Much of the thought of the 1920s, and almost all of the important literature, may be seen, unsurprisingly perhaps, as a response to World War I. Not so predictable was that so many authors should respond in the same way – by emphasising their break with the past through new forms of literature: novels, plays, and poems in which the way the story was told was as important as the story itself. It took a while for authors to digest what had happened in the war, to grasp what it signified, and what they felt about it. But then, in 1922, a year to rival 1913 as an annus mirabilis in thought, there was a flood of works that broke new ground: James Joyce’s Ulysses; T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land; Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt; Marcel Proust’s ninth volume of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Sodome et Gomorrhe II; Virginia Woolf’s first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room; Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies; and Pirandello’s Henry IV, all foundation stones for the architecture of the literature of the century.
What Joyce, Eliot, Lewis, and the others were criticising, among other things, was the society – and not only the war society – which capitalism had brought about, a society where value was placed on possessions, where life had become a race to acquire things, as opposed to knowledge, understanding, or virtue. In short, they were attacking the acquisitive society. This was in fact a new phrase, coined the year before by R. H. Tawney in a book that was too angry and too blunt to be considered great literature. Tawney was typical of a certain kind of figure in British society at the time (William Beveridge and George Orwell were others). Like them, Tawney came from an upper-class family and was educated at a public school (Rugby) and Balliol College, Oxford; but he was interested all his life in poverty and especially in inequality. After university, he decided, instead of going into the City, as many of his background would have done, to work at Toynbee Hall in London’s East End (Beveridge, the founder of Britain’s welfare state, was also there). The idea behind Toynbee Hall was to bring a university atmosphere and lifestyle to the working classes, and in general it had a profound effect on all who experienced it. It helped turn Tawney into the British socialist intellectual best in touch with the unions.1 But it was the miners’ strike in February 1919 that was to shape Tawney’s subsequent career. Seeking to head off confrontation, the government established a Royal Commission on the Coal Mines, and Tawney was one of six men representing the labour side (another was Sidney Webb).2 Millions of words of evidence were put before the commission, and Tawney read all of them. He was so moved by the accounts of danger, ill-health, and poverty that he wrote the first of the three books for which he is chiefly known. These were The Acquisitive Society (1921), Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), and Equality (1931).
Tawney, a mild man whose bushy moustache made him appear avuncular, hated the brutalism of unbridled capitalism, particularly the waste and inequalities it produced. He served in the trenches in the war as an ordinary soldier, refusing a commission. He expected capitalism to break down afterward: he thought that it misjudged human nature, elevating production and the making of profit, which ought to be a means to certain ends, into ends in themselves. This had the effect, he argued, of encouraging the wrong instincts in people, by which he meant acquisitiveness. A very religious man, Tawney felt that acquisitiveness went against the grain – in particular, it sabotaged ‘the instinct for service and solidarity’ that is the basis for traditional civil society.3 He thought that in the long run capitalism was incompatible with culture. Under capitalism, he wrote, culture became more private, less was shared, and this trend went against the common life of men – individuality inevitably promoted inequality. The very concept of culture therefore changed, becoming less and less an inner state of mind and more a function of one’s possessions.4 On top of that, Tawney also felt that capitalism was, at bottom, incompatible with democracy. He suspected that the inequalities endemic in capitalism – inequalities made more visible than ever by the acquisitive accumulation of consumer products – would ultimately threaten social cohesion. He saw his role, therefore, as helping to provide an important moral counterattack against capitalism for the many like himself who felt it had been at least partly responsible for war.5
But this wasn’t Tawney’s only role. He was an historian, and in his second book he looked at capitalism historically. The thesis of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism was that ‘economic man,’ the creature of classical economics, was by no means the universal figure in history he was supposed to be, that human nature was not necessarily shaped as classical liberals said it was. Tawney argued that the advent of capitalism was not inevitable, that its successes were relatively recent, and that in the process it had rendered extinct a whole range of behaviours and experiences and replaced them with its own. In particular capitalism had extinguished religion, though the church had to take some share of the blame insofar as it had abdicated its role as a moral leader.6
In retrospect, not all of Tawney’s criticisms of capitalism ring true anymore.7 Most obviously, and importantly, capitalism has not proved incompatible with democracy. But he was not wholly wrong; capitalism probably is inimical to what Tawney meant by culture – indeed, as we shall see, capitalism has changed what we all mean by culture; and it is arguable that capitalism has aided the change in morality we have seen during the century, though there have been other reasons as well.
*
Tawney’s vision was bitter and specific. Not everyone was as savage about capitalism as he was, but as the 1920s wore on and reflection about World War I matured, an unease persisted. What characterised this unease, however, was that it concerned more than capitalism, extending to Western civilisation as a whole, in some senses an equivalent of Oswald Spengler’s thesis that there was decay and ruin everywhere in the West. Without question the man who caught this mood best was both a banker – the archsymbol of capitalism – and a poet, the licensed saboteur.
