THINKERS OF THE RIGHT

By Dr K R Bolton
One of the most enlightening studies of the interwar Right Ive encountered in
years. Dr Paul Gottfried.
Appraisal by Dr D Michalopoulos
I do not know Kerry R. Bolton in person. Nonetheless, when a couple of years ago I
was doing further research on Northern Epirus Issue and I was looking for a short but
accurate Gabriele dAnnunzios biography, I found, in an Athens bookshop, his Thinkers of
the Right. In my mind, it is a wonderful book. For it is one of the very few in which the term
Right is well-defined. And when I say well-defined I mean that Right is given its true
content and by no means the one its adversaries want to give.
As a matter of fact, K. R. Bolton provides, in this book, his readers with an answer to
a very old query: (material) progress is for humankinds best or worst? And linking the
Right with Tradition he accomplishes a truly remarkable achievement, namely to point out
solutions to humans trials very different from the conventional ones.
His book, moreover, is a scholarly written one. His dAnnunzio biography (pp. 2330) is an exemplary one. For though Gabriele dAnnunzios memory is still honoured in
Greece, nobody has, so far, developed the Fiume issue so well as K. R. Bolton. In point of
fact, the expressions Bolton uses, Renaissance City-State and League of Oppressed
Nations, clearly show that the New Zealand scholar has very well understood what was
going on Southern Europes coasts about ninety years ago.
Dr Dimitris Michalopoulos
Athens, August 2008
1982 to 1994 Law School of the University of Salonika; 1989 1997 Naval War College of Greece; 19902000 director of the Museum of the City of Athens. Presently director of the Eleutherios Venizelos
Institute for Historical Studies.

Thinkers of the Right, privately published in 2002, and republished professionally in 2003
by Luton Publications, UK. ISBN 0-9545168-0-X.
Preamble
The book was written to deal with the political and ideological beliefs of certain of the
intelligentsia who turned to the Right after a period of crisis (World War I in most cases),
although the post World War II Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima is included. These writers
present an interesting collection and an enigma, as much of the intelligentsia of the period is
usually associated with the Left. While the latter often found their most extreme expression
in communism, those dealt with in Thinkers of the Right found their most extreme form in
Fascism. Most however eventually rejected Fascism as being too much of a collectivist
movement, and they remained suspicious of any mass movements of either Right or Left.

In writing the book I aimed to explain the reasons why some of the literati departed from
their Left-wing counterparts and embraced varieties of what might be broadly termed The
Right.
This seems to be one of the few comprehensive and wide-ranging books on the subject, at
least in the English language, the only others known to me being The Reactionaries:
Yeats, Lewis, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence: A Study of the Anti-Democratic Intelligentsia
by John R. Harrison, Schocken Books, NY, 1967; and Dr John Careys The Intellectuials
& the Masses, Faber & Faber, London, 1992. Hopefully, Thinkers of the Right then
provides an added contribution to the knowledge of the subject and a different perspective
in understanding. (2009).

vindex@clear.net.nz
2002 Bolton
P O Box 1627
Kapiti 5252
New Zealand
K R Bolton is a Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research,
(http://www.academy-of-social-and-political-research.com). Recent published works
include: Russia and China: an approaching conflict?, Journal of Social, Political, and
Economic Research, Washington, Summer 2009), The Trotskyist Agenda Against the
Family, CKR, Sociology Department, Moscow State University, October 2009, and
Geopolitica, Moscow, November 2009; and Multiculturalism as a Process of
Globalisation, Ab Aeterno: Journal of the Academy of Social And Political Research, No.
1, November 2009.
This book his available as an illustrated, commercially published volume at $NZ45.00
including postage, from:
Renaissance Press
P O Box 1627
Paraparaumu Beach 5252
New Zealand

CONTENTS
Preface Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler
Chapter 1 D H Lawrence
Chapter 2 DAnnunzio
Chapter 3 Marinetti
2

Chapter 4 W B Yeats
Chapter 5 Knut Hamsun
Chapter 6 Henry Williamson
Chapter 7 Ezra Pound
Chapter 8 Wyndham Lewis
Chapter 9 Roy Campbell
Chapter 10 P R Stephensen
Chapter 11 Rex Fairburn
Chapter 12 Yukio Mishima
Chapter 13 Julius Evola

Preface
NIETZSCHE AND SPENGLER
Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler loom large over the of the 20th Century horizon
of European thought. Nietzsche was influential in the thinking of Spengler, whilst either one
or both had a major impact on the thinking of most of the writers we deal with herein.
Both were primarily concerned with questions of decay and the possibilities of
regeneration. Both held that Western Civilisation had entered a cycle of decadence that was
particularly evident in the cultural, moral and spiritual spheres. They were therefore of great
relevance to many of the new generation of artists, writers and poets who emerged from the
First World War, a war which made transparent the crisis of Western Civilisation which had
really entered its cycle of decay several centuries previously. The English and French
Revolutions, in the name of The People, marked the overthrow of the old order by the
new bourgeoisie, the victory of money over blood-family lineage.
Democracy for many of the cultural elite was not a political creed to be welcomed but
rather a symptom, like bolshevism, of the rise of the masses and behind them of the rule of
money: of quantity over quality, with the arts being the first to be degraded.
Nietzsche and Spengler stand as the great thinkers that sought to ennoble, in a tide of
intellectualism that degraded man and culture. Against them stood Marx and his opposite
numbers, the liberal economic theorists, who make of everything a matter of economics and
Freud who reduces man and culture to a mass of sexual complexes. In addition Darwin, who
reduces man to being just another animal?
To Nietzsche the meaning of man was that of overcoming his present state, to Will
higher forms of existence, which are ultimately expressed in the arts. This was seen as being
3

embodied in the great men of history. These great men, creators via their own individual
will, are separated from the mass of humanity by a great gulf. Man is the tightrope between
animal and Overman,
A rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.
Among the first sentences uttered by Nietzsche's prophet Zarathustra are these words that
define the purpose of man,
I teach you the Overman. Man is something that should overcome. What have you done
to overcome him?
All creatures have hitherto created something beyond themselves and do you want to be
the ebb of this great tide and return to the animals rather than overcome man?
The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say The Overman shall be the
meaning of the earth.
Despite the Darwinian interpretations that have been placed on Nietzsche, it was a
rejection of Darwinism that prompted Nietzsche to herald the Overman as an act of Will
rather than as evolution through random genetic mutation. The human existence beyond any
other organism is only justified by culture, which is the perfection of nature through human
Will.
This basic idea of culture in so far as it assigns only one task to every single one of us:
to promote inside and outside of ourselves the generation of the philosopher, the artist, and
the saint, and thus to work at the perfection of nature (Untimely Meditations).
In the same essay Nietzsche states that the goal of humanity lies in its highest
specimens. Nature wants to make the life of man significant and meaningful by
generating the philosopher and artist Thereby not only is man redeemed but nature
herself.
With the central focus of history, of mankind, of nature herself being epitomised by the
artist it is no wonder that Nietzsche's philosophy caught the imagination of so many of the
creative elite.
Prefiguring Spengler with a rejection of history as lineal and progressive, Nietzsche states
that what comes later in a civilisation is not necessarily what is best. What is best is
reflected in the highest specimens, the artists and philosophers, where the gulf that separates
these higher men from the average citizen is greater than that which separates the average
man from the chimpanzee.
Hence Ezra Pound's Nietzschean attitudes towards the artist and the mass was reflected
by many other contemporaries. Some such as Wyndham Lewis and Evola were even
suspicious of Fascism as being 'too democratic', too much of a mass movement. Pound
states:
The artist has no longer any belief or suspicion that the mass, the half-educated simpering
general can in any way share his delightsThe aristocracy of the arts is ready again for
its service. Modern civilisation has bred a race with brains like those of rabbits, and... we
artists who have been so long despised are about to take over control.
4

D H Lawrence went so far as to see himself as a coming dictator who would relieve the
masses of the 'burden of democracy', whilst D'Annunzio did actually become a ruler of his
own State (Fiume) for a time, where the arts were the focus.
Nietzsche demanded new law tablets upon which would be inscribed the word 'noble'
(Zarathustra). The creative elite make their own laws through their acts of creation, and are
not constrained by the democratic mob with their laws, morals and values that are designed
for the control of the average. Hence, Nietzsche's prophet Zarathustra counsels higher man
to stay aloof from the masses, and from the market place, as the masses will drag the higher
man down to the dead level of 'equality' with such doctrines as democracy.
The Overman would be willed into creation by Higher Men striving to 'self-overcome', to
reach beyond themselves through hardship upon oneself. The Nietzschean brute is one of
many distortions of Nietzsche, who states that the strong are compassionate towards the
lesser.
Whilst Nietzsche places culture as the criterion for defining the value of both societies
and individuals, Oswald Spengler develops a morphology of culture as the basis of
historical analysis. Both philosophers elevate the cultural beyond the contemporary fads of
economic, sexual and biological determinism, as the basis of their world-views. Spengler in
the preface to The Decline of The West states that the two figures to whom he owes most are
Goethe for 'method' and Nietzsche for the questioning faculty
Hence, Spengler was also of great interest to the new generation of artists, poets and
authors. Spengler explains that by drawing on analogous cycles of history in each of the
civilisations he could explain how and why Western Civilisation was undergoing a cycle of
decay. Like Nietzsche, Spengler sees democracy, parliamentarianism, egalitarianism and the
rise of money and the merchant on the ruins of the old aristocracy of birth (or blood) as
symptoms of the decadence that are reducing the arts to the lowest denominator.
Many of the cultural elite were of a mystical nature, such as Yeats and Evola. and their
knowledge of the cyclic myths of many ancient cultures of East and West and the Americas
accorded with the cyclical conclusions drawn by Spengler.
In his influential magnum opus The Decline of the West Spengler rejects the
Darwinian, lineal, progressive approach to history, explaining:
I see in place of that empty figment of one linear history... the drama of a number of
mighty cultures, each having its own life; its own death... Each culture has its own new
possibilities of self-expression, which arise, ripen, decay and never return... I see world
history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing
and waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the other hand, sees it as a sort
of tapeworm industriously adding to itself one epoch after another.
This cyclic approach to history is organic. It sees cultures as living entities with a birth, a
flourishing, a decay and death. Each civilisation, although self-contained, has the same
cyclic phases, which Spengler identifies with the four seasons. The winter phase is the
advanced civilisation where the city replaces the country, profit replaces heroism, and the
merchant replaces the aristocrat. As for the social castes, these cease to have a cultural value
and are mere economic reflections. The rootless city dwelling proletariat replacing the rural
yeoman and craftsman, the merchant replacing the warrior, and the banker replacing the
noble. Hence, what is often regarded as new, progressive, modern and western, the
5

rise of abortion, family planning, of banking practices, of parliaments and voting majorities,
of feminism, socialism, revolutions... have already been played out in the 'winter' phase of
prior civilisations. Spengler describes it thus:
You, the West, are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove
that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism your
wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your
immorality, your birth control that is bleeding you from below and killing you off at the top
in your brains. I can prove to you that these were characteristic marks of the dying ages of
ancient states... Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome...
Many of the new generation of writers were thus drawn to Spengler's analysis of the way
the rule of money, of money values and of the money baron's control of politics, had
become determinators of the tastes of a civilisation in its final cycle. They were concerned
with overthrowing the rule of money and returning civilisation to its 'springtime' where the
arts flourished under the patronage of born nobles. Yeats and Evola look to certain epochs
of the Medieval period of the West. Ezra Pound sought the overthrow of the banks through
the economic theory of Social Credit, Hamsun and Williamson wished for a return to rural
values in place of those of the City, many were attracted to Fascism.
Spengler states that in the final phase of the winter cycle there arises a reaction against
the rule of money. Money marches on reaching its peak then exhausts its possibilities:
It thrust into the life of the yeomans countryside and set the earth moving; its thought
transformed every son of handicraft: today it presses victoriously upon industry, to make
the productive work of entrepreneur and engineer and labourer alike, its spoil. The machine
with its human retinue. The real queen of this century is in danger of succumbing to a
stronger power. Money, also. Is beginning to lose its authority, and the last conflict is at
hand in which civilisation receives its conclusive form - the conflict between money and
blood.
The rule of money will be overcome by new 'Caesars', strong leaders not harnessed to the
plutocrats and their parliaments and media. In Spengler's last book, The Hour of Decision,
he sees the Fascist legions in Italy as heralds of the 'new Caesarism'. Mussolini was much
impressed with both Nietzsche and Spengler.
Spengler resumes:
The sword is victorious over money, the master- will subdue again the plunderer- will...
Money is overthrown and abolished by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic stream
in microcosmic form... And so - the drama of a high culture - that wondrous world of
deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities - closes with the return of the pristine facts of blood
eternal that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic flow.
Chapter 1

D.H. LAWRENCE
6

My great religion is a belief in the blood"

DH Lawrence 1885-1930 is acknowledged as one of the most influential novelists of the
20th Century. He wrote novels and poetry as acts of polemic and prophecy. For Lawrence
saw himself as both a prophet and the harbinger of a New Dawn and as a leader-saviour
who would sacrificially accept the tremendous responsibilities of political power as a
dictator so that humanity could be free to get back to being human.
Much of Lawrence's outlook is reminiscent of Jung and Nietzsche but, although he was
acquainted with the works of both, his philosophy developed independently. Lawrence was
born in Eastwood, a coal-mining town near Nottingham, into a family of colliers. His father
was a heavy drinker, and his mother's commitment to Christianity imbued the house with
continual tension between the parents. At college, he was an agnostic and determined to
become a poet and an author. Having rejected the faith of his mother, Lawrence also
rejected the counter-faith of science, democracy, industrialisation and the mechanisation of
man.
LOVE, POWER AND 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 will return the
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 is self-realised. 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 Lawrence, the love of Christianity is a
sentimentality that destroys the natural hierarchy of social relations and the inequality
between individuals. The critique of Christianity is reminiscent of Nietzsche.
Love and power are the two "threat vibrations" which hold individuals together, and
emanate unconsciously from the leadership class. 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 of what he HALF knew: that before mankind would
accept any man for a king. 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, creaking open his doors to this fearful
god who is master, and entering us from below, the lower doors; let himself once admit a
master, the unspeakable god: the rest would happen."
7

What is required, once the dark lord has returned to men's souls in place of undifferentiated
'love' is a social order based on a hierarchical pyramid culminating in a dictator. 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.
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."
HEROIC VITALISM
Hence, heroic vitalism is central to Lawrence's ideas. His whole political concept 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 1921 he wrote: "I don't believe in either liberty or democracy. I believe in actual, sacred,
inspired authority." It is mere intellect, soulless and mechanistic, which is at the root of our
problems; it restrains the passions and kills the natural.
His essay on Lady Chatterley's Lover deals with the social question. It is the mechanistic,
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 Itfe 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 civilisation, but he is the death of the great humanity of the world."
Against this pallid intellectualism, the product the late cycle of a civilisation, writing in
1913 Lawrence posited:
"My great religion is a belief in the blood, as the flesh being wiser than the intellect. We can
go wrong in our minds but what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true."
The great cultural figures of our time, including Lawrence, Yeats, Pound and Hamsun, were
Thinkers of the Blood, men of instinct, which has permanence and eternity. Rightly, the
term intellectual became synonymous since the 1930s with the "Left", but these intellectuals
were 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'
championed excellence and nobility, influenced greatly by Nietzsche, and were suspicious,
if not terrified of the mass levelling results of democracy and its offspring communism. In
8

democracy and communism, they saw the destruction of culture as the pursuit of the
sublime. Their opposite numbers, the intellectuals of the Left, celebrated the rise of massman 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."
Lawrence's rebellion is against that late or winter phase of civilisation, which the West has
entered as, described by Spengler. It is marked by the rise of the city over the village, of
money over blood connections. Like Spengler, Lawrence's conception of history is cyclic,
and his idea of society organic. He wished to repudiate
uct of our civilisation, but he is the death of the great humanity of the world."
Against this pallid intellectualism, the product the late cycle of a civilisation, writing in
1913 Lawrence posited:
"My great religion is a belief in the blood, as the flesh being wiser than the intellect. We can
go wrong in our minds but what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true."
The great cultural figures of our time, including Lawrence, Yeats, Pound and Hamsun, were
Thinkers of the Blood, men of instinct, which has permanence and eternity. Rightly, the
term intellectual became synonymous since the 1930s with the "Left", but these intellectuals
were 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'
championed excellence and nobility, influenced greatly by Nietzsche, and were suspicious,
if not terrified of the mass levelling results of democracy and its offspring communism. In
democracy and communism, they saw the destruction of culture as the pursuit of the
sublime. Their opposite numbers, the intellectuals of the Left, celebrated the rise of massman 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."
Lawrence's rebellion is against that late or winter phase of civilisation, which the West has
entered as, described by Spengler. It is marked by the rise of the city over the village, of
money over blood connections. Like Spengler, Lawrence's conception of history is cyclic,
and his idea of society organic. He wished to repudiate
the death grip of late civilisation and to revive the organic over the mechanistic.
RELIGION OLD AND 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 civilisation and the artificial
world of money and industry. His quest took him around the world. Reaching New Mexico
9

in 1922, he observed the rituals of the Pueblo Indians. He then went to Old Mexico where
he then stayed for several years.
It was in Mexico that he encountered the Plumed Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, of the Aztecs.
Through a revival of this deity and the reawakening of the long repressed primal urges,
Lawrence thought that Europe might be renewed. To the USA, he advised that it should
look to the land before the Spaniards and the Pilgrim Fathers and embrace the 'black demon
of savage America'. This 'demon' is akin to Jung's concept of the Shadow, (and its
embodiment in what Jung called the "Devil archetype"), and bringing it to consciousness is
required for true wholeness or individuation.
Turn to "the unresolved, the rejected", Lawrence advised the Americans (Phoenix). He
regarded his novel The Plumed Serpent as his most important; 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 Ramon, say: "I wish the Teutonic world would
once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan and the tree Yggdrasill...".
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 a mimicing 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. Yet
what he found among the Indians was a far off innermost place at the human core, the ever
present as he describes the way Kate is affected by the ritual she witnesses among the
followers of Quetzalcoatl.
In The Woman Who Rode Away the wife of a mine owner tired of her life leaves to find a
remote Indian hill tribe who are said to preserve the rituals of the old gods. She is told that
the whites have captured the sun and she is to be the messenger to tell them to return him.
She is sacrificed to the sun... It is a sacrifice of a product of the mechanistic society for a
reconnection with the cosmos. For Lawrence the most value is to be had in "the life that
arises from the blood"
THE LION, THE UNICORN AND THE CROWN
Lawrence's concept of the dual nature of life, in which there is continual conflict between
polarities, is a dialectic that is synthe-sised. Lawrence uses symbolism to describe this. The
lion (the mind and the active male principle) is at eternal strife with the unicorn (senses,
passive, female). But for one to completely kill the other would result in its own extinction
and a vacuum would be created around the victory. This is so with ideologies, religions and
moralities that stand for the victory of one polarity, and the repression of the other. The
crown belongs to neither. It stands above both as the symbol of balance. This is something
of a Tao for the West, of what Jung sought also, and of what the old alchemists quested on
an individual basis.
10

The problems Lawrence brought under consideration have become ever more acute as our
late cycle of Western civilisation draws to a close, dominated by money and the machine.
Lawrence, like Yeats, Hamsun, Williamson and others, sought a return to the Eternal, by
reconnecting that part of ourselves that has been deeply repressed by the "loathsome spirit
of the age".

Chapter 2

D'ANNUNZIO
"We artists are only then astonished witnesses of eternal aspirations, which help raise up our
breed to its destiny."
Gabriele D'Annunzio, unique combination of artist and warrior, was born in 1863 into a
merchant family He was a Renaissance Man par excellence. This warrior bard was to have a
crucial impact upon the rise of fascism despite his not always being in accord with the way
in which it developed.
EARLY LIFE
The lad who in later years was to be heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche displayed an
iron will at an early age. Learning to swim, he would go against the current or head for the
biggest waves to discover his limits. His career as a poet began early. At 16, he was known
in Rome as an up and coming poet. When 19 D'Annunzio travelled to Rome, leading a
bohemian lifestyle, working as a gossip columnist, and writing his first novel II Piacere. A
set of short stories followed, Tales of the Pescara, celebrating the sensual and the violent.
Then came his novel Le Vergini Delle Rocce, which was important because it introduced
Italy to the ideal of the Nietzschean Overman.
D'Annunzio's first visit to Greece in 1895 inspired him to write a national epic that he hoped
would bring Italy into the 20th Century as a great nation. "I was to write a volume of poetic
prose which will be a war cry of the Latin peoples". Laus Vitae expressed a pagan,
Nietzschean ethos, of "Desire, Voluptuousness. Pride and Instinct, the imperial Quadriga."
NEW IDEALS
Around this time, new ideals for the coming century were emerging, especially among
young artists who were rejecting the bourgeois liberalism of the 19th century. In response to
11

the comfort seeking, security conscious bourgeois and merchant-minded politicians, the
young artists, writers and poets were demanding nationalism and empire. They were
represented by the Futurist movement with its provocative style and abrasive manifestos,
and led by the poet Marinetti demanding a rejection o"pastism". They stood for a new age
based on speed, dynamism, and martial valour. D'Annunzio wrote his play La Nave that
celebrated the Venetian city-state of the Renaissance and called for action with the slogan:
"Arm the prow and sail toward the wind."
The impact of the play was so powerful with the actors coming to real blows and the
populace of Rome shouting its slogans. The King congratulated D'Annunzio, and Austria
officially protested to the Italian Foreign Office. D'Annunzio was now a major influence on
Italian youth and on the Futurists. The climate created by the movement and himself and the
Italian Nationalists enabled the Prime Minster Crispi to embark upon imperial adventures in
Africa, which culminated in the resurgence of an African Italian empire under Mussolini
several decades hence. D'Annunzio inspired both the general population and the Italian
soldiers with his writings
POLITICS
Although not fitting into the conventional Left or Right, which can also be said of the
emerging Italian nationalist movement, D'Annunzio entered Parliament in 1899 as a nondoctrinaire conservative with revolutionary ideas. Nonetheless, he had contempt for
Parliament and for parliamentarians as "the elected herd".
He had written in La Vergine: "A State erected on the basis of popular suffrage and equality
in voting, is not only ignoble, it is precarious. The State should always be no more than an
institution for favouring the gradual elevation of a privileged class towards its ideal form of
existences
He took his seat and forced a new election in 1900 by crossing the floor and joining with the
Left to break a political impasse. He then stood for the Socialist Party, among whose
leadership at the time was Mussolini, although continuing to speak of a "national
consciousness" that was contrary to the internationalism of the mainstream Socialists, as
indeed Mussolini was to do. Although he was not re-elected D'Annunzio had contributed to
the formation of an ideological synthesis, along with the nationalists and the Futurists that
was several decades later to transcend both Left and Right and emerge as Fascism.
D'Annunzio expressed the new synthesis of the coming politics thus:
"Everything in life depends upon the eternally new. Man must either renew himself or die."
WORLD WAR
D'Annunzio was living in France when the war broke out. He visited the front, and resolved
to return to Italy to agitate for his country's entry into the war. Like Mussolini and Marinetti,
D'Annunzio saw the war as the opportunity for Italy to take her place among the great
powers of the 20th century. D'Annunzio was invited to speak before a crowd at an official
opening of the Garibaldi monument, declaring his own "Sermon on the Mount":
"Blessed are they, who having yesterday cried against this event, will today accept the
supreme necessity, and do not wish to be the Last but the First! Blessed are the young who,
starved of glory, shall be satisfied! Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be called on to
quench a splendid flow of blood, and dress a wonderful wound..." The crowd was ecstatic.
12

At 52 and considered a national treasure, having reestablished an Italian national literature,

there was pressure to dissuade him from enlisting in the army, but he was commissioned in
the Novara Lancers, and saw more than 50 actions. Such was the daring of his ventures that
Italy's leading literary figure soon became her greatest war hero. He flew many times over
the Alps at a time when such a fete was considered extraordinary. The Austrians put a
bounty on his head. He responded by entering Buccari harbour with a small band of hand
picked men in a mo-torboat, firing his torpedoes and leaving behind rubber containers each
containing a lyrical message in indelible ink. D'Annunzio was especially noted for his air
excursions over enemy lines dropping propaganda leaflets. It was during his flight over Pola
that he first used the war cry, "Eja! Eja! Eja! Alala!"
This was said to be the cry used by Achilles to spur on his horses. It was later adapted by
D'Annunzio's own Legionnaires when they took Fiume and eventually by the Fascists. After
serious damage to an eye, he was told not to fly again, but within several months had
returned to the air and was awarded a silver medal. He then slogged it out on foot in the
assault from Castagna to the sea. He returned from the war an international hero; having
been awarded a gold medal, five silver, a bronze, and the officer's cross of the Savoy
Military Order. He also received the Military Cross from Britain with many other countries
adding to his decorations.
FIUME
After the Allied victory, Italy did not receive the rewards she had expected. Fiume was a
particular point of contention. Venetian in culture and history, the city port had been
occupied by the French, English, American and Italian troops; yet the Italian Government
favoured turning its administration over to Yugoslavia. Mussolini, Marinetti and
D'Annunzio again joined forces to agitate on the common theme that Italy should annexe
Fiume. Young officers formed an army with the motto: "Fiume or death!" D'Annunzio was
asked to lead an expedition to take the city for Italy.
At dawn on 12th September 1919, D'Annunzio marched off at the head of a column of 287
veterans. As they marched through Italy towards Fiume, they picked up soldiers and
supplies along the way. By the time D'Annunzio reached they city he had gathered an army
of 1000. D'Annunzio confronted the Italian commander of the city and, pointing to his
medals declared, "Fire first on this". General Pittaluga's eyes filled with tears and he replied:
"Great poet! I do not wish to be the cause of spilling Italian blood. I am honoured to meet
you for the first time. May your dream be fulfilled". The two embraced and entered Fiume
together. Once D'Annunzio had taken Fiume others from all over Italy flocked to him,
nationalists, anarchists, futurists, syndicalists, soldiers and men of the arts. "In this mad and
vile world, Fiume is the symbol of liberty*, declared D'Annunzio.
RENAISSANCE CITY-STATE
D'Annunzio the Renaissance Man recreated Fiume as a 20th Century renaissance city-state.
It would be the catalyst for a "League of Oppressed Nations" to counter the League of
Nations of the bourgeois powers. The Free State of Fiume was proclaimed with the Statute
of the Carnaro. This instituted physical training for youth, old age pensions, universal
education, aesthetic instruction, and unemployment relief. Private property was recognised
but on the condition of its "proper, continuous and efficient use". Corporations and guilds
after the medieval manner were established to represent workers and producers in place of
13

the old political parties. Both freedom of religion and atheism were protected. A College of
Ediles was ^elected with discernment from men of taste and education", who would
maintain aesthetic standards in the architecture and construction of the city-state. The
parliament, or Council of the Best, was enjoined to minimise chatter, with sessions held
with "notably concise brevity". A higher chamber was called the Council of Providers.
D'Annunzio oversaw the whole edifice as the Commandante. Music was elevated as "a
religious and social institution" by statute. For 15 months, the Commandante held out
against allied protests and the blockade erected by his own Government.
BLOCKADE
The Italian Government eventually tightened its blockade, which resulted in food shortages
at the time of the European wide influenza epidemic. To counter the blockade D'Annunzio
formed the Usccccocchi (from an old Adriatic name for a type of pirate), who captured
ships, warehouses, stole coal, arms, meat, coffee, and ammunition, even army horses, in
daring raids all over Italy. D'Annunzio planned to march on Rome and take the entire
country. Indeed, the Legionnaire's song had the refrain, "with the bomb and the dagger we
will enter the Quinirile." D'Annunzio had hoped for the support of Mussolini's Fascists, who
had been propagandising for D'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume, but Mussolini considered
such a march on Rome premature, and possibly looked upon D'Annunzio as rival to his own
aims.
Government troops now moved on Fiume. D'Annunzio ordered a general mobilisation. He
hoped that Italian troops would not fire on fellow Italians. Such a notion was repugnant to
D'Annunzio, as it had been to General Pittaluga when he gave way to D'Annunzio's
occupation. Military operations began on 24th December 1920. "The Christmas of Blood"
as D'Annunzio called it. 20,000 troops began to move against D'Annunzio's 3000. The Andrea Dona sailed within firing range. D'Annunzio was given an ultimatum to surrender or
suffer bombardment. After some shelling of the balconies of the city began, the women
came forth holding aloft their babies, shouting, "This one Italy! Take this one. But not
D'Annunzio!"
The Commandante gathered his Cabinet together and announced his capitulation. Although
his men had repulsed the Governments troops for five days, the city could not withstand
heavy shelling. "I cannot impose on this heroic city its ruin and certain destruction", said
D'Annunzio.
FASCISM
D'Annunzio retired to a secluded house he called "The Shrine of Italian Victories". He
resumed his writing. He remained the most popular figure in Italy whom both Fascists and
anti-Fascists tried to recruit. Despite what he considered Mussolini's betrayal over Fiume, he
refused to assist the anti-fascists. On 27 October 1922, the Fascists marched on Rome. The
new regime established on a more realistic and pragmatic basis the romantic and visionary
ideals that D'Annunzio had briefly realised at Fiume. Many of the trappings of the Fascist
movement were first used by D'Annunzio, including the revival of the Roman salute and the
use of the blackshirt. Mussolini adopted D'Annunzio's style of speaking to the populace
from balconies with the crowds responding.
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Italy was organised as a Corporate (guild) State as Fiume had been, and cultural figures
were especially esteemed. In 1924 most of Fiume was secured from Yugoslavia. This and
such actions as the Rome-Berlin axis, the withdrawal from the League of Nations and the
invasion of Abyssinia drew D'Annunzio closer to the Fascist regime. Although he refrained
from participation in public life, the regime bestowed D'Annunzio with honours, made him
a prince, published his collected works, and made him an honorary general of the air force
and president of the Academy of Italy. On 1 March 1938, D'Annunzio died suddenly of a
cerebral haemorrhage. At D'Annunzio's funeral, Mussolini said:
"You may be sure Italy will arrive at the summit you dreamed of."

