, who have no right to love, no right to compassion because they’re

42 

Earlier, when Stephen asks her to ‘come very far away’ with her, Angela responds with a harsh reality check: ‘Could you marry me, Stephen?’ (150).

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maimed, hideously maimed and ugly—God’s cruel; He let us get flawed in the making’ (204). Two things are significant here: the first is that Stephen shifts immediately from her own sense of private betrayal to become a virtual spokesperson for the all-suffering queer community named in Krafft-Ebing’s work; the second is that she also turns quickly from an appeal to paternal authority to an appeal to religious authority. This appeal once again connects Stephen’s suffering, and obviously the suffering of those ‘thousands’, to religion, though notably without the glory and the satisfaction that has previously accompanied those connections. Religion’s foundational role here is further emphasised when Stephen, ‘before she knew what she was doing’, picks up ‘her father’s old, well-worn Bible’ (204). Much like Stephen’s apparently destined path to her father’s secret bookcase, Sir Philip’s book, perhaps divinely, ‘fell open near the beginning’, inviting Stephen to read the infamous lines about God marking Cain, after which ‘she sank down completely hopeless and beaten, rocking her body backwards and forwards with a kind of abrupt yet methodical rhythm’, repeating those lines: ‘And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, upon Cain. . . [. . .] And the Lord set a mark upon Cain—upon Cain—upon Cain’ (205). At this moment, Stephen takes on the mark and ‘reimagines her sexual orientation as the mark of Cain’, synthesising Krafft-Ebing’s sexological work and a biblical narrative of suffering. As Jodie Medd claims, ‘the shameful mark of Cain is yoked with holy martyrdom and prophecy, constituting an appropriately ambivalent figure that unites Old Testament outlaw and New Testament redeemer.’43 Stephen’s embrace of the collective that stems from this ‘conflation of Cain and Christ in the body of Stephen’ suggests ‘that the lesbian author (an evangelist?) is both outcast and messiah, that one is inextricable from the other’.44 Like Hall, then, Stephen takes a step forward down the messianic path, asking her beloved governess and friend, Puddle, ‘Would you go with Cain whom God marked?’ (205).45 Puddle, who after Sir Philip’s death proves herself to be Stephen’s most ardent defender and protector, reiterates Stephen’s place, not simply within a queer collective, but at its head: ‘we’re all part of nature. Some day the world will recognize this, but meanwhile there’s plenty of work that’s waiting. For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted perhaps [. . .] it’s up to you to have the courage to make good’ (205). It is no coincidence that knowledge of Stephen’s sexual and gender identity is connected here to her religion and to her sense of purpose; this entangling facilitates Stephen’s movement throughout the rest of The Well and directly foreshadows Stephen’s final masochistic self-sacrifice, when she actively chooses her own suffering in the name of inverts everywhere instead of a path to romantic happiness and security.

The End of Days, Sort of After witnessing back-to-back traumas, readers may still have a sense of cautious optimism when Stephen meets Mary Llewellyn during World War I, when they serve

43 

Jodie Medd, ‘War Wounds: The Nation, Shell Shock, and Psychoanalysis in The Well of Loneliness’, in Palatable Poison, 242. 44  Madden, ‘The Well of Loneliness’, 169. 45  Eventually, this metaphorical mark is replaced by an actual scar that Stephen earns during the war.

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in a women’s ambulance unit on the front.46 The affection between the two women develops intensely, with Mary ‘as though drawn by some hidden attraction, as though stirred by some irresistible impulse, quite beyond the realms of our own understanding [. . .] turn[ing] in all faith and all innocence to Stephen’ (284). Their relationship settles into a seemingly heteronormative one, in which Mary, ‘in love’ with Stephen, ‘longed to do womanly tasks for Stephen’ (323). As their intimacy develops and Mary becomes ingratiated into all aspects of Stephen’s life, there is a small reprieve from the seemingly never-ending tragedies that arrive at Stephen’s doorstep; finally, she is happy and committed and loved and readers can, at least temporarily, breathe (as long as they wilfully ignore the novel’s title). Mary and Stephen are eventually exposed to other likely queer people, including Valérie Seymour, Jonathan Brockett and the practically doomed couple Barbara and Jamie, who all represent various possible queer trajectories, reminding readers that such possibilities are often dependent on their respective financial security or lack thereof. While Valérie can run her salon with ease, Barbara and Jamie struggle with precarity, and as Barbara succumbs to a vicious case of pneumonia, Jamie, hopeless and probably destitute, kills herself. Jamie’s apparent inability to survive after losing Barbara is a particularly harsh awakening for Stephen, whose concerns about the longterm viability of her own relationship – in particular, Mary’s ‘protection or happiness’ (433–4) – have been steadily, albeit probably unnecessarily, increasing. Without consulting Mary at all, certain that Mary would never leave Stephen and their life together of her own volition, Stephen hatches a particularly cruel plan in which she asks Valérie to pretend to be her lover, thereby ensuring that Mary will abandon their relationship, though Valérie is quick to read Stephen for her tendency to suffer: ‘Aren’t you being absurdly self-sacrificing? You can give the girl a very great deal’ (433). Upon Stephen’s refusal of Valérie’s appeal that she should try to ‘get what happiness you can out of life’, she declares: ‘you were made for a martyr!’ (434). Stephen’s tendency toward suffering and self-sacrifice is well chronicled in the novel itself and this moment solidifies her choice to be martyr rather than to be loved. Stephen defaults to her standard setting that suffering proves love and, as a result, is unwilling to deviate from her plan, never pausing to consider Mary’s actual feelings. Stephen ensures that when she acts as though she has been unfaithful to Mary, there is a man waiting in the wings to ensure Mary’s return to the security of heteronormativity; indeed, she arranges for Martin Hallam, her own childhood friend, to pick up the pieces of Mary’s broken heart. Seemingly unaffected by Mary’s outpouring of emotion – ‘All my life I’ve given . . . you’ve killed . . . I loved you . . . Cruel, oh, cruel! You’re unspeakably cruel’ (435) – Stephen only calls back to Mary once she has left their home. Once she is alone, having intentionally sabotaged her once happy relationship with Mary, Stephen envisions herself surrounded by ‘unbidden guests [. . .] the quick, the dead, and the yet unborn’ who call out to her: ‘Stephen, Stephen, speak with your

46 

Notably, the insinuation that the war effort and its subsequent potential masculinising of women is itself responsible for lesbianism in a case like this seems to be a wilful misreading of the novel. As Celia Marshik explains, ‘Because Stephen so clearly fits the pattern of Havelock Ellis’s female invert, readers know that the war is not the source of her same-sex desire.’ Celia Marshik, ‘History’s “Abrupt Revenges”: Censoring War’s Perversions in The Well of Loneliness and Sleeveless Errand’, Journal of Modern Literature 26, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 150.

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God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken!’ (436). This refrain is repeated by the ‘marred and reproachful faces with the haunted melancholy eyes of the invert—eyes that had looked too long on a world that lacked all pity and understanding’ (436). Facing this legion of imaginary queer ghosts, Stephen leans into the pain that surfaces: ‘Rockets of pain, burning rockets of pain—their pain, her pain, all welded together into one great consuming agony. Rockets of pain that shot up and burst, dropping scorching tears of fire on the spirit—her pain, their pain. . .’ (437). This pain in many ways is Stephen’s greatest triumph; while previously the pain that Stephen relished, even at her most desolate and abject, was individual, this pain is collective and cumulative. More than the sum of her parts and the suffering she can perform as proof of her devotion to others, Stephen now is a product of all the pain: ‘In their madness to become articulate through her, they were tearing her to pieces, getting her under [. . .] at the cry of their suffering the walls fell and crumbled’ (437). For Stephen, the emptiness she feels upon Mary’s departure, circumstances that she herself engineered in a gesture of almost ridiculous self-sacrifice, is at least momentarily replaced as this ‘legion’ forces its way inside her: They possessed her. Her barren womb became fruitful—it ached with its fearful and sterile burden. It ached with the fierce yet helpless children who would clamour in vain for their right to salvation. They would turn first to God, and then to the world, and then to her. They would cry out [. . .] ‘You, God, in Whom we, the outcast, believe; you, world, into which we are pitilessly born; you, Stephen, who have drained our cup to the dregs—we have asked for bread; will you give us a stone?’ (437) The novel closes with this image of Stephen Gordon suddenly impregnated with the weight not simply of all future generations of queer people, but of a divine purpose: ‘A voice like the awful, deep rolling of thunder; a demand like the gathering together of great waters. A terrifying voice that made her ears throb, that made her brain throb, that shook her very entrails’ (437). This dramatic voice, an apparent synthesis of ‘her own voice into which those millions had entered’ and the voice of God to which she pleads, reiterates Stephen’s embrace of suffering, of sacrificing herself and her happiness – not to mention Mary Llewellyn’s happiness as well (437). It also lends a certain amount of divinely sanctioned authority to that suffering, the culmination of Stephen’s – and Hall’s – crusade.

The Lingering Depths of the Well The Well of Loneliness ends with an ‘anguished outburst of emotion’, a dramatic gesture toward the future of inverts everywhere, with Stephen Gordon standing at the helm.47 Terry Castle’s argument that in the ‘melodramatic final pages’ of the novel Stephen gives Mary up ‘under the masochistic delusion that she cannot satisfy her’ is a curious one.48 Instead of Stephen’s masochism being tied to her sexual and romantic

47 

Brittain, Radclyffe Hall, 62. Terry Castle, ed., The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 39.

48 

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insecurity, as Castle points out – and as Valérie herself suggests a few pages earlier – her unquestioned equating of suffering with romantic and sexual love since childhood suggests that, in many ways, the novel could end no other way. And despite Ellis Hanson’s claim that in The Well ‘Hall looks to Christian suffering as a lesbian pastime and Christian pity as an antidote to homophobia’,49 Stephen Gordon also looks to suffering as a means of empowerment. Her martyrdom is not simply an antidote to homophobia since it is cultivated throughout her life, well before the official source of Stephen’s difference is identified. Instead, Stephen associated love with suffering long before having enough self-awareness to consider the reasoning. Indeed, as Hill suggests, ‘the Christian narrative of sacrifice is united with the queer experience of suffering through the common understanding that radical love, which inevitably involves a sacrificial moving beyond the self, is always painful.’50 It is crucial, though, to remember that this pain is something that Stephen seeks out, rather than a deterrent. Ultimately, Stephen is both the social masochist and the religious one. As Reik explains, ‘Instead of the Kingdom of Heaven, an improved earthly future for mankind is the aim of the struggle, and for its sake all present suffering is willingly endured.’51 By sacrificing Mary – and her own romantic happiness along the way – Stephen chooses agony and heartbreak. By becoming the literary figurehead for the masses of scorned inverts, Stephen embraces the role of the quintessential queer martyr ‘who is predestined to suffer’.52 Radclyffe Hall, then, is the one who ‘does’ the predestining, encouraging readers to consider the complex but seductive, even satisfying, intersection between queer masochism and martyrdom.

Works Cited Avery, Todd. ‘Nailed: Lytton Strachey’s Jesus Camp.’ In Queer Bloomsbury, edited by Brenda Helt and Madelyn Detloff, 172–88. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Bauer, Heike. ‘Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis as Sexual Sourcebook for Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.’ Critical Survey 15, no. 3 (2003): 23–38. Brittain, Vera. Radclyffe Hall: A Case of Obscenity? London: Femina, 1968. Castle, Terry. ‘Afterword.’ In Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, 394–402. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. ———, ed. The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Charmé, Stuart L. ‘Religion and the Theory of Masochism.’ Journal of Religion and Health 22, no. 3 (1983): 221–33. Cline, Sally. Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John. New York: Overlook Press, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles. Coldness and Cruelty. In Masochism. 1967. New York: Zone Books, 1992. Dellamora, Richard. Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. ———. ‘The Well of Loneliness and the Catholic Rhetoric of Sexual Dissidence.’ In Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith, 114–28. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

49 

Hanson, Decadence, 368–9. Hill, ‘God’s Miserable Army’, 360. 51  Reik, Masochism, 431. 52  Bauer, ‘Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis’, 31. 50 

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Detloff, Madelyn. ‘Gender Please, without the Gender Police: Rethinking Pain in Archetypal Narratives of Butch, Transgender, and FTM Masculinity.’ Journal of Lesbian Studies 10, nos 1–2 (2006): 87–105. Doan, Laura and Jay Prosser, eds. Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 3. 1927. Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2006. Glasgow, Joanne. ‘What’s a Nice Lesbian Like You Doing in the Church of Torquemada? Radclyffe Hall and Other Catholic Converts.’ In Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revision, edited by Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, 241–54. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness. 1928. New York: Anchor Books, 1990. Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 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. Madden, Ed. ‘The Well of Loneliness, or The Gospel According to Radclyffe Hall.’ Journal of Homosexuality 33, nos 3–4 (1997): 163–86. Mallon, Thomas. ‘A Martyr to Sex and Literature.’ New York Times, 8 September 1985. https:// www.nytimes.com/1985/09/08/books/a-martyr-to-sex-and-literature.html (accessed 26 May 2022). Marshik, Celia. ‘History’s “Abrupt Revenges”: Censoring War’s Perversions in The Well of Loneliness and Sleeveless Errand.’ Journal of Modern Literature 26, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 145–59. Medd, Jodie. ‘War Wounds: The Nation, Shell Shock, and Psychoanalysis in The Well of Loneliness.’ In Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, 232–54. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Munt, Sally R. ‘The Well of Shame.’ In Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, 199–215. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Noble, Jean Bobby. Masculinities without Men: Female Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. Paxton, Amanda. Willful Submission: Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Reik, Theodor. Masochism in Modern Man. Translated by Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrud M. Kurth. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941. Rule, Jane. ‘Radclyffe Hall (1975).’ In Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, 77–88. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Troubridge, Una. The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall. London: Hammond, 1985. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing.’ In The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality. 89–112. 1994. New York: Verso, 2005.

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30 The Byzantine Modernism of Djuna Barnes Christos Hadjiyiannis

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t would be easy – if it weren’t tricky – to connect Nightwood to Christian texts. Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel is salient with religious imagery, symbolism and rhetoric. It frequently turns to religion and faith, and for some critics it even reads like some kind (admittedly a very unorthodox kind) of Christian parable.1 And yet it is also and so very clearly a heretical, blasphemous novel, a text, as Daniela Caselli puts it, mixing understatement with Barnesian excess, ‘not untouched by the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the obscene’.2 Nightwood is not only irreverent but it is also a dense and slippery work, a work which resists productive meaning, prioritises surface over depth, and which therefore refuses any one reading – let alone a ‘Christian’ reading.3 Nightwood, in case it needs saying, is not a Christian text. This is not what I’d like to suggest here, nor is it to read Barnes’s novel through the prism of Christian texts, finding similarities and differences along the way. What I’d like to do, rather, is read Nightwood and the fascinating characters that populate its world with some late antique and Byzantine Christian texts and the unlikely saints that these texts commemorate. Why Byzantine? It has, of course, been common and natural for those interested in modern literature and religion to look back to earlier (and early) religious texts. Those within British and North American modernism have customarily looked to Western religious tales and sources. But what if we were to look eastwards and bring into our discussion of anglophone modernism, religion and myth texts of a different culture, geography and language? What would happen to our reading of Nightwood – and to our reading of modernism and religion more broadly – if we ventured towards Byzantium? What might this spatial and vertical expansion yield?4 What new unorthodox readings?

1 

Patricia Juliana Smith, ‘“The Woman That God Forgot”: Queerness, Camp, Lies, and Catholicism in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood’, in Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, ed. Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 129. See also Celeste Jackson, ‘Parables in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’, The Explicator 75, no. 3 (2017): 166–8. 2  Daniela Caselli, Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus (London: Routledge, 2016), 156. 3  On Nightwood as resisting productive meaning, see Erin Holliday-Karre, ‘Seductive Nights: The Circus as Feminist Challenge in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, Feminist Modernist Studies 2, no. 3 (2019): 275. On Nightwood as prioritising surface over depth, see Caselli, Improper Modernism, 159. See also Victoria L. Smith, ‘A Story Beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’, PMLA 114, no. 2 (1999): 194–206, for whom the text keens a loss of representation, including of meaning. 4  According to Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, this spatial (moving away from national to transnational modernisms) and vertical (pluralistic opening to other modernisms) expansion is what the new modernist studies has sought to do. See their article ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737.

