Where'd you go, Magnus Hirschfeld, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you

 If, in some sense, one can speak of a “sexual revolution” in the twentieth century, then surely Magnus Hirschfeld was its Trotsky or Lenin. The arson that destroyed the Reichstag in 1933 has received a vast amount of attention, as it was the pretence that led to the Nazi seizure of power. Similarly, one can view the sack of Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology in Berlin on May 6, 1933 as a definite defeat in the struggle for sexual enlightenment.

In the 1980s, in the revisionist currents that were then emerging in Germany, two historians attacked Hirschfeld as a eugenicist whose theories preceded the Nazis, who attacked him not because he was Jewish and gay but because they no longer “needed” him. In the late period of the Cold War, with the fall of the prestige of Marxism in academia, anything went.

In an interesting response by Liliane Crips, she showed that Hirschfeld, that making a bow to the then prevalent eugenicist ideology, did not thereby show any commonality with the Nazis. He used arguments that were social – founded on his belief that women who had to many children were often strained to the breaking point – to argue for contraception and the right to abortion; all of which fit into his panorama, so to speak, of enlightened Sex-pol, which would include removing laws against homosexuality, and viewing all sexual laws in the light of a notion of the greater good that must include human sexual pleasure.

Hirschfeld was born in the 19th century – in 1868 – and thus was well into his fifties when the World War took place. It was in his sixties that he had his greatest successes, with his program of liberalization adopted, in part, by the Weimar Social Democrats. Even in Wilhelmine Berlin, he had achieved enough celebrity that there was a cabaret song about him entitled “The Hirschfeld comes”. I should probs say that “comes”, here, is no play on words – that linguistic crossing had not been constructed at the time, I think. Rather it is a reference to the Sandman.

Yet a story that ends with the Nazis and Hirschfeld dying in exile in Nice is evidently not one of onward and upward. Fascist sex-pol emerged at the end of World War I at the same time as leftist sex-pol.

For instance: In October, 1920, Hirschfeld came to Munich to give a talk. Munich was just coming out of the reaction that followed the overthrow of Munich’s Soviet Republic – a Republic that was less Soviet than Dada. After giving a talk on the 4th, Hirschfeld was followed by a crowd of what the newspaper called Swastikers, who attacked him with kudgels and left him for dead. His body was retrieved by his comrades, who got him to the hospital in time to be saved. Recovering, he had that rare chance: reading his own obituary.

It is one of the hard truths of intellectual history that even those intellectuals one looks up to – Hirschfeld as the Trotsky of the sexual revolution, to use my image – are never straightforwardly heroic. On October 4, 1920, Hirschfeld’s talk was about a man named Steinach. Steinach had a rather nutty surgical theory about being able to transplant glands to prevent aging, and as an addendum, he claimed to “cure” homosexuality. Though Hirschfeld had every reason, personal and scientific, to oppose Steinach, he thought Steinach was onto something. At least in 1920.

Hirschfeld, then, sometimes let his science envy get in the way of his intuition. But he continued even after the near death experience of 1920 to lobby for the abolition of the legal prohibition of homosexuality, Paragraph 175 to the Legal Code; in 1929, a Reichstag committee of Social Democrats and Communists voted to abolish Paragraph 175, but this was never implemented, and the Nazis of course reversed it. Astonishingly, it hung on in West Germany until 1992. In East Germany, it was abolished. So, in one of those bits of liberation that Cold War histories forbid us to peek too much at, in East Germany people were not imprisoned for homosexual sex; in West Germany, maybe about 50,000 people were convicted, mostly in the Adenauer era.