Chapter 3

FILIPPO MARINETTI
Filippo Marinetti is unlike most of the post-19th Century cultural avant-garde who were
rebelling against the spirit of several centuries of liberalism, rationalism, the rise of the
democratic mass, industrialism and the rule of the moneyed elite. His revolt against the
levelling impact of the democratic era was not to hark back to certain perceived 'golden
ages' such as the medieval eras upheld by Yeats and Evola, or to reject technology in favour
of a return to rural life, as advocated by Henry Williamson and Knut Hamsun. To the
contrary, Marinetti embraced the new facts of technology, the machine, speed, and dynamic
energy, in a movement called Futurism.
The futurist response to the facts of the new age is therefore a quite unique reaction from the
anti-liberal literati and artists and one that continues to influence certain aspects of industrial
and post-industrial sub cultures. An example of a contemporary cultural movement
paralleling Futurists is New Slovenian Art, which like futurism embodies music, graphic
arts, architecture, and drama. It is a movement whose influence is felt beyond the borders of
Slovenia. The best-known manifestation of this art form is the industrial music group
Laibach. Marinetti is also the inventor of free verse in poetry, and Futurist adherents have
had a lasting impact on architecture, motion pictures and the theatre. The Futurists were the
pioneers of street theatre. They inspired both the Constructivist movement in the USSR and
the English Vorticists Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis.
Marinetti was born in Alexandria Egypt in 1876. He graduated in law in Genoa in 1899.
Although the political and philosophical aspects of the course held his interest, he travelled
frequently between France and Italy and interested himself in the avant-garde arts of the
later 19th Century promoting young poets in both countries. He was already a strong critic
of the conservative and traditional approaches of Italian poets. He was at this time an
15

enthusiast for the modern, revolutionary music of Wagner, seeing it as assailing

^equilibrium and sobriety...meditation and silence..."
By 1904, Futurist elements had manifested in his writing, particularly in his poem
Destruction that he called "an erotic and anarchist poem", a eulogy to the "avenging sea" as
a symbol of revolution. After an apocalyptic destruction, the process of rebuilding begins on
the ruins of the "Old World". Here already is the praise of death as a dynamic and
transformative.
With the death of Marinetti's father in 1907, his wealth allowed him to travel widely and he
became a well know cultural figure throughout Europe. Nietzsche was at this time one of
the most well known intellectuals who desired liberation from the old order. Nietzsche was
widely read among the literati of Italy, and D'Annunzio was the most prominent in
promoting Nietzsche. Among the other philosophers of particular importance whom
Marinetti studied was the French syndicalist theorist Sorel, who inclined towards the
anarchism of Proudhon. This rejected Marxism in favour of a society comprised of small
productive, cooperative units or syndicates; and founded a new myth of heroic action and
struggle. Rejecting much of the pacifism of the left. Sorel viewed war as a dynamic of
human action. Sorel in turn was himself influenced by Nietzsche, and applying the
Nietzschean Overman to socialism, states that the working class revolution requires heroic
leaders. Sorel became influential not only among Left wing syndicalists but also among
certain radical nationalists in both France and Italy.
FUTURIST MANIFESTO
Marinetti's artistic ideas crystallised in the Futurist movement that originated from a
meeting of artists and musicians in Milan in 1909 to draft a Futurist Manifesto. With
Marinetti were Carlo Carra, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini. The
manifesto was first published in the Parisian paper Le Figaro, and exhorted youth to, "Sing
the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness."
The Futurists were contemptuous of all tradition, of all that is past:
"We want to exult aggressive motion...we affirm that the magnificence of the world has
been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed."
The machine was poetically eulogised. The racing car became the icon of the new epoch,
"which seems to run as a machine gun". The Futurist aesthetic was to be joy in violence and
war, as "the sole hygiene of the world*. Motion, dynamic energy, action, and heroism were
the foundations of "the culture of the Futurist future. The fisticuffs, the sprint and the kick
were expressions of culture. The Futurist Manifesto is as much a challenge to the political
and social order as it is to the status quo in the arts.
It declared:
1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage audacity and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

16

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to
exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and
the slap.
4. We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty
of speed A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of an explosive
breath-a roaring car that seems to ride on grape shot is more beautiful than the victory of
Samothrace.
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth,
along the circle of its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with ardour, splendour and generosity, to swell the
enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty.
No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as
a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
7. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries. Why should we look back when what
we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible? Time and space died
yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent
speed.
8. We will glorify war-the world's only hygiene-militarism, patriotism the destructive
gesture of freedom-bringers, the beautiful ideas that kill, and scorn for women.
9. We will destroy the museums libraries academies of every kind, will fight moralism
feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
10. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot. We will sing of
the multi-coloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modem capitals, we will sing of the
vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric motors,
greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents, factories hung on clouds by the
crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in
the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon: deep-chested
locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled
by tubing: and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners
and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary
manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land
from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too
long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the
numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.
Museums: cemeteries!... Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies
unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated
or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously
17

slaughtering each other with colour-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over
walls!
That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls'
Day, that we grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gio-conda,
I grant you that... but I don't admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid
restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison
ourselves? Why rot? And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious
contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express
his dream completely? Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a
funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off in violent spasms of action and creation.
Do you then wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past,
from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?
In truth we tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of
empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for
artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk
with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable
past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner... But we want no
part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!
So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!...
Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!... Oh,
the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discoloured and
shredded!... Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable
cities, pitilessly!
The oldest of us is thirty so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are
forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless
manuscripts-we want it to happen!
They will come against us, our successors will come from far away, from every quarter,
dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators,
sniffing dog-like at the academy doors the strong odour of our decaying minds which will
have already been promised to the literary catacombs.
But we won't be there... At last they'll find us-one winters night-in open country, beneath a
sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They'll see us crouched beside our trembling
aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today
will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.
They'll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our
proud daring, will hurtle to kill us. Driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their
hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.
Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes. Art, in fact, can be nothing
but violence, cruelty and injustice.
18

The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a thousand treasures
of force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw will-power, have thrown them impatiently away,
with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly, breathless, and unresting...Look at us We are still
untired! Our hearts know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred and speed...
Does that amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the
summit of the world, once again, we hurl our defiance at the stars.
You have objections?-Enough! Enough! We know them... We've understood!... Our fine
deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestorsPerhaps!... If only it were so!- But who cares? We don't want to understand!...Woe to
anyone who says those infamous words to us again! Lift up your heads. Erect on the summit
of the world, once again we hurl our defiance after stars!"
A plethora of manifestos by Marinetti and his colleagues followed, futurist cinema,
painting, music ('noise'), prose, plus the political and sociological implications.
WAR, THE WORLD'S ONLY HYGIENE
Marinetti's manifesto on war shows the central place violence nd conflict have in the
Futurist doctrine.
"We Futurists, who for over two years, scorned by the Lame and Paralysed, have glorified
the love of danger and violence, praised patriotism and war, the hygiene of the world, are
happy to finally experience this great Futurist hour of Italy, while the foul tribe of pacifists
huddles dying in the deep cellars of the ridiculous palace at The Hague. We have recently
had the pleasure of fighting in the streets with the most fervent adversaries of the war and
shouting in their faces our firm beliefs:
1. All liberties should be given to the individual and the collectivity, save that of being
cowardly.
2. Let it be proclaimed that the word Italy should prevail over the word Freedom.
3. Let the tiresome memory of Roman greatness be cancelled by an Italian greatness a
hundred times greater.
For us today, Italy has the shape and power of a fine Dreadnought battleship with its
squadron of torpedo-boat islands. Proud to feel that the martial fervour throughout the
nation is equal to ours, we urge the Italian government, Futurist at last, to magnify all the
national ambitions, disdaining the stupid accusations of piracy, and proclaim the birth of
Pan-Italianism.
Futurist poets, painters, sculptors, and musicians of Italy! As long as the war lasts let us set
aside our verse, our brushes, scapulas, and orchestras! The red holidays of genius have
begun! There is nothing for us to admire today but the dreadful symphonies of the shrapnels
and the mad sculptures that our inspired artillery moulds among the masses of the enemy."
ARTISTIC STORM TROOPER
Marinetti brought his dynamic character into an aggressive campaign to promote Futurism.
The Futurists aimed to aggravate society out of bourgeoisie complacency and the safe
19

existence through innovative street theatre, abrasive art, speeches and manifestos. The
speaking style of Marinetti was itself bombastic and thunderous. The art was aggravating to
conventional society and the art establishment. If a painting was that of a man with a
moustache, the whiskers would be depicted with the bristles of a shaving brush pasted onto
the canvas. A train would be depicted with the words 'puff, puff.
Both the words and deeds of the Futurists matched the nature of the art in expressing
contempt for the status quo with its preoccupation with "pastism" or the "passe". Marinetti
for example, described Venice as "a city of dead fish and decaying houses, inhabited by a
race of waiters and touts."
To the Futurist Boccioni, Dante, Beethoven and Michelangelo were "sickening" Whilst
Carra set about painting sounds, noises and even smells. Marinetti traversed Europe giving
interviews, arranging exhibitions, meetings and dinners. Vermilion posters with huge block
letters spelling 'futurism' were plastered throughout Italy on factories, in dance halls, cafes
and town squares. Futurist performances were organised to provoke riot. Glue was put onto
seats. Two tickets for the same seat would be sold to provoke a fight. 'Noise music' would
blare while poetry or manifestos were recited and paintings shown. Fruit and rotten
spaghetti would be thrown from the audience, and the performances would usually end in
brawls.
Marinetti replied to jeers with humour. He ate the fruit thrown at him. He welcomed the
hostility as proving that Futurism was not appealing to the mediocre.
POLITICS
The first political contacts of Marinetti and the Futurists were from the Left rather than the
Right, despite Marinetti's extreme nationalism and call for war as the "hygiene of mankind".
There were syndicalists and even some anarchists who shared Mari-netti's views on the
energising and revolutionary nature of war and gave him a reception.
In 1909, Marinetti entered the general elections and issued a "First Political Manifestos
which is anti-clerical and states that the only Futurist political programme is "national
pride", calling for the elimination of pacifism and the representatives of the old order.
During that year, Marinetti was heavily involved in agitating for Italian sovereignty over
Austrian ruled Trieste. The political alliance with the extreme Left began with the anarchosyndicalist Ottavio Dinale, whose paper reprinted the Futurist manifesto. The paper, La
demolizione was not specially anarcho-syndicalist, but of a general combative nature,
aiming to unite into one "fascio" all those of revolutionary tendencies, to ^oppose with full
energy the inertia and indolence that threatens to suffocate all life". The phrase is distinctly
Futurist.
Marinetti announced that he intended to campaign politically as both a syndicalist and a
nationalist, a synthesis that would eventually arise in Fascism. In 1910, he forged links with
the Italian Nationalist Association, which from its birth also had a pro-labour, syndicalist
aspect. In 1913 a Futurist political manifesto was issued which called for enlargement of the
military, an "aggressive foreign policy", colonial expansionism and "pan-Italianism", a 'cult'
of progress, speed and heroism, opposition to the nostalgia for monuments, ruins and
20

museums, economic protectionism, anti-socialism, anti-clericalism. The movement gained

wide enthusiasm among university students.
INTERVENTIONISM
The chance for Italy's "place in the sun" came with World War I. Not only the nationalists
were demanding Italy's entry into the war, but so too were certain revolutionary syndicalists
and a faction of socialists led by Mussolini. From the literati came D'Annunzio and
Marinetti.
In a manifesto addressed to students in 1914 Marinetti states the purpose of Futurism and
calls for intervention in the war. Futurism was the "doctor" to cure Italy of "pastism", a
remedy "valid for every country". The "ancestor cult far from cementing the race" was
making Italians "anaemic and putrid". Futurism was now "being fully realised in the great
world war".
"The present war is the most beautiful Futurist poem which has so far been seen. Futurism
was the militarisation of innovating artists."
The war would sweep away all the proponents of the old and senile, diplomats, professors,
philosophers, archaeologists, libraries, and museums.
"The war will promote gymnastics, sport, practical schools of agriculture, business and
industrialists. The war will rejuvenate Italy: will enrich her with men of action, will force
her to live no longer off the past, off ruins and the mild climate, but off her own national
forces."
The Futurists were the first to organise pro-war protests. Mussolini and Marinetti held their
first joint meeting in Milan on March 31st 1915. In April, both were arrested in Rome for
organising a demonstration.
Futurists were no mere windbags. Nearly all distinguished themselves in the war, as did
Mussolini and D'Annunzio. The Futurist architect Sant Elia was killed. Marinetti enlisted
with the Alpini regiment and was wounded and decorated for valour.
FUTURIST PARTY
In 1918, Marinetti began directing his attention to a new postwar Italy. He published a
manifesto announcing the Futurist Political Party, which called for "Revolutionary
nationalism^ for both imperialism and social revolution. "We must carry our war to total
victory."
Demands of the manifesto included the eight hour day and equal pay for women, the
nationalisation and redistribution of land to veterans; heavy taxes on acquired and inherited
wealth and the gradual abolition of marriage through easy divorce; a strong Italy freed, from
nostalgia, tourists and priests; industrialisation and modernisation of ^moribund cities" that
live as tourist centres. A Corporatist policy called for the abolition of parliament and its
replacement with a technical government of 30 or 40 young directors elected form the trade
associations.
21

The Futurist party concentrated its propaganda on the soldiers, and recruited many war
veterans of the elite Arditi (daredevils), who had been the blackshirted shocktroops of the
army who would charge into battle stripped to the waist, a grenade in each hand and a
dagger between their teeth.
In December 1919, the Futurists revived the "Fasci" or 'groups', which had been organised
in 1914 and 1915 to campaign for war intervention, and from which was to emerge the
Fascists.
FUTURISTS AND FASCISTS
The first joint post-war action between Mussolini and Mari-netti took place in 1919 when a
Socialist Party rally was disrupted in Milan.
That year Mussolini founded his own Fasci di Combattimento in Milan with the support of
Marinetti and the poet Ungasetti. The futurists and the Arditi comprised the core of the
Fascist leadership. The first Fascist manifesto was based on that of Mari-netti's Futurist
party.
In April, against the wishes of Mussolini who thought the action premature, Marinetti led
Fascists and Futurists and Arditi against a mass Socialist Party demonstration. Marinetti
waded in with fists, but intervened to save a socialist from being severely beaten by Arditi.
(To place the post-war situation in perspective, the Socialists had regularly beaten, abused
and even killed returning war veterans). The Fascists and futurists then proceeded to the
offices of the Socialist Party paper Avanti, which they sacked and burned.
Marinetti stood as a Fascist candidate in the 1919 elections and persuaded Toscanini to do
so. Whilst the Fascists held back, the Futurists threw their support behind the poet-soldier
D'Annunzio's take-over of Fiume. Marinetti arrived and was warmly welcomed by
D'Annunzio.
When the Fascist Congress of 1920 refused to support the Futurist demand to exile the King
and the Pope, Marinetti and other Futurists resigned from the Fascist party. Marinetti
considered that the Fascist party was compromising with conservatism and the bourgeoisie.
He was also critical of the Fascist concentration on anti-socialist agitation and on opposition
to strikes. Certain futurist factions realigned themselves specifically with the extreme Left.
In 1922, there were several Futurist exhibitions and performances organised by the
Communist cultural association, Pro-letkul, which also arranged a lecture by Marinetti to
explain the doctrine of Futurism.
FUTURISM UNDER THE FASCIST REGIME
When the Fascists assumed power in 1922 Marinetti, like D'Annunzio were critically
supportive of the regime. Marinetti considered: "The coming to power of the Fascists
constitutes the realisation of the minimum futurist programme."
Of Mussolini the statesman, Marinetti wrote: "Prophets and forerunners of the great Italy of
today, we Futurists are happy to salute in our not yet 40 year old Prime Minister of
marvellous futurist temperament".
22

In 1923, Marinetti began a rapprochement with the Fascists and presented to Mussolini his
manifesto "The Artistic Rights Promoted by Italian Futurists". Here he rejected the
Bolshevik alignment of Futurists in the USSR. He pointed to the Futurist sentiments that
had been expressed by Mussolini in speeches, alluding to Fascism being a ^government of
speed, curtailing everything that represents stagnation in the national life." Under
Mussolini's leadership, writes Marinetti:
"Fascism has rejuvenated Italy. It is now his duty to help us overhaul the artistic
establishment.... The political revolution must sustain the artistic revolutions Marinetti was
among the Congress of Fascist Intellectuals who in 1923 approved the measures taken by
the regime to restore order by curtailing certain constitutional liberties amidst increasing
chaos caused by both out-of-control radical Fascist squadisti and anti-Fascists. At the 1924
Futurist Congress, the delegates upheld Marinetti's declaration:
"The Italian Futurists, more than ever devoted to ideas and art, far removed from politics,
say to their old comrade Benito Mussolini, free yourself from parliament with one necessary
and violent stroke. Restore to Fascism and Italy the marvellous, disinterested, bold, antisocialist, anti-clerical, anti-monarchical spirit... Refuse to let monarchy suffocate the
greatest, most brilliant and just Italy of tomorrow... Quell the clerical opposition.... With a
steely and dynamic aristocracy of thought".
In 1929, Marinetti accepted election to the Italian Academy, considering it important that
"Futurism be represented^ He was also elected secretary of the Fascist Writer's Union and
as such was the official representative for fascist culture. Futurism became a part of fascist
cultural exhibitions and was utilised in the propaganda art of the regime. During the 1930s,
in particular the Fascist cultural expression was undergoing a drift away from tradition and
towards futurism, with the fascist emphasis on technology and modernisation. Mussolini
had already in 1926 defined the creation of a 'fascist art' that would be based on a synthesis
culturally as it was politically: "traditionalistic and at the same time modern".
In 1943, with the Allies invading Italy, the Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini and
surrendered to the occupation forces. The fascist faithful established a last stand, in the
north, named the Italian Social Republic.
With a new idealism, even former communist and liberal leaders were drawn to the
Republic. The Manifesto of Verona was drafted, restoring various liberties, and
championing labour against plutocracy within the vision of a united Europe. Marinetti
continued to be honoured by the Social Republic. He died in 1944.
Chapter 4

W B YEATS
The rise of industrialism and capitalism during the 19th century brought with it social
dislocation, an urban proletariat on the ruins of rural life, and the rise of commercial
interests. Smashed asunder were the traditional organic bonds of family and village,
23

rootedness to the earth through generations of one's offspring and to the cycles of nature.
With the ascendancy of materialism, came certain economic doctrines, both Free Trade
capitalism and Marxism, and the new belief in rationalism and science over faith, the
mysteries of the cosmos and the traditional religions. The forces of money had defeated
everything of the Spirit. As the German-philosopher historian, Oswald Spengler explained
in his Decline of the West. Western Civilisation had entered its end cycle. Such forces had
been let loose as long ago as the English Revolution of Cromwell and again by the French
Revolution.
However, there was a reaction to this predicament. The old conservatives had not been up to
the task. The spiritual and cultural reaction came from the artists, poets and writers who
reach beyond the material and draw their inspiration from the well-springs of what the
psychologist C. G. Jung identified as the collective unconscious.
This reaction included not only the political and the cultural but also a spiritual revival
expressed in an interest in the metaphysical.
GOLDEN DAWN
Among those reacting in what the Italian author and metaphysician Evola called "the revolt
against the modern world" was the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, leader of the Irish
literary renaissance, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
Yeats was born in 1865. Despite his English and Protestant background. He was involved in
the Young Ireland movement, much of his poetry celebrating the Irish rebellion and its
heroes. Yeats also became an early member of the Dublin Hermetic Society, studied Hindu
philosophy under the Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee, and joined the Theosophical Society
in 1895.
Moving to London in 1897, Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of
the primary influences in the revival of interest in metaphysics. For Yeats the mystical was
the basis of both his poetry and his political ideas. Yeats was particularly interested in the
Irish mystical tradition and folklore. He saw the peasantry and rural values as being
necessary to revive against the onslaught of materialism. He aimed to found an Irish
Hermetic Order substituting the alien Egyptian deities of Golden Dawn ritual with those of
the Irish gods and heroes. Yeats saw the mythic and spiritual as the basis of a culture,
providing the underlying unity for all cultural manifestations, a "unity of being," where,
writing in reference to the Byzantium culture:
"[The] religious, aesthetic and practical life were one... the painter, the mosaic worker, the
worker in gold and silver, the illuminator of sacred books were absorbed in the subject
matter, and that of the vision of a whole people."
It might seem a paradox to the Left that such men of the Right were instrumental in
introducing the West to the wisdom of the East, for all traditional civilisations have a
parallel outlook in their period of High Culture. Pound utilised Chinese characters in his
poetry, translated Chinese texts and referred to the ideas of Confucius as finding expression
in Fascism. Evola brought the ethics of the Samurai and the practices of Tantra to the notice
of the West. It was cosmopolitanism that these poets and writers rejected, seeing it as the
duty of the culture-bearing stratum to restore the unity of culture to the nation, to repudiate
"an international art, picking stones and symbols where it pleased", as Yeats put it:
24

"To deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day
labourer, would accept as common design."
ARCHETYPES AND THE MULTITUDE
Pre-dating the psychologist Carl Jung's theory of archetypes, Yeats held that symbols had an
autonomous power of their own in the unconscious. It was these symbols, age-long
inherited memories, upon which the artist and the poet drew as the source of creativity.
To Yeats, "individuality is not as important as our age has imagined". The daimons of the
ancient memories acted upon the individual, and one's creativity was an expression of these
forces. These symbols and images could be brought to consciousness and expressed
artistically via magic and ritual. Yeats's poetry was intended as an expression of these
symbols.
This resurgence of these age-long memories required a "revolt of soul against intellect now
beginning in the world."
Yeats was particularly concerned that commercialism would mean the pushing down of
cultural values in the pursuit of profit rather than artistic excellence. Hence, he called for a
revival of aristocratic values. He lamented that, "the mere multitude is everywhere with its
empty photographic eyes. A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is called for.
Everywhere the mediocre are coming in order to make themselves master."
His appeal was to the artist and to the individual of taste and culture for, as the philosopher
Nietzsche had pointed out, culture is the faculty that distinguishes the human from other
organisms. In this spirit, Yeats applauded Nietzsche's philosophy as, "a counteractive to the
spread of democratic vulgarity".
This suspicion of democratic vulgarity was poetically expressed for example in 1921 in The
Leaders of the Crowd:
"They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invents..."
Yeats's keen sense of historical context is reflected in his The Curse of Cromwell.
Here he identifies the English Revolution as what we can see as the inauguration of the
cycle of "Money over Blood", in Spenglerian terms; the victory of the merchant class over
the traditional order, which was to be re-re-enacted in the French Revolution. The Bolshevik
Revolution was of the same spirit of money against blood, of the materialistic against the
spirit and culture. All three revolutions were carried out in the name of "the people" against
the traditional rulers, only to create a greater tyranny in the service of money. Spengler had
written in The Decline of the West; "There is no proletarian, not even a communist
movement, that does not serve the interests of money."
Cromwell's English revolution has had lasting consequences for the entire West. The cycle
of Money over culture and tradition that Cromwell inaugurated has never been overcome.
25

America was founded on the same Puritan money ethics and continues to spread that spirit
over the farthest reaches of the world.
Cromwell's "murderous crew" have brought forth the "money's rant" on the blood of what is
noble.
"You ask what I have found, and far and wide I go:
Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous crew
The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay
And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen,
where are they?
And there is an old beggar wandering in his pride His fathers served their fathers before Christ was crucified
O what of that, O what of that?
What is there left to say?"
No longer are there left those of noble tradition, those who served as part of a long heritage,
"the tall men"; and the old gaiety of the peasant village, the squire's hall and aristocrat's
manor have been beaten down.
"All neighbourly, content and easy talk are gone,
But here's no good complaining, for money's rant is on."
The artists, once patronised by the aristocracy, must now prostitute their art for the sake of
money on the mass market, as script writers, and 'public entertainers' to sell a product. All
individuals are now producers and consumers, including the artist producing for a consumer
market.
"And we and all the Muses are things of no account."
Yeats considered himself to be the heir to a tradition and lived in that service.
"That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company,
Can pay the poet for a verse and hear the fiddle sound,
That I am still their servant though all are underground..."
Yeats considered himself the remnant of a tradition, and upheld the old values for the return
of nobility, high culture and the organic community.
ORDER FROM CHAOS
One product of democracy and capitalism that Yeats feared was the proliferation of what he
regarded as inferior people. Yeats advocated planned human up-breeding and joined the
Eugenics Society. As with his political and cultural views his outlook on eugenics had a
mystical basis, relating reincarnation to the race soul. In his 1938 poem Under Ben Bulben
Yeats calls in eugenic terms for Irish poets to sing of "whatever is well made", and "scorn
the sort now growing up", "all out of shape from toe to top." In this poem, there is a mixture
of the mythic, reincarnation, the race soul and eugenics. There is an immortality of the soul
26

that parts one in death only briefly from the world.

"Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities That of race and that of soul
And ancient Ireland knew it all."
The eugenic and the divine combine within the artist:
"Poet and sculptor, do the work, Nor let the modish painter shirk What his great forefathers
did, Bring the soul of man to God, Make him fill the cradles right."
However, in the modern age "The greater dream had gone. Confusion fell upon our
thought." It is the duty of the cultural-bearing stratum to set the culture anew by
remembering what had once been:
"Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds."
Yeats's antidote to the modem cycle of decline is to return to the traditional order of peasant,
squire, monk and aristocrat:
"Sing the peasantry and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers'randy laughter
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry...
The modern era is compared to the traditional by way of a man in a golden breastplate under
the old stone cross, symbols of a noble age. In The Old Stone Cross Yeats writes:
"A statesman is an easy man.
He tells his lies by rote;
A journalist makes up his lies
And takes you by the throat;
So stay at home and drink your beer
And let the neighbours vote
Said the man in the golden breastplate
Under the old stone Cross Because this age and the next engender in the ditch..."
The democratic farce, with its politicians, newspapermen and voting masses are not worthy
of attention. The modern cycle is further dealt with in The Statesman's Holiday, where
27

"I lived among great houses,

Riches drove out rank.
Base drove out the better blood.
And mind and body shrank..."
The aristocracy of old the noble lineage of blood, has been replaced by new rich, the
merchants, our new rulers are those who measure all things by profit.
FALL AND RISE
In 1921 a year prior to Mussolini's assumption to power, Yeats had prophesied in The
Second Coming the approach of a figure from out of the democratic chaos, a "rough beast"
who would settle matters amidst a world where, when "things fall apart, the centre cannot
hold."
The theme is Spenglerian, but no doubt drawn upon Yeats'recognition of the cyclic nature of
history which is the way of seeing the world in all traditional civilisations, from Greek to
Aztec to Teutonic and Hindu. However, the Spenglerian theme allows for not only a decline
and fall of a civilisation but an interim cycle where the 'new Caesar' emerges from the
decadent epoch to inaugurate a revitalisation of the civilisation. The poem opens with an
allusion to the 'turning' of the historic cycles:
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer: Things fall
apart, the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood dimmed
tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned: The best lack all
conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."
One can read in the above what appears to be then the growing tide of Bolshevik revolution
amidst the loss of tradition and of the axis around which civilisation is maintained. The
answer is the rise of a strong leader who will get civilisation back on course, the 'new
Caesar', that Spengler saw in the possibility of Mussolini.
"Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand
Yeats saw hope, like Spengler, in Fascist Italy. "The Ireland that reacts from the present
disorder is turning its eyes towards individualist Italy." Yeats supported General Eoin
O'Duffy and the Irish Blueshirts. O'Duffy, a hero of the Irish revolt and Michael Collins'
principal aide, created a mass movement and Eire was almost brought civil war between the
"Blueshirts and the IRA. Yeats wrote some marching songs for the movement. These sang
of the heroes of Ireland, and of the need for a renewed social order.
"When nations are empty up there at the top,
When order has weakened and faction is strong,
Time for us to pick out a good tune,
Take to the roads and go marching along..."
However, Yeats, like Wyndham Lewis and others was suspicious of any movement that
appealed to the masses, and of what he saw as the demagoguery of the Fascist leaders in
appealing to those masses. This was regardless of the fact that the masses were being won
28

over to national ideals and away from the internationalism of the Communists. Yeats died in
1939.