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The texts I will be discussing alongside Nightwood are ‘Byzantine’ in the historical sense that they were written and spread within the Byzantine Empire, founded in 330 ce and taken over by the Ottomans in 1453. They are ‘Byzantine’ in the other sense of the term, too. In his recent book, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages, Roland Betancourt, lingering on the connotations of ‘Byzantine’ as meaning devious, intricate, complicated and deceitful, teasingly suggests that the slur ‘Byzantine’ speaks to an ‘inherent queerness’ in Byzantine culture.5 The Byzantine texts I have in mind – stories of holy fools and of women crossing into men – record and celebrate queerness. This is a queerness that even the most anachronistic reading must of course acknowledge as different to the queerness of Nightwood, yet it is a queerness that, at the very least, gestures towards Barnes’s novel. Modern and Byzantine texts operate under ‘queer time’, thematise the lives of misfits, and transgress gender (and other) boundaries.

Out of this World: Nightwood and Byzantium For all Barnes’s protestations to the contrary, it’s difficult to find anyone in Nightwood who’s ‘normal’.6 The novel is inhabited by people who don’t fit in, who are at once stifled and curtailed by normal life, and larger than it. Where to start? Felix is an imposter Baron, a Jew-turned-Christian. He is dressed ‘in part for the evening and in part for the day’ and is never at home in the world. He ‘had come upon the odd’, and insinuates himself ‘into the pageantry of the circus and the theatre’, for ‘Here he had neither to be capable nor alien’.7 At one point, Felix admits that I wanted [. . .] to go behind the scenes, back-stage as it were, to our present condition, to find, if I could, the secret of time [. . .] One had to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life. (109) A ‘little mad’ is a fair way to describe not only Felix but also the rest of the characters in Nightwood. One by one, these misfits walk in and out – and in again – our world. In order of appearance, these are: trapeze artist Princess Nadja, whose face had a ‘tense expression of an organism surviving in an alien element’ (11); fellow unreal circus artists Baron von Tink, Principessa Stasera y Stasero, King Buffo and the Duchess of Broadback; Dr Matthew O’Connor, ‘half-angel, half-freak’; Nora Flood, ‘disengaged’, ‘deranged’ and ‘By temperament [. . .] an early Christian’ (46); Robin Vote, ‘a woman who is beast turning human’ (33); and, finally, little Guido, who ‘was not like other children’ (97). Jenny Petherbridge, ‘one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time’, is perhaps the only ‘normal’ character in the book. These characters inhabit a world that is itself ‘a little mad’. In a little over 150 pages, Barnes takes us across cities, countries, continents and historical periods. The 5 

Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 15. 6  Djuna Barnes to Emily Coleman (undated): ‘if you think [. . .] that the people here are not normal, hadn’t you better read the history of mankind (slightly at least) and then see how you would come up yoxx statement [sic].’ Quoted in Caselli, Improper Modernism, 170. 7  Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (London: Faber, 2007), 8, 9, 10. References to Nightwood are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses.

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story begins in 1880 in Vienna and ends in New York in the late 1920s, but narrative time keeps spiralling out of control. Some of the many boundaries that Nightwood bends to breaking point are those of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’. The plot, the characters, the language, they all peregrinate; time is at once arrested and free flowing. For example, we start with Felix’s parents – Guido and Hedvig – but the linear narrative is quickly interrupted, as we learn that ‘At this point exact history stopped for Felix who, thirty years later, turned up in the world’. For Caselli, Felix is ‘frozen in a time of narration that nobody will be able to recapture’.8 This does not stop us – or Felix – from looking backwards. ‘To pay homage to our past’, Felix says at one point, ‘is the only gesture that also includes the future’ (36), and for Dr O’Connor, too, the ‘remembrance of things past is all that we have for a future’ (81). Time in Nightwood is queer, to use José Esteban Muñoz’s term for time that is not straight, not reproductive, but which still somehow looks forward: queerness for Muñoz is ‘an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future’.9 For Jeanette Winterson, the people in Nightwood ‘live on into the future because they were never strapped into time’, an assault on linearity that Winterson finds to be a very modernist affair.10 For Carolyn Dinshaw, however, this type of time – time that does not demarcate past and present, that exists beyond linearity, that collides different time frames or temporal systems in a single moment – is the exact opposite of modernist time: it is non-modern time. According to Dinshaw, the study of medieval texts – Dinshaw has in mind Western medieval Christian texts from the twelfth through to the fifteenth century – reveals different temporalities, and ‘our exposure to, or contact with such temporalities’, she argues, ‘can expand our own temporal repertoires to include extensive nonmodern – okay, call them queer – temporal possibilities’.11 Drawing on a range of thinkers, chiefly Bruno Latour, Dinshaw defines the modernist idea of time as time-as-measurement, an idea she in turn sees as at the heart of specialisation, professionalisation and the cult of the expert.12 Against this modernist time, Dinshaw proposes a different non-modern time scheme, that of amateurism: ‘Amateur temporality starts and stops at will; tinkerers and dabblers can linger at moments of pleasure when the professionals must soldier duly onward.’13 Time in Nightwood, we may say after Muñoz and Dinshaw, is queer and is amateur, just like the characters in it are, and none more so than the doctor who ‘is not a licensed practitioner’ (32), is ‘my own charlatan’ (86), and whose whole existence defies all binaries. And it is this queer time, this ‘mad’ and unhinged time, that we find also in some Byzantine sources, in Christian texts that reveal different temporal possibilities.

 8 

Caselli, Improper Modernism, 166. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1. See also Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 31–3. 10  Jeanette Winterson, ‘Introduction’ to Nightwood, i. 11  Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, 6. 12  Cf. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1–23. 13  Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, 22.  9 

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It is not only narrative time that fluctuates in Nightwood. In this world populated by ‘inverts’ and irreverents, Barnes constantly mixes voices, registers, points of view and locations.14 Critics continue to struggle to find the words to describe Nightwood’s language of excess. Victoria L. Smith calls it ‘torrential and Byzantine’.15 Smith doesn’t explain what she means by ‘Byzantine’, but it’s yet another opening towards the hagiographical texts from the Byzantine period I consider below. In Byzantine Greek, the word for fool, σαλός (salos), is etymologically connected to the kind of movement – the rocking, the fluctuation – we encounter in Nightwood.16 Nightwood, we may say, is a foolish text, and its characters fools of a kind – not for the way they act but for how they ridicule and cross norms and boundaries. This is also, as we’ll now see, what holy fools and holy transgenders do.

Holy Fools The holy fools we encounter in Byzantine texts are misfits in several different ways. They act crazy, they shock, they rant and prophetise and blaspheme, they scandalise and they sin – and lead others into sinning. These are of course Christian fools: they only act as if they were mad, they only apparently sin, and they lead those who sin into repenting. Though they may have total power over their own nature and not bend to its demands, however, and though they may be absolute models of Christian morality, their scandalous behaviour enacts, in the words of Stavroula Constantinou, a ‘reversal of social and ecclesiastical order’.17 Holy fools are transgressive, dangerous things, even for Christianity. In his long study of the holy fool, Sergey A. Ivanov explains how the holy fool is a singular – and contradictory – phenomenon. Like the jester, the holy fool is a spectacle. Both jester and holy fool ‘inhabit a topsy-turvy world and neither can survive without spectators’. However, ‘the jester is part of the crowd whereas the holy fool is entirely alone even in the midst of the urban bustle; the jester is immersed in “festival time”, or “carnival time” whereas the holy fool is outside time’.18 Moreover, holy fools are characterised by a certain contrariness: they display an eccentric behaviour which is sacralised, yet as in Christianity there is free will, it’s never entirely clear what leads the holy fool to take on such eccentric behaviour. As Ivanov explains, there’s plenty in the Bible to warrant the foolishness of the holy fool, not least Paul’s insistence that the ‘wisdom of the world is foolishness with God’; by acting mad, the idea is, the holy fool reaches unprecedented levels of humility, a condition of holiness.19 Still, the lengths

14 

On the recuperation of this terrible term, see Caselli, Improper Modernism, 81. Smith, ‘A Story Beside(s) Itself’, 196. 16  See Sergey A. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Simon Franklin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 33. 17  Stavroula Constantinou, ‘Holy Actors and Actresses: Fools and Cross-Dressers as the Protagonists of Saints’ Lives’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, Volume 2: Genres and Contexts, ed. Stephanos Efthymiadis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 352. 18  Ivanov, Holy Fools, 5. 19  Ivanov, Holy Fools, 37. Leontios quotes Corinthians in the opening of the Life: ‘If one wishes to be wise in this age, let him be a fool that he may become wise’ (1 Cor. 3: 18); ‘We are fools for Christ’s sake’ (1 Cor. 4: 10); ‘For the foolishness of God wiser than men’ (1 Cor. 1: 25). 15 

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to which holy foolishness goes – the violence, the obscenity, the lying, the deception – never seem entirely warranted. We owe the first proper holy fool Life to Leontios of Neapolis, the seventh-century Cypriot Bishop who put down the story of Symeon Salos, or Symeon the Fool.20 It’s an extraordinary text written in a language (Greek) that is rich, dense and, at times, breath-taking. Leontios braids together vivid narration and Christian gospel to tell the spectacularly burlesque and miraculous story of this early Christian saint from Emesa (modern-day Homs) in Syria. The Life of Symeon the Fool paints in gaudy detail the portrait of a man whose act and actions were for those around him – and the modern reader alike – scandalous. For whatever the theological justifications offered by Leontios, Symeon’s transgressions are shocking. But it is also a story about friendship and desire, about misfits and those living in the margins of society, and about social conditioning and judgement. The text is also intriguing for the way it disrupts narrative time and layers narration. The story Leontios tells moves back and forth: from Emesa to Jerusalem, to holy Jordan and a place called Arnonas in the Dead Sea, back to Emesa, and with several flashbacks and relocations in between. It is also relayed to us as hearsay, introducing the idea of unreliable narration. As Leontios explains, the old Symeon related his life to a certain deacon named John in Emesa, who in his turn recounted it to Leontios. Deacon John, Leontios tells us, narrated to him ‘almost the entire life of that most wise one, calling on the Lord as witness to his story, that he had written nothing to add to the narrative, but rather that since that time he had forgotten most things’.21 John may have added nothing to the story, but he left some things unsaid. To add to that, in several moments in the narrative, and as is common with many texts commemorating the incredible lives of Christian saints, Leontios admits that words fail to account for Symeon’s extraordinary life. The story of Symeon starts in Jerusalem during the reign of Emperor Justinian (527–565), who at the time of Leontios’s writing is ‘faithfully departed’ (134). Two young men from Emesa, Symeon and his friend John (a different John), arrive in Jerusalem for the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (which takes place on 14 September). John is about twenty-two years old, so we can surmise that Symeon is around that age too. They are both from ‘very wealthy’ (134) families, both ‘thoroughly instructed in Greek letters’, and both ‘endowed with much intellect’ (135). John had an ageing father and a new wife while ‘Symeon did not have a father, only a mother, a very old woman about eighty’ (134). We are not given any more detail about Symeon’s mother or age – how old must his mother have been when she gave birth to him? – but we quickly know not to look for any ‘objective correlatives’. During the feast, John and Symeon grow so close together to the point where they are no longer able to part from 20 

According to Ivanov, Scholasticus gave an earlier account of Symeon but Leontios was the first to write it. Leontios in turn must have relied on a vernacular narrative from the 560s or 570s (see Ivanov, Holy Fools, 104). The vita of Symeon survives in few manuscripts, none of them earlier than the eleventh century. According to Stavroula Constantinou, ‘The first holy fool appearing in Byzantine hagiography is an anonymous nun later known as Isidora whose short story is narrated by Palladios in ch. 34 of his Historia Lausiaca. However, the role becomes exclusively male when the holy fool becomes the protagonist of the genre of Life.’ See Constantinou, ‘Holy Actors and Actresses’, 346. 21  Derek Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 135. References to Symeon are drawn from this edition and hereafter cited in parentheses.

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each other. On their way home, they find themselves ‘on the wrong road, leading back into the holy Jordan’. One road leads to life and the other – the ‘main road’, the ‘one their parents had preferred to take’ – to death. To choose which way to go, they pray, draw lots, and agree that ‘whichever is chosen, we shall convey ourselves on that path’. It is finally decided that they should both head to holy Jordan to join a monastery and, ‘overjoyed, forgetting all their property, wealth, and their parents, as in a dream, they embraced and kissed each other’ (135). Choosing the road less travelled, they spend the next twenty-nine years living as boskoi (hermits who live on what grows around them) when one day Symeon – having conquered many ‘unutterable temptations’ and having ‘nearly exceeded the limits of human nature’ (148) – decides to up and go, leave the anchorite life behind him, and move back to the ‘inhabited world’ (155). Despite John’s objections (‘I think, brother, that Satan is jealous of our silence and suggested this thought to you’), Symeon is determined to go to Jerusalem: ‘Believe me, I won’t stay, but I will go in the power of Christ; I will mock the world’ (148). Again, it is not clear from the text why Symeon decides to become a fool and mock the world. Leontios insists that this is what God commanded him, but such a command is not articulated clearly in the story. Whatever the case or the reason behind it, mock the world is what Symeon does. ‘The manner of his entry into the city was as follows’, Leontios writes: Symeon found a dead dog on a dunghill outside the city, he loosened the rope belt he was wearing, and tied it to the dog’s foot. He dragged the dog as he ran and entered the gate, where there was a children’s school nearby. When the children saw him, they began to cry, ‘Hey, a crazy abba!’ And they set about to run after him and box him on the ears. (151–2) Symeon follows up his spectacular entrance into the city with a series of other crazy performances. He pelted women with nuts and ‘put out the candles’ in a church (151), he ‘overturned the tables of the pastry chefs’, he danced ‘outside with the members of a circus faction’, smashed wine pitchers, ‘grabbed the ear’ of a monk ‘and gave him such a blow that (the bruise) could be seen for three days’, danced naked and whistled (160), threw stones at passers-by (161) and dirt at a woman (158), and, ‘when his belly sought to do its private function, immediately, and without blushing, he squatted in the market place, wherever he found himself, in front of everyone’ (159). Many of his transgressions were sexual. He ‘had a habit of visiting the houses of rich men and amusing himself there’ and ‘Often he pretended to kiss their slave-girls’. Leontios’s explanation for Symeon’s harassing is that Symeon ‘had advanced to such a level of purity and impassivity’ that he could not sin. He touched and danced with and kissed women but, ‘like pure gold, was not defiled by them at all’ (159). This is because he had been cured of desire. Back when he was a monk, his flesh troubled him with ‘burning desire’. His mentor Nikon, however, ‘took some water from the holy Jordan and put it beneath Symeon’s navel sealing the place with the sign of the precious cross’. From then on, Leontios writes, ‘neither in his sleep, nor while awake, did he experience burning desire or bodily arousal’ (159). Cured of desire, Symeon was able to cross genders seamlessly. Once, he went to the bath-house, ‘stripped off his garment and placed it on his head, wrapping it around like a turban’ (153), and headed straight for the women’s baths. When his companion asked ‘Where are you going, Fool?’, Symeon