Interestingly, Kurt Tucholsky, otherwise a man of impeccably enlightened sentiments, wrote an article about Hirschfeld’s assault that begins by assuring the reader that Tucholsky finds Hirschfeld a kitsch personage, and only then goes on to howl about the brutality of the assault and the complicity of the police in hiding the assailants. Tucholsky, as he said in a latter article, “could hardly imagine man on man sex” – which, of course, is a rather suspicious denial. However, in 1929, he came out for the decriminalization of gay sex on grounds that Hirschfeld had laid down:

“To me, the sexual relationship of a man to another man is hard to imagine – but I would never dare to make my sentiment the basis of a moral law. One could, with the same right, create a law against redhaired women or against men who are heavy perspirers. So long as sexual play does not harm society, Society has no right to attack it. … A legal code is not an ethical fable, and the ethical principles of the Catholic Church, which by its indisputable service to society bears most of the guilt for this legal fabrication, are debateable, and not the basis of all things. This is Terror, which we cannot tolerate.”

One should remember what role homophobia played in the rise of the radical right in Germany. The NYT and the Centrists are playing a dangerous game by tossing trans rights in the garbage can. But it was ever thus with centrists.

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5Eduardo Gonzalez, Chris Hudson and 3 others

The turning point: watching our structures of governance tumble down

“Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope…”

Turn to good old T.S. for your prime modernist bluesing. Or to Billy Holiday.

There has long been a sort of myth in historiography: the sighting of the “turning point”. Like the great white whale, like the unicorn or the black swan, the turning point is out there, but we can not really see it until we are posterior to it, until it happens.

Thus, that structures of governance that have been in place since WWII are collapsing all over the world might be an ephemeral sequence. In the 1970s, after the revolution in Portugal, many of the grave Western war criminals in international relations, people like Kissinger, expected Eurocommunism to advance forcefully and inevitably until Europe was Red.

Well, that didn’t happen.

So that Europe looks Brown to me might be a case of jumping the gun on the part of yours truly, who has jumped many a gun before.

Still, a turning point seems in the air. The venerable Crooked Timber, the Ur-academic blog, has solemnly decided that the U.S. is no longer the “indispensable” country. I’m not sure that is a call a blog can make. As far as I know, the U.S. has the largest economy in the world and a stock of world annihilating weapons that would make the comet that rammed into the earth and slew all the dinosaurs whistle with admiration. So that it is no longer indispensable just means: another neoliberal fairy tale, this one about interventionist democracy, is shattered into crymaking fairy-dust.

In France, the creepy Macron stays in power by finding even creepier prime ministers to force the country to swallow the same mouthwash – massive tax breaks for the wealthy, massive cuts in services for the rest of us, and a deficit accumulated almost completely by the incompetents that have surrounded Macron since the beginning – since the golden time that the media, from Le Monde to the Figaro, ran to him like puppies just wanting to be petted way back in 2016.

In Germany, an utterly soulless SD and a Green party that transformed itself into the War party without blinking are about to be ousted by the usual conservatives flanked by a neo-Nazi party supported, of course, by Elon Musk – the man who is playing circusmaster to the far right.

Of course, that same Musk has committed a rare crime in America, something out of the corruption of the 1870s, by stealing data with the connivance of Trump’s secretaries of Treasury and whatever. This happens on the same day that the NYT headlines a story: ‘We Have No Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump.’

We lack a term forceful enough to cover the field between feckless, disgusting and hilarious. Once that term is found, linguistic scientists, we can pin it on the Democratic party – which had a good run back in the distant past I hear.

“Turning point” comes, I think, from both Christian doctrine and Galenic medicine. To quote the College of Physicians website:

“What did Galen mean by “crises”? Traditionally, a “crisis” in medicine meant a turning point for better or worse. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “crisis” as (definition 1):

The point in the progress of a disease when an important development or change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death; the turning-point of a disease for better or worse; also applied to any marked or sudden variation occurring in the progress of a disease and to the phenomena accompanying it.”

Neoliberalism – the disease that kills liberalism – has long been denied as a pertinent term by, um, neoliberals. It is a perfectly good term for the strange utopian dream of attaching a deregulated capitalist system, a la 1900, to the Civil rights advances of the 1960s-1970s. I’ve called this a mock synthesis, since it has, really, no philosophical foundation, but pretends to find, in the contingent historical encounter of Ronald Reagan’s economics and Martin Luther King Jr.’s demand for equality some timeless transcendent.