Chapter 5

KNUT HAMSUN
Knut Hamsun has had a decisive impact on the course of 20th century literature, both in
Europe and America, yet he is little discussed let alone honoured even in his native Norway.
Ernest Hemingway tried to emulate him as did Henry Miller, who called Hamsun the
Dickens of my generation. Thomas Mann wrote, never has the Nobel Prize been awarded
to one so worthy of it. Herman Hesse called Hamsun his favourite author. Admired by H G
Wells, Kafka, and Brecht, Hamsun always enjoyed a great following not only in Germany
but also in Russia, lauded especially by Maxim Gorky. Even inside the Communist State
Hamsun continued to be published despite his politics. For Hamsun saw in National
Socialist Germany an attempt to reconnect man with the soil in the face of industrialisation
and materialism.
Hamsun's influence on literature will continue, even if his name remains obscured.
ORIGINS
Hamsun was born Knut Pedersen of an impoverished peasant family of seven children on
4th August 1859. His father was a farmer and a tailor; his mother's lineage was of Viking
nobility. Knut had a hard upbringing on his uncle's farm where he was sent when he was
nine. But his uncle also ran the local library, which gave Knut the chance to begin his selfeducation.
Knut left his uncle's farm in 1873, and over the next few years worked at a variety of
jobs, labouring, teaching, and clerical, as he widely journeyed about.
LITERARY STIRRINGS
At 18 he had published his first novel called The Enigmatic One, a love story. This was
followed by a poem A Reconciliation. He then paid for the publication of another novel
Bjorger. But acknowledgement as a writer was a decade away as there was little interest in
his peasant tales.
In 1882 Knut travelled to the USA, joining the great Norwegian emigration to that
country. Between numerous jobs he was able to get some newspaper articles published and
began a series of lectures on authors among the Norwegian community. From this early
start, Hamsun wrote without moral judgement, as an observer of life. He was the first to
develop the novel based on the psychology of characters. Hamsun wrote of what he saw and
felt particularly identifying with the workers and the tramps. But he was soon disillusioned
with America and had a low regard for its lack of real culture.
Hamsun's first major literary work came in 1888 when he succeeded in getting published
a short story in a magazine, which was to form part of his novel, Hunger. The story gained
him access to the literary scene in Copenhagen. Hamsun became a celebrity among the
young intellectuals. He was invited to lecture before university audiences. He was
commissioned to write a book on America in 1889 setting aside the completion of Hunger.
The result was On the Cultural Life of Modern America. Here he attacked the crass
29

materialism of the country. His contempt for democracy as a form of despotism is

expressed: his abhorrence for its levelling nature and mob politics. America is a land where
the highest morality is money, where the meaning of art is reduced to cash value. He also
expresses his misgivings about the presence of Africans in the USA. The Civil war is
described as a war against the aristocracy by northern capitalists. He writes:
Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto stud farm.
FAME
Hunger appeared in mid 1890. It has been described as one of the great novels of urban
alienation. Like much of his writing it is partly autobiographical. It centres on a young
budding writer trying to fend off poverty, wandering the streets in rags, but in some odd
way enjoying the experiences despite the hardship. Through an act of will the character
maintains his identity. This was perhaps the first novel to make the workings of the mind
the central theme. It was a genre he was to continue experimenting with over the next ten
years. He contended against contemporary psychology that states that individuals are not
dominated by a single personality type. Instead they have a complex of types that are often
not integrated. He wrote of his aim for literature:
I will therefore have contradictions in the inner man considered as a quite natural
phenomenon, and I dream of a literature with characters in which their very lack of
consistency is their basic characteristic.
Hamsun's next great novel of the 1890s was Mysteries, virtually a self-portrait. One
reviewer described Hamsun as expressing the wildest paradoxes, a hatred of the
bourgeoisie academics and the mass. The principal character, Nagel, is presented in the
form of free flowing thought associations and a stream of consciousness.
Editor Lynge is a thinly veiled attack on an antagonistic and influential newspaper editor.
Here Hamsun identifies himself as a radical who belongs to no party, but is an individual
in the extreme. The book caused uproar among literary circles, but sold well.
Having outraged the literary establishment, Hamsun next set about critiquing the younger
set of artists as arrogant and talentless wastrels in Shallow Soil. Here Hanka Tidemand, a
liberated and modern woman of the type detested by Hamsun, finds her true nature back
with her hard working husband and children, after an affair with an artist. She realises her
mistaken course, on the verge of divorce, when she sees her children. Here Hamsun sets out
his constant theme of rediscovering one's roots in the simple life, in family and children.
The Kareno trilogy focuses Hamsun's growing anti-democratic sentiment in the character
of Ivar Kareno, a young philosopher who states:
I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, not the man who is chosen but the man
who elects himself to be ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that
is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.
Hamsun had become a celebrity, cheered in the streets by crowds although he despised
the publicity and public attention. Travelling to Russia he finds to his dismay the American
type of modernity and industrialism even under the Communists. Travelling on to Turkey he
finds more to admire in the 'ancient races', having left30

...the life of chatter and cackle behind.

They smile and are silent. Maybe it's best that way. The Koran has created an attitude
toward life which cannot be debated, or discussed at meetings. The attitude is simply this:
happiness is to survive: afterwards things will be better. Fatalism.
Such a rejection of the modern rationalist spirit of Europe and America was simple, like
iron. Likewise his admiration for the simplicity of the Russian who still knows how to
obey.
Hamsun's poem Letter to Byron in Heaven is regarded as one of his most radical writings.
He appeals to Lord Byron to return and save society from degeneration, democracy and
feminism.
In 1934 Hamsun wrote an article. Wait & See in which he attacked the opponents of
National Socialist Germany, and sarcastically asked if a return of Communists, Jews and
Bruning to Germany is preferable.
OCCUPATION
In April 1940 the Germans occupied Norway to secure the sea route, after the British had
on several occasions breached Norwegian neutrality, including the mining of Norway's
territorial waters.
Hamsun wrote in Vidkun Quisling's newspaper that he hoped Germany would protect
Norway from Britain in the West and Communism in the East. Ironically, Quisling, his very
name becoming synonymous with 'traitor', was the only politician who had campaigned
before the war for a strong defence capability, and was particularly pro-British, having been
honoured by the British Government for looking after British interests in Russia. He sought
an alliance of Nordic nations including Germany and Britain, against Communism. The
only strong resistance against the German invasion came from a garrison commanded by an
officer who belonged to the Quisling party. The King and Government quickly fled, leaving
Norway without a Government. Quisling stepped in to fill the void as the only political
figure willing to try and look after Norwegian interests under the occupation. He declared
himself Minister President, but because he was not a pliant tool he did not enjoy the
confidence of the German military authorities. He was soon forced to resign in favour of an
administrative council under German control, but eventually regained a measure of
authority.
Meanwhile, Hamsun urged Norwegians to rally behind Quisling so that some form of
sovereignty could be restored. He described Quisling as more than a politician, he is a
thinker, a constructive spirit. It was a view that was to be expressed after the war by
British journalist Ralph Hewins, who had himself done his share during the war to besmirch
Quisling's name. Hamsun's longest wartime article appeared in the German language
Berlin-Tokyo-Rome periodical in February 1942. He wrote:
Europe does not want either the Jew or their gold, neither the Americans nor their
country.

31

Despite Hamsun's pro-German sentiment he championed the rights of his countrymen,

including those who resisted the German occupation. He attempted in intercede for the
writer Ronald Fangen, and many others, who had been arrested by the Gestapo. In 1943
Hamsun and his wife accepted the invitation of Goebbels to visit Germany. Goebbels wrote
of Hamsun as being the embodiment of what an epic writer should be. Hamsun was
equally impressed and sent Goebbels the Nobel medal he had been awarded, which
Goebbels accepted as Hamsun's expression of solidarity with our battle for a new Europe,
and a happy society. Whilst en route to Norway from Germany, Hamsun met Hitler, a
meeting which did not go well, as Hamsun took the opportunity to condemn the military
administration of Norway which had rendered Quisling powerless. However, Hamsun
continued to support Germany and expressed his pride in a son joining the Norwegian
Waffen SS. In 1944 he visited a Panzer division and toured a U-Boat. Hamsun received his
85th birthday greetings from Hitler.
In 1945 a stroke forced Hamsun to quieten his activities. But with Hitler's death Hamsun
defiantly wrote a tribute for the press:
I am not worthy to speak his name out loud. Nor do his life and his deeds warrant any
kind of sentimental discussion. He was a warrior, a warrior of mankind, and a prophet of
the gospel of justice for all nations. He was a reforming nature of the highest order, and his
fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism, which finally failed him. Thus might
the average western European regard Hitler? We, his closest supporters, now bow our
heads at his death
POST -WAR PERSECUTION
Membership of Quisling's party was declared a criminal offence and Hamsun's' sons Tore
and Arild were among the first of 90,000 to be arrested. Marie and Knut were arrested a few
weeks later. Due to his age, at 86, Hamsun was sent to a hospital rather than prison,
although the stress and treatment struck considerably at his still quite good health. He was
defiant and stated he would have assisted the Germans more if he could.
He was sent to an old folk's home where he was a popular guest. However, prosecuting
Norway's leading cultural figure, like America's dealing with Ezra Pound for treason, was
an embarrassing matter. Consequently he spent 119 days in a psychiatric clinic. The
psychiatrists found in him, as in the characters of his novel's, a complex interplay of traits,
but the most prominent of all they described was his absolute honesty. The conclusion
was that Hamsun was not insane but that he was mentally impaired. However, a reading of
his autobiographical On Overgrown Paths, written amidst the threats of prosecution and the
interrogations, shows him to be perfectly lucid. Hamsun, as his last writing shows, although
deaf and going blind retained his mental faculties impressively, along with a certain fatalism
and humour.
Although the Attorney General opted not to proceed against Hamsun, the Crown wished
to try him as a member of the National Samlung Party run by Quisling. To Hamsun the
action at least meant that he was being officially acknowledge as of sound mind. He was
fined 425.000 kroner.
With ruinous fines hanging over them the Hamsun's returned to Norholm. On appeal the
fine was reduced to 325.000 kroner. Tore was also fined, and his brother Arild was jailed
until 1949 for his membership of the Norwegian Waffen SS. Marie was released from jail in
1948.
32

Hamsun's On Overgrown Paths was published in 1949 and became an immediate best
seller, although Hamsun ended his days in poverty on his farm. He died in his sleep on 19th
February 1952.
Chapter 6

HENRY WILLIAMSON
Henry Williamson was of the First World War generation from whose experiences emerged
a new but eternal world-view. Williamson, like Knut Hamsun in Norway, saw mans' place
in Nature as the ultimate source of one's being, an idealisation of nature as a reaction against
the machine and the bank. The hope was of a new Springtime for the West in Spenglerian
terms, the rural against the urban, the rootedness of the soil and of working the land, against
the nebulous city masses. It was what Spengler had called the final battle of "CivilisationBlood Against Money".
Yet, whilst Williamson, like Ezra Pound and Hamsun, are recognised as having a crucial
impact upon 20th Century literature, these figures have been consigned to the memory hole.
This is due to them not only having identified with new political forms but (unlike some of
their contemporaries) to have never repudiated them. For this they cannot be forgiven by the
liberal and Jewish coteries that control Western publishing and literary and artistic criticism.
Williamson's outlook shaped by both his experiences in the trenches and in his attachment
to nature, unsurprisingly led him to an appreciation of National Socialism, with its concept
of 'Blood and Soil', and to the Fascism of Sir Oswald Mosley.
Williamson was born 1st December 1895 in London, the son of a bank clerk. As a child, he
had an intense love of nature, spending much time exploring the nearby Kent countryside.
He was intent on closely observing things for himself, this faculty remaining with him
throughout his life and forming his writing style as the author of his famous and well-loved
nature books.
WORLD WAR I
Williamson enlisted in the army on the outbreak of the war, and fought on the Somme and
at Passchendale where he was seriously wounded. He was invalided home in 1915, but was
back as an officer in France in 1916. He came out of the war as a Captain with a Military
Cross. It was his war experiences, together with his love of nature that prompted him to seek
out and experience the "life flow" that pervades all existence.
An enduring experience for Williamson was the Christmas Truce of 1914, when Germans
and Englishmen left their trenches to fraternise and play soccer. Men such as Williamson
returned from the war far from hating Germans and determined that never again would
'brother Europeans' fight among themselves for the sake of greed and selfishness
ANCIENT SUNLIGHT
After demobilisation, Williamson returned to his family home and entered employment with
the Weekly Dispatch in Fleet Street. He had his first articles published in several major
periodicals. In 1919, he read The Story of My Heart by the 19th Century English nature
33

writer Richard Jeffries. This was to have a crucial impact upon Williamson as a revelation
that he - the individual self- is more than an isolated echo but a link that stretches without
beginning or end in a cosmic flow. It was the sun that represented the symbol of this
timelessness and unity. For Williamson this truth - known to all traditionalist civilisations,
but smothered in our materialistic society - is that of a mystical union between the eternal
sunlight and the earth. The symbol of the ancient sunlight was something 'born within'.
Williamson "came to feel the long life of the earth back in the dimmest past while the sun of
the moment was warm on me... This sunlight linked me through the ages to that past
consciousness. From all the ages my soul desired to take that soul-life which had flowed
through them as the sunbeams had continually found on earth".
It was now that he embarked on the first volume, The Beautiful Years, of Flax of Dream. In
1922, Williamson returned to the countryside and rented a cottage that had been built in the
days of King John, next to the local church in Georgeham, North Devon. Williamson lived
here hermit-like and studied nature in detail, tramping the countryside and sleeping out. The
doors and windows of his cottage were always open, and he gathered about him a family of
dogs, cats, gulls, buzzards, magpies and an otter cub. The otter, Tarka (meaning little water
wanderer), had been rescued by Williamson after a farmer had shot its mother. The otter
would walk like a dog alongside Williamson. One day it walked into a rabbit trap, panicked
and fled. Williamson spent years looking for Tarka following the rivers Taw and Torridge.
He didn't find Tarka, but his intimate contact with nature inspired him to write his most
famous nature book Tarka The Otter. Published in 1927, this popular book was an intimate
description of the English countryside, and gained Williamson the Hawthorne Prize for
Literature in 1928.
In 1925, he married and his first son was born the following year. In 1929, the family
moved to Shallowford, Devon, where over the next thirteen years four further children were
sired, and more books were published, including Salar the Salmon. From 1937-45 the
Williamson family lived at the Old Hall Farm in North Norfolk, where many more books
and articles were written, and a sixth child was born.
NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Like Mosley and the many veterans who joined his British Union of Fascists, Williamson as
appalled by the prospect of another war that would soak the fields of Europe again with the
blood of closely related peoples.
Not only did the fraternity that had briefly existed between Germans and Englishmen on the
Somme on Christmas Day 1914 forever affect him, but he was also greatly influenced by
the act of the German officer who had helped him remove a wounded British soldier caught
in barbed wire on the front line. Williamson was therefore able to contrast what he knew of
the chivalry of the Germans with the anti-German hate propaganda that the press had begun
to resurrect with the advent of Hitler. Williamson saw in National Socialism a spirit that
could bring a dying Western civilisation back to its wellspring of life. He felt duty-bound to
raise a voice. He was one of the first to commit himself to Mosley and the British Union of
Fascists, and championed Hitler as the visionary leader of European rebirth. In The Flax of
Dreams and The Phoenix Generation Williamson was to describe Hitler as "the great man
across the Rhine whose life symbol is the happy child".
34

Williamson attended the 1935 Nuremberg Congress and was impressed by the economic
and social achievements of Germany whilst the British continued to languish in poverty and
unemployment. He saw a racial community based on the values of land and a revived
peasantry, freed from banker's interest, guaranteed from foreclosure, and the pioneering
conservation laws and projects. Williamson saw in the faces of the German people
expressiveness and confidence that looked as if they were "breathing, extra oxygen" as he
put it.
In the Hitler Youth, reminiscent of his days as a Boy Scout, Williamson observed:
"the former pallid leer of hopeless slum youth transformed into the suntan, the clear eye, the
broad and easy rhythm of the poised young human being".
Lest it be objected that Williamson was seeing Germany through rose coloured glasses, very
much the same description was given by the American journalist William Shirer, author of
the perennially published basic anti-Nazi text "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" whose
hatred of Hitler is beyond doubt.
"The young in the Third Reich were growing up to have strong and healthy bodies, faith in
the future of their country and in themselves and a sense of fellowship and camaraderie that
shattered all class and economic and social barriers. I thought of that later, in the May days
of 1940, when along the road between Aachen and Brussels one saw the contrasts between
the German soldiers, bronzed and clean cut from a youth spent in the sunshine on an
adequate diet, and the first British war prisoners, with their hollow chests, round shoulders,
pasty complexions and bad teeth - tragic examples of the youth that England had neglected
so irresponsibly in the years between the wars." (Shirer, p256).
To Williamson, National Socialist Germany represented "...a race that moves on poles of
mystic, sensual delight. Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression a
symbolic utterance. Everything is of the blood, of the senses."
Williamson said, "The spirit of the farm and what I was trying to do there, was the spirit of
Oswald Mosley. It was all part of the same battle." (Skidelsky)
With characteristic descriptiveness, Williamson, writes:
"Rats, weeds, swamps, depressed markets, labourers on the dole, rotten cottages, polluted
streams, political parties and class divisions controlled by the money power, wealthy
banking and insurance houses getting rid of their land mortgages and investing their
millions abroad (but not in the empire), this was the real England of the period of this story
of a Norfolk farm."
In The Story of a Norfolk Farm he writes of his vision:
"One day the sewage of the cities will cease to be poured into the rivers, and will be
returned to the land, to grow fine food for the people. One day salmon will leap again in the
clear waters of the London River; and human work will be creative and joyful."
One day the soul of man, shut in upon itself during the long centuries of economic struggle,
will arise in the light of the sun of truth. And now I lay down the pen and return to the
plough."
35

In The Phoenix Generation, he expresses his vision again through the autobiographical
Philip Maddison, the returned soldier, his generation denied the 'land fit for heroes' that had
been promised by the politicians:
"...When the soil's fertility is being conserved instead of raped, when village life is a social
unity, when pride of craftsmanship returns, when everyone works for the sake of adding
beauty and importance to life, when every river is clean and bright, and the proud words 'I
serve' are in everyone's heart and purpose. Then my country will be good enough for me."
Williamson wrote for Mosley's paper "Action". He called for Anglo-German brotherhood,
recognising that Hitler desired nothing more than peace with Britain. He saw that the result
of another war would be the bringing of Asiatic Bolshevism to the heart of Europe. He
sought to have his friend T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) join with Mosley in a peace campaign.
Lawrence was returning from having posted his letter to Williamson agreeing to such a
campaign when he had his fatal motorbike accident.
With Mosley's rallies attracting larger audiences than ever in 1940, Williamson wrote to
Mosley. If he could see Hitler, as a common soldier who had fraternised, on the faraway
Christmas Day of 1914, with the men of his Linz battalion under Messines Hill, might I not
be able to give him the amity he so desired from England, a country he admired..."
Williamson visited Mosley full of hope, but Mosley's reaction was that "/ am afraid the
curtain is down". Williamson nodded, and asked Mosley what he would do. Mosley replied
that he would carry on as long as possible working for peace.
In 1940 around a thousand Englishmen were interned without trial for opposing the war,
including Mosley and 800 BUF members. Williamson was among those arrested.
Williamson was paroled on condition that he remained silent. With this defeat of Germany
Williamson stated that his hopes for a regenerated Europe had been killed.
GALE OF THE WORLD
His marriage broke up in 1947. He returned to North Devon to live on the hilltop hut he had
bought in 1928. In The Gale of the World, the last volume of his 15 volume autobiographic
Chronicles of Ancient Sunlight, Williamson has his main character Philip Maddison (i.e.
himself) questioning the legality of the Nuremberg Trials, the devastation of Germany, and
puts the blame for the mass deaths in German concentration camps partly on the Allied
bombing of the German transport system.
Williamson remained loyal to Sir Oswald Mosley (the character Sir Hereward Birkin in The
Gale of the World). In this last volume he has Maddison write some notes for guidance to
any young, writer, a survivor of the Second World War who aspires to write a "War and
Peaces for this age. Williamson asks hopefully whether such a writer might write from his
own spirit and vision, "unimpeded and unimpaired by contemporary massed emotions to
truly show the luminous personality of Adolf Hitler": to write with "divination and truth,
without admiration or contempt, and above all without moral judgement, of the causes and
effects of the tragic split in the mind of European man, from which arose this war".
The creator of a work of art, continues Williamson/Maddison, will reveal the truth of this
age, "holding in balance the forces and counter forces which led to the disintegration of the
West."
36

The mind of the poet must with detachment assess the fatal war with an "admired sister
nation", which resulted in exposing the West to "a greater ruin from the East", because a
leader (Churchill) pursued Britain's centuries old policy of European
"balance of power" and thereby endorsed the further decline of the West by destroying
Germany.
Williamson/Madison, questions whether there was a soul of Britain or just a "disruptive
determination^, arising from its island isolation and its position of wealth from trade. "Its
policy for four hundred years has been to rule by money, thus keeping in division the
continent of Europe^, as Winston Churchill has written in an early autobiography
"And will history decide that this European of great talent and emotion [Churchill] felt it to
be his crowning purpose in life to balk and destroy a fellow European [Hitler] of genius who could build only because he had forced out money for money's sake?"
The war had been that of the 'spiritually damaged'. The German leadership was being tried
and executed unchivalrously, for war crimes, when the Soviets had been guilty of Katyn.
When thousands of shopkeepers in France were murdered and their shops looted; and
condemned as 'collaborators'.
Early in The Gale of the World, Maddison notes that after Berlin had been subdued from the
shelling by 11,000 guns, "rape and sadism preceded slow murder. Neither those
'war criminals' nor their Russian Generals are being tried at Nuremberg.","What of the socalled Allied war crimes? We are impotent to do anything about the loss of Poland's
integrity."
What the war was about for Churchill, and those who sought to keep Europe down and
divided, was the preventing of Hitler from making Europe united and self-sufficient, and
independent of loans and imports".
"For this is what the war was about; it was not directly about Synagogues burned down or
heads shaved or Catholics saying Mass or anything else which the man in the street was
told, since that was ALL he could comprehend. The war, was, and remains, an economic
war; and historically speaking, the misery of generations is less in eternity than a wave
expending itself on a rock. The European wave breaks, and is no more."
Williamson has a doctor attached to the dispossessed Ukrainians in Britain, pointing out that
Hitler ordered the halt of the German tanks at Dunkirk,
"Declaring that he had no quarrel with the English, and wished not to invade or injure in
anyway a 'cousin nation', the Fuhrer said that if the British Empire went down, the Germans,
although they would win the war in Europe, would go down under Bolshevism. Because we
did not command the sea as well."
Williamson was acutely aware that the Soviets had been permitted to invade half of Europe
while the British and American forces were held back; that they would soon have the atomic
bomb.

37

Maddison notes on the radio news the final words of the defendants at Nuremberg as they
went to the deaths on the scaffold. Immediately he makes a note:
"Herman Goring shot down Manfred Cloudesley over Mossy Face Wood at Havrincourt in
1918. He saw that his enemy, who had killed nine of his Richtofen Staffel pilots, had the
best surgeons and treatment in hospital. This morning Goring committed suicide, better to
have died on the cross, old Knight of the Order Pour le Merited.
Although Williamson does not say it, one here wonders what it was that made the victory of
World War II and its aftermath so different from that of Europe's previous brothers' wars up
until 1918. Napoleon had been comfortably exiled and continued to exercise dominion over
his island home and was treated honourably. The Kaiser was exiled to Holland. Yet, now
the German leadership was condemned to death on a new set of legal principles alien to the
Western ethos and contrived for the specific purpose of eliminating them. This was not
Western justice and chivalry, but Old Testament vengeance
POST WAR AND OSWALD MOSLEY
Williamson was one of the first to respond to Mosley's call for a United Europe and wrote
for the new magazine of Mosley's Union Movement, The European, in which he proclaimed
the birth of a new Europe in tune with nature.
In The Gale of the World, he describes Mosley's (Sir Hereward Birkin's) background.
Birkin's political career, after returning from World War I, had began with original thinking
at least two generations before his time. He was the youngest member to enter Parliament
soon after the war. He left the Tory Party because of its staid manner and joined the Labour
party.
Many perceptive men recognised him as a young man of outstanding brilliance, industry
and courage. Now let the author of this book speak for himself. Williamson then quotes
from Mosley's book The Alternative:
"We were divided and we are conquered. That is the tragic epitaph of two war generations.
That was the fate of my generation in 1914, and that was the doom of a new generation of
young soldiers in 1939. The youth of Europe shed the blood of their own family, and the
jackals of the world grew fat. Those who fought are in the position of the conquered,
whatever their country. Those who did not fight, but merely profited, alone are victorious."
Williamson takes up Mosley's post-war analysis, stating that Fascism had failed because it
was too national. Its opponent, financial democracy failed too. "It could only frustrate those
who would build a New Order". There follows a large segment from "The Alternative^,
ending with a call for Europeans to overcome their old wounds and rivalries and march
onward in the "European Spirit." Williamson remained true to what he had always believed.
Like Ezra Pound and Knut Hamsun, he was denied all honours and ignored for decades.
Williamson was even denied an honorary doctorate from the university to which he was a
benefactor.