T. S. Eliot was born in 1888, into a very religious Puritan family. He studied at Harvard, took a year off to study poetry in Paris, then returned to Harvard as a member of the faculty, teaching philosophy. Always interested in Indian philosophy and the links between philosophy and religion, he was infuriated when Harvard tried to separate the one from the other as different disciplines. In 1914 he transferred to Oxford, where he hoped to continue his philosophical studies. Shortly after, war broke out. In Europe, Eliot met two people who had an immense effect on him: Ezra Pound and Vivien Haigh-Wood. At the time they met, Pound was a much more worldly figure than Eliot, a good teacher and at that time a better poet. Vivien Haigh-Wood became Eliot’s first wife. Initially happy, the marriage had turned into a disaster by the early 1920s: Vivien descended steadily into madness, and Eliot found the circumstances so trying that he himself sought psychiatric treatment in Switzerland.8
The puritanical world Eliot grew up in had been fiercely rational. In such a world science had been dominant in that it offered the promise of relief from injustice. Beatrice Webb had shared Eliot’s early hopes when, in 1870, she said, ‘It was by science, and by science alone, that all human misery would be ultimately swept away.’9 And yet by 1918 the world insofar as Eliot was concerned was in ruins. For him, as for others, science had helped produce a war in which the weapons were more terrible than ever, in which the vast nineteenth-century cities were characterised as much by squalor as by the beauty the impressionists painted, where in fact the grinding narratives of Zola told a grimmer truth. Then there was the new physics that had helped remove more fundamental layers of certainty; there was Darwin undermining religion, and Freud sabotaging reason itself. A consolidated edition of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough was also published in 1922, the same year as The Waste Land, and this too hit hard at Eliot’s world. It showed that the religions of so-called savages around the world were no less developed, complex, or sophisticated than Christianity. At a stroke the simple social Darwinian idea that Eliot’s world was the current endpoint in the long evolutionary struggle, the ‘highest’ stage of man’s development, was removed. Also subverted was the idea that there was anything special about Christianity itself. Harvard had been right after all to divorce philosophy and religion. In Max Weber’s term, the West had entered a phase of Entzauberung, ‘unmagicking’ or disenchantment. At a material, intellectual, and spiritual level – in all senses – Eliot’s world was laid waste.10
Eliot’s response was a series of verses originally called He Do the Police in Different Voices, taken from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Eliot was at the time working in the colonial and foreign branch of Lloyds Bank, ‘fascinated by the science of money’ and helping with the prewar debt position between Lloyds and Germany. He got up at five every morning to write before going into the bank, a routine so exhausting that in the autumn of 1921 he took a prolonged leave.11 Pound’s poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, published the year before, had a not dissimilar theme to The Waste Land. It explored the sterility, intellectual, artistic, and sexual, of the old world afflicted by war. In Mauberly, 1920, Pound described Britain as ‘an old bitch, gone in the teeth.’12 But Mauberly did not have either the vividly savage images of He Do the Police, nor its shockingly original form, and Pound, to his credit, immediately recognised this. We now know that he worked hard on Eliot’s verses, pulling them into shape, making them coherent, and giving them the tide The Waste Land (one of the criteria he used was whether the lines read well out loud).13 Eliot dedicated the work to Pound, as il miglior fabbro, ‘the better maker.’14 His concern in this great poem is the sterility that he regards as the central fact of life in the postwar world, a dual sterility in both the spiritual and sexual spheres. But Eliot is not content just to pin down that sterility; he contrasts the postwar world with other worlds, other possibilities, in other places and at other times, which were fecund and creative and not at all doomed. And this is what gave The Waste Land its singular poetic architecture. As in Virginia Woolf’s novels, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Proust’s roman fleuve, the form of Eliot’s poem, though revolutionary, was integral to its message. According to Eliot’s wife, the poem – partly autobiographical – was also partly inspired by Bertrand Russell.15 Eliot juxtaposed images of dead trees, dead rats, and dead men – conjuring up the horrors of Verdun and the Somme – with references to ancient legends; scenes of sordid sex run into classical poetry; the demeaning anonymity of modern life is mingled with religious sentiments. It is this collision of different ideas that was so startling and original. Eliot was trying to show how far we have fallen, how far evolution is a process of descent.
The poem is divided into six parts: ‘The Epigraph,’ ‘The Burial of the Dead,’ ‘A Game of Chess,’ ‘The Fire Sermon,’ ‘Death by Water,’ and ‘What the Thunder Said.’ All the tides are evocative and all, on first acquaintance, obscure. There is a chorus of voices, sometimes individual, sometimes speaking in words borrowed from the classics of various cultures, sometimes heard via the incantations of the ‘blind and thwarted’ Tiresias.16 At one moment we pay a visit to a tarot reader, at another we are in an East End pub at closing time, next there is a reference to a Greek legend, then a line or two in German. Until one gets used to it, the approach is baffling, quite unlike anything encountered elsewhere. Even stranger, the poem comes with notes and references, like an academic paper. These notes, however, repay inspection. For study of the myths introduces other civilisations, with different but coherent worldviews and a different set of values. And this is Eliot’s point: if we are to turn our back on the acquisitive society, we have to be ready to work:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
It takes no time at all for the poem to veer between the heroic and the banal, knitting a sense of pathos and bathos, outlining an ordinary world on the edge of something finer, yet not really aware that it is.
There is a shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at morning rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?’17
The first two lines hint at Isaiah’s prophecy of a Messiah who will be ‘as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land’ (Isaiah 32.2). The German comes direct from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde: ‘Fresh blows the wind/Toward home/My Irish child/Where are you waiting?’ The imagery is dense, its aim ambitious. The Waste Land cannot be understood on one reading or without ‘research’ or work. It has been compared (by Stephen Coote, among others) to an Old Master painting in which we have first to learn the iconography before we can understand fully what is being said. In order to appreciate his poem, the reader has to open himself or herself to other cultures, to attempt an escape from this sterile one. The first two ‘confidential copies’ of the poem were sent to John Quinn and Ezra Pound.18
Eliot, incidentally, did not share the vaguely Freudian view of most people at the time (and since) that art was an expression of the personality. On the contrary, for him it was ‘an escape from personality.’ He was no expressionist pouring his ‘over-charged soul’ into his work. The Waste Land is, instead, the result of detailed reflection, of craftsmanship as well as art, owing as much to the rewards of a good education as the disguised urges of the unconscious. Much later in the century, Eliot would publish considerably fiercer views about the role of culture, particularly ‘high’ culture in all our lives, and in less poetic terms. In turn, he himself would be accused of snobbery and worse. He was ultimately, like so many writers and artists of his day, concerned with ‘degeneration’ in cultural if not in individual or biological terms.