Well, all good things and bad takes must come to an end, and this has certainly ended up putting egg on all our faces.

The laughs on us! Now comes the bad part.

Or as Billy Holiday might have put it:

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgement not be too heavy upon us…

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Underwood Tariff act of 1913

 Now is the time, Ladies and Germs, to think about... the Underwood Tariff act of 1913. When Trump insisted on renaming Mount Denali Mount McKinley, maybe he was being more than the Loony Tunes character he usually plays. Maybe it was a hint. The Underwood Act coupled tariff reductions and income tax. The income tax, brand spanking new from the 16th amendment, was not a mass tax. It was conceived as a class tax - the working and middle class was not the primary target. The wealthy were. It was the rare middle class worker who paid federal income tax up until the 50s. Government, in the pre-income tax days, ran on revenue from tariffs. There were other sources, but tariffs were the bulk of it. Now, consider a crazy person - lets name him Elon M. - who wants pretty much to abolish income tax on the wealthy. Well, how are you going to pay your soldiers, and more importantly, your defense contractors? How about - going back to the tried and true? The system of William McKinley.

Now, even as I type these words I can barely conceive of a person who thinks such a thing is possible in 2025, when we have run trade deficits since the Reagan years and every increase in value produced by technical innovation depends in the immediate aftermath on cheap manufacture in China or Mexico or Vietnam, etc.

But we are dealing with people whose views are cray cray, no matter how much the average NYT Op ed writer tries to respect them.

So anything is possible. However, the Democrats who supported lowering the tariff were dependent, at that time, on an all white South. The Rs who liked tariffs were business Yankee whites. I'm not sure how a policy that is favored by Rs under Trump is going to go over with a base that is now heavily Southern and midwestern white.

All of this history is returning like a nightmare just as we are going into the ring with the Democratic party in its worst shape in history - not an idea in site among the whitehaired millionaires who run it.

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For a future history of the United States: where are the oligarchs?

 

It would be an odd history of Britain, or France, or Spain, etc., which ignored the role of the aristocracy throughout the early modern period and on through the 19^th century.

But exactly that oddness is a keynote of the grand narrative of American history. Muckrakers, like Ferdinand Lundberg, the muckraking author of various books about the superrich, or Mathew Josephson, who wrote a memorable book about the Robber Barons, are definitely on the outskirts of American historiography. That historiography even lacks an anthropological account of American capital, something that would conceptualize the admixture of clan wealth and the corporate legal structure to get at the experience of power in the United States.

Myself, I take the term bratva, the Russian argot applying to criminal gangs as associations of “brothers”, as a good overall term that applies to American plutocracy.

Lately, of course, we have our mouths and eyes full of plutocracy. From Joe Biden giving a (choke) medal of freedom to the founder of the Carlyle Group (so much for the regulation of private equity on the Dem side of the equation) to the obvy influence of Musk, a billionaire, on our billionaire prez, Trump, they are here to tell us: we’ve always been here.

Yet though this headless heedless nuclear armed country is led by the most incestuous products of the boardroom and bedroom, I see few calls to go back to the muckraker classics. In the Neolib era, we are supposed to forget those embarrassing vulgarians, gawping at the felonious hijinks of those who made their piles in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

A pity. On the list of books about America that are taught in cultural studies classrooms, I imagine few have a place for the Superrich or The Robber Barons.

Lundberg did have some rightwing populist leanings – but Josephson was my angelic ideal, combining an acute literary sensibility (one of the twenties exiles in Paris, a litterateur who wrote a memoir entitled Life among the Surrealists) with a solid career at Fortune, back when Agee worked there and you could visit Whittacker Chambers in his office at the other Luce publication, Time Magazine, by taking the elevator.

Chambers, of course, was in a Manichean struggle with Communism. Josephson, though, had his eyes on the prize. The Vanderbilts. The Rockefellers. The Morgans.