38

In 1950, he remarried and sired another son, divorcing in 1968. His "Chronicle of Ancient
Sunlight" was written between 1951 and 1969, and was acclaimed as a masterpiece of
English literature, despite the efforts of certain interests to obliterate his name. He published
his final book The Scandaroon in 1972, the story of a racing pigeon. In 1974, he began
working on the script for a film of "Tarka". Unknown to Williamson, filming went ahead
despite the failing health that prevented him from completing the task himself. Willamson
died on 13 August 1977 and was buried in North Devon.
Chapter 7

EZRA POUND
Ezra Pound, heralded as the 'founding father of modern English literature' yet denied
honours during his life, was born in a frontier town in Idaho in 1885, the son of an assistant
assayer and the grandson of a Congressman.
He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1901 and in 1906 was awarded his MA
degree. He had already started work on his magnum opus, The Cantos. An avid reader of
Anglo-Saxon, classical and medieval literature, Pound continued post-graduate work on the
Troubadour musician-poets of medieval Provence. In 1908 Pound travelled to Venice.
There he paid $8.00 for the printing of the first volume of his poetry, A Lume Spento (With
tapers quenched).
Pound then went to London to meet W B Yeats, and became a dominant figure in Yeats's
Monday evening circle, serving for a time as Yeats's secretary. He quickly gained
recognition in London, and came into contact with the English Review that was publishing
the works of D. H. Lawrence and the author, painter and critic Wyndham Lewis. In 1911
Pound launched his campaign for innovative writing in The New Age edited by the
monetary reformer A. R. Orage. For Pound the new poetry of the century would be "austere,
direct, free from emotional slither."
The following year Pound founded the Imagist movement in literature. He was by now
already helping to launch the careers of William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Hemingway
and James Joyce. He was now also the mentor of Yeats, Pound's senior by 20 years and with
world recognition. In 1914 Pound started the Vorticist movement. The impetus originally
came from the avant garde sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeski. With Wyndham Lewis and
others, they launched the magazine Blast. This was also the year of the world war, which
took its toll of many Vorticists.
Vorticism was for Pound the first major experience in revolutionary propagandising and the
first cause that placed him beyond the pale of orthodoxy. Pound describes Vorticism as
setting "the arts in their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilisation".
In this way, the arts were welded in a mystic union with politics and society in the manner
already envisaged by Yeats.
Pound regarded commercialism as the force preventing the realisation of his artistic-political
ideal. Many others in his entourage and beyond, including Yeats and Lewis regarded the
39

rise of materialism, democracy and the masses as demeaning the arts, as newspapers and
dime novels replaced literature, and the mass market determined cultural expression. Hence,
many were to seek a counter-revolution in the return of aristocratic societies or saw a
modem alternative in Fascism.
SOCIAL CREDIT
Pound embraced the Social Credit economic theory of Major CH Douglas, being promoted
by The English Review. By subordinating money to the interests of society rather than
allowing the power of the bankers to run unfettered, money would become the servant of
society and not the master. Money or more correctly credit would be the lubricant of
commerce, a means of exchanging goods and services, rather than a profit making
commodity in itself. Hence, the corrupting influence of the power of money on culture and
work would be eliminated. During the 1930s and 40s Pound wrote a series of booklets on
economics, succinctly and lucidly describing economic theory and history.
At the same time Pound continued to be inspired by the classical mystery religions and by
the 'love cult' of the Troubadours, who had been suppressed. He was also impressed by the
ideas of Confucius who taught a civic religion that assigned everyone a social duty, from
emperor to peasant as, a means of achieving a balanced social order. He saw later, in fascist
Italy, the attainment of such a State.
FASCISM
Pound considered in Fascism the fulfilment of Social Credit policy, in breaking the power
of the bankers over politics and culture. He considered that artists formed a social elite
"born to rule", but not as part of a democratic mandate.
"Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust
their great artists."
Pound had written in 1914 that the artist "has had sense enough to know that humanity was
unbearably stupid... But he has also tried to lead and persuade it, to save it from itself."
In 1922 Pound wrote that the masses are malleable and that it is the arts that set the casts to
mould them. For Pound and others such as Wyndham Lewis and Lawrence, behind massman and its doctrines of democracy and communism, stood the real tyranny of the bankers.
Pound considered the bulk of humanity to be 'rabble', "the waste and their manure" from
which grows "the tree of the arts."
He writes in The Cantos of the masses and their political leaders becoming a torrent of
excrement, "democracies electing their sewage."
If one considers that the very essence of being human, of that which differentiates man from
all other organisms, is the attainment of culture, then those from the culture-bearing
minority of any society are definers of the human type. The masses of people are herded
around by a variety of forces, both malignant and benign. Many of the culture-bearing
stratum, as we are considering them here, saw the rise of a new era that placed economics
above culture. Both communism and democracy sold their economic doctrines under the
slogan of the 'happiness of the greatest number', as being the ultimate purpose of a social
40

order. The moneyed elite has replaced the cultural elite as the definers of the human type.
The aristocracy of money has replaced the old aristocracy of blood.
Pound , Lewis and Yeats all viewed the rise of these fundamentally a-cultural doctrines with
alarm. Some like Pound saw in fascism the means by which the economic could be
subordinated to the cultural. Then the masses could be harnessed for a cultural purpose by
an 'artist-statesmen' such as Mussolini. Others such as Yeats believed a return to an older
order, based on aristocracy and its patronage of the arts was the way back to something
better than crass materialism and what was then developing into the pop culture of our time.
Pound hoped the natural rulers "born to the purple", would wrest control from the plutocrats
and Bolsheviks.
Writing in "The Egoist" in 1914 Pound stated:
"The artist no longer has any belief or suspicion that the mass, the half-educated simpering
general... can in any way share his delights... The aristocracy of the arts is ready again for its
service. Modern civilisation has born a race with brains like those of rabbits, and we who
are the heirs of the witch doctor and the voodoo, we artists who have been so long despised
are about to take over control."
For those who value things beyond the material, such a cast-mould is preferable to that
which has dominated the past two centuries, that of the merchant and the banker. Pound saw
Fascism as the culmination of an ancient tradition continued in the personalities of
Mussolini, Hitler and the British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. He had studied the
doctrines of the ethnologist Frobenius during the 1920s, which gave a mystical
interpretation to race. Cultures were the product of races and each race had its own soul, or
paideuma of which the artist was the guardian. In Mussolini, Pound saw not only a
statesman who had overthrown the money power, but also someone who had returned
culture to the centre of politics. He said:
"Mussolini has told his people that poetry is a necessity of state, and this displayed a higher
state of civilisation than in London or Washington."
Writing in his 1935 book Jefferson and/or Mussolini Pound explained:
"I don't believe any estimate of Mussolini will be valid unless it starts from a passion for
construction. Treat him as ARTIFEX and all the details fall into place.. The Fascist
revolution was FOR the preservation of certain liberties and FOR the maintenance of a
certain level of culture, certain standards of living..."
Pound and his wife Dorothy settled in Italy in 1924. He met Mussolini in 1933. He also
became a regular contributor to the periodicals of Mosley's British Union of Fascists,
meeting Mosley in 1936. They remained friends into the post war period.
Writing in Mosley's BUF Quarterly, Pound stated that Roosevelt and his Jewish advisers
had betrayed the American Revolution. The American Revolution of 1776 had been a revolt
against the control by the Bank of England of the monetary system of the American
colonies. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin had stated in his diary that the colonists would have
gladly borne the tax on tea. They had issued their own colonial script reminiscent of the
41

social credit policy that Pound was advocating, and which was being undertaken in Italy and
Germany. This had resulted in prosperity with a credit supply independent of the private
banking system. The Bank of England intervened to compel the colonies to withdraw the
script at a rate of devaluation that caused depression and unemployment. The colonists
rebelled. But people such as Alexander Hamilton ensured that an independent America was
soon again subject to the orthodox financial system of private banking control. Lincoln
attempted the same resistance to the bankers and issued his famous 'Lincoln Greenbacks'.
Pound pointed out in that Mussolini had instituted banking reform in 1935, and deplored the
lack of knowledge and understanding around the world on what Italy was achieving. The
U.S. constitution provided for the same credit system, giving the government the
prerogative to create and issue its own credit and currency. Pound saw parallels between
Fascist Italy and the type of economic system sought by certain American statesmen such as
Jefferson and Jackson.
Pound's Canto XLV (With Usura) is a particularly lucid exposition of how the usury system
infects social and cultural bodies. He provides a note at the end defining usury: as "a charge
for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production: often even without
regard to the possibilities of production". That is to say, what we commonly know as
interest rates charged on loans for credit which the banks create largely out of nothing, i.e.
as a book-keeping entry, for which we all, individuals, businesses and governments must
pay back in real money as a token of our work.
"With usura...
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and to sell quickly
with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper ..
And no man can find site for his dwelling.
Stone cutter is kept from his stone
Weaver is kept from his loom
WITH USURA
Wool comes not to market
Sheep bring not gain with usura...
Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom...
Usuru slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man's courting
It hath brought palsey to bed. lyeth
Between the young bride and her bridegroom
CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores to Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
At behest of usura."
Elsewhere Pound describes usury as like sodomy, against the law of natural increase.
42

CAGED
From the late 1930s Pound began to look with favour at the economic system created by
Hitler's regime, and regarded the Rome-Berlin Axis as "the first serious attack on
usurocracy since the time of Lincoln."
In 1940, after having returned to Italy from a tour of the USA during which he attempted to
oppose the move to war against the Axis, Pound offered his services as a radio broadcaster.
The broadcasts, called The American Hour, began in January 1941.
Pound considered himself to be a patriotic American. He considered the real traitors to be
Roosevelt and his mainly Jewish advisers. After the Roosevelt instigated Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbour Pound attempted to return to the USA. However, the American Embassy
prevented him. Pound was stranded in Italy. With no means of livelihood, Pound resumed
his broadcasts, attacking the Roosevelt administration and usury with a mix of cultural
criticism.
In 1943 Pound was indicted in for treason. Hemingway, concerned at the fate of his old
mentor after the war, suggested the possibility of an 'insanity' plea and the idea caught on
among some of his literary friends who had obtained good jobs in the US Government.
Other interests were pressing for the death penalty for America's most eminent man of
letters.
Two days after Mussolini's murder Pound was taken from his home by Italian partisans after
he had unsuccessfully attempted to turn himself over to the American forces. Putting a book
on Confucius into his pocket, he went with the partisans expecting to be murdered, as a
bloodlust was now turned against all those who had been loyal to Mussolini. Instead, he
ended up in an American camp at Pisa constructed for the most vicious military prisoners.
Pound was confined in a bare, concrete floored, iron cage in the burning heat, lit
continuously throughout the night. He had a physical breakdown and was transferred to a
medical compound, where he began his Pisan Cantos. In November 1945, he was flown to
Washington and jailed.
He, like Knut Hamsun in Norway, was an embarrassment due to his fame. A trial would
bring prolonged publicity. He was therefore declared insane and sent to a ward for the
criminally insane at St. Elizabeth's mental institution. Here his literary output continued
over the course of 13 years, and he translated 300 traditional Chinese poems that were
published by Harvard in 1954.
Pound maintained his political beliefs and among his visitors was John Kasper, a fiery
young intellectual admirer of Pound's poetry, who became notorious as an agitator for racial
segregation in the southern United States of America.
Pound had still not been formally diagnosed in 1953. Inquiries from the Justice Department
solicited an admission that at most Pound had a 'personality disorder'. By the mid-1950s,
various influential figures and magazines were campaigning for his release, and the poet
Robert Frost was particularly instrumental in gaining his release. After 13 years
confinement Pound's treason indictment was dismissed on the 18th April 1958.
43

On 30 June 1958, Pound set sail for Italy. When he reached Naples, he gave the fascist
salute to journalists and declared "all America is an asylum." He continued with The
Cantos, and stayed in contact with political personalities such as Kasper and Oswald
Mosley. He remained defiantly opposed to the American system when giving interviews,
despite the protests to the Italian government by US diplomats. Because of his politics, Ezra
Pound was refused the honours due to him until after his death on 1st November 1972.
Chapter 8

WYNDHAM LEWIS
Percy Wyndham Lewis is credited with being the founder of the only modernist cultural
movement indigenous to Britain. Nonetheless, he is seldom spoken of in the same breath as
his contemporaries, Ezra Pound, James Joyce,. T S Eliot and others. Lewis was one of the
number of cultural figures who rejected the bourgeoisie liberalism and democracy of the
19th century that descended on the 20th. However, in contradiction to many other writers
who eschewed democracy, liberalism and "the Left", Lewis also rejected the counter
movement towards a return to the past and a resurgence of the intuitive, the emotional and
the instinctual above the intellectual and the rational. Indeed, Lewis vehemently denounced
D H Lawrence, for example, for his espousal of instinct above reason.
Lewis was an extreme individualist, whilst rejecting the individualism of 19th Century
liberalism. His espousal of a philosophy of distance between the cultural elite and the
masses brought him to Nietzsche, although appalled by the popularity of Nietzsche among
all and sundry; and to Fascism and the praise of Hitler, but also the eventual rejection of
these as being of the masses.
Born in 1882 on a yacht off the shores of Nova Scotia, his mother was English, his father an
eccentric American army officer without income who soon deserted the family. Wyndham
and his mother arrived in England in 1888. He attended Rugby and Slade public schools
both of which obliged him to leave. He then wandered the art capitals of Europe and was
influenced by Cubism and Futurism.
In 1922, Lewis exhibited his portfolio of drawings that had been intended to illustrate an
edition of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, in which Timon is depicted as a snapping puppet.
This illustrated Lewis' view that man can rise above animal by a classical detachment and
control, but the majority of men will always remain as puppets or automata. Having read
Nietzsche, Lewis was intent on remaining a Zarathustrean type figure, solitary upon his
mountain top far above the mass of humanity.
VORTEX
Lewis was originally associated with the Bloomsbury group, the pretentious and snobbish
intellectual denizens of a delineated area of London who could make or break an aspiring
artist or writer. He soon rejected these parlour pink liberals and vehemently attacked them in
The Apes of God. This resulted in Lewis largely being ignored as a significant cultural
figure from this time onward. Breaking with Bloomsbury's Omega Workshop, Lewis
founded the Rebel Art Centre from which emerged the Vorticist movement and their
44

magazine Blast. Signatories to the Vorticist Manifesto included Ezra Pound, French sculptor
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and painter Edward Wadsworth.
Pound who described the vortex as "the point of maximum energy" coined the name
Vorticism. Whilst Lewis had found both the stasis of Cubism and the frenzied movement of
Futurism interesting, he became indignant at Mannetti's description of him as a Futurist and
wished to found an indigenous English modernist movement. The aim was to synthesis
cubism and futurism. Vorticism would depict the static point from where energy arose. It
was also very much concerned with reflecting contemporary life where the machine was
coming to dominate, but rejected the Futurist romantic glorification of the machine.
Both Pound and Lewis were influenced by the Classicism of the art critic and philosopher T
E Hulme, a radical conservative. Hulme rejected 19th century humanism and romanticism
in the arts as reflections of the Rousseauan (and ultimately communistic) belief in the
natural goodness of man when uncorrupted by civilisation, as human nature infinitely
malleable by a change of environment and social conditioning.
A definition of the classicism and romanticism, which are constant in Lewis' philosophy,
can be readily understood from what Hulme states in his publication "Speculation":
"Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of
possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then
these possibilities will have a chance and you will get progress. One can define the classical
quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinarily 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."
Lewis's classicism is a dichotomy, classicism versus romanticism, reason versus emotion,
intellect versus intuition and instinct, masculine versus feminine, aristocracy versus
democracy, the individual versus the mass, and later fascism versus communism.
Artistically also classicism meant clarity of style and distinct form. Pound was drawn to the
manner in which, for example, the Chinese ideogram depicted ideas succinctly. Hence, art
and writing were to be based on terseness and clarity of image. The subject was viewed
externally in a detached manner. Pound and Hulme had founded the Imagist movement on
classicist lines. This was now superseded by Vorticism, depicting the complex but clear
geometrical patterns of the machine age. In contradiction to Italian Futurism, Vorticist art
aimed not to depict the release of energy but to freeze it in time. Whilst depicting the swirl
of energy the central axis of stability dissociated Vorticism form Futurism.
The first issue of Blast describes Vorticism in terms of Lewis' commitment to classicism:
"Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town.
We stand for the reality of the Present - not the sentimental Future or the scarping Past...
We do not want to make people wear Futurist patches, or fuss people to take to pink or sky
blue trousers... Automobilisim (Marinetteism) bores us. We do not want to go about making
a hullabaloo about motor cars, anymore than about knives and forks, elephants or gas
45

pipes... The Futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the
realist of 1870."
In 1916 his novel Tarr was published as a monument to himself should he be killed in the
war in which he served as a forward observation officer with the artillery. Here he lambastes
the bohemian artists and literati exemplified in England by the Bloomsbury coterie:
"Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism, the poor froth blown off the
decadent Nineties, the wardrobe-leavings of a vulgar bohemianism.... You are concentrated,
highly-organised barley water; there is nothing in the universe to be said for you: any
efficient state would confiscate your property, burn your wardrobe - that old hat and the rest
- as infectious, and prohibit you from propagating.
A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West... that
any resolute power will be able to wipe up over night with its eyes shut. Your kind
meantime make it indirectly a period of tribulation for live things to remain in your
neighbourhood. You are systemis-ing the vulgarising the individual: you are the advance
copy of communism, a false millennial middle-class communism. You are not an
individual: you have. I repeat, no right to that hair and to that hat: you are trying to have the
apple and eat it too You should be in uniform and at work. NOT uniformly OUT OF
UNIFORM and libelling the Artist by your idleness. Are you idle? The only justification of
your slovenly appearance it is true is that it's perfectly emblematic."
There is much of Lewis' outlook expressed here, the detestation of the psuedo individualistic
liberal among the intelligentsia and his desire to impose order in the name of Art. In 1918,
he was commissioned as an official war artist for the Canadian War Records Office. Here
some of his paintings are of the Vorticist style, depicting soldiers as machines of the same
quality as their artillery. Once again, man is shown as an automaton. However, the war
destroyed the Vorticist movement, Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska both succumbing, and Blast
did not go beyond two issues.
In 1921, Lewis founded another magazine. The Tyro: A Review of the Arts, Sculpture and
Design. The title reflects Lewis' view of man as automaton. Tyros are a mythical race of
grotesque beings, all teeth and laughter. Satire is a major element of Lewis' style. His
exhibition "Tyros and Portraits" satirises humanity.
THE CODE OF A HERDSMAN
Lewis' non-Nietzschean Nietzsechanism is succinctly put in an essay published in The Little
Review in 1917, The Code of a Herdsman. Among the eighteen points:
"In accusing yourself, stick to the Code of the Mountain. But crime is alien to a Herdsman's
nature. Yourself must be your Caste.
Cherish and develop side by side, your six most constant indications of different
personalities. You will then acquire the potentiality of six men... Each trench must have
another one behind it.

46

Spend some of your time every day in hunting your weaknesses caught from commerce
with the herd, as methodically, solemnly and vindictively as a monkey his fleas. You will
find yourself swarming with them while you are surrounded by humanity. But you must not
bring them up on the mountain...
Do not play with political notions, aristocratisms or the reverse, for that is a compromise
with the herd. Do not allow yourself to imagine a fine herd though still a herd. There is no
fine herd. The cattle that call themselves 'gentlemen' you will observe to be a little cleaner.
It is merely cunning and produced by a product called soap...
Be on your guard with the small herd of gentlemen. There are very stringent regulations
about the herd keeping off the sides of the mountain In fact your chief function is to prevent
their encroaching. Some in moment of boredom or vindictiveness are apt to make rushes for
the higher regions. Their instinct fortunately keeps them in crowds or bands, and their
trespassing is soon noted Contradict yourself. In order to live you must remain broken up.
Above this sad commerce with the herd, let something veritably remain "un peu sur la
montagne" Always come down with masks and thick clothing to the valley where we work.
Stagnant gasses form these Yahooesque and rotten herds are more dangerous than the
wandering cylinders that emit them... Our sacred hill is a volcanic heaven. But the result of
the violence is peace. The unfortunate surge below, even, has moments of peace."
FASCISM
Poverty dogged Lewis all his life. He, like Pound, looked for a society that would honour
artists. Like Pound and D H Lawrence, he felt that the artist is the natural ruler of humanity,
and he resented the relegation of art as a commodity subject to the lowest denominator to be
sold on a mass market.
Lewis's political and social outlook arises form his aesthetics. He was opposed to the
primacy of politics and economics over cultural life. His book The Art of Being Ruled in
1926 first details Lewis's ideas on politics and a rejection of democracy with some
favourable references to Fascism.
Support for Fascism was a product of his Classicism, hard, masculine, exactitude and
clarity. This classicism prompted him to applaud the "rigidly organised" Fascist State, based
on changeless, absolute laws that Lewis applied to the arts, in opposition to the 'flux' or
changes of romanticism.
Lewis supported Sir Oswald Mosley's British Fascist movement and Mosley records in his
autobiography how Lewis would secretly arrange to meet him. However, Lewis was open
enough to write an essay on Fascism entitled "Left wing" for British Union Quarterly, a
magazine of Mosley's British Union of Fascists, which included other well-known figures in
its columns, such as the tank warfare specialist General Fuller, Ezra Pound, Henry
Williamson and Roy Campbell. Here Lewis writes that a nation can be subverted and taken
over by numerically small groups. The intelligentsia and the press were doing this work of
subversion with a left wing orientation. Lewis was aware of the backing Marxism was
receiving from the wealthy, including the millionaire bohemians who patronised the arts.
47

Marxist propaganda in favour of the USSR amounted to vast sums financially. Marxism is a
sham, a masquerade in its championship of the poor against the rich.
"That Russian communism is not a war to the knife of the Rich against the Poor is only too
plainly demonstrated by the fact that internationally all the Rich are on its side. All the
magnates among the nations are for it; all the impoverished communities, all the small
peasant states, dread and oppose it."
That Lewis is correct in his observations on the nature of Marxism is evidenced by the antiBolshevist stance of Portugal and Spain for example, while bolshevism itself was funded by
financial circles in New York, Sweden, and Germany; the Warburgs, Schiff, and Olaf
Aschberg the so-called 'Bolshevik Banker'.
Lewis concludes his brief article for the BUF Quarterly by declaring Fascism to be the
movement that is genuinely for the poor against the rich, who are for property whilst the
"super-rich" are against property, "since money has merged into power, the concrete into the
abstract..."
"You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain store; for the peasant against
the usurer: for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business
against Big Business; for the craftsman against the Machine; for the creator against the
middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that
prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of internationalisms
Nonetheless, Lewis had reservations about Fascism just as he had reservations about
commitment to any doctrine. For him the principle of action, of the man of action, becomes
too much of a frenzied activity, where stability in the world is needed for the arts to flourish.
He states in Time and Western Man that Fascism in Italy stood too much for the past, with
emphasis on a resurgence of the Roman imperial splendour and the use of its imagery,
rather than the realisation of the present. As part of the "Time cult", it was in the doctrinal
stream of action, progress, violence, struggle, of constant flux in the world, that also
includes Darwinism and Nietzscheanism despite the continuing influence of the latter on
Lewis's own philosophy.
An early appreciation entitled Hitler was published in 1931, sealing Lewis' fate as a
neglected genius, despite his repudiation of both anti-Semitism in The Jews-Are They
Human? and Nazism in The Hitler Cult both published in 1939.
Well before such books, Lewis' satirising and denigration of the bohemian liberal
Bloomsbury set had resulted in what his self-styled "literary bodyguard", the poet and
fellow "Rightist" Roy Campbell, calls a "Lewis boycotts "When life's bread and butter
depended on thinking pro-Red and to generate one's own ideas was a criminal offence."
TIME AND SPACE
A healthy artistic environment requires order and discipline, not chaos and flux. This is the
great conflict between the "romantic" and the "classical" in the arts. This dichotomy is
represented in politics and the difference between the philosophy of "Time" and of "Space",
the former of which is epitomised in the philosophy of Spengler. Unlike many others of the
"Right", Lewis was vehemently opposed to the historical approach of Spengler, critiquing
his Decline of the West in Time and Western Man. To Lewis, Spengler and other "Time
48

philosophers" relegated culture to the political sphere. The cyclic and organic interpretations
of history are seen as 'fatalistic' and having a negative influence on the survival of the
European race.
Lewis does not concur with Spengler, who sees culture as subordinate to historical epochs
that rise and fall cyclically as living organisms. "There is no common historical and cultural
outlook representing any specific cycle, but many ages co-existing simultaneously and
represented by various individuals.
This time philosophy was in contrast to that of Space or the Spatial, and resulted in the type
of ongoing change or flux that Lewis opposed. Lewis looked with reverence to the Greeks,
who existed in the Present, which he regarded Spengler as disparaging, in contrast to the
'Faustian' urge of Western Man that looked to "destiny".
DEMOCRACY
Lewis's antipathy towards democracy is rooted in his theory on Time. Of democracy, he
writes in Men Without Art. "No artist can ever love". Democracy is hostility to artistic
excellence, and fosters "box office and library subscription standards". Art is however
timeless, classical.
Democracy hates and victimises the intellectual because the 'mind' is aristocratic and
offensive to the masses. Here again Lewis is at odds with others of the "Right", with
particular antipathy toward D H Lawrence. Again, it is the dichotomy of the 'romantic
versus the classical'.
Conjoined with democracy is industrialisation, both representing the masses against the
solitary genius. The result is the "herding of people into enormous mechanised masses." The
"mass mind... is required to gravitate to a standard size to receive the standard idea".
Democracy and the advertisement are part and parcel of this debasement and behind it all
stands money, including the "millionaire bohemians" who control the arts. Making a
romantic image of the machine, starting in Victorian times, is the product of our "Moneyage". His opposition to Italian Futurism, often mistakenly equated with Vorticism, derives
partly from Futurism's idolisation of the machine. Vorticism, states Lewis, depicts the
machine as befits an art that observes the Present, but does not idolise it. It is technology
that generates change and revolution, but art remains constant; it is not in revolt against
anything other than when society promotes conditions where art does not exist, as in
democracy.
In Lewis's satirisation of the Bloomsbury denizens, he writes of the dichotomy existing
between the elite and the masses, yet one that is not by necessity malevolent towards these
masses:
"The intellect is more removed from the crowd than is anything: but it is not a snobbish
withdrawal, but a going aside for the purposes of work, of work not without its utility for
the crowd... More than the prophet or the religious teacher, (the leader) represents... the
great unworldly element in the world, and that is the guarantee of his usefulness. And he
49

should be relieved of the futile competition in all sorts of minor fields, so that his purest
faculties could be free for the major tasks of intelligent creation".
Unfortunately, placing one's ideals onto the plane of activity results in vulgarisation, a
dilemma that caused Lewis's reservations towards Nietzsche. In The Art of Being Ruled
Lewis writes that of every good thing, there comes its "shadow", "its ape and familiar".
Lewis was still writing of this dilemma in Netting Hill during the 1950s.
"All the dilemmas of the creative seeking to function socially centre upon the nature of
action: upon the necessity of crude action, of calling in the barbarian to build a
civilisations". This was of course the dilemma for Lewis in his early support for Hitler and
for Italian Fascism.
REVOLT OF THE PRIMITIVE
Other symptoms of the romantic epoch subverting cultural standards include the feminine
principal, with the over representation of homosexuals and the effete among the literati and
the Bloomsbury coterie; the cult of the primitive; and the 'cult of the child,' that is closely
related to the adulation of the primitive.
Female values, resting on the intuitive and emotional, undermine the masculine rational, the
intellect, the feminine flux against the masculine hardness of stability and discipline. To
Lewis revolutions are a return to the past. Feminism aims at returning society to an idealised
primitive matriarchy. Communism aims at a returning to primitive forms of common
ownership. The idolisation of the savage and the child are also returns to the atavistic. The
millionaire world and "High Bohemia" support these, as it does other vulgarising
revolutions. The supposedly outrageous, to Lewis, is tame.
Lewis's book Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting Pot inspired as a counter-blast to D H
Lawrence, was written to repudiate the cult of the primitive, fashionable among the
millionaire bohemians, as it had been among the parlour intellectuals of the 18th century;
the Rousseauean ideal of the "return to nature" and the "noble savage". Although D H
Lawrence was writing of the primitive tribes to inspire a decadent European race to return to
its own instinctual being, such 'romanticism' is contrary to the classicism of Lewis, with its
primacy of reason. In contradiction of Lawrence, Lewis states that,
"I would rather have an ounce of human consciousness than a universe full of 'abdominal'
afflatus and hot, unconscious, 'soulless' mystical throbbing."
In Paleface Lewis calls for a ruling caste of aesthetes, much like his friend Ezra Pound and
his philosophical opposite Lawrence:
"We by birth the natural leaders of the white European, are people of no political or public
consequence any more... We, the natural leaders of the world we live in, are now private
citizens in the fullest sense, and that world is, as far as the administration of its traditional
law of life is concerned, leaderless. Under these circumstances, its soul, in a generation or
so, will be extinct."

50

Lewis opposes the 'melting pot' where different races and nationalities are becoming
indistinguishable. Once again, Lewis' objections are aesthetic at their foundation. The Negro
gift to the white man is jazz, "the aesthetic medium of a sort of frantic proletarian
subconscious," degrading, and exciting the masses into mindless energy, an "idiot mass
sound" that is "Marxistic".
COMPULSORY FREEDOM
By the time Lewis wrote Time and Western Man he believed that people would have to be
"compelled" to be free and individualistic. Reversing certain of his views espoused in The
Art of Being Ruled, he now no longer believed that the urge of the masses to be enslaved
should be organised, but rather that the masses will have to be compelled to be
individualistic.
"I believe they could with advantage be compelled to remain absolutely alone for several
hours every day and a week's solitary confinement, under pleasant conditions (say in
mountain scenery), every two months would be an excellent provision. That and other
coercive measures of a similar kind, I think, would make them much better peoples
RETURN TO SOCIALIST ENGLAND
In 1939, Lewis and his wife went to the USA and on to Canada where Lewis lectured at
Assumption College, a situation that did not cause discomfort, as he had long had a respect
for Catholicism although not a convert. Lewis as a perpetual polemicist began a campaign
against extreme abstraction in art, attacking Jackson Pollock and the Expressionists.
Lewis returned to England in 1945, and despite being completely blind by 1951 continued
writing, in 1948 his America and Cosmic Man portrayed the USA as the laboratory for a
coming new world order of anonymity and utilitarianism. He also received some 'official'
recognition in being commissioned to write two dramas for BBC radio, and becoming a
regular columnist for The Listener.
A post-war poem, So the Man You Are autobiographically continues to reflect some of
Lewis' abiding themes; that of the creative individual against the axis of the herd and "High
Finances
"The man I am to blow the bloody gaff
If I were given platforms? The riff-raff
May be handed all the trumpets that you will.
No so the golden-tongued. The window sill
Is all the pulpit they can hope to get."
Lewis had been systematically stifled since before World War I when he broke with the
Bloomsbury wealthy parlour Bolsheviks who ruled the cultural establishment in Britain.
Lewis continued with 'Herdsman's principles of eschewing both Bolshevism and Plutocracy,
staying above the herd in solitude:
"What wind an honest mind advances? Look
No wind of sickle and hammer, of bell and book,
No wind of any party, or blowing out
51

Of any mountain blowing us about

Of High Finance, or the foot-hills of same.
The man I am he who does not play the game!"
Lewis felt that "everything was drying up" in England, "extremism was eating at the arts
and the rot was pervasive in all levels of society He writes of post-war England:
"This is the capital of a dying empire - not crashing down in flames and smoke but expiring
in a peculiar muffled way."
This is the England he portrays in his 1951 novel Rotting Hill (Ezra Pound's name for
Netting Hill) where Lewis and his wife lived. The Welfare State symbolises a shoddy utility
standard in the pursuit of universal happiness. Socialist England causes everything to be
substandard including shirt buttons that don't fit the holes, shoelaces too short to tie, scissors
that won't cut, and inedible bread and jam. Lewis seeks to depict the socialist drabness of
1940s Britain.
Unlike most of the literati, who rebelled against Leftist dominance in the arts, Lewis
continued to uphold an ideal of a world culture overseen by a central world state. He wrote
his last novel The Red Priest in 1956. Lewis died in 1957, eulogised by T S Eliot in an
obituary in The Sunday Times, "a great intellect has gone."

