BERNICE MARTIN 59

Dada and England

Poet, thou art dead and damned, That speakst upon no moral text. Stevie Smith

Alan Young's book Dada and after: Extremist Modernism and English Literature, (Manchester University Press, f 17.50) is a moral text in the most important sense. It is written out of a commitment to humane values in art and life and gives no quarter to the dehumanising nihilism which is the chief enemy of these values in the modern world. Rhetorical flourish in such a cause is all too easy and there exists many a volume in which hatred of this enemy comes dangerously close to a generalised misanthropy - 'I love mankind, it's people I can't stand as Linus says in a famous Peanuts cartoon. Alan Young is emphatically not of this party. He displays that most elusive of combinations, a wide sympathy and a precise discrimination. He dismisses no writer or work of art purely on the grounds of the theory which is deemed to underlie it, even if that theory contains elements of nihilism: conversely he accepts nothing uncritically merely because its heart is in the right place. The work of practical criticism cannot be streamlined by taking ideological short cuts of that kind. Writers, after all, do frequently say more or better than they intend - or less and worse than they hope. Every text must therefore be allowed to speak for itself, and every act of critical judgement must attempt the impossible, that is, the abandonment of preconceptions and the engagement of the whole of the critic's rational intellect as well as his moral, emotional and aesthetic sensibilities. This is the standard which Alan Young sets himself and demands of the writers and critics whose work forms the subject-matter of his book.

The book has many themes but its basic task is to examine the impact upon English writing of two major European movements of extremist modernism, Dada and Surrealism. Since this impact was either negligible or negative for the most part, the focus of the analysis inevitably shifts to the internal forces which contrived to repel these unwelcome continental boarders. In short, it becomes a reassessment of the nature and roots of what is distinctively English in the English cultural tradition. A renewed concern with exploring and developing the national culture lies behind a number of recent publishing ventures, including PN Review, perhaps the most successful of the little magazines of the 1970s and a forum in which Alan Young has appeared. In this book he approaches the issues within the framework of literature as a discipline but his arguments and findings have a wider

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relevance. Facets of the same debate appear in history, philosophy, sociology, political science and the new hybrid studies in popular culture. For the last decade a version of it has riven and revivified English Marxism in the form of a contest between Perry Anderson and E. P. Thompson. A similar preoccupation informs much of the critical discussion in education and underlies the controversy in the Established Church about the uniqueness of the English liturgical inheritance.

It would be easy - and misleading - to caricature this debate as one in which radical innovators confront conservative traditionalists. Certainly at one level it always addresses the supposed non-revolutionary nature of modern English culture - in politics, the arts and intellectual life - as the ’problem’ which calls for elucidation. The ‘radicals’ find English culture wanting in adventurousness; it is seen as impoverished by its insulation from continental influences, woefully sleepy, pragmatic, out of date, smug and, worst of all, philosophically inchoate and uninformed. Yet the ’traditionalist’ defence against this set of charges is by no means uniformly conservative in the values it enshrines. A brief glance at the controversy within English Marxism reveals that the supposed polarity between traditionlconservatism and innovationhadicalism misses the real point.

Perry Anderson, for the ’radical’ view, has argued that the English are chronically pre-theoretical and pre-political: English culture has produced neither a revolutionary proletariat nor a radical intelligentsia in the European sense. The English may become intellectuals but they never transform themselves into a force capable of using sharp philosophical weapons to confront the ruling class. In Anderson’s view, such glimmers of radicalism as do appear and most of the articulate ideological defences of tradition and of capitalism are the product of immigrks who have imported European models into English intellectual life. E. P. Thompson’s reply to this account is a detailed documentation of the creation of an indigenous English radicalism within the working-class movement itself and in a literature of social and political criticism which encompasses the stumbling eloquence of the self-educated working man, the tradition of prophetic preaching, the political pamphleteers and the oratory of a Cobbett. He shows the English working class as actively involved in making its own radical culture in response to concrete historical circumstances. The debate between Anderson and Thompson becomes a contest of philosophical stances: between deterministic and humanistic versions of Marxism, between history as the scientific exemplification of a theoretical system and history as the art of humane reflection upon events. It is emphatically not a neat choice between ‘radical’ and ’conservative’ interpretation and values.