The Robber Barons came out at the right time, when a combination of Republican populists from the West and Democratic New Dealers from the East were making robber barons quite uncomfortable with their questions and committees – for instance, the Nye committee and its questions about J.P. Morgan’s profiteering in WWI. In the Eisenhauer era and up to the present, the conservative counter-attack on the “robber baron” myth is very, very concerned that we see these “entrepreneurs” in a sober light as, well, geniuses and our heroes. Every bratva has its minstrel.

Josephson quotes the Beards, those permanently unfashionable populist historians, in the introduction to his book:

“These men were robber barons as were their medieval counterparts, the dominating figures of an aggressive economic age.

In any case, "to draw the American scene as it unfolded between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, without these dominant figures looming in the foreground, is to make a shadow picture," as the Beards have written. "To put in the presidents and the leading senators . . . and leave out such prime actors in the drama is to show scant respect for the substance of life. Why, moreover, should anyone be interested in the beginnings of the House of a Howard or Burleigh and indifferent to the rise of a House of Morgan or Rockefeller?"

That these are “houses” or clans is a claim that, alas, has not taken root in a historiography that, no matter how Marxist or lefty the ideology of the historian, still takes no hint from the copious documentation of the anthropology of clan power in other societies. Those, of course, are “primitive” societies – not like our techno-powered secular scientific one of today and tomorrow! An essay by business historian Richard R. John, Robber Baron Redux, traces the phrase back to Charles and Henry Adams classic account of Jay Gould’s manipulation of railroad stock, Chapters of Eerie, another book on the outskirts of our American classics. John also attributes the disrepute of the “robber baron” thematic in business history to Alfred Chandler, whose influence on business history is much greater than that of Marx – at least in the U.S. Chandler preferred Industrial Statesman – not so feverish and ideological. About the same time, the term entrepreneur was revived by Joseph Schumpeter, and after a bit of a hiatus there – those crazy sixties and seventies – got take into the bosom of official speak in the Reaganite eighties. By now, of course, it is official – with the nineties cult of Jack Welch and the present cult of Elon Musk being the most celebrated images in the gallery – the rich are treated not as robbers but as artists.  The entrepreneurial myth – that value comes from the top, from management, rather than from the bottom, from workers – has been firmly set in place, liquidating the American rebellion that informed the counter-culture of unions, surrealists and Fortune journalists during the long period of American questioning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

to scold on the interwebs

 There is an etymological mystery about the word ‘scold”. In the great 0ED vol. 9, the etymology is not given – rather, the etymological theories that link the word to some original Scandinavian word are held up as unproven. Others relate the term to “skald”, a kind of satiric poet – the antithesis of bard. However the descent of the word goes, at some point it became contextually misogynistic – the scold and the shrew were stock figures of aggressive women. Scold occurs a number of times in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, where it possesses a certain figurative stature that is curiously attractive to Petruchio:

Sir, let me be so bold as ask you,

Did you yet ever see Baptista’s daughter?

TRANIO, as Lucentio

No, sir, but hear I do that he hath two,

The one as famous for a scolding tongue

As is the other for beauteous modesty.

PETRUCHIO

Sir, sir, the first’s for me; let her go by.

In Blackstone, one reads: “A common scold, communis rixatrix (for our law confines it to the female gender) is a public nuisance to her neighborhood.”

This background makes me wonder about my own reaction to scolding, which is negative. Perhaps, though, there is a reason that the rixatrixaty of political social media is both one of the notable tonal styles – the Democratic claque on bluesky responded to any complaint about the Dems by scolding, and took a scolding view of the people in general – and that this tone comes after the failure of Metoo to overturn the fundamentally misogynistic nature of our establishment. Perhaps, in the poetics of scolding, there is more than a contempt for the masses.

And yet… I think rixatrixaty is a terrible tactic to pursue. It traps one in a reactive circle, where outrage always gives the fascitudinal provocateur the advantage that the conversation is pursued in his terms. At the same time, used against the “left”, it proposes an asymmetric deal that every lefty can easily see through, of giving everything and getting nothing. Which is, come to think of it, the misogynist contract: I’ll “protect” you while you serve me. Not a deal the centrist would ever agree to.