Chapter 9

ROY CAMPBELL
Roy Campbell was born in October 1902 in the Natal District of South Africa. He enjoyed
an idyllic childhood, growing up in South Africa being imbued as much with Zulu traditions
and language, as with his Scottish heritage. He showed early talent as an artist but an
interest in literature including poetry soon became predominant.
In 1918 he traveled to England to attend Oxford where by this time he was an agnostic
with a love for the Elizabethan literature. Campbell's friendship with the composer William
Walton at Oxford brought him into contact with the literati including T. S. Eliot, the
Sitwells and Wyndham Lewis. He was by now reading Freud, Darwin and Nietzsche, and
had a distaste for Anglo-Saxonism and the 'drabness of England and found an affinity with
the Celts. He also identified with the Futurist movement in the arts. Campbell writes at this
time in a manner suggesting the Classicism of Hulme, Lewis, Pound and the Vorticists.
...Art is not developed by a lot of long-haired fools in velvet jackets. It develops itself and
pulls those fools wherever it wants them to go... Futurism is the reaction caused by the
faintness, the morbid wistfulness of the symbolists. It is hard, cruel and glaring, but always
robust and healthy.
52

Campbell continues by describing the new art in Nietzschean and Darwinian terms of
struggle, survival and victory, but also suggesting something of his own colonial character:
It is art pulling itself together for another tremendous fight against annihilation. It is wild,
distorted, and ugly, like a wrestler coming back for a last tussle against his opponent. The
muscles are contorted and rugged, the eyes bulge, and the legs stagger. But there it is, and
it has won the victory.
Campbell escaped from England's `drabness to Provence where he worked on fishing boats
and picked grapes. Despite his agnosticism he was impressed by the simple faith of the
peasants, and started writing poems of a religious nature such as Saint Peter of the Candles
- the Fishers Prayer, which took ten years to complete and portrays Campbell's spiritual
odyssey He returned to London in 1921 married Mary Garman and became highly regarded
among the Bloomsbury coterie who were impressed with his rough manners and hard
drinking.
His wife inspired his first epic poem The Flaming Terrapin, written whilst the couple
lived for over a year at a remote Welsh village where their first daughter was born. T E
Lawrence was immediately impressed with the poem and took it to Jonathan Cape for
publication. This established Campbell's reputation as a poet.
NIETZSCHE, CHRIST & THE HEROIC POET
The Flaming Terrapin is a combination of Christianity and Nietzsche. In a letter to his
parents Campbell sought to explain the symbolism as being founded on Christ's statement;
Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is, hewn down and cast into fire,
and
Ye are the salt of the earth but if that salt shall have lost its savour it shall he scattered
abroad and trodden under the feet of men.
Campbell now realised that Christ, was the first to proclaim the doctrine of heredity and
survival of the fittest, and that his aristocratic outlook was misunderstood by Nietzsche
as being a religion of the weak. World War I had destroyed the best breeding stock and
demoralised humanity. The Russians for example had succumbed to Bolshevism. But
Campbell hoped that a portion might have become ennobled from the suffering.
He continued to explain that the deluge in The Flaming Terrapin represents the World
War, and that the Noah family represents the survival of the fittest, triumphing over the
terrors of the storm to colonise the earth. The terrapin in eastern tradition is the tortoise that
represents strength. longevity, endurance and courage and is the symbol of the universe.
It is this flaming terrapin that tows the Ark, and wherever he crawls upon the earth
creation blossoms forth. He is masculine energy and where his voice roars man springs
forth from the soil. His acts of creation are born from action and flesh in one clean
fusion.
The poem published in 1924 in Britain and the USA received critical acclaim from the
press as a fresh and youthful breath, as breaking free from both the banalities of the past and
from the sceptical nihilism of the new generation. Campbell and his family returned to
South Africa where he was welcomed as a celebrity. Here Campbell lectured on Nietzsche,
53

and praised Nietzsche's condemnation of the meanness of modern democracy. In this lecture
Campbell also attacked the ascendancy of technology, stating that the rush to progress and
enthronement of science during the previous century has outpaced mans mental and moral
faculties and that man has becoming suddenly lost.
All those useful mechanical toys which man primarily invented for his own convenience
have begun to tyrannise every moment of his life.
This was a theme that concerned Campbell throughout his life. In a poem written a year
later entailed The Serf. Campbell proclaimed the tiller of the soil as timeless as he
ploughs down palaces and thrones and towers. The tiller of the soil, states a hopeful
Campbell, endures through eternity whilst the cycles of history rise and fall around him.
This gives a sense of permanence in a constantly shifting world.
His poem in honour to his wife Dedication to Mary Campbell is Nietzschean in theme
but also a criticism of his fellow South Africa, referring to the poet as living by sterner
laws, as not concerned with their commerce, and as worshipping a god superbly stronger
than their own.
ESTRANGED FROM SOUTH AFRICANS
In 1925 he became editor of Voorslag and was closely associated with William Plomer
whose first novel Turbott Wolfe involves inter-racial marriage. However, despite their
friendship and Campbell's disdain for the racial situation in South Africa he reviewed
Plomer's novel and found it having a very strong bias against the white colonists.
Nevertheless, Campbell was not impressed by what he considered as white South Africa,
reclining blissfully in a grocer's paradise on the labour of the natives.
Campbell resigned from editorship after the publisher's interference. Some of Campbell's
best poems written in South Africa at this time are considered to be among his best. To a
Pet Cobra returns to Nietzschean themes, describing poets in heroic terms, the
Zarathustrean solitary atop the mountain peaks.
There shines upon the topmast peak of peril .
There is not joy like them who fight alone .
And in their solitude a tower of pride
BLOOMSBURY & PROVENCE
On their return to Britain Campbell and his wife were introduced to the Bloomsbury
coterie, including the poetess Vita Sackville-West her husband the novelist Harold
Nicolson, Virginia and Leonard Wolfe, Richard Aldington, Aldous Huxley, Lytton
Strachey, et al. The robust Campbell found their refined manners, pervasive homosexuality
and pretentiousness sickening, writing in Some Thoughts on Bloomsbury that his own voice
is the only one he likes to hear when around all the clever people. Several years later in
The Georgiad he satirises the dinner parties of Bloomsbury where wishing to stop the 'din'
of his 'dizzy'; head he imagines stuffing his ears with meat and bread, and wishes the diners
would choke on their food that their chattering would be halted.
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In 1928 the Campbells returned to Provence. The atmosphere was altogether different
from England and the wealthy socialist intelligentsia from which he sought escape. The
Campbells fully involved themselves in the community, celebrated the harvest feasts and
welcomed the local folk into their home. Campbell became a celebrated figure in the
dangerous sport of 'water jousting'. He also assisted in the ring at bullfights. Campbell found
in the customs and culture of the Provencal villagers stability and permanence in a changing
world obsessed by science and 'progress'. His own aesthetics, at the basis of his rejection of
liberalism and socialism, was a synthesis of the romanticism of Provence and the Classicism
of the Graeco-Roman. He admired Caesar, the martial ethos and the stoicism of the ancients.
His ideal was a combination of aesthete and athlete.
In Taurine Provence, published in 1932 Campbell writes of this.
...So men in whom the heroic principle works will be driven by their very excess of
vitality to flaunt their defiance in the face of death or danger, as in the modern arena.
Campbell, freed from the English intelligentsia, now renewed his attack with fury. Writing
in 1928 in Scrutinies by Various Writers, he states that the dominant philosophy of the
contemporary writer is dictated by fear of discomfort, excitement or pain than by love of
life. His attack on the sex-socialism of Bloomsbury as being flabby and effete is
contrasted with his own robust nature that could not fit in with the simpering and decadent
atmosphere of the intellectual. Following on from Wyndham Lewis' scathing attack on
Bloomsbury, The Apes of God, which Campbell enjoyed immensely, Campbell wrote The
Georgiad in 1931, as his own broadside. This would bring against him the mixture of
condemnation and silence that the intellectual coterie had been using against Wyndham
Lewis.
The Georgiad expresses Campbell's disdain for the way Bloomsbury makes sickly
everything it touches. Campbell compares his own 'hate' with that of their dribbles.
Like lukewarm bilge out of a running leak
Scented with lavender and stale cologne
Lest by its true effluvium should be known
The stagnant depth of envy that you swim in,
Who hate like gigolos and fight like women.
BULWARK OF CHRISTENDOM
In 1933 the Campbells left Provence for Spain due to financial hardship, despite the
success of Campbell's acclaimed volume of poems Adamastor, published in both the USA
and England. This was the final work to be well received from the Bloomsbury crowd,
whilst his Georgiad received what The Times Literary Supplement was to recall in 1950 as a
conspiracy of silence.
The Campbells arrived at Barcelona where a right-wing electoral victory resulted in
strikes and violence by the anarchists and where machine guns were much in evidence on
the streets. However, the Campbells were greatly impressed by the traditional Catholic
culture.
Campbell described himself for the first time as a 'Catholic' in his 1933 autobiography
Broken Record, attacking both English Protestantism as a cowardly form of atheism and
the Freudianism that pervaded the Bloomsbury progressives. He contrasted this with the
55

traditional human values that continued to form the basis of Spanish culture. Broken
Record was a break with modernism, but still lacked a coherent philosophy. Despite the
reference to Catholicism, Campbell had not yet converted, but spiritual questions had long
occupied him, with an interest in Mithraism emerging in Provence. This cult was still to be
seen in the shrines of Provence. That it was the religion most favoured by the Roman
legions, with its strong martial ethos, together with the mythos of the bull, appealed to
Campbell.
However, he had also been strongly impressed with the faith and traditionalism of the
fishermen and farmers among whom he had been so popular in Provence. His Mithraic
Sonnets are a reflection of Campbell's own spiritual odyssey beginning with Mithras and
ending with the triumph of Christ, a mixture of the two religions. The Mithraic conquering
sun. Sol Invictus, the byword of the Roman legions, becomes transmogrified as the Sun of
the Son of God, 'the shining orb` reflecting as a mirrored shield the image of Christ. It is
with these vague feelings towards Christianity and Catholic culture that the Campbells
moved south to the rural village of Altea in 1934.
Campbell continued to sing the song of Catholicism in martial terms, of the solar Christ
as 'captain' winning the battle of faith. Spain breathes its Catholic tradition and in The Fight
Campbell writes again with a martial flavour, an aerial dog-fight for Campbell's soul; his
red self of atheism shot down by the white self of the Solar Christ, the unknown
pilot. At Altea, Campbell was again impressed with the freshness, bravery and
reverence of the people Under such an impress the whole Campbell family, actually at the
initiative of his wife, converted in 1935, received by the village priest Father Gregorio.
His daughter Anna related many years later, that for Campbell, Spain was the last country
left in Europe that was still a pastoral society whilst much of the rest had become
industrialised under the impress of Protestantism. Such was Campbell's aversion to
machinery that he never learnt to drive or even used a typewriter.
At this time Campbell wrote Rust. The rust of time that brings ruin to the intentions of
those who would industrialise and modernise.
So there, and there it gnaws, the Rust,
Shall grind their pylons into dust...
LACKEYS OF CAPITALISM
Campbell's political outlook becomes coherent with his religious conversion. An article
published in 1935 in the South African magazine The Critic shows just how clear
Campbell's knowledge of politics now was:
The artist as romantic rebel is the tamest mule imaginable. He dates from the
industrial era and has been politicised to play into the hands of the great syndicates and
cartels. First by dogmatising immorality, breaking up the Family, that one definitive unit
that have withstood the whole effort of centuries to enslave, dehumanise and mechanise the
individual, thereby cheapening and multiplying labour. It is the Intellectual which had
been chiefly politicised into selling his fellow mates to capitalism, whether the capitalism be
disguised as a vast inhuman state [as in the USSR under communism] or whether a gang of
individuals. The last century has seen more class-wars, and wars between generations, than
any other period. They have been deliberately fostered by capitalism, of which bolshevism
is merely an anonymous form. Divide and rule, said Cicero: encourage your slaves to
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quarrel and your authority will be supreme. A thousand artists and reformers with the
highest ideals have leaped ignorantly and romantically into these rackets, and by means of
causing hate between man and woman, father and son, class and class, white and black,
almost irretrievably embroiled the human individual in profitless, exhausting struggles
which leave him at the mercy of the unscrupulous few.
In 1936 Campbell met British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, at the suggestion of
Wyndham Lewis. Although Campbell declined to join Mosley as British Fascism's official
poet, his poetry was to appear in Mosley's magazines both before and after the War
TOLEDO THE SACRED CITY
The Campbells next moved to Toldeo, which had been Spain's capital under Charles V
during the Holy Roman Empire. The city was isolated and timeless, medieval, full of
churches, monasteries, convents and shrines. The old Fortress, the Alcazar, designed to play
a pivotal role in the defence of Christendom against Bolshevism, served as a military
academy. The city was full of priests, nuns. monks and soldiers, a combination of the
religious, the military and the traditional that prompted Campbell to call Toldeo the sacred
city of the mind. The assumption to power of the Left-wing Popular Front resulted in the
release of communist and anarchist revolutionaries from gaol amidst increasing political
violence in Madrid and Barcelona and street fighting between Left-wing and Right-wing
factions. Churches were now being desecrated and destroyed throughout Spain. The
violence reached Toledo where priests and monks were attacked and a church set ablaze.
The Campbells sheltered several Carmelite monks in their home. Campbell, well known
for his anti-Bolshevik views and for his faith was severely beaten by Government red
guards and paraded through the streets to police headquarters. His gypsy friend, with whom
he was riding at the time of his capture, 'Mosquito' Bargas, was murdered at the time of the
arrest. Campbell was probably spared this fate by being a foreigner. In his tribute to his
friend In Memoriam of Mosquito, Campbell writes with typical stoicism and faith when
beaten bloody and dragged through Toledo:
I never felt such glory
As handcuffs on my wrists.
My body stunned and gory
With tooth marks on my wrists...
Whilst Spain was on the verge of civil war the Campbells were confirmed into the
Church by Cardinal Goma, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, in a secret
ceremony.
In July 1938 the Government's red guards killed parliamentary opposition leader Calvo
Sotel, the leader of the monarchists. Four days later the military under General Franco
revolted against the Government to restore order and liberty of worship. With the Alcazar
being a military academy Toldeo was easily taken by Nationalist troops, and peasants from
the surrounding countryside fled to the city for refuge. The Government militia from Madrid
prepared to attack Toledo and the Alcazar was bombed and shelled. The Campbells hid the
archives of the Carmelite monks at their home for the duration of the civil war.
Seventeen Carmelite monks were herded into the streets by the red forces and shot.
Among them was the Campbell's father confessor who died with a smile and the shout of
57

Long live Christ' Long live Spain! (Father Easebio who had received the Campbells into
the Church was also killed).
In Campbell's excursion into the city he came across the Carmelites lying in the street
and found the bodies of the Marista monks. Smeared in their blood on a wall was: Thus
strike and Cheka, a reference to the Soviet secret police. In the city square religious
artefacts from churches and private homes were tossed onto bonfires.
In the besieged Alaczar were 1.000 soldiers and 700 civilians, mostly women and
children. Under the Command of Colonel Moscardo they held out, even as the Colonel's 24year-old son Louis, captured by the Red forces, was compelled to telephone his father and
say that he would be shot unless Alcazar was surrendered. In an epic of heroism and
martyrdom that helped make Alcazar a shrine to this day the Colonel replied to his son:
Command your soul to God, shout Viva Espana' And die like a hero. The Alcazar will
never surrender. The Campbells left Spain and returned to London. They felt isolated in
England where most of the literati supported the Left in the Spanish civil war. The family
soon moved to a fishing village in Portugal, a nation that retained the same spirit of faith
and tradition as Spain.
Campbell returned to Spain as a correspondent for the British Catholic newspaper The
Tablet and was given safe conduct to the Madrid front. His desire to enlist in the Nationalist
forces was unsuccessful as the Nationalist authorities were insistent that he could do more
good for the cause as a writer. He was awarded the Cruz de San Famed for saving life under
fire on multiple occasions, met Franco and was present at the Nationalist victory parade in
Madrid. The Civil War was to result in the murder of 12 bishops. 4.184 priests. 2,365
monks and around 300 nuns George Orwell who had gone to Spain along with others of the
literati to fight with the Reds, was to remark that
Churches were pillaged everywhere as a matter of course in six months in Spain I only
saw two undamaged churches . (Orwell, Homage to Catalonia)
FLOWERING RIFLE
Campbell's epic saga Flowering Rifle is a detailed explanation of his poetical credo, a
tribute to his Catholicism, to Spain's faith and martyrdom and also a condemnation of the
British intelligentsia. It his introductory note Campbell explains that 'humanitarianism is
the ruling passion of the British intelligentsia which
sides automatically with the Dog against the Man, the Jew against the Christian, the
black against the white, the servant against the master, the criminal against the judge.
As a form of 'moral perversion it was natural that such humanitarians sided with
Bolshevik mass murderers. The poem begins with a description of the (fascist) salute, the
opening palm, of victory the sign, of palms triumphant foresting the day. By contrast is
the clenched fist of communism, a Life-constricting tetanus of fingers, the sign of an
outworn age under which all must starve under the lowest Caste. The Bloomsbury
intelligentsia represents the connection between capitalism and communism. Behind these
stand the Yiddisher's convulsive gold: one of many allusions to the prominent role played
by Jews in communism and in the International Brigades.
Spain is heralded as a resurrected nation that might show the rest of Europe the path to
regeneration and stand against Bolshevism which no godless democracy could quell. The
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martyrs of the Nationalist cause are described in mystical terms, each death a splinter of
the Cross, each body building a Cathedral to the sky. Nobility is achieved through
suffering and sacrifice, as Christ, the Captain suffered. But when suffering and sacrifice
are eliminated from life mankind is shunned by the angels as effete baboons.
Primo de Rivera, the charismatic young leader of the Falangists who had been shot
without trial whilst in the custody of the Leftist Government, was similarly eulogised:
Whose phoenix blood in generous libation
With fiery zest rejuvenates the nation...
The Marxist deaths on the other hand were vacuous, for their gods are economics,
science, gold and sex, and as exponents of abortion and birth control they are the essence of
anti-life. But capitalism, is just as much a debasement of man, as communism:
To cheapen thus for slavery and hire
The racket of the Invert and the Jew
Which is through art and science to subdue.
Humiliate, and to pulp reduce
The Human Spirit for industrial use
Whether by Capital or by Communism
It's all the same despite their seeming schisms
Those who are debased the most are, under democracy, elevated to positions of honour
and state, elected by the voting masses who are mesmerised by the media and the literati,
the politicians hang about the League of Nations
That sheeny club of communists and masons
He bombs the Arabs, when his Jews invade.
Britannia's trident had become a graveyard spade whilst condemning Germany and
Italy. Who from the dead have raised more vita/ forces Franco, Mussolini and
Portugal's Salazar had 'muzzled up the soul destroying lie of communism, and as Spain had
shown, victory would come through nationhood, not League sanctions, wealth or arms.
Meanwhile Britain shunned its unbought men, such as Campbell who brings the tidings
that Democracy is dead.
When the Campbells travelled to Italy in 1938 the exiled Spanish king Alfonso XIII who
was greatly impressed with Flowering Rifle cordially greeted them. Of course the British
literati were outraged, and even some Catholics felt the poem lacked 'charity'.
WAR SERVICE
Campbell and his wife returned to Toledo in 1939, the Nationalists having triumphed. But
there was now widespread famine. Mary opened a soup kitchen and refurbished the
damaged chapel and both literally gave their clothes away to help the distressed inhabitants.
As the world war approached Campbell considered that there would be two great
contending forces. Fascism and Communism. With the exception of what he considered to
be a pagan orientation in Germany the Fascist states were eminently Christian and allowed
Christians the right to live whereas Bolshevism simply killed and degraded everything,
59

being the enemy of every form of religion. However, despite his antagonism to the English
bourgeoisie and democratic Britain. Campbell always had an admiration for the heroic spirit
of the British Empire and a feeling for those Britons facing an enemy. He sought to enlist,
although under no illusions about the justice of the Allied cause. His animosity by this time
was against all systems, fascism, democracy and bolshevism, which he dubbed as
Fascidemoshevism.
His ideal was not the cumbersome state of any of these systems but that of small, selfreliant and co-operating, family based communities, like those he had experienced in
Provence, Spain and Portugal.
In the Moon of Short Rations Campbell considered the Allied cause to be that of both
socialism and the multi-national corporations, twin figures of a universal sameness. He saw
that the post-war world would be ever more depersonalised and mechanical. Campbell could
not sit still or take a soft option as a number of his pro-war Left-wing intellectual accusers
were doing whilst Britons marched to war. He lampooned these hypocrites such as Spender
and Cecil Day-Lewis who had a job in the Ministry of Information, when they attacked his
fascism, and he wrote The Volunteer's Reply to the Poet stating:
It will be the same, but a bloody sight worse...
Since you have a hand in the game...
You coin us the catchwords and phrases
For which to be slaughtered...
However, because of his age and a bad hip Campbell had to be content with the home
guard until 1942 when he was recruited into the Army Intelligence Corps due to his skills in
languages. Britain in wartime had in Campbell's view awakened from its 'drabness' to
become again a warrior nation. Campbell was popular with the troops as a 'grandfatherly'
figure, and was stationed in East Africa. Contracting malaria and with a deteriorating hip
condition necessitating the use of a cane, he was discharged with an excellent military
record
POST-WAR WORLD
The England of the post-war years returned to its drab routine and worse still for Campbell,
the prospects of an all-consuming welfare state. Campbell soon went back into fighting
mode against the Left-wing poets with The Talking Bronco (a name that Spender had
applied to him). Even Vita Sackville-West, calling Campbell one of our most considerable
living poets acclaimed this volume. Desmond McCarthy writing in The Sunday Times
regarded Campbell as the most democratic poet, not politically, but in his feeling for the
common man and for the common soldier. Others were of course outraged. Cecil DayLewis believed Campbell should be sacked as a fascist from the job he now had as
producer of the BBC talk programmes, since he was not fit to direct any civilised form of
cultural expression.
Campbell was horrified by the Allied victory that had placed half of Europe under the
USSR. However, he was equally horrified by the rest of the world falling under the
dominion of the multinational corporations and their creed of global consumerism, or what
we today call globalisation. For Campbell the Cold War was a contention between two
equally internationalist forces. His daughter Anna wrote in 1999 that Campbell admired all
types of ethnic civilisation as opposed to the mass conformity of Marxism and the
60

globalisation of the likes of Macdonald and Coca-Cola. His concern was in everything
becoming the same. He would have been horrified by what the world has become now
she wrote.
Despite Campbell's sensitivity to being called a fascist, he was unapologetically a man
of the Right, of tradition and nationalism, and continued to forthrightly expound this
position after the war in his poetry and essays. Writing in A Decade in Retrospect in the
Jesuit journal The Month May 1950, he refers to the Gaderene stampede of progress for
the want of two sensible standbys (a brake and a steering wheel). Tradition and Reaction,
A body without reactions is a corpse. So is a Society without Tradition.
In 1949 Campbell left his job with the BBC to take over the editorship of The Catacomb.
founded by his close friend the poet Rob Lyie as a defence of Catholic and Classical
traditions against socialism and secularism.
The Catacomb stopped publication in 1951. In 1952 the family moved to Portugal.
Before leaving England Campbell got together with a number of South African literary
friends, and signed an open letter to the South African Government protesting voting
restrictions on the coloured population. However, Campbell's misgivings about the South
African situation were not prompted by the liberal desire for a democratic, monocultural
state. He feared that antagonism between the races would result in Bolshevism and the
destruction of his rustic ideal. With the advent of Black rule, free market capitalism was
ushered in on the wings of Marxism and revolution. Today the ANC today calls
globalisation and trade liberalisation the correct path to Marxism- Leninism.
In 1954 his views on his native land were given when accepting an honorary doctorate
from Natal. In an off the cuff speech, much to the embarrassment of the liberal audience, he
defended South Africa against England's condemnation of apartheid, ridiculing Churchill
and Roosevelt, who had sold two hundred million natives of Europe to the far worse
slavery of bolshevism.
Whilst in the USA on a speaking tour he praised the two greatest Yanks Senator
McCarthy and General MacArthur.
In April 1957 returning from Spain, Campbell and his wife had a motor accident.
Campbell's neck was broken and he died at the scene. Mary survived him by 22 years.
Edith Sitwell who converted to Catholicism through the example of the Campbells,
remarked: He died as he had lived, like a flash of lightning.
Chapter10