I hold no particular brief for either participant in this particular

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controversy although I respect Thompson’s humanity and his craft skill as a historian. I merely present the example as a cautionary tale to underline the absurdity of false polarisation and the possibility of defending English culture precisely for its radical characteristics. It may serve also to indicate the existence of parallel issues in the social sciences and in literature. The reluctance of the English to embrace the theoretical systems of continental thought and their unwillingness to use art as a weapon of revolutionary cultural politics recur as issues in sociology, philosophy and political science. Such concerns may be seen as part of the wider context of Alan Young’s study. I hope that social scientists as well as students of literature will read his book not only for its content but because it is a model of concreteness, lucidity and respect for evidence in a controversy too often infected by vagueness and polemic.

The main body of Alan Young’s material is the little magazines, the small, independent literary journals of criticism and poetry published in England between 1916 and 1950. He offers a careful and scrupulously fair review which traces the English response to Dada and Surrealism. His unequivocal conclusion is that there was no serious English involvement with either movement: that much would readily be conceded by any informed observer. The more challenging part of the argument, however, is that this was a considered rejection rather than an insular smugness bred of backwardness: ’far from being simply a result of narrow-minded and bigoted ignorance on the part of the English, the rejection of both an extremist sensibility and what are regarded as the appropriate techniques for the expression of that sensibility could be an informed and thoroughly cogent act. That it may also sometimes be wrong-headed and mistaken is a different possibility which I also intend to discuss’ (p. 37).

The assumption of commentators such as Edward Lucie-Smith that the English arts were necessarily impoverished by their rejection of European extremist modernism is subjected to ruthless questioning by Alan Young. who believes that some features of these movements were profoundly undesirable. In two masterly and economical chapters he summarises and illustrates first Dada (Chapter 1) and later Surrealism (Chapter 4). In doing so he makes very clear distinctions between technical, stylistic and conceptual innovations which were anti-traditional but not intrinsically anti-human and those which amount to bleak cynicism or demonic nihilism: between the temporary chaos of artistic renewal and the ultimate chaos of cosmic meaninglessness. The Dadaiste use of ideas of chance in creation, their iconoclastic attitudes to the sacred role of the artist, their exploration of artistic media, for example, in experimenting with the elemental nature of rhythm and sound for their own sake, receive a more than sympathetic

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treatment, andDr Young’s delight in Guillaume Apollinaire shines through his account. What he rejects with passionate certainty is the view ‘that the world is basically absurd in the deepest nihilistic (and metaphysical) sense, and that Dadaism is therefore the artist’s only adequate or true response’ (p. 37). Similarly with Surrealism, a far more complex and many-stranded movement: the tapping of the imagery and forms of the subconscious mind, the element of play involved in visual and verbal punning, the use of collage, for example, are all welcomed as part of the international vocabulary of modernism. Again what is rejected is purely destructive anarchy, the abandonment of reason, the dominance of death and what Alan Young in one of his many pungent phrases calls ’an anti-human viitdictiveness’. Those who value Dada and its offshoots primarily for its contribution to revolutionary cultural politics, or who wish to see the bourgeoisie overthrown at any cost, or who see the world as a grim absurdity, a bad joke made at man‘s expense by senseless forces, will hardly accept Alan Young‘s verdict, but they cannot complain that the battle lines are not clearly drawn.

The body of the book is devoted to showing exactly how and why English writers rejectedDada and Surrealism. Occasionally they threw out both the modernist baby and the nihilist bathwater but in the crucial instances modernist developments could draw on sources within the English tradition and the classical canon without recourse to the equivocal new European movements. As Alan Young points out, a period which saw the seminal work of Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Edward Thomas and Virginia Woolf is self-evidently not one in which the English language is in a stagnant state as a vehicle of artistic expression. Eliot, while tolerably well informed about Dada and Surrealism, was convinced that they were a distinctively French cultural disorder irrelevant to English writing. Joyce (pace Stoppard) never gave Dada a first, let alone a second glance in Zurich but simply pursued his own literary revolution in peace. Moreover, when the French Surrealists are pleased to claim Swift, Blake, ’Monk’ Lewis and Lewis Carroll as spiritual precursors, it is implausible to claim that the English are cut off from ‘Surrealist’ influences and models.

