should be the glamour of young gentlemen.’
Schools? Eton (BH), Marlborough (AB).
Schoolfriends? Harold Acton (BH), Louis MacNiece (AB).
Poetic milieu? Edith Sitwell (BH), John Betjeman (AB).
Universities? Oxford (BH), Cambridge (AB).
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| Anthony Blunt Brian Howard |
In short, two aesthetes of their time – whose schooldays were devoted to the callow pursuit of attitudes – would later demonstrate there was substantially more to their avant-garde posturing than larking about as pasticheurs.
Of course, in all fairness, the early vocation of Blunt, a maths wizard, was never that of a poet yet the sensitivities of a poet were nurtured by his compeer, fellow Marlburian MacNeice, who encouraged him to make this rare attempt, never to be repeated . . .
Specimen extract. (By Blunt, age 17, Marlborough.)
This edge of the abyss
Is fixed immutable
Beyond the power of time
Or God . . .
By contrast, for young Brian Howard his acute self-awareness and self-deprecation granted powers of shrewd discrimination to a boy, who – at age 13 – could write to his mother that he feared he’d been cursed with a ‘fraudulent imagination’, an opinion at odds with his earliest mentor, Edith Sitwell, who was in awe of his precocity: ‘I see more remarkable talent and promise in your work than of any other poet under twenty . . .’ (with the exception of her brother Sacheverell, she adds, of course). Brian was discovered by Edith when he was sixteen, at which age he records he won the Junior Long Jump at Eton.
Specimen extracts. (By Howard, age 16, Eton.)
. . . the green ocean . . . the green ocean . . . like a towel-horse
painted in half . . . paperbags are significant
of the futility of the kosmos when they bob up and down . . .
yes, dripping, dripping and the sensations of sticking
plaster that won’t come off . . .
it’s Verdi (throttled with light lager) . . . like acrid little chopped
up canary wings, falling down in jerks and bursts and jangles out of
a blue-gilt sky . . . they trip along the long parallels of
dry, biscuity planking . . .
Immortal lines. ‘Four lips make a mouth.’
These imagistic aspirational pseudo-Sitwellian lines composed at Eton are from Brian’s Expression of Sea and Beach from the Pier Buffet and are precursors of his poem in the anthology, Oxford Poetry 1924 (co-edited by Harold Acton), which contains the not so inconsequential biscuity line:
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| Elementary utilitarianism denies adjectival fripperies. |
A plutocratic pursuit by latent Leftists or Paper Marxists?
The First Englishman to Foresee the Nazi Horror.
For Brian Howard, however, whose boyhood in high society was lived uneasily outside the unspoken English Jewish Pale (mid-20th Century, for instance, the ‘No Jews’ policy in many of London’s gentlemen’s clubs was well known), there had been an early introduction at Eton to not-so-subtle degrees of anti-Semitism from his schoolfellows.
He was allowed no quarter in defence of his family name. ‘How is the Duke of Norfolk today?’ his classmates would taunt. He inveighed against his father – a fashionable art dealer — who, at birth, had presented him ‘. . . with an obviously false and pretentious name – not even adding the slight support of deed of poll.’ Shaped by such an upbringing, then, his precocious awareness of global political events fomenting the persecution of the Jews was matched only by his astonishingly mature assimilation of the most extreme avant-gardist cultural developments of the interwar years.
And unsurprising, therefore, that the exotic Howard – tormented by doubt as to his Jewish identity – was, according to Erika Mann, ‘. . . probably the first Englishman to recognise the full immensity of the Nazi peril and to foresee, with shuddering horror, what was to come.’
(In
1939, Brian wrote in a poem published in June of Britain’s anguished
apprehension under the shadow of the ‘Phoney War’: ‘. . . fingers crack like the prophecy
of shooting.’ Indeed, a prophetic line.)
Two years earlier, when a shooting war broke out in Spain, with Nazi Germany taking sides against the Republican government, Brian Howard was to the fore in condemning espousers of the Fascist cause. Paradoxically, he found himself set against the Imagist hero whose ‘unsurpassable technique and poetic vision’ he had venerated in his schooldays. Ezra Pound wrote of the Civil War: ‘Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.’