P R STEPHENSEN
Percy Reginald Stephensen was one of Australia's pre-eminent 'men of letters', whose
work includes biographies and short stories. He also served as a ghost writer and a mentor.
Stephensen sought to develop an Australian national culture and became a political activist
and publisher in order to foster such a culture and sense of 'Australianity'. Like many others
such as Pound and Hamsun whose politics veered to the Right, Stephensen is often
unacknowledged despite his pivotal role in developing an Australian literature and defining
an Australian culture.
Born in Queensland in 1901, of Scandinavian descent, Stephensen was from an early age
of a polemical disposition and was inclined towards the Left as a university student. In 1921
61

he was a founding member of the Australian Communist Party. After graduating in the arts
he took a teaching position in 1922 and formed a communist association. He was also one
of the first to write an in depth review of D H Lawrence's novel Kangaroo, when serving as
a writer for a Labour Party newspaper in Brisbane. In 1924 he was elected Queensland's
Rhodes Scholar and enrolled in the School of Philosophy and Political Economics at Oxford
in England. He was one of the few members of the Communist Party at Oxford and was
active in spreading propaganda in support of Indian independence.
Whatever Stephensen's ideological commitment to Communism it seems likely that his
motivation was purely a reaction against bourgeoisie society. As the publisher of the
London Aphrodite during the late 1920's Stephensen wrote an article in praise of the Russian
Anarchist leader Bakunin with particular attention to him as a man of pure action and
vitality. This devotion to the nobility of the deed reflects the influence of Nietzsche on
Stephensen's thinking and he translated and published a copy of Nietzsche's Antichrist in
1929.
In 1927 Stephensen took over the Fanfrolico Press which specialised in limited editions.
He went on to establish the Mandrake Press and published a volume of paintings by D H
Lawrence and helped to publish an undercover edition of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's
Lover, which was the first edition to be printed in England. In addition he published an
edition of Lawrence's poems. He wrote and published a biography of the controversial
occultist, poet and author Aleister Crowley, whom the sensationalist press at the time was
describing as the wickedest man in the world.
AUSTRALIAN NATIONALIST
Stephensen's eight years stay in England seems to have been influential in making him into
an Australian nationalist. He left in 1932, feeling that Britain was headed for inevitable
decline in which he saw the hope of an Australian resurgence. Settling in Sydney,
Stephensen resumed his career as a publisher as managing director of the Endeavour Press
that was funded by the Bulletin magazine and turned out more than thirty volumes of
Australian literature. Stephensen's attempts to launch his own publishing ventures were
financially unsuccessful, although he had become a recognised figure in Australian
literature and was vice-president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers.
He was also by now advocating what he called Australia First.
FOUNDATIONS OF AUSTRALIAN CULTURE
In July 1935 Stephensen published The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay
Towards National Self Respect. It is a vigorous call for an Australian national culture which
has remained influential among literary circles although seldom acknowledged as such.
Stephensen, despite his own defence of the Aborigines, and his opposition to Australian
colonial cultural cringe, states as one of his first axioms that Australian culture begins
with the arrival of the British. From this rich heritage of Europe could arise a uniquely
Australian culture which would evolve by the impress of Time and Place.
As the culture of every nation is an intellectual and emotional expression of the genius
loci, our Australian culture will diverge from the purely local colour of the British Islands,
to the precise extent that our environment differs from that of Britain. A hemisphere
separates us from 'home', we are Antipodeans; a gum tree is not a branch of an oak; our
Australia culture will evolve distinctively.
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...what is a national culture? Is it not the expression, in thought form, of art-form, of the
Spirit of a Race and of a Place?
It is culture that provides 'permanence' for a nation whilst all else moves on. Culture
transcends 'modernism' and the ephemeral nature of politics, society and economics. Race
and Place are the two permanent elements in a culture, and Place, I think, is even more
important than Race in giving that culture its direction. When races migrate, taking their
culture with them, to a new Place, the culture becomes modified. It is the spirit of a Place
that ultimately gives any human culture its distinctiveness.
It is literature, according to Stephensen, that gives the greatest sense of Place and Race
and Permanence to a nation and which indeed creates the nation. Robert Burns is an
example of the way Scotland as an idea is expressed. With England, Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Dickens... more so than the politicians, merchants and soldiers. The idea of
the French nation has been likewise expressed through Montaigne, Rabelais, Voltaire,
Victor Hugo, Balzac..., and Germany lives in Goethe, Heine, Kant, Hegel and Richard
Wagner. Russia has its Dostoevsky, Tolstoy , Chekov, Maxim Gorky; Scandinavia, Ibsen
and Knut Hamsun...
However, in the case of Australia, art was more reflective of an emerging Australian
culture than was its literature. Early Australian literature based around the Bulletin
magazine, and epitomised by poets and writers such as Henry Lawson, was of a rough
nature because it was a radical response to British denigration of Australians as 'convicts'.
Landscape painting in Australia, however, was never based on a journalistic element.
Landscape painters had to examine Australia carefully, expressing the Spirit of the Place,
the strange contours of the land, the solitude and the light quality of the atmosphere that
symbolise most purely what is Australian. Australian painters were also dependent upon an
audience and a market within their nation, and not that of the world market place where art
is prostituted for money. The painting is individual whilst the book is mass produced.
Although the art can be internationally appreciated it is nationally created, formed
locally no matter how it might travel. Regardless of how travel and communication break
down barriers local cultures remain. A creative thinker contributes to the culture of his own
people first and then to the culture of the world. But a writer or an artist needs the stimulus
of his own people.
Despite the universalising tendencies at work, Australia had the right to become a nation,
but there cannot be a nation without a national place idea, a national culture.
Stephensen attacks those academics who sought to demean Australia as a nation and as a
culture by forever subordinating Australia to Britain and the British Empire. He
acknowledges that it is the English culture from which Australian culture will proceed, but
it was the plant that would grow, rather than the English fertiliser that would now be of
concern. Culture is the essence of nationality, the nation, an extension of the individuals that
comprise it, 'generation after generation'. Nationality gives the individual a sense of pride
and meaning.
Stephensen draws on a Spenglerian cyclic analysis of history in stating that nations and
empires eventually undergo decline over the course of centuries. He foretells Britain's
decline during the 20th century.
THE PUBLICIST
In 1935 a wealthy businessmen, W J Miles, whose wartime activities included opposition to
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conscription and advocating the concept of 'Australia First', contacted Stephensen after
reading Foundations. Together they launched a magazine, the Publicist. The paper lasted
until 1942. It was described as the paper loyal to Australia First. Miles was in editorial
control. His views were overtly pro-Axis. German, Italian and Japanese propaganda
material was sold at the Publicist offices. A free hand for Japan in China was supported, at a
time when the Left was calling for a boycott of Japan.
Stephensen viewed Japan as the only country in the world completely free of
international Jew Finance. Stephensen believed that there would be a world war involving
Australia within a few years (1937). He saw no advantage to Australia in sending her men
to spill their blood in Europe. Many Australians remembered the huge losses suffered
during World War I caused partly by the unrealistic orders of British commanders.
Already in 1936 the Publicist was running a satirical recruiting poster referring to the
coming Great European War,
Don't Go' Your Country Needs You. Australia will be Here
In 1939 as the crisis in Europe was fast approaching, Stephensen wrote,
Why need Australians bemoan the absorption of Czechoslovakia by Germany when
Australia is already 'absorbed' by British and American Jew-Capitalists
Despite the radical tone of Miles and Stephensen the Publicist attracted a number of
prominent cultural figures, such as lan Mudie and Rex Ingamells, who wrote on the arts. It
also offered a generous amount of space for right of reply to its enemies. In 1939
Stephensen advocated the need for a heroic leader:
A man of harsh vitality, a born leader, a man of action, no what sicklied o'er with the
pale cast of thought. Fanatics are needed, crude harsh men, not sweetened and decorous
men, to arouse us from the lethargy of decadence, softness and lies which threatens death to
white Australia.
Democracy was part of the weakness and decay of the modem world. In a radio talk in
1938 Stephensen stated;
We oppose democracy as a political system, because we believe it can never evolve the
bold leadership that will be necessary to guide Australia through the difficulties of the
coming year.
TOWARDS A PARTY
From 1936 the Publicist started putting forth ideas for an Australia First party. In 1938
readers groups suggested a twelve point programme as a basis for discussion. The principal
group was the Yabber Club in Sydney.
In the September issue of the paper Stephensen stated that he had campaigned for peace
with Germany since any war Australia fought should be for Australian rather than Jewish
interests. The Publicist was now subjected to wartime censorship and paper restrictions.
Whilst the pro-Germany sentiments had to be toned down during 1940, the Publicist
maintained its friendly attitude towards Japan. Once Australia was engaged in the war with
Japan, the paper opposed any defeatist tendencies but continued to advocate home defence,
64

rather than sending Australian troops far afield, and the right to negotiate independently and
sue for a separate peace. Stephensen formed the Australia First Movement in September
1941. A major element in the formation of the movement was the Sydney Women's Guild of
Empire, formerly antagonistic towards the Publicist due to the issue of loyalty to Britain.
The mainstay of the Guild was Adele Pankhurst Walsh of the British suffragette family. On
migrating to Australia she had married the militant Seamen's Union organiser Tom Walsh in
1917. Both became founder members of the Australian Communist Party. Tom lectured to
the near-fascist New Guard and was outspokenly pro-Japanese.
A simple ten point manifesto was adopted, that bypassed Stephensen's more radical
manifesto of 1940. The movement demanded recall of Australian troops from overseas,
independent action in diplomacy and the removal of American influence. A number of
pubic meetings involved some interjectors, however a meeting in February 1942 which had
an audience of around 300 erupted in what the press termed 'one of the worst brawls ever to
occur in a Sydney public hall. Half the audience was antagonistic and Stephensen in
particular was met with opposition. Stephensen was hit over the head with a water carafe,
knocked to the floor and kicked by a group. The police were slow to respond. However once
order was established, Stephensen continued with the meeting despite his beating, and
continuing. interjections Stephensen addressed the meeting for around eighty minutes. He
demanded that American troops in Australia be subject to Australian command and stated
that they should be there to protect Australia not to further other American objectives.
On orders from the Attorney General Dr Evatt, Australia First was prevented from
holding further public meetings by the police.
STEPHENSEN'S POLITICAL DEMANDS
Stephensen had published several manifestos in the Publicist for a political movement
beyond the more moderate version that was temporarily adopted for immediate wartime use.
His ideas for a post-war party included policies more far ranging and elaborate. In particular
they convey Stephensen's aversion to democracy as causing party and economic divisions,
appealing to the lowest denominator for vote catching purposes, undermining leadership,
avoiding responsibility and leading to decay.
Stephensen posited his fifty-point manifesto for an Australia First Party to be founded
after the war. In the 1st May 1940 issue of the Publicist these brief points were greatly
expanded upon.
On 1st August 1941 under the heading Towards a New Order it was stated that these
were principles, not planks, for a democratic parliamentary party. Our self-imposed task
was to throw a stone into the stagnant pond of Australian political complacency
Stephensen writes in the preamble.
The first three points call for Australian self-reliance, culturally, and politically, against
imitating ideas from abroad and dependency upon others. A distinctive national Australian
culture is regarded as the prerequisite for National Unity, National Consciousness and
National Survival.
The fourth point calls for nationalism, against internationalism. Nations are natural
political units defined by racial and political factors.
Point 6 favours national socialism, against international communism. However,
Stephensen repudiates any monopoly of the term National Socialism by Germany. We
support all NATIONAL forms of socialism, as against the international version of socialism
favoured by Marxism. In those sectors of the economy where private interests would
65

become a power over the nation, the State would be required to intervene.
Further points call for frankness and honesty in diplomacy, with a 'live and let live'
attitude minus the moralising towards others that leads to war The emphasis on defence was
to be to protect Australia rather than serve other interests overseas. An attitude of
friendliness was to be fostered towards nations bordering the Pacific Ocean, which could
only be achieved when Australia was not subordinate militarily and diplomatically to British
or other interests.
Stephensen considers a declining birth rate a symptom of decadence which would lead to
the extinction of Australia, especially when there were suggestions to make up for the
population short fall through immigration. He called for a white Australia as a biological
aim to create a permanent home for persons of European racial derivation. This would
exclude Semites and other non-absorbable immigrants.
However, Stephensen's championship of Aryanism cannot be dismissed as a simple
racial supremism. Stephensen was an avid supporter of Aborigine rights, serving as
secretary of the Aborigines Citizenship Committee, which supported the Aborigines
Progressive Association comprised of an Aborigine only membership. The Abo Call was a
magazine that sold in the Publicist office alongside the Axis journals.
Introducing women into the workplace and away from child bearing under the name of
'feminism' is attacked further on in the manifesto as leading to the decline in the birth-rate as
well as undermining the wage standard.
Much of the rest of the manifesto is an attack the on democratic and parliamentary
system. Interestingly, in this light, despite Stephensen's aversion to British and other outside
influence, he upheld monarchy rather than the idea of an elected head of state under a
republic. Stephensen desires a government of statesmanship and with stated long term
principles, as opposed to short term vote pandering by political parties which leads to
compromise and demagoguery rather than recognising the harsh polices required for
survival.
The means of achieving this unity and strength was through 'Corporativism', a form of
Government that was attracting widespread support from around the world during the 1930s
as a means of overcoming the crisis of capitalism whilst avoiding the destructiveness of
communism. Corporativism had become the system of Government under which Fascist
Italy functioned, where the democratic party structure of parliament were replaced by
chambers of corporations representing the crafts and professions. Corporativism also agreed
with Catholic social doctrine and certain 'fascist' parties in some countries took specifically
Catholic forms, such as Rexism in Belgium, Hungarism in Hungary, the Irish Blueshirts,
Adrien Arcand's movement in Canada et al. Stephensen also refers to the Corporate State as,
the Body Politic and the Social Organism'. A political idea as old as humanity, a
biological fact as old as organic life.
The organic social order had existed until the French and American Revolutions.
Stephensen explains how these upheavals undermined the traditional social order with
democratic sectionalism, and an alleged equality inspired by the thoughts of J. J.
Rousseau, the French rationalist philosopher. The result, under the facade of democracy
and equality, has been not to empower 'the people', but to empower industrial and financial
interests which are able to use democracy to undermine any authority and power. However,
Corporativism enables the social organism to function as an integral whole subjecting
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sectional interests, whether class or party, to the interests of the community, like the cells of
biological organism all function for the common good of the whole organism.
Whilst Stephensen believes this Corporatist or organic state as necessary to bring
harmony between the social and economic classes, and expects both capital and labour to
restrain their sectional demands for the benefit of the whole, his ideas on financial and
economic policy do not seem to have been well developed. Despite his opposition to
international Jew finance, as he put it, and his recognition that the Axis countries had
thrown off the power of the plutocrats, his statements of policy do not reflect a recognition
that the Axis economies were based on State regulation of credit and currency creation and a
system of trade based on barter. Instead Stephensen opts for more orthodox banking
practices and condemns theories of credit expansion and specifically Social Credit, to which
many like minded men of letters such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot adhered to as a means of
overthrowing the rule of money. He does however expect capitalists to invest their capital
into productive enterprises rather than those of a speculative nature, once the State has
ensured an economic climate generating reasonable returns for such investment.
.
STEPHENSEN'S REASONED CASE AGAINST SEMITISM
Stephensen, like other Rightist men of letters such as Ezra Pound, retained friendship
with Jews as individuals they expressed animosity towards a perceived Jewish political
agenda and regarded Jews as an unassimilatable minority.
Stephensen presented Reasoned Case Against Semitism in 1940 in The Australian
Quarterly. He states that anti-Semitism arises as an anti-toxin to the toxin of an aggressive
'pro-Semitism'. His concern with the Jewish question seems to have been particularly
prompted by a suggestion that a territory in north-west Australia be set aside for Jewish
refugees from Europe. Stephensen opposed any 'cessation' of Australian land. He saw in the
Jews a highly organised, separatist minority which pursued its own interests. The Jews
remain a separate minority by choice, indeed by their insistence as a God-Chosen People.
Stephensen states that 'they cannot have it both ways' - being treated as no different to
anyone else, whilst insisting on remaining aloof from the nation in which they reside. Their
propaganda includes agitation for internationalism and the concept of the Universal
Oneness of Mankind among Gentiles, yet they have maintained themselves through 5000
years by a most exclusivistic racialism. Stephensen states that with such a double standard
nobody likes being humbugged. Stephensen compares the manner by which a small
number of Jews are able to wield immense influence through a superior close-knit
communal organisation to the manner by which communist cells were able to insinuate
themselves into institutions and get their measures adopted by an unsuspecting and largely
lethargic majority. The 'too-zealous propagandists of the Jewish Cause' in Australia had
done the Jews a disservice by drawing attention to the Jews as a distinct community, for
Anti-semtism is a reaction to aggressive Pro-semitism and neither exists unless a nation is in
a pathological state.
To Stephensen exclusion of Jewish immigrants is simply a continuation of the White
Australia policy that had been a mainstay for the development of Australian nationhood,
based on the aim of what he calls 'Fused-European Homogeneity'. European migrants had
discarded their Old World ties and amalgamated to form what was becoming an Australian
nationality. Australia had
antedated Hitler's 'racial theories' by fifty years.
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It is of interest that the white Australia policy was not an imperial or capitalistic origins but
was one of the primary aims of the Australian Labour Party, which met principal opposition
from both the British Colonial Office and from Australian business interests which sought a
pool of coolie labour.
Should Jews forego their Jewishness and fully integrate and intermarry there would be no
Jewish problem. That they do not do so is their choice, and Stephensen is here convinced
that they will never forsake their Jewishness, so the Jewish problem will remain.
Here then we are faced with a defiance by Jews of the fundamental principle of FusedEuropean Homogeneity which it is the basic aim of Australian national policy to establish
and maintain. They claim the right not only to settle here but to maintain themselves in
perpetuity, as a self-segregated minority, of different and distinct racial stock from the rest
of the Australian community.
It is, as he points out, a matter of perspective. As a non-Jew in any conflict of interest
between Jew and Gentile he would instinctively side with his own. Stephensen's loyalty was
to Australia and a large migration of Jewish refugees from Europe would undermine the
Australia which he wished to see developing as a nation, culture and people on its own
account.
INTERNMENT
Such sentiments were regarded as treasonous by the authorities whose Government had
tied Australia to British imperial and American interests. Additionally, several individuals
and groups had gained the attention of the military intelligence as possible collaborators in
the event of a Japanese invasion. Some of these had had some contact with Stephensen's
Australia First Movement. 'Enemy aliens', including those who were anti-Fascist, were
being interned. Sixteen supporters of the movement, including Stephensen, were detained
under Regulation 26 at Liverpool internment camp in March 1942. Police occupied the
Publicist office. The poet and author lan Mudie, an executive member of the movement,
although questioned, was not interned, although he was to comment that he must be either
as 'guilty' or 'innocent' as those who were. The Bulletin remained strongly opposed to the
internments, and made much of one of the internees being 'an Old Digger'. The latter,
Martin Watts, a holder of the Military medal from World War I, and several others were
conditionally released after several months. However, Watts job had gone and he died
several weeks later of bronchial pneumonia, exacerbated by his internment. (His wife Dora,
who was part Jewish, was to retain a lifelong activity with the Australian 'Right').
Transferred to Loevday, then to Tatura camps, Stephensen spent three and a half years
interned.
After the war several ex-internees continued to campaign for exoneration and two issued
a reprint of the 1942 issues of the Publicist to provide a 'durable historical record that
would show their loyalty and patriotism.
POST-WAR
The poet and author lan Mudie had been keen to see Australia First revived. However,
Stephensen was optimistic regarding the development of Australia's national consciousness,
and believed the aims of the movement were being realised. The imperial connection was
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dissipating and there was a growing interest in Australian culture.

For the first decade after the war Stephensen was mainly involved in assisting Australian
writers, principally Frank Clune. By 1959 Stephensen had sufficiently re- established his
literary reputation to be asked to undertake a Commonwealth Literary Fund lecture tour of
South Australia with his old friend lan Mudie. The lectures were published as Nationalism
in Australian Literature. Other such lectures followed in Queensland in 1961. His
continuing theme of an Australian national culture by this time was meeting with wider
support.
Stephensen's literary output continued at an impressive rate, and included The Viking of
Van Diemen's Land, The Cape Horn Breed, Sail Ho! Commodore, Sydney Sails, The Pirates
of the Big Cyprus, and Sydney Harbour, published posthumously in 1966. In 1960 he was
appointed managing director of the editorial department of a major publishing firm.
Stephensen collapsed and died after giving a lively address on Lawrences Lady
Chatterleys Lover. He never moderated his beliefs.
Chapter 11

REX FAIRBURN
Many would object to identifying A R D. Fairburn with the Right. As a central figure in
the development of a New Zealand national literature, much of the contemporary selfappointed literary establishment would wish to identify Fairburn with Marxism or
liberalism, as were other leading literary friends of Fairburns such as the Communist
R.A.K. Mason. Some critics even attempt to identify- Fairburns epic poem Dominion with
Marxism despite Fairburns own commitment to Social Credit and specific rejection of
Marxism and the materialist interpretation of history.
Indeed, the primary influences on Fairburn were distinctly non-Left, and include D H
Lawrence, Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler and of course Social Credit's Major C H Douglas. A
significant influence on his thinking was his friend from childhood, the fellow poet Geoffrey
Potocki de Montalk, claimant to the throne of Poland, fervent anti- Communist, with
sympathies towards the Axis during the war. Whilst Fairburn described himself at times as
an anarchist, it was of a most unorthodox type, being neither of the nature of the Left
wing nor of the Libertarians. For Fairburn outspokenly rejected all the baggage dear to the
Left, including feminism, and internationalism. His 'anarchism' was the type of
individualism of the Right that called for a return to decentralised communities comprised
of self-reliant craftsmen and farmers. His creed was distinctly nationalistic and based on
the spiritual and the biological components of history and culture, both concepts being
antithetical to any form of Leftism.
We feel more than justified then in identifying Fairburn as a Thinker of the Right.
Fairburn was born in 1904 in modest though middle class circumstances. He was proud of
being a fourth generation New Zealander related to the missionary Colenso.
REJECTION OF RATIONALISM
Although critical of the Church hierarchy and briefly involved with the Rationalist
Association, Fairburn was for most of his life a spiritual person, believing that the individual
attains to the most profound identity of who he is, by striving towards God. He believed in a
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basic Christian ethic minus any moralism.

Fairburn soon realised that rationalism by itself answers nothing and that it rejects the
dream world that is the source of creativity. He was in agreement here with other poets of
the Right such as Yeats, and identified with his friend Geoffrey Potocki who called poets a
spiritual aristocracy, but at this time thought socialism would free artists of economic,
worldly shackles. He was yet to discover the economic and political alternatives that would
achieve this whilst retaining the spiritual basis of culture that the socialist's dialectical
materialism rejected.
ENGLAND
Potocki had left New Zealand in disgust at the cultural climate, and persuaded Fairburn to
join him London, since New Zealand prevented them from doing what they were born here
for, to make and to mould a New Zealand civilisation, as Potocki stated it.
Fairburn arrived in London in 1930. Like Potocki he was not impressed with bohemian
society and the Bloomsbury intellectuals who were riddled with homosexuality to which
both Potocki and Fairburn had an abiding dislike.
However away from the bohemianism, the intellectualism and pretentiousness of the
city, Fairburn came to appreciate the ancestral attachment with England that was still
relevant to New Zealanders through a continuing earth-memory.
In London he felt the decay and decadence of the city. Like the Norwegian novelist
Hamsun and the Englishman Williamson, Fairburn conceived of a future tilling the soil.
He now stated:
I'm going to be a peasant, if necessary, to keep in touch with life.
SOCIAL CREDIT
In 1931 Fairburn was introduced to A R Orage, who had published Katherine Mansfield
and was editing the New English Weekly which was bringing forth a new generation of
talents to English literature, including Ezra Pound and T S Eliot. Orage had been a 'guild
socialist', advocating a return to the medieval guilds which had upheld craftsmanship and
represented interests according to one's calling rather than political party. Orage had also
discovered Social Credit economics, and it is likely that Orage introduced Fairburn to Social
Credit's founder Major C H Douglas.
Fairburn was now reading Oswald Spengler, author of the then influential Decline of
The West, which identified the cyclic and organic nature of history, of the rise and fall of
civilisations. Western Civilisation, said Spengler, had reached its cycle of decline during
which the city, merchants and money are the focus, replacing the rural community, the
knight, aristocrat, peasant and craftsman. Spengler, drawing on parallels with previous
civilisations, held that each civilisation in its final or Winter cycle undergoes a last burst of
vigour under the leadership of a great leader or 'Caesar' type who overthrows the power of
the merchant. This 'new Caesarism', according to Spengler's fatalistic interpretation of
history, is the 'last hurrah' (as we might put it) of a civilisation before its inevitable death.
However, Fairburn felt that the vitality of the individual could be the answer to a
reinvigorated culture, rather than the rise of new Caesars. This belief reflects two major
influences on Fairburn, that of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and of the
English novelist D H Lawrence, who looked to the heroic individual.
Whilst Fairburn agreed with Marx that capitalism causes dehumanisation. he rejected the
Marxist interpretation of history as based on class war and economics. Materialistic
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interpretations of history were at odds with Fairburn's belief that it is the Infinite that
touches man.
Fairburn met the Soviet press attache in England but concluded that the USSR had
turned to the 19th century Western ideal of the machine. He did not want a Marxist industrial
substitute for the capitalist one. Hence Fairburn's answer amidst a decaying civilisation was
the vital individual: not an alienated 'individual' thrown up by capitalism, but the individual
as part of the family and the soil, possessing an organic rootedness above the artificiality of
both Marxism and capitalism. Culture was part of this sense of identity as a manifestation of
the spiritual
Not surprisingly, Fairburn was increasingly distanced from his communist friends. He
was repelled by communist art based on the masses and on science, which he called 'false'.
He writes:
Communism kills the Self - cuts out religion and art, that is today. But religion and art
ARE the only realities.
Fairburn also repudiated a universal ideal, for man lived in the particular. New Zealand
had to discover its own identity rather than copying foreign ideas. Another communist
friend, the New Zealand poet Clifton Firth, wrote that the New Zealand penis was yet to be
erect. To this Fairburn replied: True, but as a born New Zealander, why don't you try to
hoist it up, instead tossing off Russia? Why steal Slav gods? Why not get some mud out of a
creek and make your own?
The 18th century artist and poet William Blake appealed to Fairburn's spiritual, antimaterialist sentiments, as a means of bringing English culture out of decadence. Fairburn
also saw in D H Lawrence a better rallying point than Lenin. He was similarly impressed
with Yeats.
To R A K. Mason, the New Zealand poet and communist, he wrote: our real life is
PURELY spiritual. Man is not a machine.
In 1932 Fairburn wrote an article for the New English Weekly attacking materialism. He
feared that the prosperity that would be generated by Social Credit monetary reform would
cause rampant materialism devoid of a spiritual basis. He saw the aim of monetary reform
as being not simply one of increasing the amount of material possessions, but as a means of
achieving a higher level of culture. Fairburn wished for a post-industrial, craft and
agricultural society. The policy of Social Credit would achieve greater production and
increase leisure hours. This would create the climate in which culture could flourish.
Because culture requires sufficient leisure time beyond the daily economic grind, not simply
for more production and consumption, as the declining cultural level of our own day shows,
despite the increasing quantity of consumer goods available.
In June 1932 he wrote to Mason that if the Labour Party rejected Social Credit economics
he would on returning to New Zealand start his own movement:
If I were in NZ I should try to induce Holland [Labour Party leader] and the Labour
Party to adopt the Social Credit scheme. Then. if they turned it down, I should start a racket
among the young men off my own bat. A Nationalist, anti-Communist movement, with
strong curbs on the rich; anti-big- business: with the ultimate object of cutting NZ away
from the Empire and making her self supporting. That party will come in England hence,
later in NZ. I should try and anticipate it a little, and prepare the ground. Objects: to cut
out international trade as far as possible (hence, cut out war); to get out of the clutches of
the League of Nations; to assert NZ's Nationalism, and make her as far as possible a
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conscious and self-contained nation on her own account. I should try, for the time being, to
give the thing a strong military flavour. No pacifism, 'idealism', passive resistance, or other
such useless sentimentalities. Then, when the time came, a Fascist coup might be possible.
But Social Credit and Nationalism would be the main planks, and the basis of the whole
movement. Very reactionary, you will say. But I am quite realistic now about these things.
No League of Nations, Brotherhood of Man stuff. 'Man is neither a beast nor an angel: but
try to make him into an angel, and you will turn him into a beast, idealism is done with over passe - gone phut.
Behind the labels, of course, all this would be a cunning attempt to get what we are
actually all after: decent living conditions, minimum of economic tyranny, goods for all,
and the least possible risk of war
Our Masters, the Bankers, would find it harder to oppose such a movement than to
oppose communism. And it would be more likely to obtain support.
Fairburn condemned the 'internationalism' of the League of Nations as really
representing 'supernationalism' which would result in war, which of course it did: a war
against the self-sufficient Axis nations which had opted out of the world trading and
financial system.
On his return to New Zealand Fairburn, instead of launching his own movement
wholeheartedly campaigned for Social Credit, mainly through his position as assistant
secretary of the Auckland Farmers' Union, which had a social credit policy and as editor of
its paper Farming First. A post he held until being drafted into the army in 1943.
TOWARDS A NATIONAL CULTURE
Fairburn now began to paint in earnest and made some money as a fabric designer. He
spurned abstract art and particularly Picasso, as falsifying life. Abstraction, like
rationalism, was a form of intellectualism that took life apart. Fairburn believed in the
total individual. In art this meant synthesis, of building up images, not breaking them down.
He wrote of this:
If art does anything it synthesises, not analyses, or it is dead art. Creative imagination
is the thing, all faculties of man working together towards a synthesis of personal
experience resulting in fresh creation.
Whilst Fairburn believed in innovation in the arts and had earlier adhered to the Vorticist
movement founded in England by Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis et al. he also believed that
art should maintain its traditional foundations. Art is a product of an organic community,
not simply the egotistical product of the artist. He saw many artists however as not only
separate from the community but as destructive, calling Picasso for instance, 'a bearer of
still-born children,' and referred to the 'falseness of abstract art 'and its 'nihilism.'
In a 1946 radio talk. The Arts Are Acquired Tastes, Fairburn elaborated:
...Art is not the private property of artists. It belongs to the living tradition of society as
a whole. And it can't exist without its public. Conversely, I think it can be said that no
society can live for long in a state of civilisation without a fairly widespread appreciation of
the arts, that is to say, without well organised aesthetic sensibility.
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Hence there was a reciprocal interaction between the artist and the public. [Both
possessed a shared sense of values and origins, in former times, whether peasant or noble, in
comparison to the formlessness of the present day cosmopolitanism].
The artist has brought contempt upon himself by letting himself be used for ends that he
knows to be destructive. By doing so he has brought art and his own type close to
extinction.
Notes in the Margin. Action. 1947)
'Form' in art, geometrically, is fundamental. It is the primary responsibility of art schools
to teach 'traditional techniques' then allow those who have genuine talent to flow from
there.
Fairburn lectured in art history at the Elam School. Auckland University, the most
influential of New Zealands art schools which produced Colin McCahon et al.
McCahon, our most esteemed artist whose splatters fetch millions on the market and
whose influence upon new generations of artists endures, was vehemently opposed by
Fairburn, who considered his works devoid of form, 'contrived' and 'pretentious humbug'.
In design, in colour, in quality of line, in every normal attribute of good painting, they
are completely lacking,
Fairburn said of McCahon's paintings. He also considered modern music sensationalist,
without content, form or order, reflecting the chaos of the current cycle of Western
civilisation.
Fairburn, in accordance with his political nationalism, advocated a New Zealand national
culture arising from the New Zealand landscape. He believed that one's connection with
one's place of birth is of a permanent quality, not just as question of which place in the
world one found the most pleasant in which to live. Writing to Mason in June 1932, he
stated that the criterion of 'fortune-hunting' in choosing where one lives cannot satisfy
'anybody who is unSemitic like myself.
Fairburn explains that the art which is manufactured for the market by those who have
no attachment to any specific place, is Jewish in nature.
The Jews are a non-territorial race, so their genius is turned to dust and ashes. Their
works of art have no integrity - have had none since they left Palestine. Compare
Mendelsohn and Humbert Wolfe with the Old Testament writers. When I came to England, I
acted the Jew, I have no roots in this soil. In the end every man goes back where he
belongs, if he is honest. . Men are not free. They are bound to fate by certain things, and
lose their souls in escaping - if it is a permanent escape....
...Cosmopolitanism - Semitism - are false, have no bottom to them. Internationalism is
their child - and an abortion .
Fairburn condemned the notion that a culture can be chosen and attached to 'like a leech'
without regard to one's origins. He further identifies the impact of Jewish influence on
Western culture; a contrived art that does not arise spontaneously from the unconscious
mind of the artist in touch with his origins:
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Jewish standards have infected most Western art. It is possible to look on even the 'selfconscious art' of Poe. Baudelaire, Mallarme. Pater - Coleridge even - as being 'Jewish', in
the sense I am meaning. The orgasm is self-induced, rather than spontaneous. It has no
inevitability. The effect is calculated. The ratio between the individual artist and his readers
is nicely worked out prior to creation It does not arise as an inevitable result of the artist's
mental processes William Blake, who was not Jewish, had perfect faith in his own intuitions
- so his work could not fail to have universal truth - to have integrity But the truth was not
calculated
Since Fairburn had written on the Jewish cosmopolitan spirit in Western art the Jews
have of course achieved their own state of Israel. However, since the bulk of Jewry exists
outside of this state the Jewish artistic influence continues to be a reflection of their
rootlessness from the lands in which most dwell. This cosmopolitan influence Fairburn saw,
expressed an 'international' or 'world standard' for the arts which debased culture. He wrote:
Is poetry shortly to he graded like export mutton?
The 'racket' of modern art was related to economic motives,
the infection of the market place .. the sooty hand of commerce. The 'modern art
racket' has the aim of, rapid turnover, a rate of change that induces a sort of vertigo, and
the exploitation of novelty as a fetish - the encouragement of the exotic and the unusual.
Fairburn's biographer Dennis Trussell comments:
Rex feared that internationalism in cultural matters would reduce all depiction of
human experience to a characterless gruel, relating to no real time or place because it
attempted to relate to all times and places.
In contrast, great art arises from the traditional masculine values of a culture: honour,
chivalry and disinterested justice.'
Writing to the NZ Listener in June 1955 Fairburn decried the development of a 'one
world' cosmopolitan state, which would also mean a standardised world culture that would
be reduced to an international commodity:
The aspiration towards 'one world' may have something to be said for it in a political
sense (even here, with massive qualifications), but in the wider field of human affairs it is
likely to prove ruinous. In every country today we see either a drive (as in Russia and the
USA) or a drift (as in the British Commonwealth) towards the establishment of mass
culture, and the imposition of herd standards. This applies not only in industry, but also in
the literature and the arts generally. In the ant-hill community towards which we are
moving, art and literature will be sponsored by the State, and produced by a highly
specialised race of neuters. We have already gone some distance along this road. Literature
tends more and more to be regarded as an internationally standardised commodity, like
soap or benzine - something that has no particular social or geographical context. In the
fully established international suburbia of the future it will be delivered by the grocer - or,
more splendidly, be handled by a world-wide chain store Literary Trust...
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The situation today has proved Fairburn correct, with the transnational corporations
defining culture in terms of international marketing, breaking down national cultures in
favour of a global consumer standard. This mass global consumer culture is most readily
definable in the term American.
Fairburn opposed State patronage of the arts, however, believing that this cut the artist
off from the cycle of life, of family and work, making art instead, contrived and forced. He
also opposed the prostitution of the nation and culture to tourism, more than ever the great
economic panacea - along with world trade - heralded by the politicians.
In a letter to the NZ Herald written in February 1955 he states:
May I suggest that there is no surer way in the long run to destroy Maori culture than to
take the more colourful aspects of it and turn them into a 'tourist attraction'. If the elements
of Maori culture are genuine and have any place outside of a museum, they will be kept
alive by the Maori people themselves for their own cultural (not commercial) needs. The
use of Maori songs and dances to tickle the pockets of passing strangers, and the
encouragement of this sort of cheapjackery by the pakeha are degrading to both races ...
And the official encouragement of Maori songs, dances and crafts as side-shows to amuse
tourists is both vulgar and harmful
DOMINION OF USURY
In 1935 he resolved to write an epic poem about New Zealand. The result was Dominion.
It is an attack upon greed and usury, and is reminiscent of Ezra Pound's Cantos With Usura.
The assumption to government of the Labour Party gave Fairburn no cause for
optimism. The Party had indeed adopted a Social Credit policy when C H Douglas visited
New Zealand to much popular acclaim in 1934. John A Lee, the celebrated Labour junior
minister was a strong advocate of social credit but was to resign when the Government
made it clear that there was no real resolve to implement the economic policy on which it
had been elected to office.
Fairburn was critical of the Government's continuation of orthodox economics, apart
from some half-hearted measures, and of the typically orthodox socialist view that a growth
economy and ever increasing consumption were themselves worthy ends. Hence, even the
humblest worker saw the chase after money as the aim of life: small greed, the travelling
weed.
Dominion begins by fingering the usurer as the lord of all:
The house or the governors, guarded
by eunuchs,
and over the arch of the gate
these words enraged:
He who impugns the usurers
Imperils the State.
Those who serve the governors are picked from the enslaved, well paid for their services
to 'keep the records of decay', with 'cold hands... computing our ruin on scented cuffs.' For
the rest of the people there is the treadmill... of the grindstone god.'
The unemployed and those on relief work as Fairburn had been when he returned to New
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Zealand, were 'witnesses to the constriction of life' which was necessary to maintain the
financial system. Nor did the countryside escape the ravages of the system. The farms are
'mortgaged in bitterness...' to the banks.
The city is,
a paper city built on the rock of debt,
held fast against all winds by the paperweight of debt.
The living saddled with debt.
A load of debt for the foetus...
And all over the hand of the usurer,
Bland angel of darkness,
Mild and triumphant and much looked up to.
Colonisation had bought here the ills of the Mother Country, and debt underscored the
lot.
They divided the land,
Some for their need,
And some for sinless, customary greed...
Fairburn's answer is a return to the land.
Fair earth, we have broken our idols:
and after the days of fire we shall come to you for the stones of a new temple.
The destruction of the usurers' economic system would result in the creation of a new
order: the land freed of debt would yield the foundation for 'a new temple' other than that of
the usurer
ORGANIC FARMING
In 1940 Fairburn extended his advocacy to include organic fanning, and he became
editor of Compost, the magazine of the New Zealand Humic Compost Club. He considered
the abuse of the land led to the destruction of civilisation. The type of civilisation that arises
depends on its type of farming, he said. Food remains the basis of civilisation, but
industrial farming is spiritually barren.
The type of community Fairburn sought is based on farming, not industry that gives rise to
fractured, contending economic classes. Industry reduces life to a matter of economics..
In a lecture to the Auckland Fabian Society in 1944 Fairburn stated:
It is natural for men to be in close contact with the earth; and it is natural for them to
satisfy their creative instincts by using their hands and brains. Husbandry, 'the mother of
all crafts', satisfies these two needs, and for that reason should be the basic activity in our
social life - the one that gives colour and character to all the rest.
In the same lecture he spells out his ideal society:
The decentralisation of the towns, the establishment of rural communities with a
balanced economic life, the co-operative organisation of marketing, of transport and of
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necessary drudgery, the controlled use of manufacturing processes...