Alan Young pursues his argument in a thorough chronological account of writing in the ’little magazines’. His case is that the flowering of English poetry and fiction in the first two decades of this century was paralleled by a revitalisation of critical standards through the work of the literary reviews which sprang up or re-formed after the first world war. He pays particular attention to The Criterion under Eliot‘s editorship, The Adelphi under John Middleton Murry and The Calendar of Modern Letters under Edgell Rickword. All these magazines pursued a policy of publishing experimental and avant-garde English work so long as it ‘observed the general conventions of

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intelligent and rational communication’ while rejecting continental nihilism. The case of Dada after 1918 was crucial for all the later developments. The

literary establishment in England was dominated by relics of the Victorian and neo-Georgian schools in whose hands form had deteriorated into mechanical formulae and whose undiscriminating condemnation fell upon modernism and foreignness tout court. The English Review and J. C. Squire‘s London Mercury tended to sneer at all forms of modernism despite the fact that Squire himself published new writers such as Graves, Sassoon and Rickword. The achievement of the new magazines was to break this stultlfying monopoly and to establish a canon of critical practice which allowed for discrimination within modernist work as well as attacking what was dead in the conventions of the immediate past. Young argues persuasively that the Sitwell caterie with its little magazine Wheels cannot be seriously considered as ‘English Dada‘. Their luxuriant Bohemianism was all on the stylish surface: the upper middle class at play stayed within the English tradition of satire, word-play and theatricality without ever taking up anti-art or nihilistic postures. (It is pleasant, in passing, to see Dr Young effect a quiet repair to the Sitwell reputation after Leavis’s heavy-handed dismissal.)

Aldous Huxley, Harold Monro, F. S. Flint, Ezra Pound, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington and T. S. Eliot were among those who examined Dada carefully - and here Dr Young shows beyond doubt that these influential figures were well informed about the continental, especially the French, scene as well as about New YorkDada. F. S. Flint in particular seems to have acted almost as informal tutor to the whole modernist school in his 1920 reviews of the French poets in Monro’sMonthly Chapbook. In the end Flint rejected the anarchy of the new movement and the ethical implications of Tzara’s manifesto. Pound and Hwdey both flirted with Dada but only so far as it could be used to castigate the imbecilities of the current establishment: ultimately both stopped well short of accepting its fundamental nihilism. Wyndham Lewis, a pre-war Vorticist, came to see Dada as the betrayer of modernism: its bitter cynicism was morally repugnant and its antics, by turning art itself into foolishness and scandal, had alienated the public beyond hope of recovery. Aldington, one of the many writers deeply affected by the destruction and chaos of the war, saw the chaos of Dada as an extension of the evil from which he sought salvation. His solution was to re-root himself in the tradition of English writing. Eliot, the towering figure of the whole inter-war period in criticism and publishing as well as in poetry itself, grounded all his work in an explicit and cogent commitment to the whole European past. This re-attachment to tradition was the method of renewal favoured by both Romantics (represented by The

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Adelphi) and classicists (represented by The Criterion). What was of value in Dada - its iconoclasm, its individualism and its will to play - was unoriginal, and what was original was as sinister as it was irrelevant.

After this, Surrealism stood little chance. As Alan Young points out, England was not alone in ignoring the French movement in its first decade from the mid-1920s: all over Europe it was treated as an insignificant cdterie, rather than the sine qua non of modernism. In England it received very little explicit attention although particular instances of extremist modernism were discussed in the magazines with some frequency. Some of the influences which had fed into Surrealism, such as Freudian ideas, did receive sympathetic attention without being regarded as distinctively Surrealist property. Auden for instance was deeply affected by the concept of the unconscious but entirely unpersuaded by Surrealism. Rickword in The Calendar Of Morlern Letters argued for an honest confrontation of man’s sadistic tendencies but dismissed Surrealism as nothing more than a fashionable literary cult.

In the mid-1930s something resembling a belated Surrealist movement did appear in England. Herbert Read and David Gascoyne were its most prominent exponents, and Roger Roughton‘s Contemporay P o e t y And Prose was the magazine which came closest to being a shop window for English Surrealist writing. Even here it is hard to identify any serious component of radical nihilism however. What we see is a playful rather than a politically and morally anarchic Surrealism: England had missed what Breton called the ‘anarchic’ stage of the movement and caught up with it at the second ’rational’ stage. The English Surrealists were not even prepared to jettison the English past-’Shakespeare and all that’ in Hugh Sykes Davies’s words - but saw Surrealism as a dialectical response to that past. By the mid-1930s Surrealism had anyway been massively outbid as the most credible carrier of a revolutionary message by the hard political movements of Fascism and Communism. In France Aragon abandoned Surrealism for the Communist Party. The English Left had little time for Surrealism: it was dismissed in The Leff Review by Anthony Blunt, among others, as bourgeois pseudo-revolution. In Alan Young’s assessment two points are crucial. The first is the mildness of the English movement: its playfullcomic tone is a far cry from the ’unremitting defeatism, demoralisation and aggression’ advocated by Hugnet. The second is the very minor stature of the adherents: the major English writers are not found in Surrealist ranks (although he drops an intriguing hint that Dylan Thomas might be considered as influenced by Surrealism. What a pity not to see the case developed!). Again, however, the message is that nihilism could gain no purchase on English culture. The case had been put and definitively rejected in the 1920s. After

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that English modernism was too strong and internally vital to need continental extremism and, further, was too explicitly attached to humane moral values and to its own literary roots to be tempted by nihilism.