Frederick May, the critic and translator, has suggested that Luigi Pirandello’s highly innovative play Six Characters in Search of an Author is a dramatic analogue of The Waste Land: ‘Each is a high poetic record of the disillusionment and spiritual desolation of its time, instinct with compassion and poignant with the sense of loss … each has become in its own sphere at once the statement and the symbol of its age.’19
Born in Caos, near Girgenti (the modern Agrigento) in Sicily in 1867, in the middle of a cholera epidemic, Pirandello studied literature in Palermo, Rome and Bonn. He began publishing plays in 1889, but success did not arrive fully until 1921, by which time his wife had entered a nursing home for the insane. His two plays that will be considered here, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), and Henry IV (1922), are united in being concerned with the impossibility of describing, or even conceiving, reality. ‘He dramatises the subconscious.’ In the earlier title, six characters invade the rehearsal of a play, a play Pirandello had himself written a few years earlier, insisting that they are not actors, nor yet people, but characters who need an ‘author’ to arrange the story that is within them. As with Wittgenstein, Einstein, and Freud, Pirandello is drawing attention to the way words break down in describing reality. What is the difference – and the overlap – between character and personality, and can we ever hope to pin them down in art? Just as Eliot was trying to produce a new form of poetry, Pirandello was creating a new form of drama, where theatre itself comes under the spotlight as a form of truth-telling. The characters in his plays know the limits to their understanding, that truth is relative, and that their problem, like ours, is to realise themselves.
Six Characters created a scandal when it was first performed, in Rome, but a year later received a rapturous reception in Paris. Henry IV had a much better reception in Italy when it was premiered in Milan, and after that Pirandello’s reputation was made. As did Eliot’s, his wife descended into madness and Pirandello later formed a relationship with the Italian actress Marta Abba.20 Unlike Eliot, whose art was forged despite his personal circumstances, Pirandello several times used madness as a dramatic device.21 Henry IV tells the story of a man who, twenty years before, had fallen from his horse during a masquerade in which he was dressed as the German emperor Henry IV, and was knocked unconscious when he hit his head on the paving. In preparation for the masquerade, the man had read widely about the emperor and, on coming to, believed he was in fact Henry IV. To accommodate his illness his wealthy sister has placed him in a mediaeval castle surrounded by actors dressed as eleventh-century courtiers who enable him to live exactly as Henry IV did, though they move in and out of their roles, confusingly and at times hilariously (without warning, a costumed actor will suddenly light up a cigarette). Into this scene are introduced old friends, including Donna Matilda, still beautiful, her daughter Frida, and a doctor. Here Pirandello’s mischief is at its highest, for we can never be sure whether Henry is still mad, or only playing a part. Like the fool in earlier forms of theatre, Henry asks his fellow characters penetrating questions: ‘Do you remember always being the same?’ Therefore, we never quite know whether Henry is a tragic figure, and aware that he is. This would make him moving – and also sane. It would also make all the others in the play either fools or mad, or possibly both. But if Henry is fully sane, does it make sense for him to live on as he does? Everyone in the play, though real enough, is also desperate, living a lie.
The real tragedy occurs when the doctor, in order to ‘treat’ Henry by facing him with a shocking reality, provokes him into murder. In Henry IV no one really understands themselves completely, least of all the man of science who, so certain of himself and his methods, precipitates the greatest calamity. Devastated by the wasteland of his life, Henry had opted for a ‘planned’ madness, only to have that backfire on him too. Life, for Pirandello, was like a play within a play, a device he used many times: one can never be entirely sure who is acting and who is not. One cannot even be sure when one is acting oneself.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, discussed in chapter 9, was actually published in the annus mirabilis of 1922. So too was The Last Days of Mankind, the great work of Wittgenstein’s Viennese friend Karl Kraus. Kraus, who was Jewish, had been part of Jung Wien at the Café Griensteidl in the early years of the century, mixing with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Adolf Loos, and Arnold Schoenberg. He was a difficult and slightly deformed man, with a congenital abnormality in his shoulders that gave him a stoop. A satirist of almost unrivalled mordancy, he earned most of his considerable income from lectures and readings. At the same time, he published a magazine, Die Fackel (The Torch), three times a month, from 1899 until his death in 1936. This made him a lot of enemies but also earned him a wide following, which even extended to the troops on the front line in World War I. Punctilious to a degree, he was no less interested in language than his philosopher friend and was genuinely pained by solecisms, infelicitous turns of phrase, ungainly constructions. His aim, he once said, ‘is to pin down the Age between quotation marks.’22 Bitterly opposed to feminine emancipation, which he regarded as ‘a hysterical response to sexual neurosis,’ he hated the smugness and anti-Semitism of the Viennese press, together with the freewheeling freemasonry that, more than once, led him into the libel courts. Kraus was in effect doing in literature and society what Loos was doing in architecture, attacking the pompous, self-regarding self-satisfaction of the ancien régime. As he himself described his aim in Die Fackel: ‘What has been laid down here is nothing else than a drainage system for the broad marshes of phraseology.’23
The Last Days of Mankind was written – usually late at night – during the summers of World War I and immediately afterward. On occasions Kraus escaped to Switzerland, to avoid the turmoil of Vienna and the attentions of the censor. His deformity had helped him avoid military service, which made him already suspect in the eyes of certain critics, but his opposition to the aims of the Central Powers earned him even more opprobrium. The play was his verdict on the war, and although certain passages appeared in Die Fackel in 1919 it wasn’t completed until 1921, by which time Kraus had added much new material.24 The play draws a cumulative strength from hundreds of small vignettes, all taken from newspaper reports and, therefore, not invented. Life at the front, in all its horror and absurdity, is juxtaposed (in a verbal equivalent of Kurt Schwitters’s technique) with events back in Vienna, in all their absurdity and venality. Language is still the central element for Kraus (Last Days is essentially a play for voices rather than action). We witness the Kaiser’s voice, that of the poet, the man at the front, Jewish dialects from Vienna, deliberately cheek-by-jowl with one another to throw each crime – of thought or action – into relief. The satirist’s technique, of holding one phrase (or thought, or belief, or conviction) against its opposite, or reciprocal, is devastatingly effective, the more so as time passes.