In 1946 Fairburn elaborated again on his ideal of decentralisation, regarding the
corporation as soulless and the State as the biggest of corporations:
The best status for men is that of independence. The small farmer, the small
tradesman, the individual craftsman working on his own - these have been the mainstay
of every stable civilisation in history. The tendency for large numbers of men to
forsake, or to have taken from them, their independent status, and to become hangers-on
of the state, has invariably been the prelude to decay.
NEW BARBARISM - AMERICA AND THE USSR
Fairburn feared that the victors of World War II, America and the USSR would usher
in a new age of barbarism. In 1946 he wrote in an unpublished article to the NZ Herald:
'The next decade or two we shall see American economic power and American
commercial culture extended over the whole of the non-Russian world The earth will
then be nicely partitioned between two barbarisms... In my more gloomy moments I find
it hard to form an opinion as to which is the greater enemy to Western civilisation Russian materialism - the open enemy, or American materialism with its more insidious
influence. The trouble is that we are bound to stick by America when it comes to the
point, however we may dislike certain aspects of American life. For somewhere under
that Mae West exterior there is a heart that is sound and a conscience that is capable of
accepting guilt.
Experience has shown that Fairburn's 'more gloomy moments' were the most realistic,
for America triumphed and stands as the ultimate barbarian threatening to engulf all cultures
with its materialism, hedonism and commercialism. The Russian military threat was largely
bogus, a convenient way of herding sundry nations into the American orbit. The USSR is no
more, whilst Imperium Americana stands supreme throughout the world, from the great
cities to the dirt road towns of the Third World, where all are being remoulded into the
universal citizen in the manner of American tastes, habits, speech, fashions, and even
humour.
BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVES
Fairburn regarded feminism as another product of cultural regression. In The Woman
Problem he calls feminism an 'insidious hysterical protest' contrary to biological and social
imperatives. He saw the biological urge for children as central to women.
Fairburn also considered biological factors to be more important than the sociological
and economic, therefore putting him well outside the orbit of any Left-wing doctrine, which
reduces history and culture into a complex of economic motives.
Our public policies are for the most part anti-biological. Social security legislation
concerns itself with the care of the aged long before it looks to the health and vitality of
young mothers and their children. We spend vast sums of money on hospitals and little or
nothing on gymnasia. ...We discourage our children from marrying at the right age. when
desire is urgent, and the pelvic structure of the female has not begun to ossify; we applaud
them when they spend the first ten years of their adult lives establishing a profitable
cosmetic business or a legal practice devoted to the defence of safe breakers.. The
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feminists must feel a sense of elation when they see an attractive young woman clinging to
some pitiful job or other, and drifting toward spinsterhood, an emotion that would no doubt
be shared by the geo-political experts of Asia, if they were on the spot.
Indeed, what has feminism shown itself to be, despite its pretensions as being
'progressive'. other than a means of fully integrating women into the market and into
production, whilst abortion rates soar?
Fairburn saw Marxism, Feminism and Freudianism as denying the 'organic nature' of
man. Urbanisation means the continuing revitalisation of the male physically and ethically
as he is pushed further into the demands of industrial and economic life. The 'masculine
will' requires reassertion in association with the decentralisation of the cities and,
the forming of a closer link with agriculture and the more stable life of the countryside.

The influence of Oswald Spengler's philosophy can be seen in Fairburn's criticism of

urbanisation as leading to the disintegration of culture:
Whether this will anticipate and prevent or follow in desperation upon the breakdown of
Western society is a matter that is yet to be decided.
Fairburn died of cancer in 1957. He continues to be recognised as a founder of a New
Zealand national literature, albeit one that has not been much added to beyond that small
number of individuals from the 1930s.
Chapter 12

YUKIO MISHIMA
Yukio Mishima was born into an upper middle class family in 1925. Author of a hundred
books, playwright, actor, he has been described as the 'Leonardo da Vinci of contemporary
Japan, and is one of the few Japanese writers to have become widely known and translated
in the West.
DARK SIDE OF THE SUN
Since World War II, the West has forgotten the Shadow soul of Japan, as Jung would have
termed it, the collective impulses that have been repressed by 'Occupation Law' and the
imposition of democracy. The Japanese are seen stereotypically as being overly polite and
smiling business executives and camera snapping tourists. The emphasis has been on the
soft counterpart of the Japanese psyche, on the "chrysanthemum" (the arts) as Mishima puts
it, and the repression of the "word" (the martial tradition). The American anthropologist
Ruth Benedict wrote of the duality of the Japanese using this symbolism in her
Chrysanthemum and the Sword, to which Mishima referred approvingly. He insisted that
Japan return to a balance of the arts and the martial spirit, to what, again referring to Jung,
would be called individuation, in allowing the repressed Shadow archetype to reassert itself.
Mishima was himself that synthesis of the scholar and the warrior, who rejected pure
intellectualism and theory in favour of action.

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THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI

Mishima's aesthetic was the beauty of the violent death, the death of one in his prime, an
ideal common in classical Japanese literature. As a sickly youngster, Mishima's ideal of the
heroic death had already taken hold: "A sensuous craving for such things as the destiny of
soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling... the ways they would die."
He was determined to overcome his physical weaknesses. There is much of the Nietzschean
'Overman' about him, of self-overcoming personal and social restraints to express his own
heroic individuality. His motto was: "Be Strong." (He had read Nietzsche during the war).
World War II had a lasting impact on Mishima. Along with his fellow students, he felt that
conscription and certain death waited. He became chairman of the college literary club, and
his patriotic poems were published in the student magazine. He also co-founded his own
journal and began to read the Japanese classics. He associated with a literary group, Bungei
Bunka that believed war to be holy. The Japanese Romanticists were another literary group
avowing the same principles with which Mishima was in contact. Mishima barely passed
the medical examination for military training. He was drafted into an aircraft factory and
several other such jobs.
In 1944, he had already had his first book, Hanazakan no Mori (The Forest in Full Bloom)
published, a considerable feat in the final year of the war, which brought him instant
recognition.
WILL TO HEALTH
In 1952, Mishima, established as a literary figure, travelled to the USA. Sitting in the sun in
transit aboard ship, something he had been unable to do in his youth because of his weak
lungs, Mishima resolved to match the development of his physique with his intellect.
His interest in the Hellenic classics took him to Greece. He wrote that, "In Greece there had
been however an equilibrium between the physical body and intelligence, soma and
sophia..." He discovered a "Will towards Health", an adaptation of Nietzsche's "Will to
Power", and he was to become almost as noted as a body builder as he was a writer. In 1966
Mishima wrote; "The goal of my life was to acquire all the various attributes of the warrior."
His ethos was that of the Samurai Bunburyodo-ihe way of literature (Bun) and the Sword
(Bu), which he sought to cultivate in equal' measure, a blend of "art and action". "But my
heart's yearning towards Death and Night and Blood would not be denied."
He expressed the Samurai ethos: "To keep death in mind from day to day, to focus each
moment upon, inevitable death,.., the beautiful death that had earlier eluded me [World War
II] had also become possible. I was beginning to dream of my capabilities as a fighting
man." In 1966, he applied for permission to train at the army camps.
In the spirit of Bunburyodo, Mishima's novels plotted the course of his life. In 1967,
Runaway Horses had as its hero a right-wing terrorist who commits hara-kiri after stabbing
to death a businessman.

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Already in 1960 Mishima had written his short story Patriotism, in honour of the 1936 Ni ni
Roku rebellion of army officers of the Kodo-ha faction who wished to strike at the Soviet
Union in opposition to the rival Tosei-ha, who aimed to strike at Britain and other colonial
powers. The Kodo-ha officers had mobilised 1400 men and taken Tokyo. However,
Emperor Hirohito ordered them to surrender.
The incident impressed itself on Mishima. In Patriotism the hero, a young officer, commits
Hara-kiri, of which Mishima states: "It would he difficult to imagine a more heroic sight
than that of the lieutenant at this moment."
Mishima was again to write of the incident in his play Toka no Kiku and in his 1966 novel
The Voices of the Heroic Dead. Here he criticises the Emperor for betraying the Kodo-ha
officers and for renouncing his divinity after the war as a betrayal of the war dead. Mishima
combined these three works on the rebellion into a single volume called the Ni Ni Roku
trilogy.
Mishima comments on the Trilogy and the rebellion: "Surely some God died when the Ni
Ni Roku incident failed. I was only eleven at the time and felt little of it. But when the war
ended, when I was twenty, a most sensitive age, I felt something of the terrible cruelty of the
death of that God... the positive picture was my boyhood impression of the heroism of the
rebel officers. Their purity, bravery, youth and death qualified them as mythical heroes; and
their failures and deaths made them true heroes in this world...."
In early 1966, Mishima systemised his thoughts in an eighty-page essay entitled Eirei no
Koe (The Voices of the Heroic Dead), after which he decided to create the Tatenokai. In this
work he asks, "why did the Emperor have to become a human being".
In an interview with a Japanese magazine that year, he upheld the imperial system as the
only type suitable for Japan. All the moral confusion of the post-war era, he states, stems
from the Emperor's renunciation of his divine status. The move away from feudalism to
capitalism and consequent industrialisation in the modern state causes relationships to be
disrupted between individuals. Real love between a couple requires a third focus, the apex
of a triangle embodied in the divinity of the Emperor.
TATENOKAI
The following year Mishima created his own militia, writing shortly before this of reviving
the "soul of the Samurai within myself ." Permission was granted by the army for Mishima
to use their training camps for the mostly student followers he recruited from several rightwing university societies.
At the office of a right-wing student journal, a dozen people gathered. Mishima wrote on a
piece of paper: "We hereby swear to be the foundation of Kokoku Nippon [Imperial
Japan]." He cut a finger, and everyone else followed, letting the blood fill to the brim of a
cup. Each signed the paper with their blood and drank from the cup. The Tatenokai (Shield
Society) was born.
The aims of the society were:
(i) Communism is incompatible with Japanese tradition, culture and history and runs
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counter to the Emperor system;

(ii) the Emperor is the sole symbol of our historical and cultural community and racial
identity; and
(iii) the use of violence is justifiable in view of the threat posed by communism.
The emblem that Mishima designed for the society comprised two ancient Japanese helmets
in red against a white silk background. The militia was designed to be a "stand by the
army", described by Mishima as "the world's least armed, most spiritual army".
By this time, Mishima felt that his calling as a novelist was completed. It must have seemed
the right time to die. He had been awarded the Shinchosha Literary Prize in 1954 for the
Sound of Waves and the Yomiuri Literary Prize in 1957 for The Temple of the Golden
Pavilion. His novels Spring Snow and Runaway Horses had sold well in 1969, but Mishima
started to feel the antagonism of the Left-wing dominated literary elite and his Sea of
Fertility received the silent treatment. His sole defender at this time was Yasunari
Kawabata, who had received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, Mishima missing out
because the Nobel Prize committee assumed he could wait awhile longer in favour of his
mentor. Kawabata considered Mishima's literary talent as exceptional.
Mishima wrote of the intellectuals as, "The strongest enemy within the nation. It is
astonishing how little the character of modern intellectuals in Japan has changed, i.e. their
cowardice, sneering, 'objectivity', rootlessness, dishonesty, flunkeyism, mock gestures of
resistance, self-importance, inactivity, talkativeness and readiness to eat their words."
HAGAKURE
Mishima's destiny was shaped by the Samurai code expounded in a book that he had kept
with him since the war. This was Hagakure, the best-known line of which is:
"I have discovered that the way of the Samurai is death."
Hagakure was the work of the 17th century Samurai Jocho Yamamoto, who as a priest was
to dictate his teachings to his student Tashiro. Hagakure became the moral code taught to
the Samurai, but did not become available to the general public until the latter half of the
19th century. During World War II, it was widely read, and its slogan on the way of death
was used to inspire the Kamikaze pilots. Following the occupation it went underground, and
many copies were destroyed rather than have them read by the Americans.
Mishima wrote his own encapsulation and commentary on Hagakure in 1967. He stated in
his introductory remarks that this is the one book that he has referred to continually in the
twenty years since the war, and that during the war he had always kept it close to him.
Immediately following the war, Mishima relates that he felt isolated from the rest of literary
society, which had accepted ideas that were alien to him. He asked himself what his guiding
principal would be now that Japan was defeated. Hagakure was the answer, providing him
with "constant spiritual guidances and "the basis of my morality^. Like all other books of
the war period, this had become loathsome, to be wiped from the memory, but in the
darkness of the times it would now radiate "its true light".

81

The heroic death is the culmination of the life of the man of action. For the man of action
death is the single point of the completion of one's life. It must be taken at the right time.
Mishima found the social and moral criticism of Jocho relevant to post-war Japan.
FEMINISATION OF SOCIETY
The feminisation of the Japanese male (contemporarily as a result of the influence of
American democracy) was, Mishima pointed out referring to Hagakure, also noted by Jocho
during the peaceful years of the Totcugawa era. The 18th century prints of couples together
hardly distinguish between male and female, with similar hairstyles, cut and pattern of
clothes, even the same facial expressions, which make it impossible to tell who is the male
and who the female. Jocho records in Hagakure that during his time, the pulse rate that
differed between the genders had become the same, and this was noted when treating
medical ailments. He called this fumigation "the female pulse."
CELEBRITIES REPLACE HEROES
Jocho condemns the idolisation of certain individuals achieving what we'd today call
celebrity status. Mishima comments:
"Today, baseball players and television stars are lionised. Those who specialise in skills that
will fascinate an audience tend to abandon their existence as total human personalities and
be reduced to a kind of skilled puppet. This tendency reflects the ideals of our time. On this
point there is no difference between performers and technicians. The present is the age of
technocracy... differently expressed, it is the age of performing artists. "It means
specialisation and therefore the confinement of the individual into a single cog."
BOREDOM OF PACIFISM
Under pacifism and democracy, the individual is literally dying of boredom, rather than
living and dying heroically.
"Ours is an age in which everything is based on the premise that it is best to live as long as
possible. The average life span has become the longest in history, and a monotonous plan
for humanity unrolls before us."
After finding his place in society and the struggle is over, there is nothing left for youth,
apart from retirement, "and the peaceful, boring life of impotent old age." The comfort of
the welfare state ensures against any need to struggle, and one is simply ordered to "rest".
Mishima comments on the extraordinary number of elderly who commit suicide. Now we
might add the even more extraordinary number of youth that commit suicide.
Mishima equates socialism and the welfare state, and finds that at the end of the first, there
is "the fatigue of boredom"; whilst at the end of the second there is suppression of freedom.
People desire something to die for, rather than the endless peace that is upheld as a Utopia.
Struggle is the essence of life. To the Samurai death is the focus of his life, even in times of
peace. "The premise of the democratic age is that it is best to live as long as possibles
REPRESSION OF DEATH
The modern world seeks to avoid the thought of death. Yet the repression of such a vital
element in living will become ever more explosive, as do all such inner-directed impulses.
Here the psychologist Jung would concur. Mishima states:
"We are ignoring the fact that bringing death to the level of consciousness ic an important
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element of mental health...Hagakure insists that to ponder death daily is to concentrate daily
on life. When we do our work thinking that we may die today, we cannot help feeling that
our job suddenly becomes radiant with life and meaning."
EXTREMISM
Mishima states that Hagakure is a "philosophy of extremism^ Hence, it is inherently out of
character in a democratic society. Jocho stated that whilst the Golden Mean is greatly
valued, for the Samurai one's daily life must be of a heroic, vigorous nature, to excel and to
surpass. Mishima comments that "going to excess is an important spiritual springboard".
There is something in this that is reminiscent of Nietzsche and of the heroic vitalism
expounded in the west by D H Lawrence and Ernst Junger and others.
INTELLECTUALISM
Of intellectuals, Mishima shares the same contempt as the other Thinkers of the Right who
are attuned to the life force or elan vital that transcends the intellectualism that arises from
the cities of civilisations in decline. Jocho had stated that:
"The calculating man is a coward. I say this because calculations have to do with profit and
loss, and such a person is therefore preoccupied with profit and loss. To die is a loss, to live
is a gain, and so one decides not to die. Therefore one is a coward. Similarly a man of
education camouflages with his intellect and eloquence the cowardice or greed that is his
true nature. Many people do not realise this."
Mishima comments that in Jocho's time there was probably nothing corresponding to the
modem intelligentsia. However, there were scholars, and even Samurai themselves, who
began to form themselves into a similar class "in an age of extended peace." Mishima
identifies this intellectualism with "humanism". This intellectualism means, contrary to the
Samurai ethic, "one does not offer oneself up bravely in the face of danger."
NO WORDS OF WEAKNESS
The Samurai in times of peace still talks in a martial spirit, Jocho taught that "the first thing
a Samurai says on any occasion is extremely important. He displays with this one remark all
the valour of the Samurai."
Mishima comments that there is never a word of weakness uttered by a Samurai.
"Even in casual conversation, a Samurai must never complain. He must constantly be on his
guard lest he should let slip a word of weakness." Another principle; "One must not lose
heart in misfortune."
FLOW OF TIME
Something of the cycles of a civilisation from health to degeneracy and death, as Spengler
and Julius Evola showed, are also portrayed in Hagakure by Jocho as "the flow of time".
Mishima points out that whilst Jocho laments "the decadence of his era and the degeneration
of the young Samurai", he observes "the flow of time", realistically stating that it is no use
resisting that flow.
As Jocho stated:
"The climate of an age is unalterable. That conditions are worsening steadily is proof that
we have entered the last stage of the Law." This refers to the entering of three progressively
83

degenerate stages according to the Buddhist cycles of history.

Jocho employs the analogy of seasons just as Oswald Spengler did in describing the cycles
of a civilisation from birth, flowering, withering and death.
"However, the season cannot always be spring or summer, nor can we have daylight
forever. What is important is to make each era as good as it can be according to its na-ture".
Jocho does not recommend either nostalgia for the return of the past, or the 'superficial'
attitude of those who only value what is modem, or 'progressive' as we call it today.
Julius Evola, the Italian 'Thinker of the Right', elaborating on the cyclical nature of history
similarly recommended to young activists concerned at the demise of Western Civilisation
that they cannot return to the past nor prevent the present cycle. They must "ride the tiger",
see out the present era and to lay the foundations for a cultural renewal.
SAMURAI'S DESTINY
25 November 1970 was chosen as the day that Mishima would fulfil his destiny as a
Samurai. Four others from the Tatenokai joined him. All donned headbands bearing a
Hagakure slogan. The aim was to take General Mishita hostage to enable Mishima to
address the soldiers stationed at the Ichigaya army base in Tokyo. Mishima and his
lieutenant Monta would then commit Hara-kiri. Only daggers and swords would be used in
the assault, in accordance with Samurai tradition.
The General was bound and gagged. Close fighting ensued as officers several times entered
the general's office. Mishima and his small band each time forced the officers to retreat.
Finally, they were herded out with broad strokes of Mishima's sword against their buttocks.
A thousand soldiers assembled on the parade ground. Two of Mishima's men dropped
leaflets from the balcony above, calling for a rebellion to "restore Nippon".
At mid-day precisely Mishima appeared on the balcony to address the crowd. Shouting
above the noise of helicopters he declared: "Japanese people today think of money, just
money: Where is our national spirit today. The Jieitai [army] must be the soul of Japan."
The soldiers jeered. Mishima continued: "The nation has no spiritual foundation. That is
why you don't agree with me. You will just be American mercenaries. There you are in your
tiny world. You do nothing for Japan." His last words were: "I salute the Emperor. Long
live the emperor!"
Morita joined him on the balcony in salute. Both returned to Mishita's office. Mishima knelt
shouting a final salute, and plunged a dagger into his stomach, forcing it clockwise. Monta
bungled the decapitation leaving it for another to finish it. Monta was then handed
Mishima's dagger but called upon the swordsman who had finished off Mishima to do the
job and Morita's head was knocked of in one swoop. The remaining followers stood the
heads of Mishima and Morita together and prayed over them.
10,000 mourners attended Mishima's funeral, the largest of its kind ever held in Japan. "I
want to make a poem of my life" Mishima had written at 24 years of age. He had fulfilled
his destiny according to the Samurai way:
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"To choose the place where one dies is also the greatest joy in life".
After his death, his commentary on the Hagakure became a best seller.