But now I come to my puzzlement and my grumbles about this book. It arrives at the 1940s and abruptly changes direction and tone. In fact I suspect that Alan Young has really written two books in one. The first, which I have outlined above, is eloquent, scholarly, impeccably documented, subtle and good-mannered. It is also very convincing. The second book, or more accurately the embryo-treatise comprising chapter 8 ‘Post Dada in Enghsh writing 195&1980’ and a brief ‘Afterword’ is staccato, fragmentary, partisan and intermittently angry. It is very unsatisfying and poses a large question which the book never answers.

The premise of the ‘second book’ is that somehow nihilism and cynicism did find their way into English culture and English writing in the period following World War 11. Alan Young glances briefly in the direction, again, of French nihilistic existentialism and suggests that it now ’percolates through the middlebrow levels of British cultural life’. Yes. But how strange, given his previous analysis. He looks, too, at Neo-Dada in the post-war arts, visual as well as literary. Again, how does that come to be so fashionable? He examines in a little more detail the politico-literary underground of the 1960s and pop poetry, and finds more evidence of nihilism, often compounded by banality as well as irrationality. His thesis is that since the war ‘a joyless, violent and destructive spirit, one which has tended to be anti-human and despairing about the future, has permeated the arts’. In one angry and over-condensed sentence he cites the ‘grim metaphysical stance’ of Ted Hughes, the ‘hate-filled plays’ of Harold Pinter and the ‘cynical novels’ of Kingsley Amis as fashionable instances of this cultural disease. A wholesale massacre of that kind really does call for practical criticism to justify itself! (I am not even sure that he is quite fair to Jeff Nuttall who reacts quite sharply against the nihilistic implications of his own revolutionary practice in ‘Bomb Culture’.)

I do not see it as my task as reviewer to salvage any of these reputations but the parallel between Amis and Wyndham Lewis (to whom Alan Young is rightly tender) is hard to resist. In his anger against nihilism Wyndham Lewis turned so bitter that his own tone often sounded defeatist, echoing the negativity of the thing he hated. A not dissimilar process might be seen in Amis whose dislike of and contempt for nihilistic modernism are well known. In my view his novels are, anyway, not so much’cynical’ as based on a comedy of bad temper raised to cosmic proportions. Moreover one novel, Russian Hide and Seek, surely could engage a certain amount of Alan Young’s sympathy precisely because it is a fictional contemplation of the very

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problem of the cultural dominance of nihilism. In that book Amis portrays an England with its cultural tradition destroyed, reduced to the state of a society literally without human values. It is not great art but it is a timely parable: can parables really be cynical?

I am not suggesting that Alan Young’s verdict is nonsensical, and would readily concede that comedies of manners today depend on knowingness, precocity and an irony which easily becomes cynicism. In making my small demur I am not intending to challenge Alan Young’s overall argument. Indeed I agree with his verdict that a de-humanising tendency characterises an alarmingly wide spectrum of modem art. I am merely frustrated that the argument became so telescoped that there was no room for the virtues of the ’first book’ where no statement was conjured from empty air and no judgement was detached from the author‘s wide human sympathy. The splendid part of ‘book two’ is Dr Young’s highly persuasive account of the work of two experimental poets, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Christopher Middleton as a brief illustration of the continuing possibility of humane modernism even today. The roots of these two writers are international as well as local, and one clear message with which Alan Young leaves us is that the inward-turning of the tradition of English writing which was a strength and a defence in the 1920s has now become staleness and stagnation, impotent against the current wave of nihilism.

The questions posed by or implied in this final section are important. Their answers, as I have argued elsewhere, lie as much in social changes as in developments in the arts themselves and, crucially, in popular culture. Historians, social scientists and critical commentators in the arts need to do much more to pool their resources if we are to understand cultural shifts of this import and scale. I suspect that Alan Young has a great deal more to say on this subject. Won‘t some publishers please commission him to turn chapter 8 into a real second book?