What I lack, what I’d love to read, is a discourse analysis of scolding. It holds a place in the Neolib order that signifies something interesting about our political unconscious.

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5Eduardo Gonzalez, Christopher Norris and 3 others

Bye Bye Miss American Pie

 

In 1984, Andrew Kopkind and Alexander Cockburn wrote a terrific jeremiad in the Nation that began:

“With hardly a backward—or forward—look, the bulk of the surviving American left has blithely joined the Democratic Party center, without the will to inflect debate, the influence to inform policy or the leverage to share power. The capitulation of the left—a necessarily catchall word, here covering the spectrum of progressive politics from old socialism to recent radical activism—is almost without precedent. This time out there is no McCarthy of 1968, no McGovern of 1972, no Kennedy of 1980; not even a John Anderson or a Barry Commoner to raise a standard of dissent or develop an alternative vision against a Democratic Party whose project is overwhelmingly conservative in attitude and action. The excuse for submission is easy to discern: Anybody But Reagan. But the consequences are likely to be dire, and they are already taking shape. By accepting the premises and practices of party unity, the left has negated the reasons for its own existence.”

I think Kopkind and Cockburn were marking a moment – the moment when the term “leftist” became an honorific, rather like esquire. Roger Gathmann, Leftist is the equivalent to saying I will mouth certain slogans and ideas, knowing of course that they have absolutely no attachment to any political force on the horizon – at least for the U.S. and most of the “West”. In France, theoretically and absurdly, the “Left” does name a real thing, the New Popular Front, which has been absolutely unable to stop the Macronist drift to the ultra-right, as the French shambles of a government proceeds in a numbed sleepwalk.

I was living in New Orleans in 1984. I was trying to be a writer, of course, of course. Working in a university library. And, in my spare time, protesting against the Nicaraguan intervention shoulder to shoulder so to speak with members of the local CISPES group.

I remember being told by someone in the group that there was a Social Democratic activist who wanted to meet with a bunch of us. I thought that sounded great. Socialism – this was my politics!

We met in someone’s apartment. Chips, sodas, a couple of sofas, a bearded guy. Whose talk, astonishingly, was: let’s all go out and elect Mondale!

I had to laugh. I didn’t have a tv at the time, and have never really cared to watch tv news, but I had seen a few clips of Mondale and the one thing I knew, immediately, was that Mondale was a loser. I mean, he carried such a loser vibe that him running for president had the air of giving some faithful bank employee a gold watch for his service.

Given his obvy lose vibes, here I was, thinking that a serious Social Democrat would think, we’ve got nothing to lose by trying to make a real third party! Instead of which we were supposed to get fired up about a moderate gray Democrat who went around saying things like “Isolate Nicaragua if it won’t bend”. Shit like that.

I realized, vaguely, something that Cockburn and Kopkind were on about. American politics was captured by a two party system which excluded any real leftist program, tugged America inexorably to the right, and there was nothing I could do about it. So, I demonstrated. I didn’t vote, of course.

The Dems, in true loser fashion, then came up with Dukakis (it was like they were trying to lose) and then Clinton. Again, some lefty person really kept after me – at this time I was living in Atlanta – to vote Clinton. I think I actually did. And Clinton of course did what he did, which was screw up universal health care, his one issue, then “reformed” the Great Society welfare system so that it became the shit it is today.

The Democratic party gets worse and worse, older and older, its wheeler dealers richer and richer, and we are now meeting with true authoritarianism and they really, really don’t give a shit.

I suppose 1984 was one of the quiet turning points. One can holler, out in the far seats, for the Dems to do this or that. But it is like hollering at the actors in a play that has already been scripted. They are not going to deviate from their lines. Which is why the other audience members, on social media, the volunteer Dembots, adopt, predictably, a scolding tone. Shush! You are objectively helping the fascists by not supporting the retreating bulk of Dem politicos in their "resistance" - why many of them have put hearts under a Selena Gomez video!