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coolly retorted that ‘it doesn’t matter at all whether (I use) this one or that’ (154), because he had become incorporeal, just like a ‘piece of wood’. Symeon lived his life like a maniac, a moonstruck and a ranter: ‘language’, Leontios says, ‘is not sufficient to paint a portrait of his doings’. He ‘pretended to have a limp’, he ‘jumped around’, he ‘dragged himself along on his buttocks’ and ‘when there was a new moon, he looked at the sky and fell down and thrashed about’ (155). Symeon, Leontios explains elsewhere, ‘did not want to do anything in a clear manner; instead he always did things through clowning’ (167). And his preferred crowd were madmen, slaves, prostitutes, fornicators, Jews, and other sinners and outcasts; he even frequented, according to Ivanov, ‘an unidentified place [. . .] an asylum for the insane’.22 And so he lived his foolish, sacrilegious and blasphemous life scandalising those around him until his death, which, in Leontios’s version of the vita, comes about in hard-won obscurity.23 When Symeon perceived the ‘profane hour’ of death, he withdrew to his hut and died quietly under a ‘bundle of twigs’. On seeing him, those who knew him thought he was just ‘beside himself’ and wondered if his death was not ‘another idiocy’. He was eventually taken to be buried ‘in the place where strangers are buried’, without any ceremony or fanfare. But a former Jew, whom Symeon converted to Christianity, could hear ‘music such as human lips could not sing, and a crowd such as all humanity could not gather’ (170). It is this Jew-turned-Christian who buries Symeon – with his own hands. Leontios concludes his narration with an admission and a parenetic epilogue, as is common with hagiographical texts, in which he reflects on the significance of the saint’s life. He once more concedes the shortcomings of language: ‘what language could praise one who is honored beyond language, or how can fleshly lips (praise) one who, while in the flesh, appeared plainly without flesh?’ As for the moral of the story, Leontios pleads with his fellow Christians to refrain from judging others, for ‘Truly no one knows a person’s deeds without knowing the person’s spirit’ (170). Do not condemn, Leontios says, and do not engage in judicious assessment or analysis. T. S. Eliot, who never shied away from dispatching wisdom himself, asked readers of Nightwood not to judge its characters too harshly or through their own biases. They were not a horrid show of freaks, he insisted, and he encouraged readers not to ‘harden our hearts in an inveterate sin of pride’. In fact, Eliot, who admittedly could see religiosity wherever he wanted, found in the character of the doctor qualities almost saintly. Dr O’Connor has a ‘desperate disinterestedness and a deep humility’, Eliot wrote, which, rather than making the doctor indifferent to others, actually endowed him with a ‘hypersensitive awareness’.24 The doctor lives near the church of St Sulpice (in the Latin Quarter, named after Sulpitius the Pious). The small square off the rue Servandoni is his ‘city’ (26): ‘Here he had been seen ordering details for funerals [. . .] buying holy pictures and petits Jésus

22 

See Ivanov, Holy Fools, 120. The Syriac version has Symeon’s dead body placed in a marble urn in the Church of the Forerunner in the Cave monastery. 24  T. S. Eliot, ‘Preface’ to Nightwood, xix. In her own introduction to the novel, from 2007, Winterson wrote that little Guido reminded her of a ‘holy fool’. This is a teasing thought which, however, Winterson did not pursue further. ‘Introduction’ to Nightwood, i–ii. 23 

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in the boutique displaying vestments and flowering candles. He had shouted down at least one judge in the Mairie du Luxembourg after a dozen cigars had failed to bring about his ends.’ Moreover, ‘He walked, pathetic and alone [. . .] was seen coming at a smart pace down the left side of the church to go into Mass’ and he was also seen ‘bathing in the holy water stoup as if he were its single and beholden bird’ (26). Barnes has him not only buy holy pictures and shout at people, but also be drunk in public, prophetise and rant, speak in favour of depravity (106) and of suffering (‘Ah, to be able to hold onto suffering, but to let the spirit loose’), and, of course, disguise and outright lie – what the holy fool does so well.25 Felix thinks the doctor a ‘great liar, but a valuable liar’, with the doctor himself admitting that ‘by his own peculiar perversity God has made me a liar’ (67). Elsewhere in the novel, we read that ‘His fabrications seemed to be the framework of a forgotten but imposing plan, some condition of life of which he was the sole surviving retainer’. There is a ‘seriousness’ and a ‘melancholy’, Felix thinks, ‘hidden beneath every jest and malediction that the doctor uttered’ (35). Like the holy fool, and being a misfit himself, the doctor feels comfortable among outcasts, but like the holy fool once more he remains an ascetic. Explaining the ascetic way of life, Ivanov says that ‘By abandoning everything and going away, it is as if the saint is saying: “you may live with your mundane joys and woes; marry, raise children, accumulate wealth – none of this is forbidden by the Gospels. But please, do this without me”’.26 In this sense, it is not just the doctor who’s ascetic but almost everyone in Nightwood. Robin, Nora and Jenny all shun societal norms of marriage and family and all refuse to live by any one standard of gender and sexuality. This makes them queer and also, in a sense, martyrs, because all martyrs, as Bill Burgwinkle and Cary Howie argue, are queer: queer in the sense that they stand out of heterosexual societal norms (marriage, reproduction, extended families built on biological ties) and because they are always on the verge.27 Robin, Nora, Jenny, the doctor – they all give up heteronormative life, as does the text, which also forcefully rejects reproductive meaning. Characters and text share something with those theories of lesbianism that read lesbianism as a form of ‘desire which functions as excess within the heterosexual economy’ and as a form of ‘nomad desire’, to use Elizabeth Grosz’s term, that is ‘productive, though in no way reproductive [. . .] that makes but reproduces nothing’.28 By comparison to Symeon, who’s also an ascetic living amidst the buzz of an inhabited place but who has close confidants and of course an unwavering faith in God, the doctor seems far lonelier – a holy fool in a godless world. As Eliot recognised, the sadness of the doctor lies in his realisation that he gets no sustenance (Eliot’s word) from those around him, that his not-so-quiet work remains unrecognised, however miraculous it appears to Felix (32). Towards the end of the novel, a drunk doctor mutters to himself: ‘Matthew, you have never been in time with any man’s life and you’ll never be remembered at all, God save the vacancy!’ (143). At this

25 

On this point, see Constantinou, ‘Holy Actors and Actresses’, 349. The holy fool and the cross-dresser, she argues, are ‘the greatest “liars” in Byzantine hagiography’. 26  Ivanov, Holy Fools, 84. 27  Bill Burgwinkle and Cary Howie, Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 28  Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Refiguring Lesbian Desire’, in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 79.

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point, Matthew runs into a friend of his, an ‘unfrocked priest’ to whom he confides his solitude and bitterness, speaking of ‘The people in my life who have made my life miserable, coming to me to learn of degradation and the night’ (145). Symeon requires no recognition; instead he thrives on society’s negative view of him, which is also what sets him apart. Leontios is keen to set the saintly qualities of Symeon against the community’s view of him: to those ‘more impassioned and more fleshly he seemed to be a defilement, a sort of poison, and an impediment to the virtuous life on account of his appearance’ (132). Equally, the doctor is not ‘cured’ of any desire, and there’s nothing sadder than desire unfulfilled or unrequited. In one of the Life’s most striking metaphors, Leontios calls Symeon ‘a pearl which has traveled through slime unsullied’ (133). The slime is both the city and its trappings and the reactions he causes to those around him. Felix uses a similar metaphor – that of a pearl – to describe the doctor. But the doctor is a different kind of pearl, vulnerable and uneasy. There is in the doctor, Felix thinks, ‘a long series of convulsions of the spirit, analogous to the displacement in the fluids of the oyster, that must cover its itch with a pearl’ (33).

Holy Crossers Though the doctor might be the most scandalous character in Nightwood, in many ways the most ascetic is Robin – someone who lives not so much in the margins of society but who hovers over it. She comes and goes as she pleases, traverses time and place. She walks ‘in formless meditation’ (53) and her ‘engagements’, Barnes tells us, ‘were with something unseen’ (151): it was as if she had come ‘from some place that we have forgotten and would give our life to recall’ (106). She is ‘the infected carrier of the past’ (34), someone who has ‘in her every movement a slight drag as if the past were a web about her, as there is a web of time about a very old building’ (107). Robin could have easily had her own Life; it’s as if she walks into the world of Nightwood straight from an early Christian tale: Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person’s every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey. (33–4) Crucially, and as is common with Byzantine texts commemorating charismatic men or women, Robin is also someone who crosses worldly gender binaries. This is what holy fools do. As we’ve seen, one of the different ways in which The Life of Symeon the Fool is transgressive – there are many – is in the way the protagonist adopts traditional (which is to say patriarchal) female characteristics: he is irrational, promiscuous, hysteric. Mad that he is, Symeon’s behaviour spurns gender binaries. This should not come as a shock – despite the Christian church’s long commitment to fixed gender norms and binaries. Holy fools, as Constantinou explains, have always been associated with ‘cross-dressers’, saintly figures of late antique hagiography who, like holy

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fools, have their origins in the early Eastern monastic culture.29 Ivanov agrees: ‘the holy fool’, he claims, ‘has a tendency to blur the boundary between male and female’.30 Although there are exceptions, holy fools are on the whole men and those who cross gender are women.31 We encounter women who transition to men in at least nine Lives, the majority of which were written in late antiquity (after the first century) and passed down to the Byzantine era in various versions. Such texts are even more provocative than the Lives of holy fools. For while feigning madness was not formally condemned until the seventh century (in the sixteenth canon of the Council of Trullo in 691–2), cross-dressing was already prohibited in the Bible, in Deuteronomy 22: 5, which asserts that ‘A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God’. And again in 340, the Council of Gangra condemned women who ‘under pretence of asceticism’ wear men’s clothing (Canon 13) or cut their hair ‘which God gave as a reminder of subjection’ (Canon 17).32 For Betancourt, this is another ‘perplexing contradiction’ in Christian texts, for transgenderism is at once explicitly prohibited by the Church and venerated in several hagiographical texts.33 In thinking about women who first disguise themselves and then live as men, scholars have traditionally invoked the principle of ‘masking’. Just as with holy fools, who, according to Peter Hauptmann, wear the ‘mask of foolishness’, so these women have been thought of as masking their birth-assigned gender through costume.34 In this sense, they are like actors aware of what Constantinou calls the ‘Costume’s power to enhance a role and to contribute to its successful performance and perception’.35 Like with actors, there is also a certain kind of ritual involved in their transgendering. While the holy fool performs always in public, women crossing into men do so in private, a ritualistic transformation that hagiographers tend to capture in a quick, paratactic way. As regards the reasons for women changing gender, these are different, and the majority are social. In a patriarchal society, women disguise themselves as men to escape male control and to ensure easy and safe passage.36 But there are also theological reasons (though of course also explained by patriarchal structures) for this, with hagiographical texts drawing on the Bible and patristic texts emphasising holy women’s ‘manliness’. In late antique and Byzantine texts, women cross gender to escape arranged marriage or to exit abusive relationships. The anonymous Life of Euphrosyne (sixth or

29 

Constantinou, ‘Holy Actors and Actresses’, 343. Ivanov, Holy Fools, 63. 31  Two exceptions are Onesima, who starts her monastic career as a holy fool, and Marina, who feigns madness to get herself out of an arranged marriage and then switches to a man, calls herself Marinos, and enters a monastery in Jerusalem. On their stories and lives, see Constantinou, ‘Holy Actors and Actresses’, 347. 32  On the Church’s attitude towards madness and cross-dressing, see Constantinou, ‘Holy Actors and Actresses’, 345. 33  Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality, 205. 34  Peter Hauptmann, ‘Die “Narren um Christi Willen” in der Ostkirche’, Kirche im Osten 2 (1959): 27–49, cited in translation in Constantinou, ‘Holy Actors and Actresses’, 348. 35  Constantinou, ‘Holy Actors and Actresses’, 349. 36  See Stavroula Constantinou, Female Corporeal Performances: Reading the Body in Byzantine Passions and Lives of Holy Women (Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia 9) (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2005), 106. 30 

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seventh century) tells the story of a young girl who disguises herself to avoid marrying her father’s chosen one, the son of a rich nobleman. And so Euphrosyne becomes Smaragdos, passes as a eunuch, and enters a monastery. Matrona (mid sixth century) becomes Babylas to escape an abusive marriage; when her identity is revealed, she leaves the monastery and joins a convent in Emesa, where, however, her abusive husband tracks her down, and she has to escape once more. And Marina (eleventh to twelfth century) first feigns madness to avoid having to marry and then – after her solitary life in a cell is interrupted by fame – switches to Marinos and boards a ship. On the ship, Marinos is attacked by a sailor, but that sailor becomes possessed. Marinos then joins a monastery in Jerusalem before – eventually – returning to Sicily to die. For Constantinou and others, monasteries act as a kind of shelter from everyday patriarchy.37 Still, and no matter how good the disguise, these women never have it easy. As again Constantinou emphasises, these women always live a life of suffering and humiliation and, like holy fools, they reside in the margins. As W. H. Auden said about the ‘Old Masters’, late antique and Byzantine hagiographers were never wrong about the suffering of women and of transgender people.38 One of the ways in which these female-to-male saints are discriminated against is, unsurprisingly, sexual. The Life of Theodora of Alexandria (c. mid fifth to sixth century) tells the story of a married woman who dresses up as a monk to repent for ‘betraying’ her husband. Somehow Theodora, now Theodore, is accused of fathering a child. She does not deny the accusation and ends up instead raising the child. Susanna/ John (her Life is probably from the fourth century) is the daughter of a pagan man and a Jewish woman. She changes her gender to enter a monastery, where she finds herself accused of raping a woman. She reveals herself to be a woman to escape the charges, but now that she’s outed she is made to leave the monastery. Mary (known in the West as Marina, and her Life dating from about 525–650) becomes Marinos to follow her father to a monastery. She is accused of impregnating an innkeeper’s daughter, a charge that she, like Theodora, does not deny. Euphrosyne (fourteenth century) turns into John to again enter a monastery, but when she’s asked to become the monastery’s Abbot, she leaves to become the disciple of an old hermit. When Satan threatens to disclose her womanhood, John runs away, switches back into a woman, and spends the rest of her life an ascetic. These stories and texts can be (and have been) parsed in many different ways. Women crossing into men is a phenomenon that goes back to ancient religious ceremonies, during which women would carry out sacrifices in men’s clothes, and men in women’s clothes. It’s a transformation that betrays a male monk fascination and fantasy for women in the monastery, and which has also been seen as a historical event motivated by pragmatic reasons: an attempt on the part of some women to imitate the ‘superior’ gender and so elevate their status. For Betancourt, this pattern stretches back to early Christianity, the idea being that ‘Since the feminine is seen as entwined with the earthly and sensual desires of the flesh, women should aspire to become like men,

37 

Constantinou, Female Corporeal Performances, 101. See W. H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’: ‘About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters, how well they understood.’ In Selected Poems, new edn, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1979), 79–80.