The play has been rarely performed because of its length – ten hours – and Kraus himself claimed that it was intended only for performances on Mars because ‘people on Earth could not bear the reality presented to them.’25 At the end of the play, mankind destroys itself in a hail of fire, and the last lines, put into the mouth of God, are those attributed to the Kaiser at the start of the war: ‘I did not want it.’ Brecht’s epitaph of Kraus was: ‘As the epoch raised its hand to end its life, he was this hand.’26
The most overwhelming of the great books that appeared in 1922 was Ulysses, by James Joyce. On the surface, the form of Joyce’s Ulysses could not be more different from The Waste Land or Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, which will be considered later. But there are similarities, and the authors were aware of them. Ulysses was also in part a response to the war – the last line reads: ‘Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914–1921.’ As Eliot does in The Waste Land, Joyce, as Eliot himself commented in a review, uses an ancient myth (in this case Homer) as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’27
Born in Dublin in 1882, Joyce was the oldest child in a family of ten. The family struggled financially but still managed to give James a good education at Jesuit schools and University College, Dublin. He then moved to Paris, where at first he thought he might be a doctor. Soon, though, he started to write. From 1905 he lived in Trieste with Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway who he had met on Nassau Street, Dublin, in 1904. Chamber Music was published in 1907, and Dubliners, a series of short stories, in 1914. On the outbreak of war, Joyce was obliged to move to neutral Zurich (Ireland was then ruled by Great Britain), though he considered Prague as an alternative.28 During hostilities, he published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but it was Ulysses that brought him international fame. Some chapters appeared first in 1919 in a London magazine, the Egoist. However, the printers and some subscribers took objection, and publication of subsequent chapters was discontinued. Joyce next turned to an avant-garde American magazine, the Little Review, which published other chapters of the book, but in February 1921 that magazine was found guilty of obscenity, and the editors were fined.29 Finally Joyce approached a young bookseller in Paris, another American named Sylvia Beach, and her shop, Shakespeare & Co., published the book in its entirety on 2 February 1922. For the first edition, one thousand copies were printed.
There are two principal characters in Ulysses, though many of the countless minor ones are memorable too. Stephen Dedalus is a young artist going through a personal crisis (like Western civilisation he has dried up, lost his large ambitions and the will to create). Leopold Bloom – ‘Poldy’ to his wife, and modelled partly on Joyce’s father and brother – is a much more down-to-earth character. Joyce (influenced by the theories of Otto Weininger) makes him Jewish and slightly effeminate, but it is his unpretentious yet wonderfully rich life, inner and outer, that makes him Ulysses.30 For it is Joyce’s point that the age of heroes is over.* He loathed the ‘heroic abstractions’ for which so many soldiers were sacrificed, ‘the big words which make us so unhappy.’31 The odyssey of his characters is not to negotiate the fearsome mythical world of the Greeks – instead, he gives us Bloom’s entire day in Dublin on 16 June 1904.32 We follow Bloom from the early preparation of his wife’s breakfast, his presence at the funeral of a friend, encounters with newspaper acquaintances, racing aficionados, his shopping exploits, buying meat and soap, his drinking, a wonderfully erotic scene where he is on the beach near three young women and they are watching some fireworks, and a final encounter with the police on his way home late at night. We leave him gently climbing into bed next to his wife and trying not to wake her, when the book shifts perspective and gives us his wife Molly’s completely unpunctuated view of Bloom.
It is one of the book’s attractions that it changes style several times, from stream of consciousness, to question-and-answer, to a play that is also a dream, to more straightforward exchanges. There are some lovely jokes (Shakespeare is ‘the chap that writes like Synge’, ‘My kingdom for a drink’) and some hopelessly childish puns (‘I beg your parsnips’); incredibly inventive language, teeming with allusions; endless lists of people and things and references to the latest developments in science. One point of the very great length of the book (933 pages) is to recreate a world in which the author slows life down for the reader, enabling him or her to relish the language, a language that never sleeps. In this way, Joyce draws attention to the richness of Dublin in 1904, where poetry, opera, Latin and liturgy are as much a part of everyday lower-middle-class life as are gambling, racing, minor cheating and the lacklustre lust of a middle-aged man for virtually every woman he meets.33 ‘If Ulysses isn’t fit to read’, said Joyce to his cousin, responding to criticism, ‘life isn’t fit to live.’ Descriptions of food are never far away, each and every one mouthwatering (‘Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith.’). Place names are left to hang, so we realise how improbable but very beautiful even proper names are: Malahide, Clonghowes, Castleconnel. Joyce revisits words, rearranges spelling and punctuation so that we see these words, and what they represent, anew: ‘Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday …’, ‘He smellsipped the cordial …’, ‘Her ample bedwarmed flesh …’, ‘Dynamitard’.34
In following Bloom the reader – like Dedalus – is exhilarated and liberated.35 Bloom has no wish to be anything other than who he is, ‘neither Faust nor Jesus’. Bloom inhabits an amazingly generous world, where people allow each other to be as they are, celebrating everyday life and giving a glimpse of what civilisation can evolve into: food, poetry, ritual, love, sex, drink, language. They can be found anywhere, Joyce is saying. They are what peace – inner and out – is.
T. S. Eliot wrote an essay about Ulysses in the Dial magazine in 1923, in which he confessed that the book for him had ‘the importance of a scientific discovery,’ and indeed part of Joyce’s aim was to advance language, feeling it had dropped behind as science had expanded. He also liked the fact that Joyce had used what he called ‘the mythical method.’37 This, he believed, might be a way forward for literature, replacing the narrative method. But the most revealing difference between Ulysses, on the one hand, and The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room, and Henry IV on the other, is that in the end Stephen Dedalus is redeemed. At the beginning of the book, he is in an intellectual and moral wasteland, bereft of ideas and hope. Bloom, however, shows himself throughout the book as capable of seeing the world through others’ eyes, be it his wife Molly, who he knows intimately, or Dedalus, a relative stranger. This not only makes Bloom profoundly unprejudiced – in an anti-Semitic world – but it is, on Joyce’s part, a wonderfully optimistic message, that connections are possible, that solitude and atomisation, alienation and ennui are not inevitable.