It is as if they are finishing off the job of alienating the people that might, vaguely, vote Dem if it would do something.

Such a sad piece of history I ‘ve lived through in the States.

auden's New Year's Poem part two: trans- and the palimpsest subject

 last bit on Auden's New Year's Letter

In the beginning was the letter.

And the letter was a sorter, a lister, a control.

In the beginning was the letter. And the letter here was an element in a postal system, however named or organized. The alphabetical letter and the epistolary form called a letter, and finally literature as “letters” are layered on top of each other – this is the modernist insight. And the modernist subject is a palimpsest – a layering. While the lyrical subject might have two souls in its breast, the palimpsest subject has layers it is unaware of, tracing a destiny in letters that moves at different levels of history and myth.

Tiresias in the Wasteland, Bloom in Ulysses – these palimpsest subjects opened up a way in which the poetic form could absorb the collagist techniques of the tabloid, the daily, in which headlines and stories hang together in a community of contemporaneity. One learns to scan the newspaper and segregate topics. On January 1, 1940, The front page of the New York Times had five headlines. The headline with the largest font read: FINNS SMASH A RED DIVISION; HALT MOVE TO CUT COUNTRY;NAZI DRIVE ON BRITAIN SEEN. Next to it, on the left, is BOARD SANCTIONS SALE BY U.S. LINES OF EIGHT VESSELS, then LABOR HEADS WARN WAR ‘PROSPERITY’ WILL NOT END ILLS, then in smaller font 1940 Bornin Wild Revelry; Good Year for Nation Seen, and then, finally, REPUBLICAN FIGHT ON NEW DEAL LOOMS IN CONGRESS. The educated reader does not see this as a chaos, a confetti of wildly different topics. Down to the size of the font, this reader can follow the various stories, even as the headlines sometimes dissolve into telegraphy.

So, too, can the reader of the New Year’s Letter trace through its various stanzas a certain newspaper like flow of topic. According to Edward Mendelson’s Late Auden, the three parts were “mechanically” devoted to Kierkegaard’s divisions: the aesthetic, the religious and the ethical. But Mendelson doesn’t believe this is the deep structuring principle of the poem – rather, as a New Year’s resolution, it is a way of saying the poet’s way to acting and writing under a certain structure of belief – the belief being in the future. Talking himself into believing this belief – within the framework of a letter to Elizabeth May, who Mendelson portrays as “mother” figure to Auden.

“A German refugee” living with her psychiatrist husband on Long Island, who Auden was introduced to by Benjamin Britten.

But this isn’t a testimonial poem even if it encompasses the current news and the whole Decline of the West. It isn’t Muriel Rukeyser. It is distinctly a letter poem, subordinating the topical structure to the conversational, meditative flow of the epistle. As in Pope’s Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot, or Donne’s verse letters. Donne’s letter to Henry Wotton lights up when contrasted with Auden’s New Year’s letter, and vice versa. So I pick from Donne this:

“For in best understandings sin began;

Angels sinned first, then devils, and then man.

Only perchance beasts sin not; wretched we

Are beasts in all but white integrity.

I think if men, which in these places live,

Durst look in themselves, and themselves retrieve,

They would like strangers greet themselves, seeing then

Utopian youth grown old Italian.”

Utopian youth – that’s a phrase for Auden, coming off the decade of the thirties!

The ultimate letters for a man turned Christian are, of course, Paul’s. Utopian youth here – the Jesus romance of the Gospels – is followed by didactic letter from one whose knowledge of what Jesus actually said and meant was, naturally, a little shaky, a little oral, a kind of gossip. Yet as Paul was convinced he had seen Jesus, had been physically blinded and then by further miracle given back his sight by Jesus, and so he winged it – choosing the letter form to mix news and doctrinal improvisation.

This is what the rhymes in Auden’s New Year’s Letter do – they make the doctrinal seem improv, and thus put it to another cadence.

