by K. R. Bolton
Potocki, Fairburn, and even Marxists such as Mason were acutely aware of their responsibility to forge a “new civilization” in the antipodes, and some, such as Potocki in particular, self-exiled to Britain and elsewhere in the hope of finding a more fruitful cultural environment. Disgusted at the cultural climate, Potocki had left New Zealand and persuaded Fairburn to join him in London. As Potocki put it, New Zealand prevented them from doing what they were born there for, “to make and to mould a New Zealand civilization.”394
However, in Britain, neither Fairburn nor Potocki were impressed with bohemian society, although Potocki dressed and conducted himself as an eccentric bohemian par excellence.395 Nor were they impressed with the Bloomsbury intellectuals, who were riddled with homosexuality, for which both Potocki and Fairburn had an abiding dislike.
FORMATIVE YEARS
Potocki was born in Remuera, Auckland, New Zealand, on October 6, 1903. His description of his birth, related to Greig Fleming in 1993, consists mainly of astrological correspondences, showing his lifelong mystical inclination.396 Potocki also speaks from the beginning about his own “heathenism,” a problematic tendency for the claimant to the throne of Poland and Hungary, mentioning elsewhere that he “hated and despised Christian morality.”397
Potocki, ever flamboyant, was not inclined to modesty, describing his countenance from childhood as one of great nobility which appeared “fabulous in comparison to the low level of New Zealand in that regard,” one that indicated a person destined for talent and brilliance.398
Potocki began writing poetry at the age of eight, and decided from then that he was to be a poet.399 Having lost his mother at an early age, and living with a step-mother who was unsympathetic, the life of Potocki and his brother became hard, including frequent starvation when his father, an architect, had financial difficulties.400
A Renaissance Man out of his time (a “man against time”?401), Potocki was fluent in French, Provencal, Latin, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, German, and Sanskrit, and in the last years of his life was learning Maori (he considered the Maori to be superior to the common run of New Zealanders).
Known for his outspokenly pro-fascist and pro-Nazi sentiments—an outspokenness not dampened by the war and life in wartime England—Potocki was, however, more than anything a traditionalist and a royalist, a neo-aristocrat who in some respects can be compared to another mystic, Julius Evola. Potocki was profoundly conscious of his identity and his lineage, and New Zealand—which prides itself on being the egalitarian society par excellence—could do nothing but repulse such a man. Potocki was to reminisce of his native land: “Life in New Zealand is a wonderful training for a future King—a superb lesson in ‘How a nation ought not to be governed.’”402
His appearance was that of another era. In London, he sported flowing hair, a billowing cloak, large beret, and sandals. In later life, including his years back in New Zealand, he adopted the appearance of a large-bearded, robed magus, a style that during and immediately after the war was also supplemented by a self-designed “uniform” in the manner of the Polish army.
Potocki’s claim to Polish royal linage was legitimate enough, despite being dismissed as an “embarrassment” by his New Zealand family.403 Count Joseph Wladislas Edmond Potocki de Montalk dispensed with his title and reduced his name down to de Montalk upon migrating to New Zealand from France in 1868, as befits a land without noble traditions other than those of the Maori.404 The Potocki family is of ancient royal lineage, and is prominent in the history of Poland, being one of the oldest families of the nation.405
EARLY MUSINGS
Potocki’s family moved to Nelson, in the South Island, in 1917. He did well at High School, winning a prize for excellence in English, French, Latin, and history, and was regarded by the headmaster as having a very personable character.406 Moving to Wellington in 1918, Potocki continued to excel at school.407 In 1919, at only 16, he became a teacher and privately studied Greek at Victoria University College. In 1921, he returned to Auckland with the aim of studying law and entered the employ of a law firm as a clerk.
By 1923 Potocki had entered the literary scene, and had met R. A. K. Mason. Despite being a newcomer, a literary group formed around him, which saw itself as a “poetic aristocracy”408 which would revitalize English poetry. Potocki still had faith that New Zealand, as a colony, had not been infected by the decadence of the “old world.” He published his first collection of poems as a four-page leaflet.