Brian Howard wrote: ‘A people, nearly half of whom has been denied the opportunity to learn to read, is struggling for bread, liberty and life against the most unscrupulous and reactionary plutocracy left in existence . . . With all my anger and love, I am for the People of Republican Spain.’
Don’t call me comrade.
It is of course wholly simplistic to remind ourselves with 20/20 hindsight that, for the many fervent British anti-Fascists of the Thirties, it took the fatal aberration of a dewy-eyed idealism in the face of merciless dictatorships to finally convince them to ally themselves to Communism as the only acceptable countervailing champion of the People . . . a conversion to be regretted in disillusion soon enough. Moscow show trials and Stalin’s purges would irrevocably change their minds.
In this sense, it’s intriguingly significant that in 1936 W. H. Auden (who never joined the Communist Party despite complex social views apparent in his Thirties political writings) changed ‘Comrades’ to ‘Brothers’ in his poem of 1932, Comrades Who When the Sirens Roar.
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| Да здравствует сталинская конституция! Long Live the Stalinist Constitution! |
The trajectory of Blunt’s beliefs was to meet that same disillusion. Recruited by the NKVD just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was swept up in the groundswell of anti-Fascism that had driven his contemporaries to support the Republican cause. (One’s enemy’s enemies are one’s friends.) Yet, as a young Cambridge don of cold-eyed didacticism, it’s more likely the superior role of ideologue tempted him to a decisive step further to take sides beyond the boundaries of Western Europe and sign up to the Soviet utopian dream, enlisted, however, more as a talent-spotter of Cambridge leftists from among promising undergraduates disposed to be suborned . . . fledgling spies destined for the heart of the British Establishment.
Blunt at that time (early 1937) played the canniest game of poker insofar as his Russian handlers never permitted him to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.
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| Red propaganda laid on a bit too thick? |
(Plus ça change . . . today, UK academics turn a blind eye to the increasing ideological threats posed by Chinese influence implicit in our universities’ acceptance of the ‘soft power’ that defines faculty funding issuing from autocratic strategists in Beijing. Students in fields of research such as advanced materials or quantum mechanics, or artificial intelligence or biotech, are particularly vulnerable to approaches by agents of hostile states.)
And as for High Treason and the betrayal of Britain by pinning his colours to the cause of the Soviet Union, Blunt answered, ‘We did not think of ourselves as working for Russia. We were working for the Comintern.’ Or to put it another way, is this the lofty intellectual’s claim to being an internationalist, to be ranked with Einstein, say, as a citizen of the world?
Incurable nostalgists.
But I digress, so let us quickly return to my modest attempt to correlate the parallel paths taken by a Marlburian Cantabrigian (Blunt) and Etonian Oxonian (Howard) towards our arrival at a cultural sensibility that can satisfy a 21st Century notion of a moralistic poetising aesthete, if such there be. In other words, ‘How does a writer, precipitated into a moral fog, remain forensically honest?’ (The term, ‘forensically honest’ was applied to a contemporary poet in my hearing the other day.)
For the answer, perhaps we should seek our True Oracle and Champion Skewerer of Communism – George Orwell. A dedicated polemicist and, indeed, a collector of polemical pamphlets, Orwell was also an unwitting pasticheur . . .
See Rural Bard or Faltering Palimpsestic Balladeer? https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/05/
When Orwell wrote the concluding couplet of an unfinished poem, the refrain must have persisted like an earworm from his days residing in Southwold, Suffolk . . .
When good King Edward ruled the land
And I was a chubby boy.
Imitative (unwittingly?) of a celebrated early nineteenth century Suffolk versifier, Orwell’s poem reveals the incurable nostalgist who hankers for the belle époque certainties of his youth. As his biographer spells out, ‘He was, indeed, a revolutionary in love with the Edwardian era.’
Can the same be said, then, of Blunt and Howard, two cultural rebels yet, in reality, both cleaving to dreams of a ‘Golden Country’ (cf. Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four) while seismic political convulsions would somehow leave them unscathed?
