Artists of the Right Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  D. H. Lawrence

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Gabriele D’Annunzio

  Filippo Marinetti

  W. B. Yeats

  Knut Hamsun

  Ezra Pound

  Wyndham Lewis

  Henry Williamson

  Roy Campbell

  About the Author

  ARTISTS OF THE RIGHT

  RESISTING DECADENCE

  by

  K. R. Bolton

  Edited By Greg Johnson

  Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.

  San Francisco

  2012

  Copyright © 2012 by K. R. Bolton

  All rights reserved

  Cover image: Portrait of Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis

  Cover design by Kevin I. Slaughter

  Published in the United States by

  Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.

  P.O. Box 22638

  San Francisco, CA 94122 USA

  http://www.counter-currents.com

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-935965-13-8

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935965-14-5

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-935965-15-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bolton, K. R. (Kerry Raymond), 1956-

  Artists of the right : resisting decadence / by K. R. Bolton ; edited with a foreword by Greg Johnson.

  p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-935965-13-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-935965-14-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-935965-15-2 (ebook) 1. Literature--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Fascism and literature. I. Johnson, Greg, 1971- II. Title.

  PN56.F35B65 2012

  809’.93358--dc23

  2012014610

  Foreword

  Leftists think that their belief in human equality makes them better than the rest of us. They are particularly wedded to the idea that they are not just the party of humanity but of the intellectual and artistic elites. Thus it is a profound embarrassment to the Left that some of the greatest creative minds of the twentieth century—including leading modernists—were men of the Right, and not just conservatives, but fascists, National Socialists, and fellow travelers.

  Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right: Resisting Decadence focuses on ten leading twentieth-century literary figures: D. H. Lawrence, H. P. Lovecraft, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Filippo Marinetti, W. B. Yeats, Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Williamson, and Roy Campbell.

  All ten were immensely accomplished. Yeats and Hamsun both won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Lawrence, Pound, Marinetti, and D’Annunzio were commanding figures of their day. Campbell, Williamson, and Lewis (the last a first-rate painter as well) enjoyed smaller but intensely appreciative audiences, whereas Lovecraft’s growing fame is almost entirely posthumous.

  As Joseph S. Salemi has remarked, the independence of mind that allowed these artists to break from Left-wing orthodoxy also prevented them from forming a new orthodoxy of the Right. They disagreed on many issues, including religion, economics, and the finer points of political ideology.

  Yet to a man, they were united in their rejection of human equality—the common root of capitalism and communism—and their affirmation of a hierarchical model of society. Yet they sought a hierarchical society free of exploitation and invidious distinctions, upholding an organic model of society in which all parts must serve the common good of the whole. Finally, they were united in their rejection of atomistic individualism, although they also affirmed the possibility of creative and heroic individualism.

  As Rightists, these artists rejected modern decadence and sought to preserve and restore healthier pre-modern social forms within the context of modernity. As artists, they often explored modern decadence from the inside, even as they upheld a longing for something higher: a form of life characterized by health, beauty, wholeness, and sanctity, based on models from classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, or the natural world. They also combatted decadence by seeking to release vital creative forces imprisoned by ossified artistic traditions, often giving rise to startling forms of modernism, including Vorticism and Futurism.

  With the exception of the chapter on Lovecraft, Artists of the Right consists of extensively expanded and reworked essays from Kerry Bolton’s earlier book Thinkers of the Right: Challenging Materialism (Luton, England: Luton Publications, 2003). A companion volume will cover T. S. Eliot, Yukio Mishima, Rex Fairburn, P. R. Stephensen, Count Potocki of Montalk, and others.

  I wish to thank Kerry Bolton for his hard work, patience, and good humor over the long process of bringing this project to birth. I also wish to thank Matthew Peters for his meticulous proofreading, Kevin Slaughter for designing the cover, Michael Polignano for preparing the manuscript for the Library of Congress cataloguing process, Jack Donovan for preparing the Kindle edition, and Jonathan Bowden, Leo Yankevich, Dr. Joseph S. Salemi, Charles Krafft, and James J. O’Meara for their blurbs.

  Greg Johnson

  San Francisco

  August 7, 2012

  Acknowledgements

  My acknowledgements and thanks to those who wrote encouraging prepublication appraisals: the late, lamented Jonathan Bowden, Leo Yankevich, Dr. Joseph S. Salemi, Charles Krafft, and James J. O’Meara. Thank you for the encouraging words. To my friend and colleague in Athens, Dr. Dimitris Michalopoulos, for his enthusiastic comments on the 2003 precursor of the book; veteran British nationalist Keith Thompson for the original idea of a book; Dr. Greg Johnson, for suggesting its further development into the present volume, and undertaking the editing; and Matthew Peters for his incomparably meticulous proofreading.