38 

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unmoved by passions’.39 Yet the phenomenon carries a theological valence, too, having its roots in Jesus’s telling his disciples that they will enter the Kingdom of Heaven only if they manage to make male and female one and the same. For Constantinou, ‘the cross-dresser has its origins in the patristic doctrine of the holy woman’s manliness’.40 We encounter this idea, that holy women are androgynous, in several hagiographical texts. The most exciting of these is the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, an early third-century text written partly as an autobiography (although the modern term has no ancient analogue), which tells the story of the Carthaginian martyr Vibia Perpetua.41 Perpetua’s narrative voice makes up the largest part of the text and recounts the story of a woman who shuns traditional roles (of daughter, of wife, of mother) and attitudes, and whose body becomes a site of suffering and miracles. Perpetua’s break from oppressive male structures coincides with her being relieved of her duties as a mother. Having already fended off her father (who pleads with her not to martyr for Christ), she is miraculously freed of her motherly duties: ‘As God willed,’ she says, ‘the baby no longer desired my breasts.’42 While in prison, Perpetua has a vision in which she is taken to an arena to fight a man ‘foul in appearance’.43 Not only does she triumph over this man easily, but, when stripped naked, she has to her astonishment – and to ours – become a man. Her metamorphosis complete, she from now on displays characteristics that were for the Christians of her time traditionally male. As Margaret Cotter-Lynch and Mieke Bal have separately argued in their deconstructive readings of the Passion, it is not only Perpetua but the entire text that is transgressive: in CotterLynch’s words, ‘the text as a whole [. . .] dismantles binary categories so that Perpetua can represent herself as simultaneously male and female’.44 In Nightwood, Barnes drives gender binaries to breaking point. Just as the Byzantine Lives of women/men demonstrate gender to be performative, so too in Nightwood gender exists as performance. And it is again the doctor who’s at the centre of this decentring of sexual norms. He is variously described as the ‘last woman left in this world’ (90), ‘the Old Woman who lives in the closet’ (124), ‘the other woman that God forgot’ (129), a ‘girl’ (81), ‘the bearded lady’ (90) and ‘a lady in no need of insults’ (137). In that famous passage in the novel, Nora walks into the doctor’s flat to find him in a ‘wig with long pendent curls’, ‘heavily rouged and his lashes painted’ (71). For Erin Holliday-Karre, the doctor’s ‘transvestism underscores the artificiality of gender difference’. ‘The radical potential of the transvestite’, she argues, ‘lies in the ability to overturn the laws of sexuality and the sexual binary upon which these laws rely through prodigality and play’ (282). Like in the Christian texts just invoked, clothing is crucial, as are the moments in which the ‘disguise’ takes place, which, as in the older texts, are presented quickly: ‘In the narrow iron bed, with its heavy and dirty linen

39 

Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality, 97. Constantinou, Female Corporeal Performances, 100. 41  The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 126. 42  The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, 128. 43  The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, 130. 44  Margaret Cotter-Lynch, Saint Perpetua across the Middle Ages: Mother, Gladiator, Saint (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 9. See also Mieke Bal, ‘Perpetual Contest’, in On Story-Telling: Essays in Narratology, ed. Mieke Bal and David Jobling (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1991), 227–41. 40 

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sheets, lay the doctor in a woman’s flannel nightgown’ (71). Robin’s transformation, as relayed by Nora, is even quicker: ‘Sometimes, if she got tight by evening, I would find her standing in the middle of the room in boy’s clothes’ (133). In this moment, Robin, already described as ‘a tall girl with the body of a boy’ (41) and as ‘a girl who resembles a boy’ (123), and already freed of her motherly duties, shatters the girl doll she gave Nora. She ‘put her foot on it, crushing her heel into it’, Nora tells the doctor, ‘and then, as I came crying behind her, she kicked it, its china head all in dust, its skirt shivering and stiff, whirling over and over across the floor’. Any facile gender binaries are forever crushed. We find Robin dressed in boys’ clothes one more time in the final scene of the novel, which takes place in a chapel. In New York, where she came with Jenny, Robin had been ‘going into many out-of-the-way churches, sitting in the darkest corner or standing against the wall, one foot turned toward the toe of the other, her hands folded at their length, her head bent’. She eventually took herself to ‘Nora’s part of the country’. Having ‘frightened the woods into silence by her breathing’, she hears Nora’s dog barking. The doctor had already prophesised that ‘though those two’ – Nora and Robin – ‘were buried at opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both’, and it of course does (95). Dogs, and animals in general, are important in Byzantine Christian texts. Thinking about the dog Symeon ties around his belt as he enters Jerusalem, Constantinou claims that it points ‘to the empty meaning that social values, such as worldly wisdom and order, have for Symeon’.45 Many Christian women saints, Perpetua included, have to fight off wild beasts in the arena, beasts that are either tamed or who end up fighting on the side of female martyrs.46 Nightwood, a text which refuses the closure offered by Christian tales, ends with Robin fighting both against Nora’s dog and with Nora’s dog on her side (literally and metaphorically). In an image reminiscent of what happened when Nora and Robin first met, when a ‘powerful lioness [. . .] turned her furious great head with its yellow eyes afire and went down, her paws thrust through the bars and [. . .] as if a river were falling behind impassable heat, her eyes flowed in tears that never reached the surface’, Nora’s dog in the chapel ‘began to cry [. . .] and she grinning and crying with him’ until the moment when the dog ‘lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees’ (153). This is not quite the same as the martyrdom of Christian heroines, but it retains the power and pathos of those Christian women martyrs who fought for their freedom, and their death. To speak of the Byzantine modernism of Djuna Barnes (and Nightwood in particular) is not to impose traditional Christian ideas of sacrifice, suffering, love and redemption onto a text that refuses the banal and the obvious. It is rather yet another way of going into such a rich text, an attempt at welding the text’s religious mood with its irreverent transgressions, its deep Christian symbolism with its torrential language of extremes, its flawed yet also impressive characters. Read with some Byzantine texts, Barnes’s misfits become part of a longer tradition of unreal characters whose freakishness is engrossing and even perhaps meaningful. Like holy fools, like 45 

Constantinou, ‘Holy Actors and Actresses’, 351. See, for example, the case of Thekla, in Acts of Paul (second century). Thekla is made to fight against a ‘fierce lioness’ but the lioness ends up fighting on her side. New Testament Apocrypha, Volume 2: Writings Relating to the Apostles, Apocalypses and Related Subjects, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. R. McL. Wilson (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1992), 244.

46 

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holy crossers, the characters in Nightwood live on the verge and operate under a time that is different, queer. To the long list of religious sources lurking behind anglophone modernism, we must add Byzantine texts that commemorate the lives of misfits.

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge Stavroula Constantinou for alerting me to these texts and for so generously sharing her time, expertise and insights with me. I would also like to thank everyone who took part in the workshop organised by the editors of this Companion in July 2021 for their valuable feedback – especially Jennifer Mitchell, for encouraging me to read with and not against. The research for this chapter was co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus through the Foundation of Research and Innovation (Project: EXCELLENCE/1216/0020). Some of the ideas that inform the chapter’s arguments were developed within the framework of the project ‘Network for Medieval Arts and Rituals’ (NetMAR), which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 951875. The opinions expressed in this document reflect only the author’s views and in no way reflect the European Commission’s opinions. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Works Cited Auden, W. H. ‘Musée des Beaux Arts.’ In Selected Poems, new edn. Edited by Edward Mendelson. 79–80. New York: Vintage, 1979. Bal, Mieke. ‘Perpetual Contest.’ In On Story-Telling: Essays in Narratology, edited by Mieke Bal and David Jobling, 227–41. Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1991. Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. London: Faber, 2007. Betancourt, Roland. Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Burgwinkle, Bill and Cary Howie. Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Caselli, Daniela. Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus. London: Routledge, 2016. Constantinou, Stavroula. Female Corporeal Performances: Reading the Body in Byzantine Passions and Lives of Holy Women (Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia 9). Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2005. ———. ‘Holy Actors and Actresses: Fools and Cross-Dressers as the Protagonists of Saints’ Lives.’ In The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, Volume 2: Genres and Contexts, edited by Stephanos Efthymiadis, 343–62. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. Cotter-Lynch, Margaret. Saint Perpetua across the Middle Ages: Mother, Gladiator, Saint. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Dinshaw, Carolyn. How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Eliot, T. S. ‘Preface.’ In Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, xvii–xxi. London: Faber, 2007. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘Refiguring Lesbian Desire.’ In The Lesbian Postmodern, edited by Laura Doan, 67–84. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Heffernan, Thomas J., ed. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Holliday-Karre, Erin. ‘Seductive Nights: The Circus as Feminist Challenge in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.’ Feminist Modernist Studies 2, no. 3 (2019): 274–86. Ivanov, Sergey A. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Translated by Simon Franklin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Jackson, Celeste. ‘Parables in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.’ The Explicator 75, no. 3 (2017): 166–8. Krueger, Derek. Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. ‘The New Modernist Studies.’ PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. New Testament Apocrypha, Volume 2: Writings Relating to the Apostles, Apocalypses and Related Subjects. Edited by Wilhelm Schneemelcher. Translated by R. McL. Wilson. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1992. Smith, Patricia Juliana. ‘“The Woman That God Forgot”: Queerness, Camp, Lies, and Catholicism in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood.’ In Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith, 129–48. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Smith, Victoria L. ‘A Story Beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.’ PMLA 114, no. 2 (1999): 194–206. Winterson, Jeanette. ‘Introduction.’ In Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, ix–xv. London: Faber, 2007.

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

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odernism and sexuality are such wide-ranging terms that putting them together produces too broad an avenue to explore without some means of focusing the discussion. This chapter addresses two traits that are not unique to cultural modernism, but which converge there in ways not yet fully articulated or understood: modernism’s association with the occult, and the noticeable tendency toward polyamory in modernist lives. The occult influenced many writers of this era, even those who were not themselves occultists; it is unnecessary to debate to what extent T. S. Eliot or James Joyce was interested in the occult, for example, so long as it is accepted that both of their major works dealt with occult themes. Polyamory we find much harder to think about, in part because it is a newer term which, like the term modernism, was not used by any modernists. Also, we can find very little written on it, at least within modernist studies, and so begin to address it here tentatively, cautiously. We consider the occult revival that coincided with the modernist period to have its own historical ‘flavour’ distinct from the nineteenth-century occultism that preceded it and the New Age movement that followed it. In an effort to historicise our discussion of the occult and sexuality, in addition to literary figures we consider the work of two influential occultists of the period who published esoteric treatises on love and sexuality: Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune. As for polyamory, while it is visible today (it has its own flag), what one might recognise as polyamory in other eras similarly takes on the historical flavour of that time; we associate polyamory before modernism with the Oneida Community and other Utopian communes; after modernism polyamory also carries political (the Weather Underground) and health (Wilhelm Reich) connotations. We have missed some, no doubt, and yet drilling down on modernism, the occult and polyamory takes us to that rare dimension where spirituality, sexuality and modernist identities speak directly to each other. With all these qualifications, we still find ourselves with any number of starting points. We could assess the representation of an ethnically non-monogamous relationship in crisis in H.D.’s 1935 novella Nights,1 or begin with the image of Mary Butts

1 

Elliptically referred to as ‘erotic experiments’ at the novella’s outset (4), these relationships are clarified by Perdita Schaffner (somewhat uncharitably) in her introduction: ‘jumpy mixed up people with their bisexual conflicts, their wars of nerves, and their forays into the occult’; in H.D., Nights (New York: New Directions, 1986), xv. While Schaffner’s stance is a biased one (she was writing about her parents and their circle), she nonetheless evokes a clear connection between polyamory and occult practices.

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making a quip to a friend coated in goat’s blood at a drug-fuelled sex magick ritual.2 Is this what the modernists were up to? H.D. and Bryher (né(e) Annie Winifred Ellerman), friends of Butts’s, kept politer company than Aleister Crowley, but some members of their circle were more influential on theories of sexuality than he (Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud spring to mind). While surely there were no goat sacrifices at Kenwin, the villa is an enduring architectural extension of the non-monogamous queer marriage between Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher.3 Dion Fortune might be a third starting point: not a modernist writer but an occultist and ceremonial magician of note in the modernist era, she wrote and published work about the esoteric power of love (erotic and otherwise) in the manner of an expert instructing the uninitiated. All three of them wrote about occult love.4 This chapter adopts the idea that these writers’ theoretical polyamory (occultinformed reformulations of the concept ‘love’) helps to colour modernist texts beyond those directly associated with the occult or non-normative sexualities.5 The occult suggested another hierarchy, a new way to organise and experience the world. The loosening up of modernist sexualities also suggested a new form of experience of interest to nearly everyone: beyond received forms of love, beyond the marriages sanctioned by state and church. Our guiding question is as follows: ‘what is it about the conjunction of the occult and polyamory that draws a modernist writer, as distinct from how it would attract someone from another era?’ – or, to clarify: ‘when some modernists, guided by spirituality, rethink sexuality from a non-monogamous basis, what ground are they breaking and to what end?’ We suggest three possible answers without settling definitively for any one of them: 1. Freedom: love does not need to be limited to models sanctioned by church and state; 2. Curiosity: maybe there is more to it all than what we can see, and maybe some sorts of people have kept alive a tradition that teaches about that ‘more’; 3. Agency: I can experiment or experience, or retreat and detach, as I like. The occult as DIY psychoanalysis, as active, engaged brain change.

Occult as Appropriated and Sexuality as Given In this chapter, we propose a specialised definition of the occult as it was experienced by modernist writers, which for the sake of ease we term the ‘modernist occult’. We suggest the occult underwent its own modernist moment: all evidence seems to point to a radical change in the occult in the early twentieth century, as once-secret

2 

For one version of this anecdote, see Susan Stanford Friedman, Analyzing Freud: The Letters of H.D., Bryher, and their Circle (New York: New Directions, 2002), 455–6. 3  See Susan McCabe, H.D. and Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 4  There are many occult loves, not all of which involve sexuality or even spirituality, so add ‘occult love’ to the list of overly broad terms we merely glance at here. 5  We have repurposed the work of Deric Shannon and Abbey Willis, ‘Theoretical Polyamory: Some Thoughts on Loving, Thinking, and Queering Anarchism’, Sexualities 13, no. 4 (2010): 433–43. We hope we have been faithful, give or take, to its spirit.

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rituals were published for the masses and the fin-de-siècle traditions were splintering (and the splinters were proliferating). Though he is hardly a modernist, Aleister Crowley certainly had a hand in giving the occult a new face.6 His colleague Dion Fortune, who wrote extensively on conceptions of sacralised sexuality in The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage (1922), has a very different vision of the occult which yet equally, we believe, helped modernise the occult. Fortune, too, believed it was necessary to make public things once kept secret, so that a generation reeling from collective trauma might find solace once available only through an underground communication. Though her Esoteric Philosophy is in some ways deeply conservative, it nevertheless opens up possibilities – the self as ‘bi-sexual’, the idea of marriage as but one form of a ‘group-soul’7 – that were explored by modernist writers conversant with occult theory, especially H.D. and Mary Butts. Our working definition limits the occult to (1) those things about the occult that seemed of most concern to modernist writers, and (2) the ways in which the occult was ‘going mainstream’ and seeping into the culture, the professions and the technologies. We argue that for the modernists, the occult is less a religion than a practice that makes use of religion; with the occult one performs actions to produce results, and one builds a sense of what the results should be by doing inner work, theurgy, the kind of ‘magick’ that each of these writers saw as necessary to a spiritual practice. The transformation of the inner self is achieved variously by meditation exercises and rituals, which taken together are used to enhance one’s faculties, overcome irrational fears and complexes, and grow beyond what are commonly thought to be the limits of the human. The occult as it was encountered by various modernist writers had been energised by a cluster of turn-of-the-century scientific paradigm shifts, or a single paradigm shift, that painted an unfamiliar new picture of reality, counter-intuitive and vast in scope: the very small, the very large and the inner world were not as they had seemed yet could be collected into an as-yet-undrawn Venn diagram. Humans were taking flight, capturing moments of image and sound, and communicating at vast distances. Scientists cast light on the darkness of the unconscious while social scientists crunched data to find surprising affinities, mysterious patterns out of thousands of collated world myths.8 Outside the ‘official’ sciences, occultists and theosophists 6 

Compared to other prominent occult figures of the era (Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Steiner and Fortune are all figures who helped transform the occult in the twentieth century), Crowley changed the face of the occult largely by turning it on its head, dragging occult practice from hidden sanctums to the popular discourse. His self-promotion, publishing of secret documents, celebration of sex and drug use, and branding of the ‘new age’ as ‘Thelema’ influenced neo-paganism, Wicca, elements of counter-culture and the sexual revolution, and new religious movements. Beyond occult communities, his influence extended to popular culture: he appears on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper and is caricatured in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. 7  Dion Fortune, The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage and The Problem of Purity (London: Aquarian Press, 1988), 38, 54–60. On the heteronormative and reactionary facets of Fortune’s occult project, see her early tracts published under her birth name, especially Violet M. Firth, The Problem of Purity (London: Rider & Co., 1925), 110–13. 8  See, for instance, Mark Morrison’s Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Note also that Israel Regardie and Robert Anton Wilson, both major figures in twentieth-century occult networks, pursued advanced degrees in psychology as part of their occult practice. P. D. Ouspensky became an occultist when he noted, as a mathematician, that quantities of artificial limbs allocated to the front were determined with remarkable accuracy. The Crowley-Butts book Magick claimed ‘the method of science’ for ‘the aim of religion’.

