Artists of the Right
Page 17
[134] Yeats, Four Years, ch. 2.
[135] The modernists.
[136] Yeats, Four Years, ch. 2.
[137] Yeats, Four Years, ch. 2. However, it might be asked whether the enormous interest in wizardry and fantasy, and in new forms of the heroic epic, in film and literature among present-day youngsters (J. R. R. Tolkien, Harry Potter, and the like) is an embryonic reaction against the modern world. Does this express a yearning for the return of something deeper, religion and the mystical having been driven from life by science, technology, and the shopping mall?
[138] Yeats, Four Years, ch. 17.
[139] “Hidden Masters,” supposedly controllers of the world in some remote region such as Tibet, manifesting their desires to lesser mortals through their chosen vehicles, have been in vogue since Blavatsky’s day, and often provide the legitimacy for claims to occult leadership.
[140] Yeats, Four Years, ch. 18. The notion of “thought forms” being able to take on an independent existence should not perhaps be automatically dismissed as nonsense. The present-day scientist Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist of repute, has devoted much research into the possibility of what he calls the “morphic field” and “morphic resonance,” which is analogous to what mystics call the “astral plane,” where thought forms might take tangible shape. Rupert Sheldrake Website: http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html
A fascinating example of what Yeats seems to be hypothesizing is the famous Philip Experiment in Toronto in 1972, in which a group “thought form” was created that took on a personality and even a history and name of its own.
[141] Yeats, Four Years, ch. 19. Here again one could have recourse to Jung’s concept of the Collective Unconscious, although Yeats seems to have developed an analogous theory on his own account.
[142] Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (Northamptonshire: The Aquarian Press, 1985), pp. 100–102.
[143] Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 119.
[144] Alexander Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1984), p. 212, citing: “A Vision: Notes on Sailing to Byzantium.”
[145] Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats, p. 117.
[146] Greek, one’s higher intuitive, creative faculties.
[147] The pre-eminent nineteenth-century historian of the occult, Eliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant) referred to the aristocratic tradition of the occult as elevating the adept to the “rank of kings, because magical initiation constitutes a true royalty . . . characterized by all Adepts as the Royal Art.” See Eliphas Lévi, The History of Magic, trans. A. E. Waite (London: Rider, 1982), p. 5. Like Evola and René Guénon, Lévi, a former socialist agitator and Freemason of the Rose-Cross Degree, also warned of an anti-tradition that included Freemasonry and that was behind the French Revolution: “The anarchists have resumed the rule, square, and mallet, writing upon them the word Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—Liberty, that is to say, for all lusts, Equality in degradation, and Fraternity in the work of destruction. Such are the men whom the Church has condemned justly and will condemn for ever” (p. 287). See also: Book 6, chapter 4: “The French Revolution.” It is of interest that the French Revolutionary slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” also happens to be the slogan of the Grand Orient of France.
[148] W. B. Yeats, “Letter to John O’Leary,” 1892.
[149] “Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood” (Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, p. 507).
[150] W. B. Yeats, On the Boiler (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1938), p. 25.
[151] John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 25.
[152] W. B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, “The Leaders of the Crowd” (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1921).
[153] Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, p. 507.
[154] Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, p. 506, n1.
[155] Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, p. 506, n2.
[156] Spengler referred to the “analogous historical epochs” of Civilizations in terms of the Seasons, to emphasize the organic nature of his cyclic historical paradigm.
[157] Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, p. 302.
[158] W. B. Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben,” 1938.
[159] W. B. Yeats, On the Boiler (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1938).
[160] W. B. Yeats, “The Old Stone Cross,” 1938.
[161] W. B. Yeats, “The Statesman’s Holiday,” 1938.
[162] “The coming of Caesarism breaks the dictature of money and its political weapon democracy” (Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, p. 506).
[163] W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1921.
[164] W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 261.
[165] Allen Wade, ed., The Letters of W. B. Yeats (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 656.
[166] Yeats, “The Second Coming.”
[167] D. R. Pearse, ed., The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), p. 173.
[168] Yeats had been appointed to the first Irish Senate in 1922 and was reappointed in 1925.
[169] The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, p. 111.
[170] The Letters of W. B. Yeats, p. 808.
[171] The Letters of W. B. Yeats, p. 813.
[172] Maurice Manning, The Blueshirts (London: Gill and Macmillan, 1970).
[173] Manning, The Blueshirts, p. 232.