Potocki then dropped law and entered a seminary to study for the Anglican priesthood, not because he felt he had a divine calling but because he was attracted to the ritual and liturgy. This did not leave him in his later years, as he would attend Evensong at the Anglican Cathedral in Wellington for the same reason as he had done in his youth at the Christchurch Cathedral, despite his continued adherence to paganism. It was in seminary that he learned about missionary printing in the 19th century, and this prompted his own lifelong interest in self-publishing limited editions of his works on antiquated presses.
Potocki was briefly married in 1924. It was perhaps predictable that he could not settle down to family responsibilities. He tried to work as a milk vendor, although he could not compel himself to demand the money owed him by poor families, nor did he have an interest in money-making per se, surely itself a sign of innate aristocracy. He returned to Christchurch with his family and re-entered law for a short time, but continued with his real passion, poetry.409
In 1926 Potocki received a letter from Rex Fairburn, whom he had briefly known at primary school, and a life-long friendship ensued. Potocki assumed the role of mentor, as the more worldly-wise of the two.410 At Easter 1927, Potocki published his first collection of poems, Wild Oats, which he dedicated to Fairburn.411
Not surprisingly, given the Left-wing character of much of the literary milieu, Fairburn was flirting with communism as a means by which the artist could become economically independent to pursue his profession. However, he was not by temperament a rationalist or a materialist, and was also drawn to a spirit of aristocratic feeling that did not settle easily with socialism. Others of an artistic or literary calling who turned to the Right around the same time, men such as Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and Wyndham Lewis, did so for similar reasons, fearing that a cult of the proletariat or of mass, undifferentiated humanity, as much democratic in spirit as communistic, would result in the drowning of all real individual excellence.
Fairburn asked his royalist friend Potocki to read Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism,412 to show him that the aristocratic spirit and the creative genius could be accommodated under socialism.413 However, in 1931 when Fairburn met A. R. Orage, editor of the New English Weekly,414 he discovered that such freedom for creativity could not only be maintained but also enhanced by the economics of Social Credit. (Orage’s magazine was from 1932 on discussing new social and political ideas, with a focus on Maj. C. H. Douglas’ proposals.)415 Fairburn had in 1930 already read and been heavily influenced by Spengler’s Decline of the West,416 so his rejection of Marxism was a natural development.
Fairburn was avid in promoting Social Credit and in opposing usury, whereas Potocki’s perspective must be discerned from more meager sources. For example, in his pamphlet on New Zealand race relations written in 1987, Potocki stated: “But as far as I am concerned the present financial system busy plundering and misgoverning the world is in its higher reaches a criminal anti-human conspiracy.”417
Stephanie de Montalk writes of the significance of Potocki and his contemporaries of this period:
Although Wild Oats collected the writings of youth and, in keeping with a young man’s follies, contained moments of extravagance and grandeur, it was nonetheless one of the starting points in the development of New Zealand’s poetic identity. It placed Potocki among the generation of writers who would lay the basis of New Zealand literature as it developed in the 1930s.418
This was the Golden Age of New Zealand culture, and
one which Fairburn, Potocki, Mason, Curnow, and others of the time wanted to see flourish. However, unlike what might be called the New Zealandist commitments of the rest, including Marxists such as R. A. K. Mason, and above all Potocki’s protégé Fairburn, Potocki was not foremost a New Zealander but a royalist and a traditionalist.
While Fairburn and others achieved wide recognition in New Zealand, Potocki left, and only returned much later in life. He was keeping the commitment he had made to Fairburn when Wild Oats appeared, that his first collection was a “test” which, if it failed to gain a good response in New Zealand, would prove that the country was not fit for Potocki and he would have done with the place.419 Potocki got mixed reviews, partly because of the bias against someone who was “in the process of dissolving his marriage.” Fairburn too had had enough of New Zealand, and Potocki wrote to him that poets are treated badly there, in “this land of white savages and All Blacks” while “they are feted, laurelled and crowned in Merrie England.” In October 1927, he left for England.
