United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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towards Stalinism. The new Bolsheviki were determined to “organ¬ ize the psyche of the toiling masses,” and their triumph was magni¬ ficent: they achieved an absolute stifling of all creative endeavour between the Urals and the Caspian Sea. While this tragic opera was being enacted in the Near East, the cognoscenti of post-war letters were tilting with a futile fury at imaginary windmills, or dashing madly about in the deserts of their own creation and hiding their heads in the sands. These juvenile gymnasts were vaguely aware of the menace of materialism and seized upon science as their bete noir; they resurrected the cele¬ brated disagreement between Arnold and Huxley and proclaimed the superiority of humane letters to empirical science as a way of wisdom. Darwin and Spencer had purged the universe of poetry, while Freud and Adler were explaining creative activity as the sub¬ limation of scatological desires; and the frantic dilletantes sought to exorcize the bogey men with an old-fashioned snobbery and a new species of black magic. Mr. T. S. Eliot, dabbled in Catholic classicism, decried the “curious Freudian — social — mystical — rationalistic — higher — Critical interpretation of literature,” and yearned for some unsanitary cloister in which the man of sense would have an un¬ limited opportunity to contemplate his navel and indulge in the meticulous dissection of metaphysical hairs. Prof. Irving Babbitt denounced “Naturalism” as preached by Francis Bacon and the thoroughly un-Baconian Rousseau, declared that “all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization” were the work of pious gentlemen, and revamped the dix-huitieme ideal of the private salon in which the man of leisure might shut himself off from harsh reality and wallow in the amenities of culture and the felicitous exchange of social gossip. When it became evident that humanity was losing faith in such literary panaceas and swinging into step with the men of science, the literati withdrew into a world of personal experience and individual ecstasy, tilled the Pamassien weed of “l’art pour l’art,” and toyed with the inept theories of undis¬ ciplined punctuation and etymological gibberish; they played the sedulous ape to mr. e.e. cummings and wrote about “the Pytha¬ gorean sesquipedelia of the panepistemion, grunted and gromwelled, ichabod, habbakuk, opanoff, uggamyg, hapaxle, gomenon, pppppffff,” or what you will. The quotation is from James Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” and anyone’s guess is as good as mine. In any case the lone consequence of this verbal revelry has been that scores of delirious undergraduates and deluded farm boys are perpetrating “poetry” upon a bewildered public, a few critical opportunists have [113

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ARS QUIXOTICA NEIL A. DEWAR T)ACK in the late fall of 1930, in the relatively halcyon days before - - either the Nazi nightmare or the Five-Year Plan were faits accomplis, a solemn body of martially uniformed aesthetes fore¬ gathered in the shadow of the Kremlin and announced that “the method of art is the method of dialectic materialism,” and that artists should abandon “individualism” as a “petty bourgeois atti¬ tude,” accept the viewpoint of the proletariat and develop art as one of the weapons of the working class in the universal struggle for power. Such were the cultural fruits of Stalinism. Earlier in the era the great God Lenin had displayed a distressingly bourgeois admiration for Beethoven and Bernhardt, while his satellite Trots¬ ky, had championed art’s right to be judged by its own laws; but by 1930 Lenin existed only as a mummified substitute for the Deity, and Trotsky in exile was simply a modern counterpart of the wan¬ dering Jew. A schism in the Communist party had fostered a new dispensation, which “assumed that book production can be planned in advance, like the production of textiles or steel,” and prattled glibly about “collective creation” and “the seizure of power in the arts.” Creative independence was tabooed. The new rulers de¬ nounced with vehemence those Slavic Cosmists who vainly sought “a new dazzling road for the planet,” and ridiculed with some justice, I must admit, those mystical youths who desired to “seize the reins of our wind-blown thoughts and ply to the nowhere in our charla- tansky sharabang,” while wooing a vapoury Muse whose essays in Imagism were designed to read equally well from either end. For such nebulous paronomasia, declared the Commissar, there was no place in the proletarian state, and the authorities were prepared, if necessary, to bring recalcitrant scribblers into line with the aid of a little violence. A campaign was launched in the official organ, Pravda, with headlines that screamed of “Literary Sabotage” and “Treason on the Home Front.” Men who claimed an artistic privi¬ lege of “removing the veils from reality” were compelled to exercise that privilege in solitary confinement on the Siberian steppes; men who refused to prostitute their genius for the workers’ cause were driven to the composition of swan songs in their own life-blood. Art was being put on a factory basis, under which material would be collected by reporters, collated by specialists and crystallized by hacks into an offensive blend of Social Realism and Red Roman¬ ticism, portraying the world process as an evolutionary crescendo [10]

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built an ephemeral reputation by interpreting the rigmarole as “thinking raised to a more than ordinary intensity,” and society at large has disposed of the whole affair as a comparatively innocuous manifestation of that curious lunacy under which the world is furi¬ ously arming itself against its imminent suicide. I shall not bore you now by discussing Mr. Mencken’s little the¬ ory that modem art is simply the pastime of the spiritually decadent and the “intellectually immature,” but it does seem to me that un¬ less poetry hastens to revitalize itself at the Pierian fountain, it is destined rapidly to retrogress towards that primitive guttural in which it had its origin. As things stand at present, the man of let¬ ters would be well advised to draw the obvious moral from an ele¬ mentary survey of literary history. Pre-Socratic Magi made a haunt¬ ing melody of the most forbiddingly metaphysical of themes; Dante and Chaucer sang with a more than amateurish insight of the nature of humours and Hell; and even as late as the sixteenth century, in the post-Ptolemaic twilight before Scripture was wholly discredited, the moral Milton penned a fervent epic upon the adventures of an attractive Devil who darted nonchalantly around in the extra-mun¬ dane chaos and matched his wits with his God. These men made brilliant music of the intellectual currents of their times. Since the incorporation of empiricism, however, and the Royal Society’s in¬ sistence upon a “mathematical plainness” of speech, the dominant tendency has been for the paths of literature and science increasingly to diverge; and while the truth-seekers have described an ever changing absolute with all the verbal inflation of Kant Darwin, the poets have grown constantly more obscure and insipid until they threaten to outdo even the philosophers in the fine art of in¬ coherent profundity. What between Mr. Joyce and the Soviet cam¬ paign for social propaganda, art is today perched precariously with one foot in the grave and the other waving about in frantic icono- clasm in the hope of convincing itself that it is still alive. That, of course, presents a problem for the Euthanasians; but in the mean¬ time certain academic Isaiahs might at least clamber down from their lecterns and give us something more aesthetically significant than hysterical pacifism in a subterranean vault. We have already languished too long under the twofold delusion that poetry is a mere stimulus of 1 pleasurable emotion, while Mr. Poincare’s “con¬ venient conventions” have a more than pragmatic truth; and if we are ever to be freed from these popular fallacies .... Let us bow our heads and pray! [12]