  Kerry R. Bolton

  Kapiti Coast

  New Zealand

  September 17, 2012

  D. H. Lawrence

  “My great religion is a belief in the blood.”

  —D. H. Lawrence[1]

  DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE, 1885–1930, is acknowledged as one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century. He wrote novels and poetry as acts of polemic and prophecy. For Lawrence saw himself as a prophet and the harbinger of a new dawn as well as a leader-savior who would sacrificially accept the tremendous responsibilities of dictatorial power to free humanity to return to being human. Much of Lawrence’s outlook is reminiscent of those of C. G. Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche, but although he was acquainted with the works of both, his philosophy developed independently.

  Lawrence was born into a family of colliers in Eastwood, a coal-mining town near Nottingham. His father was a heavy drinker, and his mother was committed to Christianity, thus the house was rife with tension between the parents. At college, he was an agnostic and was determined to become a poet and an author. Having rejected the faith of his mother, Lawrence also rejected the counter-faith of science, democracy, industrialization, and the mechanization of man.

  Love, Power, & the “Dark Lord”

  For Lawrence capitalism destroyed the soul and the mystery of life, as did democracy and equality. He devoted most of his life to finding a new-yet-old religion that would return mystery to life and reconnect humanity to the cosmos.

  His religion was animistic and pantheistic, seeing the soul as pervasive, God as nature, and humanity as the way God realizes himself.[2] The relations between all things are based on duality—opposites in tension. This duality is expressed in two ways: love and power. One without the other results in imbalance. Hence, to L
awrence, Christian love is a sentimentality that destroys the natural hierarchy of social relations and the inequality between individuals. This critique of Christianity is reminiscent of Nietzsche, and indeed Lawrence has been described as “Nietzsche’s major English disciple.”[3]

  Love and power are the two “threat vibrations” which hold individuals together and emanate unconsciously from the leadership class.[4] With power, there is trust, fear, and obedience. With love, there is “protection” and “the sense of safety.”

  Lawrence considers that most leaders have been out of balance with one or the other. That is the message of his novel Kangaroo. Here the Englishman Richard Lovat Somers, although attracted to the fascist ideology of “Kangaroo” and his Diggers movement, ultimately rejects it as representing the same type of enervating love as Christianity, the love of the masses, and pursues his own individuality. The question for Somers is that of accepting his own dark master (Jung’s Shadow of the repressed unconscious). Until that returns, no human lordship can be accepted:

  He did not yet submit to the fact which he half knew: that before mankind would accept any man for a king, and before Harriet would ever accept him, Richard Lovat, as a lord and master, he, this self-same Richard who was strong on kingship must open the doors of his soul and let in a dark Lord and Master for himself, the dark god he had sensed outside the door. Let him once truly submit to the dark majesty, break open his doors to this fearful god who is master, and enters us from below, the lower doors; let himself once admit a Master, the unspeakable god: and the rest would happen.[5]

  What is required, once the dark lord has returned to men’s souls in place of undifferentiated “love,” is a hierarchical social order shaped like a pyramid whose apex is a dictator.[6] The dictator would relieve the masses of the burden of democracy. This new social order would be based on the balance of power and love, something of a return to the medieval ideal of protection and obedience.[7]

  The ordinary folk would gain a new worth by giving obedience to the leader, who would in turn assume an awesome responsibility and would lead by virtue of his being “circuited” to the cosmos. Through such a redeeming philosopher-king, individuals could reconnect cosmically and assume heroic proportions through obedience to heroes. “Give homage and allegiance to a hero, and you become yourself heroic, it is the law of man.”[8]

  Heroic Vitalism

  Hence, heroic vitalism is central to Lawrence’s ideas. His entire political philosophy is antithetical to what he called “the three fanged serpent of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Instead, “you must have a government based on good, better, and best.”

  In 1922 he wrote: “I don’t believe either in liberty or democracy. I believe in actual, sacred, inspired authority: divine right of natural kings: I believe in the divine right of natural aristocracy, the right, the sacred duty, to wield undisputed authority.”[9] It is mere intellect, soulless and mechanistic, which is at the root of our problems; it restrains the passions and kills the natural.[10]

  His essay on Lady Chatterley’s Lover deals with the social question. It is the mechanistic outlook, arising from pure intellect, devoid of emotion, passion, and all that is implied in the blood (instinct) that has caused the ills of modern society:

  This again is the tragedy of social life today. In the old England, the curious blood connection held the classes together. The squires might be arrogant, violent, bullying, and unjust, yet in some ways they were at one with the people, part of the same blood stream. We feel it in Defoe or Fielding. And then in the mean Jane Austen, it is gone . . . So, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover we have a man, Sir Clifford, who is purely a personality, having lost entirely all connection with his fellow men and women, except those of usage. All warmth is gone entirely, the hearth is cold, the heart does not humanly exist. He is a pure product of our civilization, but he is the death of the great humanity of the world.[11]

  In 1913 Lawrence posited, against this pallid intellectualism, the product of the late phase of a civilization: “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.”[12]

  The great cultural figures of our time, including Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Knut Hamsun, were “Thinkers of the Blood,” men of instinct, which has permanence and eternity. Rightly, since the 1930s the term “intellectual” became synonymous with the “Left,” but such intellectuals are products of their time and the century before. They are detached from tradition, uprooted, alienated, bereft of instinct and feeling.