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sought out a perennial philosophy that had, over the millennia, guarded secrets about humanity’s sacred origins and kept its divine potential alive despite persecution and distortion. Modernist writers and artists, positioning themselves among the intelligent and professional classes, were keeping up with all this. The occult traditions that influenced modernist writers were many and varied, but those that emphasised inner work or theurgy were naturally attractive to people under pressure to create new art for a new world, who experimented with form and content, reconfiguring the borders of genre and thus, by extension, identity. Theurgy can be conceived of as a practical folk psychoanalysis that has been systematised over years of theory and experiment, passed on or guarded because it produced testable results.9 Simpler exercises (or rituals) are aimed at reducing anxiety and muscle tension; intermediate ones develop new faculties such as intuition and mental concentration, increasing in complexity until one performs the ‘great work’ of completely reconfiguring the self. The aim of such work is to disintegrate the ‘lower’ personality hampered by fears, impulses, prejudices and social conditioning and replace it with an uninhibited ‘higher’ self with a direct connection to the spiritual or the divine – to the higher will or esoteric purpose – unencumbered by the lower astral forces. In parallel with some trends arising out of psychoanalysis, as we have outlined above, occultists, rogue psychologists, religious groups and political activists number among twentieth-century users of sexual ‘exercises’ or ‘rituals’ as necessary or even core components of the training of a would-be adept. Although knowledge of occult sex rituals is relatively scant,10 it seems that the sexual self is highly conditioned by taboos and anxieties, traumas and time-bound reasoning, and the majority of the behaviours that arise from that mostly occluded self seem irrational, destructive or harmful to the health so long as they are (not) bound by strict codes. The ritualised breaking of that conditioning is theorised in various ways to be part of the process of dissolving the ‘lower’ self. These exercises range from the relatively uxorious and monogamous, in which a married couple works magic together over a lifetime (Fortune, Yeats), to the deliberately non-monogamous or even anti-monogamous (H.D., Butts, Crowley, even Joyce’s Ulysses). The attainment of the higher self also usually involved some form of modification of one’s gender identity by embracing the masculine, feminine, androgynous, agender and fluid aspects of the self as necessary parts of the whole. Indeed, what was often aspired to was a complex multiple idea of selfhood and identity that could not be adequately described by a single, dual or triple gender, sexual orientation or relationship orientation. Several strains of occult thinking seemed to understand higher beings as

9 

Israel Regardie, Crowley’s former secretary and a ceremonial magician in his own right, believed that ‘psychotherapy was essential for anyone practicing any spiritual discipline [. . .] [he] decided that the techniques of psychotherapy would and should be a [prerequisite] to ceremonial magic’. See Nicholas Popadiuk, Joseph Keating, Patrick Montgomery and Lawrence Siordia, ‘From the Occult to Chiropractic Psychiatry: Francis Israel Regardie, D.C.’, Chiropractic History 27, no. 2 (2007): 37. See Israel Regardie, The Middle Pillar: A Co-Relation of the Principles of Analytical Psychology and the Elementary Techniques of Magic (Eden, NY: Aries Press, 1945) for examples of some of the exercises enumerated here, but Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Reiss and Crowley offer others. 10  A good starting point is Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

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having incorporated elements of all genders, variously as androgynous, bisexual and/ or uncategorisable. Balzac’s Seraphita, an early influence on both H.D. and Pound, the works of Éliphas Lévi and the public persona of Simon Ganneau all in their own way seemed to invite the association of gender nonconformity, spiritual development and authority to speak. While the links between non-normative gender and occult or hermetic interests have been thoroughly investigated, however, those between the occult and polyamory have not. Monogamy has seemed, in the arena of sexuality as modernism encountered it, the cultural norm when it came to love or, in the words of Angela Willey, a ‘compulsory status’.11 And yet this is not the full picture. The generation before the modernists had attempted to create Utopian communities based in sexual freedom, as with the Oneida Community in upstate New York, while the generation after the modernists would go further to claim the sexual revolution as their own – to coin it. The Weather Underground’s 1969 Smash Monogamy campaign saw couples’ love bonds dismantled in enforced non-monogamy, engineered to create ‘an army of lovers’.12 The terms ‘sexual revolution’ and ‘sex positivity’ can be traced, by some accounts, to Sigmund Freud’s rogue student Wilhelm Reich, the ‘discoverer’ of orgone (a cosmic sexual energy), who believed that ‘a true political revolution would be possible only once sexual repression was overthrown’.13 Reich’s marriage of mysticism and science overshadowed his politics: he also invented the ‘cloudbuster’, which could bring rain to even the wastiest of waste lands by manipulating ‘orgone’ – like prana or chi but orgasmic – which incidentally could be accumulated and stored in an easy-to-build metal-lined box. The generation after H.D. and Freud would see ‘orgastic potency’ in manipulable invisible fields. H.D. and Bryher, along with Butts and occultists such as Dion Fortune, found their own ways to shake up the received barriers separating love, sexuality and spiritual practice. For these writers, whatever sexuality, love and spiritual practice became in modernism was entangled with what the occult offered in place of traditional religion by way of self-transformation and self-recreation. As we weave together these disparate threads – the occult, polyamory and modernist writing – we aim to create a tapestry that acknowledges how these writers’ and thinkers’ lives and works intertwine and diverge.

Polyamory: A Working Definition Polyamory is a relatively new concept, and so it is problematic to use the term to describe the lives of people who lived before the word was coined.14 Though ‘we come to understand ourselves in terms of the concepts that are available to us in the time

11 

Angela Willey, Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. 12  Dinitia Smith, ‘No Regrets for a Love of Explosives: In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen’, New York Times, 11 September 2001. 13  Christopher Turner, ‘Wilhelm Reich: The Man Who Invented Free Love’, The Guardian, 8 July 2011. 14  H.D.’s preoccupation with the esoteric dual concept of l’amour and la mort, love and death, in her later years prompted one of us to use a nonce spelling, ‘polyamoury’, to describe H.D.’s aesthetic of multiple loves, a spelling we do not use here because it is a little silly.

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and place we live in’, our use of ‘polyamory’ in these pages is not to detract from these writers’ realities, but instead to clarify and elucidate them.15 Much as polyamory allows for the consideration of many (sexual or non-sexual) loves, so too does it allow for many definitions, about as many as there are practitioners – even in a twenty-firstcentury context, the term remains a ‘contested [. . .] discourse on non-monogamy’.16 Our interest here is in how this practice was lived, felt and explored by the modernists and occultists mentioned above, and how that polyamorous ethic becomes a polyamorous aesthetic. Following Klesse’s suggestion that ‘love is central to the discourses on polyamory’,17 in this chapter we are considering the usefulness of polyamory in terms of the way it invites thinking about love. Conceptually slippery, love is often difficult to separate from spirituality, and the occult concepts of love that absorbed these writers line up well with the kind of thinking that refuses to consider monogamy as anything other than a special manifestation of romantic love. So, we take the term’s etymology seriously and take it to refer to many loves, though not necessarily to many sexual loves.18 But the problem remains that there is not adequate scholarly attention to these terms for us to form a coherent theory of modernism, spirituality and sexuality that can precisely distinguish between polyamory and a ritual drugged orgy – and we find that scotoma to be problematic. While ‘polyamory has [. . .] been invested with hopes for spiritual growth’,19 we stress that our analysis provides neither a complete or definitive definition of polyamory (we have not been able to find one that everyone agrees on) nor the last word on modernist women, sexuality and the esoteric. At best we can offer another first word on the subject. Thinking modernism through a polyamorous aesthetic is a mode of theoretical polyamory, envisioning ‘a radical reorganization of sexuality’20 as a mode of queering (and therefore complexifying) discourse about a subject, a mode that allows for said subject to speak anew. For H.D., lovers can replace one another serially or burn bright like large stars, but they can also co-exist and not annihilate one another; each relationship partakes of love: we can begin with the axiom that love does not find its origin in any one relationship.

A Different Ethic and Aesthetic: Yeats, Eliot and Joyce Before examining some modernist work that directly addresses esoteric, spiritual issues surrounding identity, sexuality and the occult, it is useful to consider some who wrote at the periphery of these issues, who do not straightforwardly challenge received paradigms

15 

Ani Ritchie and Meg Barker, ‘“There Aren’t Words for What We Do or How We Feel So We Have to Make Them Up”: Constructing Polyamorous Languages in a Culture of Compulsory Monogamy’, Sexualities 9, no. 5 (2006): 585. 16  Christian Klesse, ‘Polyamory and its “Others”: Contesting the Terms of Non-Monogamy’, Sexualities 9, no. 5 (2006): 566. 17  Klesse, ‘Polyamory’, 567. 18  A stance which accords with contemporary understandings of the term, e.g. Klesse. 19  Christian Klesse, ‘Poly Economics—Capitalism, Class, and Polyamory’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 27 (2014): 206. 20  Shannon and Willis, ‘Theoretical Polyamory’, 434.

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of gender and sexuality while sensing that those paradigms’ force is in decline, that a new world is in the making. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land focuses on the emptying of meaning in the sexual sphere as it is encountered in the (modernist) present. The Fisher King, the sexually wounded stand-in for the land, and Tiresias, the gender-fluid prophet who waits in the underworld for heroes, catalogue a bevy of sexual ills, a diagnosis without a prescribed cure. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions, the poem emphasises the dangers of attachment to passions and aversions (burning) and marks the absence of purity in a land divorced from the ancient ways of proper, ‘natural’ relations among beings. Sexuality, in Eliot’s long poem, is about fecundity of fields, the flow of rivers; any perversion from this brings barrenness, and the received myth is played against contemporary London. Eliot’s notion of the ‘mythical method’, which he ‘discovered’ upon reading Joyce’s Ulysses, offered a radically new way of writing based on the realism of timeless affinities. We call it a ‘realism’ (small r) because the openness of Ulysses to the purported fact of metempsychosis and the actual fact (for Joyce) of meaningful coincidences and omens is part of the fabric of the novel’s attention to the real, along with mental concepts, objects, things and so on.21 Eliot clearly saw the possibilities for such a poetics that sees writing primarily as a timeless dialogue with the patterns that arise from scientific, comparative study of myth, but Joyce uses the ‘method’ for other purposes: Leopold Bloom, fluid, a flower, flows from the past into a blinding new world, shining a kindly light on the regions of sexual darkness he traverses. Bloom is in the process of remaking himself into someone with a polyamorous ethic and aesthetic, which is the identity he needs in the world as it manifests to him in the here and now, the new moment (and not the moment of the ‘historical’ Odysseus). This is not so much his choice as a nod to the reality of Blazes Boylan and everything he represents. After years of trying to fit into a set of roles, Bloom realises that he could never have succeeded: his countrymen would never accept him because they are bound to old codes. Meanwhile, the love of his life will not accept his deviance (the result of trauma) from the codes he is meant to follow (normative sexual and gender behaviour being front and centre) without being able to deviate, in her own way, from the received codes gathered under the institution of marriage. Wanting to preserve in some form the relationship he has to Molly – or perhaps courageously wishing to go on with her in a radically new paradigm – he must come to accept that ‘marriage’ will become completely dissolved and renewed in another form, just as his ego is broken down and reformed as ‘Professor Bloom [. . .] a finished example of the new womanly man’. This is a multiple transformation, incorporating all that he has been, could be, and discovers about himself, plus all the other literary and mythical figures he, through coincidence, reiterates. Bloom becomes a fluid, conscious entity in the here and now. It is the transfiguration of the totality of the self that Eliot imagines happening in ‘the tradition’ whenever a writer makes something new. Joyce and Eliot, like many writers with only a passing interest in the occult, were nonetheless drawn to the ideas the occult could generate. Stephen Dedalus does not answer the charge put to him

21 

See John Cosgrave, ‘Joyce’s Use of Occultist Sources’, for an account of Joyce’s ‘fascination with the occult’. In Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition, ed. Leon Surette and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 97–118.

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in ‘Aeolus’: ‘you came to [A.E.] in the small hours of the morning to ask him about planes of consciousness’,22 and Eliot was known for playing dead.

Expertise The modernists who form the main focus of this chapter were active and knowledgeable participants: Butts’s challenge to Crowley was on the basis of occult expertise, and H.D.’s intensifying concern with occultism in her later years caused her to feel isolated from her mediumistic and spiritualistic associates, whom she considered to be ill-informed when compared to her own knowledge and experience. Mary Butts revisited Eliot’s chief esoteric source for The Waste Land, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, in 1927. Noting that ‘the Mysteries had an exoteric & an esoteric side’, she observes that Weston stops short of revealing the latter, the ‘final mystery’ that gets beyond ‘popular, instinctive, life-stimulation, more babies, butter, bees, birds’, a ‘final mystery’ based on ‘the physical symbols of growth & sex’.23 This involves a journey into the astral realm, an escape from space and time, and a profound transformation of the self in the form of initiation, a familiar formula that is described in many books on the occult and modernism. Butts’s real admiration for Weston, however, is in her attempts to be scientific. Like Crowley, who taught her some astral journey techniques (with and without the aid of drugs), Butts as an occultist values the scientific approach to mystical experiences. She departs from Crowley, however, in her strong preference for good art, as exemplified by Yeats, over occult mumbo-jumbo, saying, ‘Isn’t one page of Per Amica worth every Equinox?’24 H.D. was originally wary of Yeats (as she was, too, of Crowley), writing to Robert Duncan in October 1960: I met Yeats and ‘Georgie,’ as they first called her, & they invited me to Oxford—but something held me back. I did not know that ‘Georgie’ was a medium or he, what he was. I am glad that I had saved (as it were) my real psychic experience for that War II contact.25 W. B. Yeats was deeply invested in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as revealed in the work of George Mills Harper and Margaret Mills Harper, an intergenerational project to explicate Yeats’s occult beliefs. Yet the poet-occultist nonetheless had deep worries about the coming of the ‘new age’ or the Aeon. ‘The Second Coming’ speaks to this ambivalence and perhaps specifically to his magical order’s dabbling in Egyptian mythology and magic. The poem would seem to predict a transition from the magic of Orders to the magick of chaos. H.D. by contrast eagerly anticipated the coming change

22 

James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 135. Mary Butts, The Journals of Mary Butts, ed. Nathalie Blondel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 264. 24  Nathalie Blondel, ‘Introduction’, in The Journals of Mary Butts, 9. The Equinox was an occult journal published by Crowley, in which he famously leaked many secret documents of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Yeats’s Per Amica Silentia Lunae, a collection of essays, explores both the theory and practice of the astral (anima mundi) connection with one’s daimon. 25  Robert J. Bertholf, ed., A Great Admiration: H.D./Robert Duncan Correspondence 1950–1961 (Culver City, CA: Lapis Press, 1992), 122. 23 

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that the new age would bring, a generation before the popular New Age movement. As Susan Acheson explains, H.D. associated the Aeon of Aquarius with ‘WOMAN’, occult knowledge and unorthodox love.26

Dion Fortune’s Esoteric Concept of Love First initiated in 1919 into Alpha et Omega, a temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Dion Fortune would eventually found the Fraternity of the Inner Light in 1924. Fortune yoked her interest in the human mind to not only her occultism but also her literary works, which have been called ‘therapeutic psychological aids’ (an echo of the relationship between psychoanalysis and occultism we outlined above). Sex, in Fortune’s worldview, is not restricted to monogamous marriage, and that ‘sexual energy should be transmuted into spiritual energy’.27 In Fortune’s world, the concept of sex is far more complicated than is known to the uninitiated, who were limited to a certain dimension of thought.28 For Fortune sex is a divine life force which manifests in myriad ways: it preserves complex forms of life that resist the inevitable drift into homogeneity that seems to be the way of the universe. On a more granular level, sex for Fortune can be seen to resolve itself into binaries such as ‘male’ and ‘female’, but these binaries are only terminological conveniences used to describe different states of the same divine energy. It would be a distortion to read gender essentialism into Fortune’s esoteric conception of sex so far as identity is concerned, because her system allows for multiple rebirths of individuals into a variety of bodies. These ideas resonate with the twentieth-century Western occult’s acceptance of Buddhist traditions about reincarnation which open the door to individual experience beyond the human. H.D.’s work in the last decades of her life is profoundly engaged with ideas about reincarnation, and for all its irony, so is Ulysses.29 For Dion Fortune, and certainly for the late H.D., love is prior to any relationship, and its evolution occurs over multiple lifetimes, not one. As Fortune writes in Through the Gates of Death (1932): It would be well for us were we taught from our earliest years to think of our lives as rising and falling like a boat on the crest of a wave. Now descending into matter through the gates of birth; now re-ascending to the invisible world through the gates of death, ever and anon to return again and withdraw again in the rhythmical cyclic tide of evolving life.30

26 

See Susan Acheson, ‘H.D. and the Age of Aquarius: Liturgy, Astrology and Gnosis in Trilogy’, Sagetrieb 15 (1996): 136. 27  See Susan Graf Johnston, ‘The Occult Novels of Dion Fortune’, Journal of Gender Studies 16, no. 1 (2007): 47. 28  P. D. Ouspensky thought that the nascent ability to think in the fourth dimension constituted a ‘Tertium Organum’ or paradigm shift in human consciousness. Butts read his work on the fourth dimension as a way to think about the problems of art. See Butts, Journals, 233. 29  Occult theorists and writers of the later twentieth century unapologetically read Joyce esoterically; Robert Anton Wilson, a powerful influence in the popular occult of that time, was an enthusiastic amateur Joyce scholar who moved to Ireland to pursue his studies. 30  Dion Fortune, Through the Gates of Death (London: Inner Light Publishing Society, 1932), 2.