In 1922 Joyce’s Irish colleague W. B. Yeats was named a senator in Ireland. Two years later he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yeats’s fifty-seven-year career as a poet spanned many different periods, but his political engagement was of a piece with his artistic vision. An 1899 police report described him as ‘more or less of a revolutionary,’ and in 1916 he had published ‘Easter 1916,’ about the botched Irish nationalist uprising. This contained lines that, though they refer to the executed leaders of the uprising, could also serve, in the ending, as an epitaph for the entire century:
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever the green is worn,
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.38
Yeats recognised that he had a religious temperament at a time when science had largely destroyed that option. He believed that life was ultimately tragic, and that it is largely determined by ‘remote … unknowable realities.’39 For him the consensus of life, its very structure, will defeat us, and the search for greatness, the most noble existential cause, must involve a stripping away of the ‘mask’: ‘If mask and self could be unified, one would experience completeness of being.’40 This was not exactly Freudianism but close and, as David Perkins has shown, it led Yeats to a complicated and highly personal system of iconography and symbols in which he pitched antitheses against one another: youth and age, body and soul, passion and wisdom, beast and man, creative violence and order, revelation and civilisation, time and eternity.41
Yeats’s career is generally seen in four phases – before 1899, 1899–1914, 1914–28, and after 1928 – but it is his third phase that marks his highest achievement. This period includes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and the prose work A Vision (1925). This latter book sets out Yeats’s occult system of signs and symbols, which were partly the result of his ‘discovery’ that his wife had psychic powers and that spirits ‘spoke through her’ in automatic writing and trances.42 In anyone else such an approach might have been merely embarrassing, but in Yeats the craftsmanship shines through to produce a poetic voice that is clear and distinctive, wholly autonomous, conveying ‘the actual thoughts of a man at a passionate moment of life.’43 Yeats the man is not at all like Bloom, but they are embarked on the same journey:
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans…
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
– ‘The Wild Swans at Coole,’ 1919
Yeats was affected by the war and the wilderness that followed.
Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude…
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
– ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,’ 1919
But, like Bloom, he was really more interested in creating afresh from nature than lamenting what had gone.
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
– Those dying generations – at their song,
Those salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
–‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ 1928
Yeats had begun his career trying to put the legends of Ireland to poetic use. He never shared the modernist desire to portray the contemporary urban landscape; instead, as he grew older he recognised the central reality of ‘desire in our solitude,’ the passion of private matters, and that science had nothing worthwhile to say on the matter.44 Greatness, as Bloom realised, lay in being wiser, more courageous, more full of insight, even in little ways, especially in little ways. Amid the wasteland, Yeats saw the poet’s role as raising his game, in order to raise everybody’s. His poetry was very different from Eliot’s, but in this one aim they were united.
Bloom is, of course, a standing reproach for the citizens of the acquisitive society. He is not short of possessions, but he doesn’t have much, or all that he might have, yet that doesn’t bother him in the slightest. His inner life is what counts. Nor does he judge other people by what they have; he just wants to get inside their heads to see how it might be different from his own, to aid his experience of the world.
Four years after Ulysses, in 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald published his novel The Great Gatsby, which, though a much more conventional work, addresses the same theme albeit from virtually the opposite direction. Whereas Leopold Bloom is a lower-middle-class Dubliner who triumphs over small-scale adversity by redemptive wit and low-level cunning, the characters in Gatsby are either very rich or want to be, and sail through life in such a way that hardly anything touches them, inhabiting an environment that breeds a moral and intellectual emptiness that constitutes its own form of wasteland.
The four main characters in the book are Jay Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Nick Carraway, the narrator. The action takes place one summer on an island, West Egg, a cross between Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Long Island, but within driving distance of Manhattan. Carraway, who has rented the house next to Gatsby by accident, is a relative of Daisy. To begin with, Gatsby, who shared some biographical details with Fitzgerald, the Buchanans, and Carraway lead relatively separate lives; then they are drawn together.45 Gatsby is a mysterious figure. His home is always open for large, raucous, Jazz Age parties, but he himself is an enigmatic loner; no one really knows who he is, or how he made his money. He is often on the phone, long distance (when long distance was expensive and exotic). Gradually, however, Nick is drawn into Gatsby’s orbit. In parallel with this he learns that Tom Buchanan is having an affair with a Myrtle Wilson whose husband owns a gas station where he often refuels on his way to and from Manhattan. Daisy, the original ‘innocent,’ a 1920s bright young thing, is blissfully unaware of this. The book is barely 170 pages long, and nothing is laboured. There is an early mention of ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires, by this man Goddard,’ a reference to Lothrop Stoddard’s eugenic tract The Rising Tide of Colour. This provokes a discussion by Tom about race: ‘If we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved … it’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things…. The idea is that we’re Nordics … and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilisation – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’46 The area where the fatal accident takes place, where Myrtle is killed, is known as the Valley of Ashes, based on Flushing Meadow, a swamp filled with garbage and ash. At other times, ‘breeding’ is a matter of exquisite fascination to the characters. But these points are lightly made, not forced on the reader.
Permeating all is the doubt that surrounds Gatsby. Dark rumours abound about the way he made his fortune – liquor, drugs, gambling. It soon transpires that Gatsby wants an introduction to Daisy and asks Nick, her relative, to arrange a meeting. When he does so, it turns out that Gatsby and Daisy already know each other and were in love before she married Tom. (Fitzgerald was worried that this was the weak point of the book: he had not explained adequately Gatsby’s earlier relations with Daisy.)47 They resume their affair. One afternoon a group of them go in two cars to Manhattan. In the city Tom accuses Gatsby and Daisy of being lovers. At Gatsby’s instigation, Daisy confesses she has never loved Tom. Angered, Tom reveals he has been checking up on Gatsby: he did go to Oxford, as he claimed; he was decorated in the war. Like Nick, the reader warms to Gatsby. We also know by now that his real name is James Gatz, that he comes from a poor background, and that fortune smiled on him as a young man when he was able to do a millionaire a favour. But Tom has amassed evidence that Gatsby is in fact now involved in a number of unwholesome, even illegal schemes: bootlegging and dealing in stolen securities. Before we can digest this, the confrontation breaks up, and the parties drive back to the island in two cars, Gatsby and Daisy in one, the rest in the other. We surmise that the confrontation will continue later. On the way, however, Gatsby’s car kills Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s lover, but doesn’t stop. Tom, Nick, and the others, travelling well behind, arrive to find the police at the scene and Mr Wilson distraught. Mr Wilson has begun to suspect that his wife is being unfaithful but doesn’t know who her lover is. He now suspects Gatsby, deciding his wife was killed to keep her quiet, so he goes to Gatsby’s house, finds him in the pool, shoots him, and then turns the gun on himself. What Wilson doesn’t know, and what Tom never finds out, is that Daisy was driving. This is kept from the police. Daisy, whose carelessness kills Myrtle, gets off scot-free. Tom’s affair, which triggers all this tragedy, is never disclosed. Tom and Daisy disappear, leaving Carraway to arrange Gatsby’s funeral. By now Gatsby’s shady business deals have been confirmed, and no one attends.48
The last scene in the book takes place in New York, when Nick sees Tom on Fifth Avenue and refuses to shake hands. It is clear from this meeting that Tom still has no idea that Daisy was driving the car, but for Nick this innocence is irrelevant, even dangerous. It is what enchants and disfigures America: Gatsby betrays and is betrayed.49 He feels that even if Tom is unaware that Daisy was driving, their behaviour is so despicable it really makes no difference to his judgement of them. He also has some harsh words to say about Daisy, that she smashed up things, and then ‘retreated back’ into her money. In attacking her, Nick is forsaking the blood link, disallying himself from the ‘Nordics’ who have ‘produced civilisation.’ What Tom and Daisy have left behind, despite their breeding, is catastrophe. The Buchanans – and others like them – sail through life in a moral vacuum, incapable of distinguishing the significant from the trivial, obsessed with the trappings of luxury. Everywhere you turn in The Great Gatsby is a wasteland: moral, spiritual, biological, even, in the Valley of Ashes, topographical.