  The first Thinkers of the Blood, influenced greatly by Nietzsche, championed excellence and nobility and were suspicious if not terrified of the mass leveling resulting from democracy and its offspring communism. In democracy and communism, they saw the destruction of culture understood as the pursuit of the sublime. Their opposite numbers, the intellectuals of the Left, celebrated the rise of mass man in a perverse manner that would, if communism were universally triumphant, mean the destruction of their own liberty to create above and beyond the state commissariats.

  Lawrence believed that socialistic agitation and unrest would create the climate in which he would be able to gather around him “a choice minority, more fierce and aristocratic in spirit” to take over authority in a fascist-like coup, “then I shall come into my own.”[13]

  Lawrence’s rebellion is against that late or winter phase of civilization, which the West has entered as described by Oswald Spengler. It is marked by the rise of the city over the village, of money over blood. Like Spengler, Lawrence’s conception of history is cyclic, and his idea of society organic. He wished to break the death grip of late civilization and to revive the organic over the mechanistic.[14]

  Religion Old & New

  Lawrence sought a return to the pagan outlook with its communion with life and the cosmic rhythm. He was drawn to blood mysticism and what he called the dark gods. It was the “Dark God” that embodied all that had been repressed by late civilization and the artificial world of money and industry. His quest took him around the world. Reaching New Mexico in 1922, he observed the rituals of the Pueblo Indians. He then went to Old Mexico where he stayed for several years.

  It was in Mexico that he encountered Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent of the Aztecs. Through a revival of this deity and the reawakening of long-repressed primal urges, Lawrence thought that Europe might be renewed. He advised the United States to look to the land before the Spaniards and the Pilgrim Fathers and embrace the “black demon of savage America.”[15] This “demon” is akin to Jung’s concept of the Shadow (and its embodiment in what Jung called the “Devil archetype”). Bringing it to consciousness is required for true wholeness or individuation.

  Turn to “the unresolved, the rejected,” Lawrence advised the Americans in the periodical Phoenix.[16] He regarded his novel The Plumed Serpent as his most important. It is the story of a white women who becomes immersed in a social and religious movement of national regeneration among the Mexicans, based on a revival of the worship of Quetzalcoatl.

  Through the American Indians Lawrence hoped to see a lesson for Europe. He has one of the leaders of the Quetzalcoatl revival, Don Ramón, say:

  I wish the Teutonic world would once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan and the tree Yggdrasill. And I wish the Druidic world would see, honestly, that in the mistletoe is their mystery, and that they themselves are the Tuatha De Danaan, alive, but submerged. And a new Hermes should come back to the Mediterranean, and a new Ashtaroth to Tunis; and Mithras again to Persia, and Brahma unbroken to India, and the oldest of dragons to China. Then I, Cipriano, I, First Man of Quetzalcoatl, with you, First Man of Huitzilopochtli, and perhaps your wife, First Woman of Itzpapalotl, could we not meet, with sure souls, the other great aristocrats of the world, the First Man of Wotan and the First Woman of Freya, First Lor
d of Hermes, and the Lady of Astarte, the Best-Born of Brahma, and the Son of the Greatest Dragon? I tell you, Cipriano, then the earth might rejoice, when the First Lords of the West met the First Lords of South and East, in the Valley of the Soul. Ah, the earth has Valleys of the Soul, that are not cities of commerce and industry. And the mystery is one mystery, but men must see it differently.[17]

  Looking about Europe for such a heritage, he found it among the Etruscans and the Druids. Yet although finding his way back to the spirituality that had once been part of Europe, Lawrence does not advocate the mimicking of ancient ways for the present time; nor the adoption of alien spirituality for the European West, as is the fetish among many alienated souls today who look at every culture and heritage except their own. He wishes to return to the substance, to the awe before the mystery of life. “My way is my own, old red father: I can’t cluster at the drum anymore,” he writes in his essay “Indians and an Englishman.”[18] Yet what he found among the Indians was a far-off innermost place at the human core, which he characterizes as the ever present in his description of the way Kate is affected by the ritual she witnesses among the followers of Quetzalcoatl.