By 1931 Potocki was earning sufficient money to devote himself to writing and was being published regularly back home in the Auckland and Christchurch newspapers as a feature writer.420 It was his imprisonment in 1932 on “obscenity” charges in relation to poetry, together with his actions during the Second World War, that were to block his path to the sort of success achieved by Fairburn, Mason, and others.
By 1930, Potocki’s poetic vision was already showing aristocratic and elitist traits. That same year Surprising Songs was published, in the foreword to which Potocki condemns “Christianity and democracy,” against which he “raises the banner of the aristocratic gods, and their sons, the kings and the poets.” He describes New Zealand as “Hell” from which he had fled as soon as he could. In both mystical and traditionalist tenor Potocki states that poetry is the expression of the “great spirit, the outrider of the hordes of men, the king proclaiming his kingdom, the avatar bearing in his own being a light against the darkness.”421 This and other volumes were favorably, even enthusiastically, reviewed from Europe to New Zealand.
Fairburn too now arrived from New Zealand, as disheartened by the low cultural level as Potocki, and seeing the hope of establishing a “native literature” as unlikely. However, to Potocki’s disappointment, Fairburn, the quintessential New Zealander, was more interested in pub-crawls than in cathedrals.
ENGLISH LITERATI & PRISONS
At this time, Potocki was learning more about his lineage and began a tentative claim to Poland’s throne, the main obstacle as he saw it being that he was not a Catholic. The claim was strengthened several years later when, in Poland, he found that the Potockis had married into the Piast family, which had reigned over Poland until the mid 17th century.422
By now a rather well-established poet, Potocki embarked on a controversial publication that was to end his acceptance among mainstream publishers. Here Lies John Penis was a collection of poems, including translations from Rabelais and Verlaine, and some explicit verses in an account of some sexual misadventures by Rex Fairburn. It was intended only for distribution among friends, and was to be printed by Potocki himself on his small press.423
Potocki’s efforts to get the type set by Leslie de Lozey resulted in the MS being taken to the police. Potocki’s room was raided, and he was arrested, along with fellow New Zealand expatriate Douglas Glass.424 Both were remanded in custody in Brixton Prison. At trial Sir Ernest Wild warned three women jurors that “this was a very filthy case indeed,” two of whom excused themselves from service.
Potocki’s refusal to swear on the Bible caused some consternation in court, and there was the question as to whether a pagan’s oath would be acceptable.425 The oath he swore in court was to Apollo, raising his right arm “in the Roman salute,” “like Julius Caesar or Benito Mussolini,” he was to later recount.426 The verdict was “guilty.” Justice Wild had not only made it very clear how the vote should proceed, he had not even allowed the jury leave to deliberate. Potocki was sentenced to six months in Wormwood Scrubs.
The case was widely reported and commented upon, generally with sympathy for Potocki. Among those who tried to help financially were W. B. Yeats, J. B. Priestly, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, and Augustus John.427 Leonard and Virginia Woolf organized a campaign for Potocki, and questions were asked in the House of Commons for the case to be reviewed.428 In the end, actual support from his well-wishers turned out to be meager.429 The appeal heard in March 1932 was rejected.
Potocki was to relate much later to his cousin and biographer Stephanie that he believed his predicament, which ended his success as a recognized poet,430 had actually been the result of Douglas Glass muttering unfavorable remarks about Jews in front of de Lozey when they had taken the proofs to the publisher for typesetting. Potocki had not known de Lozey was Jewish and did not understand Glass’s references at the time. Potocki was informed after trial by the publisher Knott that de Lozey had taken exception to Glass’s comments, and wanted him arrested, which could not be done other than by also having Potocki arrested. Potocki opined that it was really Glass that the police had been after, because he was a petty thief and a swindler.431 These experiences in Britain left Potocki embittered towards both the justice system and the British class system. An antagonism towards Jews also emerged at that time.432
Some, such as the Woolfs, assumed that Potocki would go “Left,” like the common run of Bloomsbury. But it is evident from his general character and outlook that Potocki was, like his contemporaries Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Roy Campbell, and others, innately and indelibly of the “Right.” His royalist sympathies were manifest at an early age, and well prior to his escapades with the British Establishment.