James Joyce and Marcel Proust met in 1922, on 18 May, after the first night of Igor Stravinsky’s Renard, at a party for Serge Diaghilev also attended by Pablo Picasso, who had designed the sets. Afterwards Proust gave Joyce a life home in a taxi, and during the journey the drunken Irishman told Proust he had never read a single word he had written. Proust was very offended and took himself off to the Ritz, where he had an agreement that he would always be fed, however late.50
Joyce’s insult was unbecoming. After the delay in publication of other volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu, caused by war, Proust had published four tides in fairly rapid succession. A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (which won the Prix Goncourt) was published in 1919, Le Côté de Guermantes came out the year after, and both Le Côté de Guermantes II and Sodome et Gomorrhe I were released in May 1921. Sodome et Gomorrhe II was published in May 1922, the very month Proust and Joyce met. Three more volumes – La Prisonnière, Albertine disparue, and Le temps retrouvé — all came out after Proust died in 1922.
Despite the delay in publication, Jeunes filles and Le Coté de Guermantes take us back to Swann, the salons of Paris, the minutiae of aristocratic snobbishness, the problems associated with Swann’s love for Gilberte and Odette. But with Sodome et Gomorrhe there is a change, and Proust fixes his gaze on one of the areas singled out by Eliot and Joyce: the landscape of sex in the modern world. However, unlike those two, who wrote about sex outside marriage, outside the church, casual and meaningless sex, Proust focused his attention on homosexuality. Proust, who was himself homosexual, had suffered a double tragedy during the war years when his driver and typist, Alfred Agostinelli, with whom he had fallen in love, left him for a woman and went to live in the south of France. A short while later, Agostinelli was killed in a flying accident, and for months Proust was inconsolable.51 After this episode, homosexuality begins to make a more frank appearance in his work. Proust’s view was that homosexuality was more widespread than generally realised, that many more men were homosexual than even they knew, and that it was a malady, a kind of nervous complaint that gave men female qualities (another echo of Otto Weininger). This changed dramatically Proust’s narrative technique. It becomes apparent to the reader that a number of the male characters lead a double life. This makes their stiff, self-conscious grandeur and their snobbery more and more absurd, to the extent that Sodome et Gomorrhe finally becomes subversive of the social structure that dominates the earlier books. The most enviable life, he is showing us, is a low comedy based on deceit.
In fact, the comedy is far from funny for the participants.52 The last books in the sequence are darker; the war makes an appearance, and there is a remarkable description of grief in Albertine disparue. Sex also continues to make its presence felt. But possibly the most poignant moment comes in the very last book, when the narrator steps on two uneven flagstones and an involuntary memory floods in on him, just as it did at the very start of the series. Proust does not bring us full circle, however. This time the narrator refuses to follow that path, preferring to keep his mind focused on the present. We are invited to think that this is a decisive change in Proust himself, a rejection of all that has gone before. He has kept the biggest surprise till the end, like the masterful storyteller that he is. But still, one cannot call it much of a climax, after so many volumes.53
At the time of his death, Proust’s reputation was high. Now, however, some critics argue that his achievement no longer merits the enormous effort. For others, A la recherche du temps perdu is still one of the outstanding achievements of modern literature, ‘the greatest exploration of a self by anyone, including Freud.’54
The first volume of Proust’s novel, it will be recalled, had been turned down by among others André Gide at the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF). The tables were soon turned, however. Gide apologised for his error, and in 1916 Proust migrated to NRF. At Proust’s death, Gide’s great novel The Counterfeiters was barely begun. He did in fact record a dream about Proust in his journal for 15 March 1923 (Proust had died the previous November). Gide was sitting in Proust’s study and ‘found himself holding a string which was attached to two books on Proust’s shelves. Gide pulled the string, and unwound a beautiful binding of Saint-Simon’s Memoirs. Gide was inconsolable in the dream but did acknowledge later that his action may have been intentional.55
The Counterfeiters, which had been on the author’s mind since 1914, is not really like A la recherche du temps perdu, but some similarities have been noted and are pertinent.56 ‘Gide’s novel has its own Baron de Charlus, its band of adolescents, its preoccupation with the cities of the plain. In both works the chief character is writing a novel that turns out to be, more or less, the very novel we are reading. But the most important resemblance is, that each was written with the conscious intention of writing a great novel. Gide was attempting to rival Proust on his own ground. In the dream the element of jealousy in Gide’s attitude to Proust is ‘brought to a head, confessed, and reconciled.’57 The novel, with its highly complex plot, is important for a number of reasons, one of which is that Gide also kept a journal in which he recorded his thoughts about composition. This journal is probably the most complete account of a major literary work in formation. The main lesson to be learned is how Gide progressively changed and winnowed away at his early ideas and cut out characters. His aim was to produce a book where there is no main character but a variety of different characters, all equally important, a little bit like the paintings of Picasso, where objects are ‘seen’ not from one predominant direction but from all directions at once. In his journal he also included some newspaper cuttings, one about a band of young men passing counterfeit coins, another about a school pupil who blew his brains out in class under pressure from his friends. Gide weaves these elements into a complex plot, which includes one character, Edouard, who is writing a novel called The Counterfeiters, and in which, in essence, everyone is a counterfeiter of sorts.58 Edouard, as a writer, and the boys with the false money are the most obvious counterfeiters, but what most shocked readers was Gide’s indictment of French middle-class life, riddled with illegitimacy and homosexuality while all the time counterfeiting an attitude of respectable propriety (and not so dissimilar in subject matter from the later volumes of Proust). The complexity of the plot has its point in that, as in real life, characters are at times unaware of the consequences of their own actions, unaware of the reasons for other people’s actions, unaware even of when they are being truthful or counterfeiting. In such a milieu how can anything – especially art – be expected to work? (Here there is an overlap with Luigi Pirandello.) While it is obvious why some counterfeiting (such as passing false money) works, some episodes of life, such as a boy blowing his brains out, will always remain at some level a mystery, inexplicable. In such a world, what rules is one to live by? The Counterfeiters is perhaps the most realistic diagnosis of our times. The novel offers no prescription; it infers that none is really available. If our predicament is ultimately tragic, why don’t more people commit suicide? That too is a mystery.