Did Blunt, who had endangered the lives of one hundred and seventy-five thousand Allied servicemen, by betraying the secret of the D-Day landings to his Soviet masters, truly believe that he would return to a liberated Paris, cultural capital of the world, where the cognoscenti who had survived the Occupation would prostrate themselves at his feet? Indeed, did Blunt believe too that Paris was the eternal pleasure-dome of the fevered imaginings of Germany’s occupying troops, a belief expressed by Ernst Jünger – writer and decorated Wehrmacht captain and uninvited boulevardier of pillaged Parisian streets – in his denigratory observation, ‘One realises that the city was founded on the altar of Venus.’
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| In Search of the Fourth Man by Catherine Eisner was published in the literary journal, Ambit, issue 193, Summer 2008. Particular reference is made to the avant-gardist photomonteur, Helmut Herzfeld, a committed Communist, whose 1938 photo- montage memorialising the victims of Guernica outstrips in its passion the abstruse figurations of fellow-Communist, Picasso. |
Commie-Tsars . . . Self-Elective Illiterate Minion-Dominions.
Perhaps Blunt, the Francophile and distinguished francophone, truly did believe la France éternelle and her cultural treasures would somehow survive her defeat for cherishment by world citizens under the benign patronage of the Comintern. (A new interpretation, perhaps, of what the Nazis derided as Kulturbolschewismus?)
Is that what Blunt truly wanted? Or had he a liking to be ruled by the Commi-czars of a self-elective illiterate minion-dominion such as the Rumania of Ceaușescu? Orwellian motto: ‘Ignorance is Strength.’
Der neue Wilhelminismus. The Answer?
Englands und Deutschlands akute Nostalgie? The coronation of Charles III earlier this year brought to mind the writings of the
conservative monarchist, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, an anglophile, whose Diary of a Man in Despair (Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten: Zeugnis einer inneren Emigration) describes the rise from a
shabby ‘Furnished Room’ of ‘The-Man-with-the-Forelock’ and the domination of
the Masses by a cabal of Industrialists and suborned generals from the
early 1930s to the diarist’s summary execution by pistol shot (Genickschuss) in Dachau in 1945.
He writes: ‘Nationalism: a state of mind in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else’s.’
Reck concluded that to reconcile his own ethos to some semblance of civic rectitude required a return to Wilhelminism (Wilhelminismus)
as the guarantee of peace when confronted with revolution of any stripe
(Communism or National Socialism). He refers, of course, to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and King of Prussia, forced to abdicate at the end of WWI.
What a pity, then, we have missed our own chance to live under Wilhelminism now Charles III has the throne. Maybe his heir, our Prince William, could remedy this omission as a salve to the troubled American Collective Unconscious. Prince William is, after all, named as America’s most popular public figure ahead of Trump and Zelensky. Perhaps William could assure world peace in the guise of the Count of Nassau, and by assuming this stirring title accorded one of his ancestors, King William III of England, he’ll return to rule the Amerikaanse Hollanders in New York and any other province or state eager to welcome him, as though the events of 1776 had all been a dreadful mistake.
It’s clear to me that those conflicted nostalgists, Blunt and Howard, would have found this monarchical parlour trick an agreeable expedient, each of them absolved of an overburdened conscience . . . Brian Howard’s guilt that his modest oeuvre had not been truly iconoclastic enough and that he’d be remembered merely as an unfulfilled worldling . . . Anthony Blunt’s guilt that by the rigidity of his ideological posture he had denied the legacy of his nationhood, the gravest of too many broken taboos whose ultimate sanction was a sentence of ignominy. . . to be stripped of his knighthood and removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
The icy cerebrality of Blunt’s nature from his earliest undergraduate days can be measured by the occasion when the elite Cambridge debating society, the Apostles, met to vote on the question ‘Must art come from the heart?’ Both Blunt and Wittgenstein voted. Both were Trinity men. Both were mathematicians. One was a philosopher. One would be a spy. Blunt voted ‘No;’ Wittgenstein ‘Yes’. Needless to spell it out. Humanities versus Maths. Thought versus feeling. Blunt’s was the bloodless ideologue’s answer.