In a chapter called “Quack, Quack” in his Social Climbers in Bloomsbury,433 Potocki was to record his one meeting with the Woolfs in which Virginia sought agreement on her belief that her husband’s race was much more civilized than the English and had been since ancient times. Potocki replied that, to be frank, he did not at all agree.
After his release from prison, Potocki assumed the style he was to retain throughout his life: medieval robes and a crimson cloak, modeled after the clothing of Richard II, with sandals, a velvet beret adorned with the Polish royal eagle and the Potocki coat of arms, and waist length hair that he had first allowed to grow out while in jail.
He set off for Poland in 1933, where he was welcomed by the literati and obtained employment as a translator of Polish poetry and prose into English. He was greeted with celebrity status by the press, which recognized his royal pedigree—despite the ill-informed denigration it had received from the Court in England—and remarked upon his aristocratic character and bearing.434
Stephanie de Montalk hypothesizes that his “anti-Semitism” might have been galvanized in Poland, having been seeded by experiences in England. However, at that time there was little need to visit Poland to draw conclusions about Jews, given on their conspicuous roles in communism and the “Left” in general. That was how Jews were widely perceived among well-informed and high-born quarters since the time of the 1917 Revolution.
THE RIGHT REVIEW
The outbreak of the Civil War in Spain in 1936 polarized the intelligentsia and literati. Some, such as Potocki and in particular Roy Campbell,435 identified with the rebel cause. In 1935, Potocki returned to England in 1935. The following year, with funds from Aldous Huxley and Brian Guinness, Potocki bought a printing press, and began publishing his long-running literary and political journal The Right Review. The Right Review, like all of de Potocki’s works, was printed as limited editions but did garner the adverse attention of John Bull and the positive reaction of the reviewer for The New English Weekly and T. S. Eliot’s Criterion.
Potocki’s editorial in the first issue, which appeared in October, cogently describes his position:
It is our aim to show that the Divine Right of Kings is the sanest and best form of government. . . .
We are as much opposed to Capitalism, if by that term is meant Plutocracy, as any communist could be—but we are not opposed to capitalists so long as they function without damaging the interests of the whole State. . . .
Neither do we consider Fascism as anything but a very bad form of government, being as it is based on demagogy, but we point out that it is a natural reaction, based on a thoroughly justifiable instinct of self-protection, whereby nations rid themselves of the socialist and communist plague. . . .436
Thus, Potocki’s support for fascism was critical and conditional. Fascism is a populist movement, and elitists such as Potocki were suspicious of such movements, in whatever form they took, whether Left or Right. Others of similar opinion were Evola and Wyndham Lewis.
His views on Jews did not constitute the common sort of “anti-Semitism,” where Jews are generally placed in a no-win position no matter what they do. Potocki saw certain actions of many Jews as detrimental to humanity as a whole due to their own ethnocentricity and support for communism. “Aryan racialism,” which presumably means Hitlerism, was therefore seen also as a “reaction” to Jewish exploits since the time of the Old Testament. Nonetheless, in disagreeing with both fascists and communists on the question of race, Potocki stated “men are to be judged by their worth as members of the human race as a whole—by their beauty, breeding, wisdom, and good will.” This applies “even to Jews,” but there was a duty to be “very suspicious of a race” which itself “invented inhuman racialism” to the detriment of non-Jews.437
With The Right Review being published on a rudimentary press in small numbers, Potocki nonetheless started to become known among the British “Right,” and he met both Sir Oswald Mosley and Mosley’s propaganda chief, William Joyce,438 the later “Lord Haw Haw” for whom Potocki’s affection never wavered. Potocki seems to have retained his aristocratic suspicion of fascist demagogy, but he did undertake printing for the British Union of Fascists.439