Chapter 13

JULIUS EVOLA
The name Julius Evola has over recent years become increasingly known in less
conventional strata of the English-speaking world, thanks to an upsurge of interest in
metaphysics, as many more people are starting to look beyond the superficial life offered by
the materialistic society.
Evola has also had an enduring impact on the post-war so-called 'New Right'. He is
politically heretical within the Modern liberal-capitalist era. Despite his criticism of the
Fascist regime of his native Italy, which resulted in the banning of his magazine The Tower.
Evola's Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race was endorsed by Mussolini as providing a spiritual
and cultural conception of race distinct from the biological determinism of German National
Socialism.
Hence, if it were not for Evola's eminence as a writer on the mystical traditions of both
the East and the West it seems more than likely that his name would have remained
unknown to the English-speaking world. In post-war years, having successfully defended
himself against charges of 'Fascism', Evola was sought out by a new generation of national
revolutionaries' in Italy who were looking for an alternative to liberal-capitalism and
communism that would surpass what they considered the now passe Fascism of their fathers
and grandfathers. These youths wished to make themselves the 'revolutionary elite' or
'political soldiers' that Evola had written would emerge to revolt against the Modern world
on an exalted, spiritual level.
The American metaphysical publishing house Inner Traditions International has been the
most prominent in introducing Evola's works to a wider audience in the English speaking
world. Although apologetic as regards his Fascist past, they have so far published his
Eros and the Mysteries of Love (1983), The Yoga of Power (1992), The Hermetic Tradition
(1995) The Doctrine of Awakening (1995). Revolt Against the Modern World (1995), and
Meditations on the Peaks (1998).
It is Revolt Against the Modern World which is Evola's most important work regarding
the spiritual, and hence political and cultural plight of Western civilisation.
For Evola the foundations of life are a reflection of the metaphysical, expressed in the
mystical dictum, as above, to below. While embracing the cyclical analysis of history of
Oswald Spengler (for whom Evola was the Italian translator), Evola draws on the cyclic
laws of history that were followed by traditional civilisations from Aztec America, to Vedic
India to Eddic of Scandinavia and Hellas.
WHO WAS EVOLA?
Baron Julius Evola was born in 1898 of a Sicilian family. In his youth he was a poet and
painter adhering to the anti-traditional Dadaist and futurist movements in revolt against
bourgeoisie society. After voluntary war service as an officer cadet in the artillery, Evola
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began to study mysticism and metaphysics. He saw in the mystical traditions of both East
and West a common reality, and in 1927 founded his own magical order, the UR group.
Although born a Catholic, Evola was at odds with the Fascist regime over both its accord
with the Vatican, and what he saw as the mass, proletarian nature of Fascism, which he
regarded as fundamentally democratic. His view of life is aristocratic and reactionary,
although occasionally converging with aspects of Fascism.
Although also at odds with the materialistic racism of Hitler's Germany, Evola hoped to
find common ground with the more paganistic elements, and lectured there. His aim being
to establish a transnational fraternity of knights who would restore tradition and chivalry.
Evola saw hope in the SS as being such a knighthood. However, Himmler's adviser on
esoteric and spiritual matters, Karl Mana Wiligut, for one reason or another,
had Evola's lectures terminated. A report by Himmler's personal staff in 1938 succinctly
states Evola's aims and ideas at this time:
The ultimate and secret goal of Evola's theories and projects is most likely an
insurrection of the old aristocracy against the modern world... His overall character is
marked by the feudal aristocracy of old.
He is described in the report as a reactionary Roman, and his aim of a RomanGermanic Imperium is rejected. The report also refers to plans by Evola for a secret
international order. He was not only to be prevented from lecturing in Germany, but his
activities in neighbouring countries were to be carefully observed . Himmler endorsed the
report.
Evola for his part was critical of the centralism and collectivism of National Socialism,
criticising it as having renounced the ancient. Aristocratic tradition of the state. Writing
in the Fascist newspaper Lo Stato (1935) he states:
Nationalistic Socialism has clearly renounced the ancient, aristocratic tradition of the
state it is nothing more than a semi-collective nationalism that levels everything flat in its
centralism and it has not hesitated to destroy the traditional division of Germany into
principalities, lands and cities which have all enjoyed a relative autonomy.
Hence Evola's ideal for Western civilisation can be seen to be a return to the medieval
specifically the Ghibelline era of the Holy Roman Empire. His anti-materialist doctrine as
applied to race saw him at odds not only with National Socialism but also with some
elements within the Fascist party, although Mussolini saw Evolas doctrine on race as
preferable to the German influence. Evola considers race on three levels: the race of the
body (biological), of the soul (character) and of the spirit (religious outlook).
Evola's seeks to define his attitude in a 1942 article in Vita Italiana entitled The
Misunderstanding of Scientific Racism:
We would like to make it clear that to us spirit means neither frivolous philosophy or
theosophy, nor mystical, devotional withdrawal from the world, but is simply what in better
times the wellborn have always said were the marks of race: namely, straightforwardness,
inner unity character, courage, virtue, immediate and instant sensitivity for all values which
are present in every great human being and which, since they stand well beyond all chancesubjected reality, they also dominate. The current meaning of race, however, which differs
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from the above by being a construction of 'science' and a piece out of the anthropological
museum we leave to the pseudo intellectual bourgeoisie, which continues to indulge in the
idols of nineteenth-century Positivism
EVOLA'S HISTORICAL METAPHYSICS
To Evola, all traditional civilisations are based on spiritual aspirations: what we are more
commonly familiar with as the 'divine right of kings' being a vestige of this. Hence the
castes of a traditional society are based on a divine order. Any undermining of this spiritual
order ushers in an era of chaos, the Kali Yuga or Dark Age in Hindu mythology of which all
traditional civilisations were aware.
In this cosmic order, the king or emperor as a manifestation of god, is not only a political
ruler, but also more importantly a priestly ruler whose most sacred duty is to attend to the
spiritual concerns of his subjects, lest the forces of chaos return. Likewise, for the warrior
caste the principal duty was not merely that of a soldier in the present sense, but a cosmic
warrior, restoring the central focus to a civilisation. The Hindus refer to this in a Bhagavad
Gita as a dharmic or cosmic duty of the ksatriya or warrior caste. The Japanese equivalent
is the Samurai just as Japanese civilisation has as its axis the 'divine emperor'. Those
civilisations, which succumbed to anti-traditional or chaotic forces, would decline: Again
referring to the Japanese, the emperor renounced his divinity following World War II under
the dictate of the Americans.
Evola's cyclic view, which he calls the metaphysics of history, rejects the lineal
outlook, which can be called 'Darwinian' or progressive', which sees history as an ascending
line, from primitive to 'Modern'. Like Spengler, Evola sees civilisations as going through
the same cycles of birth, blossoming and decay. Since he regards civilisation to be a
manifestation of the supernatural each civilisation was founded on a central myth. The
further a civilisation goes from its founding myth, no matter how materially progressive it
has become, like our present cycle of Western civilisation, it slips further into chaos.
One is reminded of Yeats' poem The Second Coming which could be seen to encapsulate
Evola's approach to the cycles of history:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer, things
fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
AXIS OF CIVILISATIONS
In Evola's historical metaphysics every civilisation has an axis around which everything
is focused, and that axis in traditional civilisations is the priest-king, embodying the divine
order, the apex of a pyramidal hierarchy of caste. We can only consider the present
'classes' of this Western cycle to be the most degenerate reflections of the old castes, based
entirely on economics and devoid of spiritual content. In the pyramidal hierarchy of the
traditional civilisations the king serves as a bridge, or the Pontifax Maximus as the Romans
termed it, between the people and the eternal divine order. All else in traditional civilisation
stems from this cosmic principle: caste, law, war, religion, empire... Writing in Revolt
Against the Modern World. Evola explains:
In order to understand both the spirit of tradition and its antithesis, modern civilisation,
it is necessary to begin with the fundamental doctrine of the two natures. According to this
doctrine there is a physical order of things and a metaphysical one: there is a mortal nature
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and an immortal one; there is the superior realm of 'being' and the inferior realm of
'becoming'. Generally speaking, there is a visible and a tangible dimension and prior to and
beyond it, an invisible and intangible dimension that is the support, the source, and true life
of the former.
Anywhere in the world of Tradition, both East and West and in one form or another, this
knowledge (not just a mere 'theory') has always been present as an unshakeable axis around
which everything revolved
This central focus upon which a traditional civilisation revolves is symbolised in the
'wheel'. The 'universal king' of Hindu cosmology is called the lord or spinner of the
wheel. The Helenes called this the wheel of generation of the wheel of fate, with the
motionless centre symbolising spiritual stability. The Hindu universal lord is called also the
Lord of the Law or The Lord of the Wheel of the Law.
In the East the axial symbol is represented by the mandula. We can also see it among the
Occidental cultures in the swastikas and sunwheels.
MOUNTAIN AND THE GRAIL
Other symbols of the spirituality of traditional civilisation include the Grail Myth and the
mountain.
Evola was an accomplished mountaineer. His book Meditations on the Peaks - Mountain
Climbing as a Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest, is a series of articles gathered together with
Evola's permission in 1973 from works written between 1930 and 1942. His attitude
towards mountains can be summarised in the quote he gives from Nietzsche: Many meters
above sea level - but how many more above ordinary men. Evola rejected the romantic and
lyrical attitude of the bourgeoisie towards mountains that predominated in the 19' century,
as well as mountaineering as a mere sport, that he regarded as typically American. Evola
viewed mountain climbing as an aristocratic pursuit that takes the climber beyond the
masses and the materialistic society, with the Nietzschean-type self-overcoming. Selfdiscipline and will being required, reaching states sought by Eastern and Western mystics.
The mountain itself is symbolic of the axis between the earthly and the divine. This
spiritual view of the mountain Evola cites as existing in such diverse civilisations as the
South American, Germanic, Roman, Indian, Tibetan, and that of the Gothic era with the
tradition of Charlemange and Frederick sleeping within mountains, ready to arise and
restore order to their impoverished kingdoms. Imposing mountains were the abode of the
gods. One thinks immediately of Olympus, the term Olympian meaning both godly and that
of the actions of heroes struggling to ascend earthly boundaries.
The Mystery of the Grail originally formed an appendix to Evola's 1934 book Revolt
Against the Modern World. Evola sought pre-Christian, pagan origins for the Grail legend,
which he identified as regal blood or Sangreal. This myth of the Quest for the Grail is
also representative of the heroic individual transcending mundane boundaries, for only the
worthy knight can reach it. The legend is centred on the symbol of the dead, wounded or
sleeping king, his kingdom stricken with ruin due to loss of faith, or the falling away from
the sacred tradition. The Knight who succeeds in the quest, undergoing many tests, restores
the King to health (or assumed the mantle of kingship himself) and re- establishes the
Kingdom. The legend of King Arthur is the most familiar of this myth. The King who sleeps
and who will return when Albion is in its greatest peril. Likewise the Ghibelline emperor
Frederick Barbarosa is said to lie sleeping in the Harz mountains, awakening to lead
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Germany at its darkest hour.

Evola considers the Ghibelline medieval culture as the apex of Western Civilisation. The
Ghibelline during the medieval period was represented by the German Hohenstaufen
imperial line in opposition to the papacy. The result in Italy was fierce fighting between the
two contenders for authority, the papal faction of the Guelf, often represented by wealthy
property owners and merchants. After the extinction of the Ghibelline line in 1268,
Ghibelleanism came to symbolise nostalgia for the return of the Holy Roman Empire, which
had achieved European unity.
The Grail myth according to Evola is centred around the Ghibelline tradition. It continues
as an expression to restore European Civilisation. The Knights of the Grail, states Evola,
continued through the Templars, hence their suppression by the Vatican. The Rosicrucians
also existed to restore Europe's tradition, hence the reference in their manifestos to Knights
of the Golden Stone, and the resurrected King who wears a Templar's cross. To Evola the
Grail legend remains a central myth for European revival and unity, a symbol of the
warrior-priest whom he counsels to maintain spiritual purity amidst the present Dark Age.
TRADITIONAL SOCIAL ORDER
The aristocracy was not merely political but spiritual and the focus of tradition, with the
divine king serving as the bridge between two ways of approaching the metaphysical heroic action and contemplation. Contemplation manifested in the rites of the culture; the
social order rested on traditional law and caste, and the earthly political expression was that
of empire.
These foundations of traditional, civilisation, states Evola, have been wiped out by the
triumph of man-centred or anthropocentric civilisation of the present day. The
secularisation of the aristocracy in Western Civilisation had already started in the mid feudal
period and had become thoroughly rotten by the time of the French Revolution. What
replaced the nobility was the bourgeoisie with its money values. Evola refers to the decline
of the traditional aristocracy as leading to an aristocracy of intellectuality rather than of
the spirit. Hence, the original purpose of rulers as being a bridge to the divine has been dead
in Western Civilisation for centuries.
Evola is unapologetically patriarchal, seeing the goddess worship of certain cultures not
as the most primordial forms of worship, as it is now fashionable to claim, but as a later
development arising from degraded cycles of history. Evola states that traditional
civilisations in their original states were solar and heavenly directed, rather than goddess
and earth directed. The ethic of traditional civilisations is therefore of a virile nature and
includes valour, honour and character as manifested at the apex of a civilisation in its
aristocratic caste.
HISTORY CYCLIC, NOT LINEAL
Evola rejects Darwinism both biologically and historically. Neither man nor nature
proceeds in a linear manner. History does not proceed in a straight line of evolution or
progress from 'primitive' to 'modern', with our own technological phase of Western
civilisation being the apex of history. Rather, man has fallen from a high state through a
succession of ages. Evola cites this tradition from numerous civilisations which state that
man's primal state, far from being animalistic or ape-like was more than human. Our
present state biologically and culturally is therefore a debasement.
Contrary to orthodox historians, Evola considers the Renaissance as having been the
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point from where Western civilisation began to decline, which was the beginning of
rationalism over the spiritual and ultimately the ascent of materialism to the present day.
During this period traditional wisdom was carried underground by secret societies such as
the Rosicrucians. In opposition to these societies were those that upheld the rationalistic and
materialistic doctrines through the llluminati and Freemasonry, which were influential in
fomenting the French, American and other revolutions.
With the ascent of materialism everything was de-sanctified, including the castes upon
which traditional social order was based. There was a shift in power from the warrior to
the merchant and to the capitalist oligarchies which have replaced the divine priestkings. The result has been increasing dehumanisation. from a human to a sub-human
type. Evola refers to the 'glorification of modern man' presented under the name of
'science' with the modern ideologies of evolution and progress. This means the
abandonment of traditional truths which held that man has a transcendent origin.
and ... the West no longer believes in the nobility of the origins but in the notion that
civilisation arises out of barbarism, religion from superstition, man from animal (Darwin),
thought from matter, and every spiritual form from the 'sublimation' or transposition of the
stuff that originates the instinct, libido, complexes....(Freud. Jung)... (Revolt Against the
Modern World).
The result of the 'evolutionary' myth' in infiltrating every dimension has been destructive,
overthrowing 'every value', and 'de-consecrating' mankind. Evola elaborates on an antiDarwinian form of 'racism' in a pamphlet. Race as a Revolutionary Idea. Here he repudiates
the idea that man arose from apelike creatures and evolved into higher forms and higher
civilisations. Rather, he believes that if such apelike creatures did exist they belonged to an
inferior line that was not continued through homo sapiens. Evola states:
The true and essential origin of man is to be found elsewhere, in superior races who,
already in prehistoric ages. possessed a civilisation of limited material development but of
notable extremely elevated spiritual content, so much so as to be symbolically designated
remembrances of all peoples, as 'divine races', as races of 'god-like men
Evola's form of racism is posited against the myth of the faceless proletarian mass
without a fatherland . Evola considers the practical application of the revival of racism
and nationalism as:
One of the preliminary conditions for re-organising those forces which, through the
crisis of the modern world, are sinking in the quagmire of a mechanical, collectivistic and
internationalistic indifferentiation. This duty is a question of life and death for the future of
European civilisation.
This racism is a 'continuation of Fascism', because like Fascism, it refuses to
consider the single individual 'by himself, as an atom. Rather this racism regards every
man as a member of a community as regards space, time and his continuity in the past and
the future, of a stock, of a blood, of a tradition.
However, racism, to Evola, did not stop at a mere biological level, otherwise racism
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would be worthy of the accusation by the Jew Trotsky of it being zoological materialism.
Man is differentiated from the animal in having not only a body but also a soul and a
spirit. Therefore men are not only different in body but also in soul and spirit. A significant
example is that of the Jews, who are termed a race of the soul , who have often had a
disintegrating effect upon society. This race of the soul might exist within an individual
whose bodily race is different.
DEHUMANISATION
To Evola the USA represents the materialistic triumph over the spiritual just as much as
the USSR. This dehumanisation has resulted in a new human type. The economic classes
have replaced the castes that were reflections of divine order. Hence, in the power structure,
the merchant replaced the warrior, the kings of money replaced the kings of blood and
spirit. Evola writes of this state in Revolt Against the Modern World,
Moreover contemporary society looks like an organism that has shifted from a human to
a subhuman type, in which every activity and reaction is determined by the needs and
dictates of purely physical life.
This de-spiritualisation is reflected in architecture. Through cycles of regression the
dominant building has shifted from the temple (divine ruler) to the fortress and castle
(warrior caste), to the walled city-state (age of merchants), to the factory and finally to the
dull buildings that are the hives of mass man. The family has likewise slipped from being
a manifestation of the sacred to that of a legalistic unit, and eventually will be replaced by
the people and society and party (this being the stated ideal of the Communists).
Likewise, the concept of war went through analogous phases, from the sacred war,
to war waged for the honour of one's lord (warrior caste) to those fought by nations for
economic interests (caste of merchants). The Arabic culture is the vestige of a civilisation
that continues to uphold the concept of sacred war (Jihad) in our own time.
In aesthetics sacred art gave way to the epic art and poems of the warrior caste,
psychological art produced for the consumption of the merchant caste, and finally the social
art produced for the masses. At a time when the USSR was a triumphant spectre over much
of Europe, Evola saw the final phase after the capitalistic (the merchant caste) as being
those of the caste of serfs represented by communism.
However, Evola recognised that the impetus even for the Bolsheviks came from America
as the centre for the technical and mechanical world. Evola cites several Soviet directives in
the early days of the Bolshevik regime that look to America as having started a historical
process of mechanisation. Evola states that America does not represent a new or youthful
nation, but the end product of a cycle of European decay, the exact contradiction of the
ancient European tradition. The American ideal is soulless and mechanical.
Writing of American civilisation in a 1945 essay of that name, Evola states that although
the popular notion of the USA is that it is a young nation with the faults of youth it is
rather the final stage of modern Europe. The representative of the most senile aspects
of Western Civilisation.
What in Europe exists in diluted forms are magnified and concentrated in the US
whereby they are revealed as the symptoms of disintegration and cultural and human
regression.
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Evola's metaphysics of history concludes that,

the final collapse will not even have the character of a tragedy.
Evola called for a new unitary European consciousness. He thought it unavoidable
that, fate will run its course, that the river of history flows along the riverbed it has carved
for itself.
TENDERS OF THE PERENNIAL FLAME
The possibilities still available in the last time, concern only a minority
This minority exists throughout the world and those who comprise it are largely unknown to
each other, but are united by a spiritual bond, and form an unbreakable chain in the
traditional spirit. They shun the spotlight of modern popularity and culture.
They live on spiritual heights:
they do not belong to this world.
This spiritual minority does not act in the world, but symbolically tends to the perennial
flame of tradition which ensures that the Earth is still connected to the super-world.
Evola states that what this minority can do is to enlist others to them who are confused by
the modern world and yearn for liberation, though they do not know in the name of what.
It is therefore necessary to have watchers who will bear witness to the values of tradition
and firmly stand against the anti-traditional forces to keep standing amid a world of
ruins.
Another path that Evola suggests, reminiscent of Nietzsche's dictum Push the falling,
is to accelerate the process of destruction to hasten the advent of a new order. This would
require taking on the most destructive processes of the modern era, whilst protecting one's
own soul and spirit, in order to use them for liberation. Evola explained this simply by
stating, this would be like turning a poison against oneself or like 'riding a tiger', a term
adopted from the Indo-Aryan or Hindu tradition.
...Although the Kali Yuga [Hindu, Dark Age] is an age of great distractions, those who
live during it and manage to remain standing may achieve fruits that were not easily
achieved by men living in other ages.
Evola was paralysed during a Russian bomb attack on Vienna while researching the SS
archives on Masonic groups in 1945. He had never sought shelter during air raids, but
walked through the streets calmly to question his fate. After several years in hospital he
returned to Rome. He was arrested in 1951 on charges of glorifying Fascism and
intellectually inciting secret combat groups. Acquitted, he remained a host to a new
generation of activists who addressed him as maestro. Evola called for an anarchism of
the Right to disrupt the old order, and inspire the leadership of national revolutionary
groups in Italy, as well as the political parties such as the MSI and the National Alliance.
The latter being a Government coalition partner in Italy. He is lauded by 'New Right'
theorists from France to Russia. His writings have been published in the English language
'New Right' magazine The Scorpion, whilst the upsurge of interest in alternative spirituality
has prompted many who would not otherwise study ideas with such political implications to
read his works.
Evola died in 1974. His ashes were scattered in a crevice of a particular legendary glacier
on Mount Rosa.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Allott, Kenneth, The Penguin book of contemporary verse, Penguin books, 1965.
Bentley, Eric, The Cult of the Superman, London, 1947.
Berghaus, Gunter, Futurism and politics, Berharn books, USA, 1996.
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Campbell Roy, Collected works, Vols 1 and 2, South Africa, 1985.
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Evola J., Meditations on the peaks, Inner Traditions, 1998.
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Fairburn A R D Collected poems, Christchurch, 1966.
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Hamsun K., On overgrown paths, NY, 1968.

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Mishima Y, On Hagakure Samurai ethic and modern Japan, London 1977.
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---Gold and work, Rapallo 1944, London 1951.

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Yeats W B, Collected poems, London, 1981.

Afterword
Opening the Conservative Mind
by Paul Gottfried on May 19, 2009

New Zealander K.R. Bolton has sent for my benefit a self-published work, Thinkers of the Right:
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Challenging Materialism,

which is one of the most enlightening studies of the interwar Right Ive
encountered in years. Its author, who explained to me that no New Zealand academic or
commercial press would touch his extremist material, lives in a corner of the world that is even
more PC than Obamaland. Boltons lack of acceptability stems from the fact that he discusses his
subjects, including pro-fascist New Zealanders and Australians, without savaging them. That is to
say, he has the nerve to write about these people without exhibiting the Stalinist reflex of antifascist outrage.
An advantage of this approach is that it allows Boltons readership, which is presumably quite small, to
form some idea of what fascist sympathizers were actually like. From listening to Jonah Goldberg or Glenn
Beck, one might think these types were predecessors of Robert Reich, Michael Lerner, and Hillary Clinton,
that is, fans of egalitarian politics and affirmative-action programs. From reading European antifascists,
one might take away another equally misleading impression, namely that fascists were and are Christian
fanatics who oppose Muslim immigration into Europe and who mumble disapprovingly about gay
marriage. Somehow these attitudes, if left unchecked, we are led to believe, would lead to another Nazi
Holocaust, and therefore it is necessary to push entire countries into mind-altering, reeducation programs
to prevent this disastrous outcome. All of Boltons subjects saw themselves as being at war with
materialism, which they associated interchangeably with consumer capitalism and Marxist socialism.
Most of Boltons figures held negative views about Jews as being implicated in both forms of the
materialism they condemned.
But this particular prejudice did not affect some of Boltons case studies, like Italian proto-fascist Filippo
Marinetti, Irish poet W.B. Yeats and Japanese militarist Yukio Mishima, none of whom was particularly
exercised over the role of Jews in the cultural decadence they attacked. Other fascist sympathizers treated
by Bolton, such as English poet and Franco-supporter Roy Campbell and New Zealander Rex Fairburn,
were Catholic converts. The last two resonated to the Catholic sense of authority and to Catholic hierarchy,
and they espoused their own variations of neo-medieval corporatism and guild socialism. But others cited
in Boltons book, particularly the greatest Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, were unmistakably
Protestant; and two other fascisant literary giants, D.H. Lawrence and Gabriel DAnnunzio, were
exultantly neo-pagan and effusively anti-Christian.
A question that occurred to me while reading Thinkers of the Right is whether or not American
conservatives would recognize Boltons subjects as fellow-rightists. Such a question would obviously not
apply to neoconservatives and FOX-news aficionados, groups whose views of conservatism have nothing
to do with any imaginable authentic Right. Unless one associates the Right with a democratic welfare
state, the oratory of Martin Luther King, fighting intergalactically for democratic values, and backing the
Likud Party to the hilt, it is hard to find any fit between our mainstream conservatives and GOP boosters
and any historic Right. But even given the non-rightist character of these faux conservatives, where does
one place the Ron Paul supporters, the Constitution Party, and other groups that have positioned
themselves outside of our establishment politics? Certainly such Americans would have trouble
recognizing themselves in the ideas that Bolton ascribes to his rightist and often pro-fascist subjects.
I would have two answers to this, one of which I am taking from David Gordon and the other of which is
my own. First it might be useful to distinguish between being on the current economic right and being a
rightist in any theoretical sense. In the present political context, being an opponent of the welfare state
and of a highly centralized public administration and wishing to free the economy from both is a
conservative stand. Given the alternatives, there is no other position that a non-leftist would be able to

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take without assisting the Left to gain further control over our social institutions and our lives. But a world
of self-actualizing individuals held together by economic transactions is certainly not a future that any real
rightist would hope for. At the same time, it is possible that a rightist would approve of various stands that
a self-described libertarian, say, Ron Paul would be taking on specific issues, such as the Federal Reserve
System or the piecemeal nationalization of the American economy. Therefore the real Rights present-day
alliance with libertarians would be dictated by circumstances.
Another answer I would give to the question posed above is that the Rights beliefs stay constant but its
responses will vary from one age to the next. The Right always believes as a matter of principle and
observation that human beings are naturally unequal and that hierarchy is essential for a sound society. It
accepts the person as a spiritual being but rejects the idea of individuals liberated from traditional familial
and communal contexts. It is also categorically against such abstract concepts as human rights and
global democracy, recognizing in these rhetorical labels instruments for the expansion of managerial
power and global social engineering. But having provided this list of general beliefs, it is imperative to add
that rightists react differently to what they perceive as challenges from the Left. At different times and in
different cultures they have proposed different alternatives; and they have not always focused blame for
what they see as social derailments in a prudent or accurate manner.
It is also less relevant for identifying Boltons subjects what they proposed as an alternative to
international capitalism or socialism than their concern with social order and traditional hierarchies. Note
this is not being offered as a defense of the ludicrous ideas about money or anti-Semitic fixations of an
Ezra Pound or the Australian journalist P.R. Stephensen, who is another of Boltons subject. It is rather an
attempt to distinguish what is quintessentially rightist from what some rightists might have embraced as
policy positions, or whims, in different periods.
Moreover, there is a distinction to be made between the political and aesthetic Rights. One could be on
both or either, a point that I was made aware of while reading a long review of my book Conservatism in
America in the journal Quadrant by one of Australias premier poets and novelists Peter Kocan. The
reviewer commends my book as a tale of irony about how a false notion that led a movement and a
whole superpower astray became in the end the plain truth. Kocan is amused by my story of how the
changing conservative movement has continued to throw people off the bus and about how this
movement came to peddle abstract universals applicable to anything, while serving as a front for the
neoconservative ascent to world power.
At the same time, Kocan takes me to task for not embracing the ideal of the European counterrevolution.
He sees me as fixated on the small-town Protestant, bourgeois character of the American Right, while not
recognizing that the Burkean example that was a florid import of the 1950s now stands as the only proper
recourse for what remains of the true American Right. Although one could retort that none of this has
much to do with the American historical experience and even less with the contemporary European, it
seems that Kocan is not speaking about politics. He is referring to a sensibility that celebrates gratitude
rather than grievance and which is aligned with the Cavalier rather than the Puritan view of life.
According to Kocan, it is the legacy of American Puritanism that lives on in our regimes of political
correctness with their rage to police all life to the last inch. He notes that I too ascribe this lunacy to a
form of degenerate Protestantism but continue to find merit in the older tradition that became twisted
into our current political culture. I shall readily concede my weakness for Americas bourgeois Protestant
character as the source of its moral strength and social cohesion. Nor am I sure that one could draw as

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straight a line as Kocan thinks between the now eroded Puritan heritage and our present, anarchotyrannical regime, one that tramples on biblical morality while enforcing special rights for what was once
considered plain weirdness. I would also note that what the Right arose to protect, and what Boltons
subjects hoped to bring back, was an ordered, disciplined society. Im not quite sure that Peter Kocans
Cavalier mentality would fit in with this vision, although it does represent an aesthetic protest against the
kind of world the Left built. By the way, despite this quibble, I do recommend Kocans literary work
unconditionally. He is the most brilliant novelist now writing in the English language.

Takis Magazine
Takimag.com
Dr Paul Gottfried is Professor of Humanities at Elizabeth College, Penn., Guggenheim Grant
Recipient, and a seminal philosopher of palaeconservatism.

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