Gide was unusually interested in English literature: William Blake, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens. But he also knew the Bloomsbury set – Gide had studied English at Cambridge, the Bloomsbury outpost, in 1918. He met Clive Bell in Paris in 1919, stayed with Lady Ottoline Morrell in Garsington in 1920, carried on a lengthy correspondence with Roger Fry (both shared a love of Nicolas Poussin), and later served on an antifascist committee of intellectuals with Virginia Woolf.
As she was preparing her novel Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf was only too well aware that what she was trying to do was also being attempted by other authors. In her diary for 26 September 1920, she wrote, ‘I reflected how what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr Joyce.’59 T. S. Eliot, she knew, was in touch with James Joyce, for he kept her informed of what the Irishman was doing.
Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 into an extremely literary family (her father was founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and his first wife was a daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray). Although she was denied the education given to her brothers, she still had the run of the family’s considerable library and grew up much better read than most of her female contemporaries. She always wanted to be a writer and began with articles for the Times Literary Supplement (which had begun as a separate publication from its parent, the London Times, in 1902). But she didn’t publish her first novel, The Voyage Out, until 1915, when she was thirty-three.60
It was with Jacob’s Room that the sequence of experimental novels for which Woolf is most remembered was begun. The book tells the story of a young man, Jacob, and its central theme, as it follows his development through Cambridge, artistic and literary London, and a journey to Greece, is the description of a generation and class that led Britain into war.61 It is a big idea; however, once again it is the form of the book which sets it apart. In her diary for early 1920 she had written, ‘I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time; no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist.’62 Jacob’s Room is an urban novel, dealing with the anonymity and fleeting experiences of city streets, the ‘vast atomised masses scurrying across London’s bridges’, staring faces glimpsed through the windows of tea shops, either bored or bearing the marks of ‘the desperate passions of small lives, never to be known.’63 Like Ulysses and like Proust’s work, the book consists of a stream of consciousness – erratic at times – viewed through interior monologues, moving backward and forward in time, sliding from one character to another without warning, changing viewpoint and attitude as fast and as fleetingly as any encounter in any major urban centre you care to name.64 Nothing is settled in Jacob’s Room. There isn’t much plot in the conventional sense (Jacob’s early promise is never fulfilled, characters remain unformed, people come and go; the author is as interested in marginal figures, like a flower seller on the street, as in those who are, in theory, more central to the action), and there is no conventional narrative. Characters are simply cut off, as in an impressionist painting. ‘It is no use trying to sum people up,’ says one of the figures, who could have stepped out of Gide, One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.’65 Woolf is describing, and making us feel, what life is like in vast cosmopolitan cities of the modern world. This fragmentation, this dissolution of the familiar categories – psychological as well as physical – is just as much the result of World War I, she is saying, as the military/political/economic changes that have been wrought, and is arguably more fundamental.
The effect of Sigmund Freud’s psychological ideas on André Breton (1896–1966) was very direct. During World War I he stood duty as an hospital orderly at the Saint-Dizier psychiatric centre, treating victims of shell shock. And it was in Saint-Dizier that Breton first encountered the (psycho) analysis of dreams, in which – as he later put it – he did the ‘groundwork’ for surrealism. In particular, he remembered one patient who lived entirely in his own world. This man had been in the trenches but had become convinced he was invulnerable. He thought the whole world was ‘a sham,’ played by actors who used dummy bullets and stage props. So convinced was he of this vision that he would show himself during the fighting and gesture excitedly at the explosions. The miraculous inability of the enemy to kill him only reinforced his belief.66
It was the ‘parallel world’ created by this man that had such an effect on Breton. For him the patient’s madness was in fact a rational response to a world that had gone mad, a view that was enormously influential for several decades in the middle of the century. Dreams, another parallel world, a route to the unconscious as Freud said, became for Breton the route to art. For him, art and the unconscious could form ‘a new alliance,’ realised through dreams, chance, coincidence, jokes – all the things Freud was investigating. This new reality Breton called sur-reality, a word he borrowed from Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1917 Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and Léonide Massine had collaborated on a ballet, Parade, which the French poet had described as ‘une espèce de sur-réalisme.’67
Surrealism owed more to what its practitioners thought Freud meant than to what he actually wrote. Few French and Spanish surrealists could read Freud’s works, as they were still only available in German. (Psychoanalysis was not really popular in France until after World War II; in Britain the British Psychoanalytic Association was not formed until 1919.) Breton’s ideas about dreams, about neurosis as a sort of ‘ossified’ form of permanent dreaming, would almost certainly have failed to find favour with Freud, or the surrealists’ view that neurosis was ‘interesting,’ a sort of mystical, metaphysical state. It was in its way a twentieth-century form of romanticism, which subscribed to the argument that neurosis was a ‘dark side’ of the mind, the seat of dangerous new truths about ourselves.68
Though surrealism started as a movement of poets, led by Breton, Paul Eluard (1895–1952), and Louis Aragon (1897–1982), it was the painters who were to achieve lasting international fame. Four painters became particularly well known, and for three of them the wasteland was a common image.