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H.D.’s speaker in Vale Ave XXVIII puts it more succinctly: ‘Love was the primum mobile.’31 A polyamorous aesthetic is a natural enough choice for someone who believes they have lived many lives before the present one. Fortune, Butts and H.D. saw sequences of lives, rather than separate individual identities, as the best and likeliest model for the human condition, and as a natural consequence, conventional notions of self, gender and love were inadequate to the task of serving as guideposts for human existence under the new paradigm.

‘Love is the altar we burn upon’: H.D.’s Vale Ave Taken on its own, H.D.’s Vale Ave seems like a story of a stormy romance played out between a man and a woman over many time periods. Compared to Orlando, a work exploring similar ideas by someone whose circle practised forms of non-monogamy for political, rather than spiritual, reasons, it seems almost tame. But taken together with the Delia Alton cycle, Helen in Egypt, and Hermetic Definition, the picture is complicated: in H.D.’s work, it is sometimes the pair but more often the entire group or circle that reincarnates together, time and again (as she tells Robert Duncan in 1959, ‘I can’t say that I “re-member” the re-birth sequence of “Vale,” but I lived it & love it. The lines are conventional—no experiment, a re-living.’32 Even in a single lifetime, groups and the roles found within them reiterate themselves over a person’s life, as H.D. documents in numerous texts. Sometimes individuals can also be ‘walked into’ by other souls, she is told by Duncan. Sometimes in the next reincarnation people exchange roles: in Hermetic Definition H.D.’s speaker gives ‘birth’ to Lionel Durand after his death. The dynamics of the group are fluid and can also be sexually charged: sex drives cycles of births even in the invisible planes, and proper attunement to the sexual is a prerequisite to the level of spiritual development shared by circles that move together through time and space. The occult and sexuality had long been intertwined in H.D.’s mind though she deepened her interest in the occult as she aged. The first stage in her version of the tripartite initiation into the mysteries, as she understood it, was a healthy enjoyment of sexuality: as she put it, ‘to shun, deny and belittle such [sexual] experiences is to bury one’s talent carefully in a napkin’.33 Free and uncomplicated sexuality for H.D. seems to be the sign and bellwether for a proper physical existence, the building block upon which an undeluded mind can work, a mind which in turn might be able to support a connection to the over-mind. A healthy body for H.D. is a body whose attunement to sexuality is unproblematically positive to the extent that physical health and sex positivity are practically synonyms.34

31 

H.D., Vale Ave, in New Directions: An International Anthology of Poetry and Prose, ed. J. Laughlin, Peter Glassgold and Frederick R. Martin (New York: New Directions, 1982), 38. 32  Bertholf, A Great Admiration, 10. 33  H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho, intro. Albert Gelpi (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982), 17. 34  This is in line with Mary Butts’s attitude to sexuality, a study of which may lead to fruitful scholarship.

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William Butler Yeats, borrowing it appears from Buddhist traditions about reincarnation, wrote about identity and love in lines that H.D. discovered in the Sunday Times (3 February 1957): I’m looking for the face I had Before the world was made. What if I look upon a man As though on my beloved, And my blood be cold the while And my heart unmoved? Why should he think me cruel Or that he is betrayed? I’d have him love the thing that was Before the world was made35 The poem was selected by the newspaper to accompany an article by Hugh Dowding, in which he (Dowding) wrote the following: After my retirement from the Royal Air Force I was privileged to work for some years in a small circle, to which were brought by its invisible leaders numbers of men who had been suddenly killed by land, air or sea, and had not got rid of their etheric doubles, with the result that they were in an earth-bound condition and did not even know that they were dead. [. . .] a clairvoyant and clairaudient medium enabled them to communicate with us, and gave us a running commentary on their actions.36 The article continues with details and observations about the astral world, then concludes with the assertion that such wisdom has been passed down through the ages. H.D. found this article at a time when figures from her life were colliding and reappearing: the article is sent to her by Bryher (with an enclosed note reading ‘the usual thing—by your friend’); she is shocked by seeing these layered acquaintances from her past, Yeats and Dowding, each echoing the other’s preoccupation with the astral, the self before the self of birth. The article suggested disagreements from long ago: Dowding’s mind tends toward the literalism of the spiritualist movement, while H.D.’s is to the esoteric. Dowding works to help poor souls stuck in the astral world, a plane he characterises as ‘primarily emotional, and the lessons of the astral are to subdue the emotions of fear, lust, hate, greed and the like, and to foster the emotions of love and veneration’. H.D.’s spiritual initiations have had to do with connecting to ever-higher aspects of being, and include

35 

William Butler Yeats, ‘Before the World Was Made’, Sunday Times, H.D. Papers, box 50, folder 1260, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Cf. H.D., Hirslanden Notebooks: An Annotated Scholarly Edition, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Matte Robinson (Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2015), 77, passim. 36  Hugh Dowding, ‘Earth Lives and Astral Lives’, Sunday Times, H.D. Papers, box 50, folder 1260, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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hosts of spirit ‘contacts’ that are not clearly either aspects of herself or actual spirits of the dead. H.D.’s breaking of identity barriers extends to the interpersonal as well; she sometimes imagines several people as aspects or doubles of one another, who might somehow find unity on a higher plane. Robert Duncan will follow H.D. along these lines into some of the most arcane corners of her work. Having been raised a Hermeticist, Duncan had a unique perspective on this work by a woman who was pleased to discover that such a thing as a ‘Hermeticist’ exists; a woman who drew explicit lines between her occultism and poetic practice in order to highlight their overlaps: it is wonderful to read such words as ‘Hermetic brotherhood’ and ‘some Simon Magus in myself’—one seldom writes or speaks & perhaps the inner experience, the ‘magic,’ as you call it, had to be expressed—you will see in ‘Vale Ave’ & in ‘Sagesse.’37 Duncan’s indebtedness to H.D. is perhaps most apparent in his aptly titled The H.D. Book.38 What we see looking back on The H.D. Book is an anti-The Pound Era,39 a work that puts H.D.’s poetry at the new centre after years on the periphery because it was spiritual and new. It was a new religion of sorts, but really it was an old religion of love. Just as love can easily be abstracted from gender, sexuality can easily be abstracted from love, and H.D.’s understanding of sexuality is determined by the state of those abstractions in modernist poetry, which is something she helped generate.

Where From Here? A Conclusion Conceiving these attitudes to love, identity and gender as polyamory produces a modernist love that asserts itself as real without submitting to being defined by any one instance, manifestation or act. It is a letting go of codes regulating love bound in any given place and time, an openness to other codes, other loves, other times. In acknowledging not only other loves but also other hegemonies, other hierarchies, other circles, polyamory relativises the cultural anchors of love while perceiving them as if for the first time, and the occult supports and explicates new self-perceptions emerging out of polyamory’s ‘radical reorientation of sexuality’ by working at stripping away the timebound assumptions loving selves make in the search for love itself. Neither a return to ancient, pre-agricultural ways nor anything but a revision of how people have always lived for generations, polyamory as it not-quite-appears in the modernist world is not so much a practice as an orientation that unites political and spiritual radicals, albeit in a limited way. Shannon and Willis have used ‘theoretical polyamory’ to produce ‘more holistic and nuanced movements’ within an otherwise diverse and anarchistic field. Viewing modernism through a polyamorous lens produces a new way of thinking about the ways in which love, esotericism, symbolism, sexuality and identity are connected in the minds of some women modernists.

37 

Bertholf, A Great Admiration, 15. The best edition is Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book, ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 39  Cf. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 38 

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What were those people up to? One thing that perhaps everyone can agree on is that modernist writers took their craft seriously, and they expected other modernist writers to be the best qualified judges of their accomplishments. Butts, H.D. and Fortune were educators in the occult: Butts’s knowledge of the occult more than matched Crowley’s, and though he was an accomplished mountaineer, Butts was the better writer. H.D. faced serious characters – Freud, Lawrence, Pound, Dowding – and found their knowledge of the occult and sexuality lacking, despite their claims to be spiritual figures. Fortune’s esoteric philosophy stands up well to Yeats’s, though he is the more celebrated alumnus of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its inner orders. The three authors differ in their expression of sexuality, the esoteric and love, but that difference manifests itself in ways that require a nuanced understanding of the role of the spiritual in modernism, one that meets each author on their own terms, judged first by their peers.

Works Cited Acheson, Susan. ‘H.D. and the Age of Aquarius: Liturgy, Astrology and Gnosis in Trilogy.’ Sagetrieb 15 (1996): 133–50. Bertholf, Robert J., ed. A Great Admiration: H.D./Robert Duncan Correspondence 1950–1961. Culver City, CA: Lapis Press, 1992. Butts, Mary. The Journals of Mary Butts. Edited by Nathalie Blondel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Cosgrave, John. ‘Joyce’s Use of Occultist Sources.’ In Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition, ed. Leon Surette and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, 97–118. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996. Dowding, Hugh. ‘Earth Lives and Astral Lives.’ Sunday Times. H.D. Papers, box 50, folder 1260. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Duncan, Robert. The H.D. Book. Edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1968. Fortune, Dion. The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage and The Problem of Purity. London: Aquarian Press, 1988. ———. Through the Gates of Death. London: Inner Light Publishing Society, 1932. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Analyzing Freud: The Letters of H.D., Bryher, and their Circle. New York: New Directions, 2002. Harper, George Mills, ed. Yeats and the Occult. Toronto: Macmillan, 1975. Harper, Margaret Mills. Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. H.D. Hirslanden Notebooks: An Annotated Scholarly Edition. Edited by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Matte Robinson. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2015. ———. Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho. Introduction by Albert Gelpi. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982. ———. Vale Ave. In New Directions: An International Anthology of Poetry and Prose, edited by J. Laughlin, Peter Glassgold and Frederick R. Martin, 18–68. New York: New Directions, 1982. Johnston, Susan Graf. ‘The Occult Novels of Dion Fortune.’ Journal of Gender Studies 16, no. 1 (2007): 47–56. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Klesse, Christian. ‘Polyamory and its “Others”: Contesting the Terms of Non-Monogamy.’ Sexualities 9, no. 5 (2006): 565–83.

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———. ‘Poly Economics—Capitalism, Class, and Polyamory.’ International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 27 (2014): 203–20. McCabe, Susan. H.D. and Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Morrison, Mark. Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Popadiuk, Nicholas, Joseph Keating, Patrick Montgomery and Lawrence Siordia. ‘From the Occult to Chiropractic Psychiatry: Francis Israel Regardie, D.C.’ Chiropractic History 27, no. 2 (2007): 35–54. Regardie, Israel. The Middle Pillar: A Co-Relation of the Principles of Analytical Psychology and the Elementary Techniques of Magic. Eden, NY: Aries Press, 1945. Ritchie, Ani and Meg Barker. ‘“There Aren’t Words for What We Do or How We Feel So We Have to Make Them Up”: Constructing Polyamorous Languages in a Culture of Compulsory Monogamy.’ Sexualities 9, no. 5 (2006): 584–601. Schaffner, Perdita. ‘Introduction.’ In Nights by H.D., ix–xvi. New York: New Directions, 1986. Shannon, D. and A. Willis. ‘Theoretical Polyamory: Some Thoughts on Loving, Thinking, and Queering Anarchism.’ Sexualities 13, no. 4 (2010): 433–43. Smith, Dinitia. ‘No Regrets for a Love of Explosives: In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen.’ New York Times, 11 September 2001. Surette, Leon and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, eds. Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996. Turner, Christopher. ‘Wilhelm Reich: The Man Who Invented Free Love.’ The Guardian, 8 July 2011. Urban, Hugh B. Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Willey, Angela. Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Yeats, William Butler. ‘Before the World Was Made.’ Sunday Times. H.D. Papers, box 50, folder 1260. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Contributor Biographies

Elizabeth Anderson is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing (Bloomsbury, 2020) and H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2013), co-editor of Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Associate Editor of the journal Literature and Theology. Her articles have appeared in Modernist Cultures, Literature and Theology, Christianity and Literature and Women: A Cultural Review. Charles Andrews is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Whitworth University, where he teaches courses in modern British, Irish and postcolonial literatures as well as film studies. He is the author of Writing against War: Literature, Activism, and the British Peace Movement (2017) as well as articles using political theology and peace studies to examine writers including George Bernard Shaw, Vera Brittain, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf. Sanja Bahun is Professor of Literature and Film and the University Dean of Postgraduate Research and Education at the University of Essex. She is Associate Editor of Feminist Modernist Studies, and a member of the editorial board of Modernism/modernity. Her publication record includes more than thirty book chapters and articles that appeared in journals such as Modernist Cultures, Modernism/modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Comparative Critical Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, EJES, The Faulkner Journal and others, as well as the following books: Thinking Home: Interdisciplinary Dialogues, co-editor (Bloomsbury, 2018, second edition 2020), Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning, author (Oxford University Press, 2014), Cinema, State Socialism, and Society in the USSR and Central and Eastern Europe, 1917–1989: Re-Visions, co-editor (Routledge, 2014), Myth, Literature and the Unconscious, co-editor (Karnac, 2013), Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions, co-editor (Routledge/Ashgate, 2012), Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras, co-editor (Routledge/ Ashgate, 2011), From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production, co-editor (Cambridge Scholars, 2009), Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate, co-editor (Ashgate, 2008; second, enlarged