Yet, in the end, both Blunt and Howard slipped back – more or less resignedly – into the formalisms of the English culture that had bred them. Ideological Nimbys. Yes, revolution is all very well, but Not In My Back Yard. And looking back, doubtless Brian questioned whether his trail-blazing had truly been so far ahead of the ancien régime.
Brian Howard, a self-confessed failure, would still hold fast to the haughty manner defined by his penchant for classical axiomatic epigrams he’d striven to polish in his undergraduate years. Characteristically, Brian, a cocaine addict and a tuft-hunting colossal snob who toadied up to peers of the realm attending Oxford, had the ironic motto, ‘Put your trust in the Lords’ blazoned on a banner strung across his undergraduate rooms. Where, then, is the spirit of the 1937 barricades and of his championing of the ‘People of the Republic’ in his jaded oft-quoted remark, ‘Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.’ Did his witticism refer to the thirty-somethings of all Spanish peasantry?
In such a stratified society, did the coteries of Blunt and Howard ever collide? When the Communist ‘recruiter’ of Blunt, his close friend Guy Burgess, escaped to the USSR, a newspaper manhunt was launched, and by the strangest of coincidences, which made world headlines, it was Brian Howard, while partying in Asolo in Italy, who was mistaken for the missing Cambridge spy. One posturing, flamboyant Englishman is much like any other, one supposes, in the eyes of our detractors on the Continent.
And for Blunt in retreat maybe there was escape too; escape into the gentlemanly preoccupations of the quondam don, where could be found the consolations of his last great fixation: the convoluted brilliant mind of mathematician Francesco Borromini, the 17th Century architect of Roman Baroque . . . a fixation directed with ‘maniacal concentration’, we learn.
We can only guess and wonder at the attraction held by those complex Borrominian geometries that are seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through transformational interpenetrations, charged with the power to resolve, say, the intersection of two opposing planes into a miraculously invisible conjunction.
Mmm . . . yes, we can only guess at why such geometric ambiguities held such an attraction for Blunt.
A compulsion to study a great architect who can neatly resolve two opposing planes at an imperceptible conjunction?
How emblematic of a man who could with such ease switch ideological hobby horses mid-stream, as it were, and serve simultaneously as a spy for Communist Russia and as a loyal liegeman of HM The Queen. Arise Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO, knight of the realm and Keeper of the Crown’s Pictures . . . a liegeman who throughout his service during WW2 in MI5 passed over a thousand classified secret documents to his Soviet handlers, arduously memorised or copied under intense pressure and the constant threat of exposure.
Post-modern or Post-ironic Bobos?
Did I almost forget? In my notional prosodic contest between a Marlburian Cantabrigian and Etonian Oxonian, I conclude that Oxford won – thumpingly – by a length at Chiswick Bridge.‘It is obviously impossible that I—son of a Jewish mother and a Communist father, brought up on the republican values of the most progressive French petite bourgeoisie and immersed through my literary studies in the humanism of Montaigne and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Surrealist revolution and the Existentialist worldview—could ever be tempted to “sympathize” with anything to do with Nazism, in any shape or form.’
No. An adherent of Nazism? No. Never. But the French would no more abandon their communistic societal underpinning than they would enter Le Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris without a horse. And how intriguing to les Alliés Binet’s despatch must be for those still among us who liberated the land of les cocos.
Last word
Or to be fair, should, perhaps, the last word on these thorny questions be that of a KGB officer from the Third Department of the USSR’s Foreign Directorate whose terse verdict on the convolutions of our well-bred disingenuous Cambridge spies was to dismiss them as: ‘Ideological shit.’
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So very Oulipian . . . so very self-referential . . . so very Borrominian those geometries of the mind that are seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through transformational interpenetrations, charged with the power to resolve the intersection of two opposing lines of thinking into a miraculously ambivalent conjunction. Oh. Hang on! Orwell had a term for it. Doublethink: the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory meanings as correct. Doublethink: ‘The Mutability of the Past.’ |
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
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