Max Ernst was the first artist to join the surrealists (in 1921). He claimed to have hallucinated often as a child, so was predisposed to this approach.69 His landscapes or objects are oddly familiar but subtly changed. Trees and cliffs, for example, may actually have the texture of the insides of the body’s organs; or the backside of a beast is so vast, so out of scale, that it blocks the sun. Something dreadful has either just happened or seems about to. Ernst also painted apparently cheerful scenes but gave these works long and mysterious titles that suggest something sinister: The Inquisitor: At 7:07 Justice Shall Be Made.70 For example, on the surface Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale is cheerfully colourful. The picture consists of a bird, a clock that resembles a cuckoo clock, a garden enclosed by a wall. But then we notice that the figures in the picture are running away after an episode not shown. And the picture is actually painted on a small door, or the lid of a box, with a handle attached. If the door is opened what will be revealed? The unknown is naturally menacing.
The most unsettling of the surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), the ‘painter of railway stations,’ as Picasso dubbed him. An Italian of Greek descent, de Chirico was obsessed by the piazzas and arcades of north Italian towns: ‘I had just come out of a long and painful intestinal illness. I was in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity. The whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and the fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent…. The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the church façade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at these things for the first time.’71 These landscapes, these townscapes, are always depicted in the same way by de Chirico. The light is always the same (it is afternoon light, coming from the right or left, rather than from above); there are long, forbidding shadows; darkness is not far away.72 Second, there are next to no people – these townscapes are deserted. Sometimes there is a tailor’s mannequin, or a sculpture, figures that resemble people but are blind, deaf, dumb, insensate, echoing, as Robert Hughes has said, the famous lines of Eliot: ‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins.’ There are often humanlike shadows just around the corner. De Chirico’s is a cold world; the mood is forbidding, with a feeling that this is perhaps the last day of all, that the universe is imploding, and the sun about to cease shining forever. Again something dreadful has either happened or is about to happen.73
At first sight, Joan Miró (1893–1983) was a much more cheerful, playful painter than the other two. He never joined the political wing of the surrealists: he didn’t get involved in manifestos or campaigns.74 But he did contribute to group shows, where his style contrasted strongly with the others. A Catalan by birth, he trained in Barcelona at a time when that city was a cosmopolitan capital, before it was cut off from the rest of Europe by the Spanish Civil War. He showed an early interest in cubism but turned against it; after a childhood spent on a farm, his interest in wildlife kept bubbling through.75 This gave his paintings their biological lyricism, increasingly abstract as time went by. In The Farm 1921–2, he painted scores of animals in scientific detail, to produce a work that pleases both children and adults. (He carried dried grasses all the way from Barcelona to Paris to be sure he got the details right.) In his later Constellation series, the myriad forms echo earlier artists such as Hieronymus Bosch but are joyful, more and more abstract, set in a nebulous sky where the stars have biological rather than physico-chemical forms. Miró met the surrealists through the painter André Masson, who lived next door to him in Paris. He took part in the first surrealist group show in 1924. But he was less a painter of dread than of the survival of the childlike in adult life, the ‘uncensored self,’ another confused concept drawn from psychoanalysis.76
The wastelands of Salvador Dalí are famous. And they are wastelands: even where life appears, it corrupts and decays as soon as it blooms. After Picasso, Dalí is the most famous artist of the twentieth century, though this is not the same as saying he is the second best. It has more to do with his extraordinary technique, his profound fear of madness, and his personal appearance – his staring eyes and handlebar moustache, adapted from a Diego Velázquez portrait of Philip IV of Spain.77 Discovering his facility with paint, Dalí found he was able to render crystal-clear landscapes that, given the themes he pursued, played with reality, again in the way dreams are supposed to do. He had the lyricism of Miró, the afternoon light of de Chirico, and Ernst’s sense of dread derived from subtly changing familiar things. His images – cracked eggs (‘Dalinian DNA’), soft watches, elongated breasts, dead trees in arid landscapes – are visually lubricious and disturbing to the mind.78 They convey a world pullulating with life, but uncoordinated, as if the guiding principles, the very laws, of nature have broken down, as if biology is coming to an end and the Darwinian struggle has gone mad.
René Magritte (1898–1967) was never part of the salon of surrealists – he spent all his life in Brussels – but he shared their obsession with dread, adding too an almost Wittgensteinian fascination with language and the hold it has on meaning. In his classic paintings, Magritte took ordinary subjects – a bowler hat, a pipe, an apple, an umbrella – and made extraordinary things happen to them (he himself often wore a bowler).79 For example, in The Human Condition (1934), a painting of a view through a window overlaps exactly with the same view, so that they fuse together and one cannot tell where the painting begins and ends. The world ‘out there,’ he is saying, is really a construction of the mind, an echo of Henri Bergson. In The Rape, also 1934, a naked female torso, framed in hair, forms a face, a prim yet at the same time wild face, casting doubt on the nature of primness itself, suggesting a raw sexuality that lies hidden. This image is seen against a flat, empty landscape, a purely psychoanalytic wasteland.80
The surrealists played with images – and the verb is pertinent; they were seriously suggesting that man could play himself out of trouble, for in play the unconscious was released. By the same token they brought eroticism to the surface, because repression of sexuality cut off man from his true nature. But above all, taking their lead from dreams and the unconscious, their work showed a deliberate rejection of reason. Their art sought to show that progress, if it were possible, was never a straight line, that nothing was predictable, and that the alternative to the banalities of the acquisitive society, now that religion was failing, was a new form of enchantment.
Ironically, the wasteland was a very fertile metaphor. What underlines all the works considered here is a sense of disenchantment with the world and with the joint forces of capitalism and science, which created the wasteland. These targets were well chosen. Capitalism and science were to prove the century’s most enduring modes of thought and behaviour. And by no means everyone would find them disenchanting.