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and revised edition Routledge, 2015) and The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism, co-editor (Cambridge Scholars, 2006). Lisa Banks is a writer and course lecturer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her scholarship has appeared in Parallel Universe: The Poetries of New Brunswick (Frog Hollow Press/Hamilton Arts & Letters, edited by Shane Neilson and Sue Sinclair, 2018), and reviews have appeared in CV2, Arc, The Antigonish Review and Canadian Literature. Rebecca Bowler is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at Keele University. She is the author of Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair and co-edited May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds with Claire Drewery. She is co-founder of the May Sinclair Society and co-General Editor on the forthcoming Edinburgh Critical Editions of the Works of May Sinclair, also with Claire Drewery and Suzanne Raitt. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to workshop and produce a digital genetic edition of one of Sinclair’s short stories, in collaboration with the Kislak Center and the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania. Her next monograph project will be Modernist Wellness, examining literary dietetics with relation to the fit/fit-for-purpose body. She is on the British Association for Modernist Studies Executive Committee and co-organises the Northern Modernism Seminar. Jamie Callison is Associate Professor of Literature in English at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway, where he teaches courses on poetry and poetics, modernism, and religion and literature. His articles on T. S. Eliot, David Jones and twentiethcentury religious culture have appeared in ELH, Literature and Theology and Modernist Cultures. He has published (with Thomas Goldpaugh) a critical edition of a previously unpublished book-length poem by David Jones entitled The Grail Mass (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). His monograph Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. Jane de Gay is Professor of English Literature at Leeds Trinity University and an Anglican priest. Her second monograph, Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), shows that Virginia Woolf was profoundly interested in, and knowledgeable about, Christianity as a faith and as a socio-political movement. Her first monograph, Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), was the first book to explore Woolf’s preoccupation with the literary past and its profound impact on the content and structure of her novels. Gregory Erickson is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at New York University’s Gallatin School, where he teaches courses on modernist literature, James Joyce, popular culture and religion. He is the author of The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), the co-author, with Richard Santana, of Religion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred (McFarland, 2008, 2016), and the co-editor of the collection Reading Heresy: Religion and Dissent in Literature and Art (De Gruyter, 2017). More recently, he published Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination: Reinventing the Word (Bloomsbury, 2022) and

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Speculative Television and the Making and Unmaking of Religion (Routledge, 2022). He is also a founding member and former president of the International Society for Heresy Studies. In his spare time, he is a professional trombone player and a member of the Thermophily Brass Trio and Orchestra 914. Luke Ferretter is Professor of English at Baylor University, where he teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century British and American literature and theory. He is the author of The Glyph and the Gramophone: D. H. Lawrence’s Religion (Bloomsbury, 2013), as well as articles on Lawrence in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, Études Lawrenciennes and D. H. Lawrence in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has also published Sylvia Plath’s Fiction: A Critical Study (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), Louis Althusser (Routledge, 2006) and Towards a Christian Literary Theory (Palgrave, 2003). Scott Freer is an independent researcher and an Associate Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. He is the author of Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods (2015) and co-editor of Religion and Myth in T.S. Eliot’s Poetry (2016). His book, American Disaster Movies of the 1970s: Crisis, Spectacle and High Modernity, as well as an edited volume, The Transmedia Legacies of T. S. Eliot’s Poetry, will be published in 2023. He is currently writing two books: American EcoHorror (Edinburgh University Press) and The Problem of Evil in Post-war British Catholic Women Writers (Bloomsbury). Alex Grafen is an independent researcher based in the United Kingdom. He has contributed entries to London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia and a chapter to Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration. Christos Hadjiyiannis is Research Fellow at the Centre for Medieval Arts and Rituals at the University of Cyprus. He is the author of Conservative Modernists: Literature and Tory Politics in Britain, 1900–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and, with Rachel Potter, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Seán Hewitt is Teaching Fellow in Modern British and Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin. His first monograph is J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2021). His debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape, 2020), won the Laurel Prize in 2020. All Down Darkness Wide, a memoir, was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA (2022). He is Poetry Critic for The Irish Times. Suzanne Hobson is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature in the English Department at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–60 (Palgrave, 2011), and co-editor of The Salt Companion to Mina Loy (Salt, 2010). She is past Chair of the British Association for Modernism and co-organiser of the London Modernism Seminar. Graham H. Jensen is a Mitacs Elevate/Accelerate Industrial Postdoctoral Fellow in Open, Collaborative Scholarship (Arts & Humanities) in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab

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at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where he is also Principal Investigator of the Canadian Modernist Magazines Project (modernistmags.ca). His most recent work on modernism, religion, Canadian poetry and the literary influence of William James is published or forthcoming in Future Horizons: Digital Humanities in Canada, William James Studies, University of Toronto Quarterly and Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews. He is currently completing his first book project, Unorthodox Modernisms: Varieties of Religious Expression in Twentieth-Century Canadian Poetry. Allan Kilner-Johnson is Associate Dean and Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Surrey. He is the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature: Castration, Narration, and a Sense of the Beginning, 1919–1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2022). Pericles Lewis is the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he also serves as Vice President for Global Strategy. He is the author of three books – Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism and Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel – and editor of The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism. He is also an editor for literature since 1900 in the Norton Anthology of World Literature. He was formerly Founding President and Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Douglas Mao is Russ Family Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Inventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation, and Justice (2020), Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860– 1960 (2008) and Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (1998), all from Princeton University Press. He is also the editor of The New Modernist Studies (Cambridge, 2021) and of the Longman Cultural Edition of E. M. Forster’s Howards End (2009), as well as the co-editor, with Rebecca Walkowitz, of Bad Modernisms (Duke, 2006). In addition, he is Series Editor of Hopkins Studies in Modernism, from Johns Hopkins University Press. Gabrielle McIntire is Professor of English Literature at Queen’s University, Canada. She is the author of Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Her essays have appeared in journals and book collections including Modernism/modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Narrative, Callaloo, The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry, The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse and The Oxford Handbook on Virginia Woolf. Her book of poetry, Unbound, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2021. Jennifer Mitchell is Associate Professor of English at Union College. She writes about and teaches classes in modernism, contemporary literatures, and gender, sexuality and queer studies. She is the author of Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction (University Press of Florida, 2020) and the co-editor of The

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Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s (Routledge, 2018). Her work has also appeared in Feminist Modernist Studies, College Literature, The D. H. Lawrence Review, The Journal of Lesbian Studies and The Journal of Bisexuality, among others. She is currently working collaboratively on a book about reading practices, modernism and gender. Mafruha Mohua teaches Postcolonial Literature in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. Her general area of research is modernism in relation to colonialism, especially that of the British Empire. She is currently preparing a monograph on T. S. Eliot, which examines his work from the perspective of Empire, as well as researching on Bengali modernism. Matthew Mutter is Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College. His first book, Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. His essays and reviews have appeared in English Literary History, Twentieth-Century Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Modernism/modernity, Common Knowledge and other journals and books. His current book project explores the resistance of American novelists and poets to the burgeoning cultural authority of the social sciences in the twentieth century while examining the broader theoretical problems at the intersection of humanistic and social-scientific knowledge. Steve Pinkerton teaches and writes about twentieth-century literature at Case Western University, USA. His monograph Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh (Oxford University Press, 2017) shows how a shared commitment to blasphemy shaped the modernist imagination from Ulysses to The Satanic Verses. His other writings reflect a range of interests in modern culture – including literary engagements with jazz, psychoanalysis and the second law of thermodynamics – and have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Studies in the Novel, Modern Fiction Studies, the Journal of Modern Literature and the African American Review. Sean Pryor is Associate Professor in English at the University of New South Wales. He writes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry, with a focus on modernism. He is the author of Poetry, Modernism, and an Imperfect World (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Poetry of Paradise (Ashgate, 2011), and he edits the journal Affirmations: of the modern. He is currently working on the history and theory of the idea of poetic technique. Andrew Radford is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His books include The Occult Imagination in Britain 1875–1947 (co-edited with Christine Ferguson, 2018), Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism: The Enchantment of Place (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Mapping the Wessex Novel: Landscape, History and the Parochial in British Literature, 1870–1940 (Bloomsbury, 2010). He has recently published a critical edition of Marie Corelli’s occult bestseller A Romance of Two Worlds (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Matte Robinson is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at St. Thomas University, Canada. Matte has been involved in the publication

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of five previously unpublished late works of H.D. He has co-edited H.D.’s Hirslanden Notebooks and authored a book on H.D., religion and the occult, The Astral H.D. He has written six articles and chapters, including contributing to The Cambridge Companion to H.D. and Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest’s Intercalaires: agrégation d’anglais series. Robinson holds a BA from St. Thomas University and an MA and PhD from the University of New Brunswick. His current research has led him to consider the relationship between esotericism, gender and sexuality within modernist writing groups and the broader intellectual communities with which they are connected. David Sherman is Associate Professor of English at Brandeis University, USA. He is the author of In a Strange Room: Modernism’s Corpses and Mortal Obligation (Oxford University Press, 2014). He has contributed articles to the Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism/modernity, The Henry James Review, Twentieth-Century Literature and Woolf Studies Annual. David’s current research project is The Machine Stops: Modernism, Human Fungibility, and the Critique of Secular Hope. This book investigates cultural responses to the fungibility of persons in modern political and economic systems. The Machine Stops argues that modernism imagined the secular as a new set of cultural strategies for preserving the social power of human traces against efficient disposal. Lorraine Sim is Senior Lecturer in Modern English Literature at Western Sydney University and current Chair of the Australasian Modernist Studies Network. She is the author of Ordinary Matters: Modernist Women’s Literature and Photography (Bloomsbury, 2016), Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience (Ashgate, 2010) and numerous articles and book chapters in the fields of modernist literature, modernity and everyday life, and feminist studies. Lorraine’s current research projects include a book on modernism and happiness, and archival studies in early twentiethcentury Australian women’s photography. Jennifer Spitzer is Associate Professor of English at Ithaca College, USA. She writes and teaches at the intersection of transatlantic modernism, psychoanalysis, modern spiritualism, and gender and sexuality. Her book Secret Sharers: The Intimate Rivalries of Modernism and Psychoanalysis, forthcoming from Fordham University Press, examines psychoanalysis as a crucial context for literary modernism by anchoring modernist arguments about aesthetic autonomy, literary form, literary interpretation and the role of the critic in debates between modernists and psychoanalysts during the first half of the twentieth century. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Journal of Modern Literature, Studies in the Novel, Modern Language Quarterly and other journals. Erik Tonning is Professor of Literature at the University of Bergen, Norway. His books include Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen 1962–1985 (Peter Lang, 2007), Modernism and Christianity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse (Brill, 2015) and Broadcasting in the Modernist Era (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). Lara Vetter is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches modernism, poetry, life writing and American literature. Her books

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include Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose (with Annette Debo) (Modern Language Association Press, 2011), By Avon River by H.D. (University Press of Florida, 2014) and A Curious Peril: H.D.’s Late Modernist Prose (University Press of Florida, 2017). Leigh Wilson is Professor of English Literature at the University of Westminster. She is the author of Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (Edinburgh University Press, 2013; paperback 2015) and co-editor of The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Selected Writings of Andrew Lang (2 vols, Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Mimi Winick is a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century anglophone literature and religion. She completed her chapter in this volume while a Postdoctoral Fellow on the ‘Transcendence and Transformation’ initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School (HDS). In 2020–21, she was Research Associate and Visiting Lecturer of Women’s Studies and Society in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at HDS, where she was writing a book on the first generation of women theorists of religion. She is affiliate faculty in the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she has taught Victorian and modernist literature and literary theory. Her essays on literature and religion have appeared in journals including Nineteenth-Century Literature, Modernism/modernity and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, as well as in edited collections including The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness, edited by Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford and Heather Walton (Palgrave, 2016).

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Index

Aaronson, Lazarus, 101 Achebe, Chinua, 122–3, 135 The Adelphi (journal), 55, 74 Adorno, Theodore, 8, 146, 151–4, 156, 160–1, 163–4, 322 Agamben, Giorgio, 8, 185 agnostic/ism, 36–7, 131, 186, 198, 200, 204, 206, 208, 210, 322, 392, 430–1 Alexandria, 11, 394, 458–9, 461–7, 470, 472–4, 504 Altizer, T. J. J., 412, 419 Ambelain, Robert, 54 anarchism, 101, 108, 190, 192, 510 Anglican/ism, 24, 36, 37, 39–40, 125, 187, 190, 217–18, 309, 318, 339, 373, 375–6, 382, 385 anthroposophy, 11, 12, 215, 226, 229, 337, 339, 340, 459, 460 Antioch, 458, 468 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 7 apostasy, 123, 124, 130, 188 Ariès, Philippe, 319 Assagioli, Roberto, 330 astrology, 50, 58, 60, 468 astronomy, 50, 58 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 202, 454, 504 Auerbach, Erich, 251 automatism, 363 Babbitt, Irving, 441–56 Bacchus, 73 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 208–9, 218 Bailey, Alice, 300 Baldwin, James, 6, 8, 121–36 Balzac, Honoré de, 513 Barfield, Owen, 339–40 Barnes, Djuna, 3, 11, 494–508 Barth, Karl, 281, 385 Barthes, Roland, 202, 278 Beckett, Samuel, 134, 188, 300, 412, 419 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 48, 198, 201, 218 Bell, Michael, 9, 267–9, 282 Bell, Quentin, 202

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Bely, Andrei, 460 Ben Uri Art Society, 108–9 Becker, Ernest, 319 Benson, Robert Hugh, 307 Bentham, Jeremy, 152, 156–60, 162 Berger, Peter, 8, 206 Bergson, Henri, 429, 450 Berman, Marshall, 4 Besant, Annie, 336, 346, 425 Blackwood, Algernon, 52, 305, 333, 427 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 11, 61, 290, 329–32, 335, 337, 340, 346, 425, 511 Boehme, Jacob, 202 Bomberg, David, 100–1, 103, 105, 107–11 Bottomley, Gordon, 111–12 Bramble, John, 4, 331 British Union Quarterly (journal), 25 Brittain, Vera, 350, 484 Brodetsky, Selig, 104, 111 Brontë/s, 236, 415 Brooks, Cleanth, 335 Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), 51, 54, 56, 59–60, 61, 510, 513, 519 Bryn Mawr, 52 Buber, Martin, 426 Buddhism, 11, 59, 74, 218, 329, 358, 426, 433, 435, 443, 449–50, 453, 517, 519 Butts, Mary, 3, 9, 16, 234, 240, 299–314, 344, 380, 509, 511, 516, 521 Armed with Madness, 299–305, 306, 307–9, 311–12 Death of Felicity Taverner, 304, 307 ‘The Saint’, 299–300 Traps for Unbelievers, 301, 304, 309 Calvin, John, 23 Campbell, Joseph, 333 Cannan, Gilbert, 112, 113 Carlyle, Thomas, 106 cartomancy, 58 Cassirer, Ernst, 268–9 Cavafy, Constantine, 11, 12, 457–76 Celtic Twilight 109, 291, 292

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index 531 Cézanne, Paul, 107, 218 Chekhov, Anton, 41–2 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 2, 106, 307, 380 Christian Science, 217–19, 222, 307 clairvoyance, 54, 346–7, 354, 363, 519 Coetzee, John Maxwell, 1 Cohen, Joseph, 101–2 Cohen, Sonia, 109–10 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 160–4, 338, 411 Colquhoun, Ithell, 333 Congregational/ism, 67–8 Conrad, Joseph, 9, 122, 255, 257, 321 Cooke, Harold, 57 Coomaraswamy, Anand, 333 Corelli, Marie, 307 Critchley, Simon, 8, 185–6, 190, 192 The Criterion (journal), 22, 24, 385, 441, 442, 448 Crockett, Clayton, 185 Crowley, Aleister, 509–10, 511, 512, 516, 512 Cubism, 107, 109, 215 Cullen, Countee, 83, 86–8, 92–3, 96–7 Cunard, Nancy, 454 Davids, Caroline Rhys, 426 Dawson, Christopher, 2, 448 Delphi, 55, 294, 295, 306 Derain, André, 108 Derrida, Jacques, 200 Descartes, Renee, 199, 285 The Dial (journal), 21, 301, 304, 309, 426 Doctor Who (television series), 412 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 344 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 82 Duncan, Robert, 62, 516, 520 Durkheim, Émile, 13, 390, 392, 393, 405, 452 Eagleton, Terry, 282, 296, 381 Einstein, Albert, 252, 404, 405, 406, 408, 409–10, 412–3, 415, 417, 418–9 Eisler, Robert, 437 Ekstiens, Modris, 4 Eleusinian Mysteries, 23, 56, 59 Ellis, Havelock, 54, 481, 482, 484, 490, 510 Eliade, Mircea, 333, 392 Eliot, T. S., 1, 7, 8, 10, 11, 19–34, 35, 37, 38, 45–6, 121–35, 152, 167, 182, 186, 198, 205, 235, 240, 244–7, 254–6, 258, 261, 267, 269, 274–84, 300, 301, 331, 333–5, 344, 374–5, 377, 380–8, 427, 430, 438, 441–56, 500–1, 509, 514–16 After Strange Gods, 19, 22, 28, 33, 380, 449, 453, 515–16 Four Quartets, 10, 29, 255, 258, 261, 281, 374, 382–6, 447, 451, 453 The Waste Land, 46, 125–6, 129, 205, 267, 274–9, 281, 334–5, 430, 438, 442