If I am right about the palimpsest subject, than that subject naturally tends to the trans – trans-sexual, trans-historic, trans-Atlantic, trans-class – the latter being the privileged position of the clerks in the system of circulation. The trans figure is everywhere – Tiresias in the Wasteland, Bloom in Nighttown, the characters in Djuna Barnes Paris nightlife oratorio, Nightwood – with its shout out to Thelma Wood. And one might think that this is where Auden will end up.

He doesn’t, though, and one of the tales in the many tellings in the New Year’s Letter is a renunciation of this kind of modernist self, this kind of styling of the self’s transformative powers. He takes, instead, an Augustan turn – but unlike a Queer writer like Firbank, who also adored mixing an eighteenth century tone with cocktails, Auden ends up firmly on the side of identity, against the devil’s confusions of Meum and Tuum.

However, as Auden plays with the philosophical poem, his vocabulary and the music of the couplet rather lose an energy that Pope could summon in the eighteenth century. The second and third sections are exercises in the diminishing returns of an epistle poem that wants, as well, to be a conceptual summary. Auden seems to want to stand radically for some not at all radical blend of social responsibility and hedonism: the Cold War creed, in fact, elevated to abstractions that not only lose us, but weaken the muscle tone of the jaunty hard-boiled tone of the first section:

“Hell is the being of the lie

That we become if we deny

The laws of consciousness and claim

Becoming and Being are the same,

Being in time, and man discrete

In will, yet free and self-complete;

Its fire the pain to which we go

If we refuse to suffer, though

The one unnecessary grief

Is the vain craving for relief…”

This is a version of Hell that seems sprung more from late English utilitarianism, from the kind of philosophy undergraduate scene that begins Forster’s The Longest Journey, than from the peasant knowledge of torture: the shrinking from fire, the pain of knives and bullets and cudgels, the pain of starvation, the pain of being utterly unable to protect one’s nearest from the vilest violence. And in none of those hells, these bodily enacted horrors, do we shrink from Becoming and Being being the same. Neither the torturer nor the tortured would either understand that business or think it was somehow enacted in the theatre of concentration camp vioence.

There are moments in the movement from Utopian youth to Anglican casuistry that do make me think of the caricature of Auden and Isherwood in Put out more Flags as Parsnip and Pimpernell. Or like the college boys in The Longest Journey:

“The cow is there,” said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited till the end of the match fell off. Then he said again, “She is there, the cow. There, now.”

“You have not proved it,” said a voice.

“I have proved it to myself.”

“I have proved to myself that she isn’t,” said the voice. “The cow is not there.” Ansell frowned and lit another match.”

The poem is not damned by these weaker moments; within it there is a New Year’s message for this New Year, 2025, weird as I find that date, weird as I living in this century that has brought me, personally, much love, but in my perception of the community to which I once felt I belonged, just shame on shame, year after year. So much wealth and all of it just shit, just adding to disaster and the lifestyle of desperation from which no party, no movement promises a rescue.

Blah blah blah. That’s what the politics says.

“Whatever nonsense we believe,

”Whomever we can still deceive,

Whatever language angers us,

Whoever seems the poisonous

Old dragon to be killed if men

Are ever to be rich again,

We know no fuss or pain or lying

Can stop the moribund from dying,

That all the special tasks begun

By the Renaissance have been done.”

This is the Anglican turn with a vengeance, a tempting quietism that sits down by the Waters of Babylon and … dithers. Too broad a view can incorrigibly blur the particulars; an epistle poem must have the touch of the letter, of someone on the other end receiving it, to justify its form.

Still: this poem distils sentiments that will come into intellectual life only after the war. The Cold War liberal with his Popperian aversion to utopia and its misleading apostles, from Plato to Rousseau, sounds out in this poem from 1940 – and it would be easy to draw the line, here, from Auden to Hayek. In this sense, we are coming to a period when “the special tasks begun/by the New Deal have been done.”