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The English Review (journal), 362 Epicurean/ism, 458 epiphany, 9, 200, 250–64, 307, 310, 355, 373, 380 Epstein, Jacob, 102, 107, 108, 109 The Equinox (journal), 516 Eranos (organisation), 333 Evans-Gordon, William, 105 Evans-Wentz, Walter, 295, 318 Farr, Florence, 346 Ferguson, Christine, 306, 425 Fisher King, 21, 334–5, 515 Fisher, Rudolph, 96 Flammarion, C., 54 Forster, Edward Morgan, 73, 172 Fortune, Dion (Violet Firth), 303, 509–10, 511, 513, 517 Frazer, James George, 22, 59, 235, 270, 275, 277, 279–80, 282, 291–2, 295, 300, 304, 393–4, 433–4 Freeman, Nick, 307 freemasonry, 301, 322, 330, 336 Freud, Sigmund, 50, 52, 54, 59, 252, 277, 321, 322, 333, 345, 481, 510, 513, 521 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 1, 2, 5, 58, 139, 213, 389, 390, 427, 510 Fry, Roger, 107 Frye, Northrop, 262 Galvan, Jill, 344, 349, 350 Gangulee, Nagendranath, 452, 453–4 Garrity, Jane, 190, 299, 302, 304 Gertler, Mark, 100, 101–2, 103, 105, 107, 110–13 Gandhi, Mahatma, 329–30 Gibbon, Edward, 457 Gilbert, Sandra M., 319 Gnostic/ism 84, 270, 333, 340, 425, 457, 459–61 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 335, 336, 338 Goldstein, Morris, 101 Goodison, Lorna, 10, 389–403 Grant, Duncan, 107 Grail, 21, 299–314, 335, 434 Green, Thomas Hill, 124 Gregg, Frances, 53 Griffin, Roger, 4, 5, 6, 20, 286 Gropius, Walter, 4 Gurdjieff, George, 82, 166, 511, 512 Habermas, Jürgen, 269 Halberstam, Jack, 190, 192 Hall, Radclyffe, 3, 11, 479–93 Hanegraaff, Wouter J., 302, 329, 330 Hardy, Thomas, 6, 69, 106, 200, 204 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 41, 242, 303, 307, 393–4 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 292, 319

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532 index Harry Potter, 412 Hastings, James, 435 Hawking, Stephen, 412 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 52 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 12, 14, 15, 50–66, 235, 242, 248, 282, 323, 344, 390, 402, 459, 460, 509–14, 516–21 Helen in Egypt, 54, 62, 63, 518 Hermetic Definition, 64, 518 Majic Ring, 52, 60, 61 Notes on Thought and Vision, 50, 51, 56, 518 Palimpsest, 56 Pilate’s Wife, 57, 63 Trilogy, 52, 55, 58, 60–2, 63, 282 Vale Ave, 62, 518, 520 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 358, 360, 361, 364 Heidegger, Martin, 268, 391 Hepworth, Barbara, 9, 213–32 Hermetic/ism, 60, 333, 340 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 289, 333, 516, 517, 521 Herodotus, 295 Hindu/ism, 11, 74, 202, 205, 329, 358, 426, 435, 442, 445, 446, 449–50, 453 Hirschkind, Charles, 139 Hitler, Adolf, 25, 27 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 267 Horkheimer, Max, 8, 146, 151–4, 156, 160–1, 163–4, 322 Howard, C., 59, 61 Hughes, Langston, 81, 83, 84–6, 90 Hulme, Keri, 6, 10, 389–403 Hurston, Zora Neale, 82–3, 87–90, 96–7, 394 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 90 hypnotism, 305, 306 Ibsen, Henrik, 106 Impressionism, 107, 450 Indian Home Rule, 329 Iqbal, Muhammad, 182 Islam, 6, 11, 74, 128, 426, 435, 448, 458, 461–3, 464–5, 466, 472–3 James, Henry, 344 James, William, 13, 147, 202, 205, 210, 250–64, 362, 433, 460 Jewish Association of Arts and Sciences, 109 The Jewish Chronicle (journal), 102, 107, 110 Jewish Education Aid Society, 107, 110 Jewish/ness, 8, 11, 22, 26, 100–17, 173, 240, 321, 333, 404, 426, 435, 437, 462, 468, 472, 473, 504 Johnson, James Weldon, 82 Jones, David, 2, 182, 301 Joyce, James, 3, 9, 11, 41–2, 46, 104, 131, 134, 186, 200, 207, 251, 253–7, 260, 262, 274,

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300, 316, 317–18, 324, 344, 404–21, 509, 512, 514–15, 516, 517 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 207, 254 Finnegans Wake, 153, 404, 407–9, 411–15, 418–19 Stephen Hero, 253, 257, 260 Ulysses, 41, 46, 274, 317, 318, 323, 405, 410–11, 512, 515, 517 Joynt, Maud, 433 Julian the Apostate, 307, 468 Jung, Carl, 321, 332, 333 Kabbalism, 54, 59, 62, 289 Kabir Das (poet), 202 Kafka, Franz, 134, 141 Kandinsky, Wassily, 4, 224, 226, 229, 330 Kant, Immanuel, 145, 169, 170, 206, 358, 360, 361 katabasis (descent into the underworld), 10, 129, 173–4, 320 Keats, John, 43, 131 Kenner, Hugh, 335, 520 Kingsford, Anna, 347 Klint, Hilma af, 9, 213–32 Kripal, Jeffrey, 431, 437 Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 330 Kupka, František, 226 Lang, Andrew, 292 Larkin, Philip, 320, 378–9, 383, 385 Lawrence, David Herbert, 3, 7, 8, 46, 57, 67–80, 172, 186–90, 192–3, 199, 234, 239–41, 267–74, 279, 303, 442, 521 Apocalypse, 187–9, 270, 274 Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, 267, 269–73 Kangaroo, 72–5 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 188–9 The Lost Girl, 67, 303 Mornings in Mexico, 271 The Plumed Serpent, 75–7 The Rainbow 46, 69–71 Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, 78, 272 Study of Thomas Hardy, 69 Women in Love, 72 Lebensreform movement, 337 Leftwich, Joseph, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111 Lessing, Doris, 122 Lévi, Éliphas, 513 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 452 Lewis, Clive Staples, 268, 339 Lewis, Pericles, 3, 8, 9, 35, 138, 182, 199, 200, 214, 315–27, 373, 378, 451, 480 Lewis, Wyndham, 25, 105, 107, 109, 427 Litvinoff, Emanuel, 106 Locke, Alain, 82, 87, 90, 92, 96

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index 533 London, Jack, 105 Löwy, Ruth, 111 Loy, Mina, 3, 460 Luckhurst, Roger, 9, 344, 385 Lucifer, 90–1, 96, 274 Lucifer (journal), 332, 425 Lukács, György, 122–3, 133–5, 321, 322 Luther, Martin, 23

New Thought, 307 Newman, John Henry, 210 Newton, Isaac, 415 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 109, 175, 176, 206, 252, 268–70, 275–6, 279, 281–2 Niggeratti, 82, 84, 90–2 Noguchi, Yone, 427 Nugent, Richard Bruce, 82–3, 90–7

Macaulay, Rose, 382–3, 410 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, 409–10, 415, 419 Machen, Arthur, 9, 301–2, 305–14, 333, 427 The Great Return, 9, 301, 309–10 The Secret Glory, 301, 305–10 MacLeod, Fiona (William Sharp), 427 Macauliffe, Max Arthur, 435 Mahmood, Saba, 6, 8 Malinowski, Bronisław, 154–60 Malevich, Kazimir, 226 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 253 Manichaeism, 461 Mann, Thomas, 9, 10, 134, 315–28 Mansfield, Katherine, 9, 253, 257, 261 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 109 Marsden, Dora, 109 Marsh, Edward, 105 McKay, Claude, 86 Mead, George Robert Stow, 11, 329–30, 332–5, 340, 425–40 Merezhkovsky, Dmitri, 58, 60, 61, 63 Meyrink, Gustav, 332–3 Mile End Old Town, 105 Mirrlees, Hope, 41, 438 Mithraism, 57, 333 Mondrian, Piet, 224, 226, 229, 330 Monism, 170, 363 Montparnasse, 108 Mormon/ism, 84 Moravian/ism, 50–2, 57, 59, 63 Morris, Margaret, 109 Mosley, Oswald, 22, 25 Mufti, Aamir, 138 Murray, Gilbert, 55 Murray, Margaret, 56 Musil, Robert, 122 Mussolini, Benito, 23, 27 Myers, Asher, 107 Myers, Frederic William Henry, 345–6, 431

Ogden, Charles Kay, 8, 151–65 Olcott, Henry Steele, 332, 425 Oneida Community, 509, 513 Original Sin, 19, 20, 22, 28 Orphism, 235, 437 Ouspensky, Pyotr Demianovich, 511, 512, 517 Outlander (television series), 407, 408, 414 Owen, Alex, 10, 331, 345–6 Owen, Wilfred, 430

Nazism, 25, 26, 32, 60, 188, 215, 337 Neo-impressionism, 107 Neoplatonism, 202, 333, 340 Neumann, Erich, 333 The New Age (journal), 426 The New English Weekly (journal), 22 The New Freewoman (journal), 109 The New Yorker (journal), 202

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palmistry, 305, 363 Pater, Walter, 131, 132, 133 Plutarch, 471 Picasso, Pablo, 4, 218 Pius X, 281 Pope, Alexander, 43 Post-impressionism, 107, 215 Pound, Ezra, 2, 7, 19–34, 52–3, 104, 113, 152, 235, 240, 244–5, 256, 267, 331–4, 374, 427, 430, 438, 442, 460, 513, 520–1 Powys, John Cowper, 9, 301–2, 304–5, 308, 310–14 Powys, Llewelyn, 301 Proust, Marcel, 9, 316, 317, 319, 324, 353, 412 Quaker/ism, 36–7, 52, 166, 202, 323 The Quest (journal), 11, 333–4, 423–40 Raschke, Carl, A., 8, 180, 185 Regardie, Israel, 511, 512 Reich, Wilhelm, 509, 513 Reims Cathedral, 406 Richards, Ivor Armstrong, 8, 151–65 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 144 Rocker, Rudolf, 101, 108 Rodker, John, 100, 101, 103, 108, 109–11, 240–2, 302 Roman Catholic/ism, 40, 307, 385, 409, 473, 483 Rosenberg, Isaac, 101–3, 107, 109, 110–14 Rosicrucian/ism, 52, 62, 226, 289, 330, 336, 340 Rothfeld, Otto, 436 Said, Edward, 138 Santayana, George, 167 Sassoon, Siegfried, 430 Schmitt, Carl, 183 Scholem, Gershom, 333, 426 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 358, 360, 361, 366, 367, 449 Sergeant, Philip W., 305

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534 index Shakespeare, William, 43, 45, 48, 181–2, 198, 201, 276–8 Shaw, George Bernard, 12 Sikh/ism, 435 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 395 Simmel, Georg, 142–4, 417–18 Sinclair, May, 7, 10, 344, 349–50, 358–70, 428 Slade School of Fine Art, 101, 107, 110 Society for Psychical Research, 345, 431, 432 Stein, Gertrude, 344 Steiner, Rudolf, 11, 229, 330, 335–40 Stephen, Leslie, 36, 37, 210 Stevens, Wallace, 131, 138, 146–8, 186, 234, 242, 270, 282 Stoker, Bram, 6, 11, 344, 404, 415–16, 418–19 Sufism, 202 Surette, Leon, 2, 3, 21, 23, 245, 300, 331, 334, 373, 374 Swinburne, A. C., 53, 106 Symbolism, 253 Tagore, Rabrindranath, 11, 182, 333, 427, 441–56 Taoism, 56, 218 tarot, 50, 58–9, 62, 305, 335 Taylor, Charles, 1, 5, 7, 8, 132, 206, 322, 381, 407, 427 telepathy, 343–4, 345–7, 350, 353–6 temenos, 307–8 Theocritus, 53 Theosophy, 5, 10, 57, 61, 215, 218, 226, 256, 287, 293, 307, 329–42, 425, 427, 433–6, 460 Thoreau, Henry David, 205 Thor, 73 Thurman, Walter, 82–3, 90 Tibet, 318, 330, 340 Tingley, Catherine, 330 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, 268, 339 Tolson, Melvin, 86, 96 Toomer, Jean, 3, 8, 12, 82, 166–79 transvestism, 505 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 417 Tyrell, George, 426, 438 Underhill, Evelyn, 202, 300, 303, 305, 310, 333, 361, 364, 426, 431, 433 Van Vechten, Carl, 90, 92 Vātsyāyana, Mallanaga, 240 Venus, 73, 310 Verlaine, Paul-Marie, 253 vitalism, 166, 167, 274 Vittoz, Roger, 125 Waite, Arthur Edward, 301, 305, 309, 332, 434 Wagner, Richard, 4, 338 Wallace, David Foster, 262

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Ward, Mary Augusta, 8, 121–36 Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 8, 186–93 Waugh, Evelyn, 182, 279 Weather Underground, 513 Weber, Max, 8, 143, 145–6, 404, 405, 430, 452 Weigall, Arthur, 57 Weimar, 336 Weiss, Matthias, 50 Wells, Herbert George, 3, 7, 11, 41, 152, 261, 404–7, 412–13, 417, 419–21 West, Rebecca, 5, 7, 10, 343–57 Harriet Hume, 343, 347–8, 350, 352–6 The Return of the Soldier, 343–4, 347–52 Weston, Jessie L., 59, 299–301, 304, 332–5, 426, 429–32, 434, 516 Whitby Abbey, 404, 406, 415–19 Whitechapel Boys/Group, 8, 100–4, 105, 106, 108, 110–11, 113, 114 Whitman, Walt, 166, 202, 240, 252, 449 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 236 Wilde, Oscar, 90–1 Williams, Charles, 299, 300, 301, 303, 305, 308, 311, 339 Wilson, Edmund, 301, 331 Winsten, Clare, 101, 108 Winsten, Stephen, 101, 108, 109, 111, Winterson, Jeanette, 496, 500 Wolf, Lucien, 107 Wolmark, Alfred, 109 Woolf, Virginia, 4, 7, 8, 9, 35–49, 197–212, 412 A Room of One’s Own, 36, 41, 44–5, 210 ‘A Sketch of the Past’, 35, 41, 45, 48, 197–8, 200, 205, 206 Jacob’s Room, 140, 197, 198 ‘Modern Fiction’, 41–3, 46, 200 Mrs Dalloway, 37–8, 40–1, 43, 46–7, 197, 202, 203–4, 208–9, 412 The Waves, 201, 203, 208, 209 Three Guineas, 36, 38, 45, 210 To The Lighthouse, 40–1, 46–7, 197–8, 201, 203–4, 205, 206, 209, 214, 317 Wordsworth, William, 200–1, 205, 251–2, 257, 259–62, 281, 338, 380, 417 Yeats, William Butler, 9, 61, 167, 253, 282, 285–98, 300, 331, 344, 427, 432, 438, 442, 460, 512, 514–16, 519, 521 Zangwill, Israel, 101, 105, 107 Zeus, 73, 295, 473, Zinzendorf, Nikolaus, 50 Žižek, Slavoj, 185, 486 zoology, 436 Zoroastrian/ism, 462 Zukofsky, Louis, 104

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