[174] Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, Part One: Germany and World-Historical Evolution, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1963), pp. 186–87. However Spengler also believed that Fascism might transform into something else prefiguring a “new Caesarism” (p. 230).
[175] Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 300.
[176] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 301.
[177] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 13.
[178] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 21.
[179] Richard C. Nelson, Knut Hamsun Remembers America: Essays and Stories, 1885–1949 (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2003), pp. 4–5.
[180] Knut Hamsun, “Letters from America,” Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 7.
[181] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 68.
[182] Knut Hamsun, “The American Character,” Aftenposten (Christiania, Norway), January 21, 1885; Knut Hamsun Remembers America, pp. 17–18.
[183] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 19.
[184] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 14.
[185] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 20.
[186] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 21.
[187] Knut Hamsun, “New York,” Aftenposten, February 12, 14, 1895; Knut Hamsun Remembers America, pp. 28–29.
[188] Hamsun, “New York,” p. 29.
[189] Hamsun, “New York,” p. 30.
[190] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 101.
[191] Knut Hamsun, The Cultural Life of Modern America (1889), trans. Barbara Gordon Morgridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969)
[192] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 7.
[193] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 9.
[194] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 9.
[195] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 10.
[196] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 10.
[197] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 124.
[198] Knut Hamsun, Mysteries: A
Novel (1892), trans. anonymous (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967).
[199] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 133.
[200] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 138.
[201] Knut Hamsun, Shallow Soil (1893), trans. Carl Christian Hyllested (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914).
[202] Josef Wiehr, Knut Hamsun: His Personality and His Outlook upon Life (Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, 1922), p. 23.
[203] Wiehr, Knut Hamsun, p. 24.
[204] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 164.
[205] Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil (1920), trans. W. W. Worster (New York: Macmillan, 1980), Book I, ch. 3. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hamsun/knut/h23g/index.html
[206] Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, ch. 4.
[207] It needs to be pointed out that by “race” Spengler did not a biological, or “Darwinistic” conception, but an instinct. “Race” means “duration of character,” including “an urge to permanence.” See Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, Part One: Germany and World-Historical Evolution, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 220.
[208] Spengler, The Hour of Decision, p. 220.
[209] Spengler, The Hour of Decision, pp. 220–21.
[210] Spengler, The Hour of Decision, pp. 221–22.
[211] Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, ch. 5.
[212] Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, ch. 5.
[213] Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, ch. 9.
[214] Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, ch. 10.
[215] Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, ch. 14.
[216] Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, Book II, ch. 11.
[217] “Related to one another” in the sense that they express the analogous features of a culture in its “Spring” High Culture phase and its “Winter” Late Civilization phase respectively.
[218] Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, p. 102.
[219] The name of Isak’s farm.
[220] Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, Book II, ch. 12.
[221] Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, Book II, ch. 12.
[222] Knut Hamsun, August (1930), trans. Eugene Gay-Tifft (New York: Fertig, 1990).
[223] The Boers were—and partly remain—an anomaly in the modern world; the vestige of the bygone era who had to be eliminated as a hindrance to the global economic structure. Hence the recent ideological and economic war against the Afrikaner to destroy apartheid was a continuation of the Boer Wars under other slogans, but with the same aim: to capture the wealth of southern Africa—in the name of “human rights”—for the sake of the same kind of plutocracy which had fought the Afrikaners’ forefathers a century previously.
[224] Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, Book II, ch. 12.
[225] Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s “Green Party” (Buckinghamshire: The Kensal Press, 1985), p. 91.
[226] Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), trans. Vivian Bird (Torrance, Cal.: The Noontide Press, 1982), p. 268.
[227] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 326.
[228] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 338.
[229] Ralph Hewins, Quisling: Prophet Without Honour (London: W. H. Allen, 1965), p. 201. Hewins, a wartime journalist, wrote his biography to amend for the part he had played in portraying Quisling as the epitome of “treason” (p. 11).
[230] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 333.
[231] Hewins, Quisling, p. 9.
[232] Hewins, Quisling, p. 55.
[233] Vidkun Quisling, Russia and Ourselves (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931), p. 275.
[234] Hewins, Quisling, p. 208.
[235] Hewins summarizes the situation when writing: “The whole myth of unprovoked aggression by Germany should be abandoned. It is incredible and does grievous injustice to the ‘quislings’ who are quite wrongly alleged to have engineered the German Occupation. There is no truth in this sinister legend” (Quisling, p. 198).
[236] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 357.
[237] Knut Hamsun, “Real Brotherhood,” Berlin-Tokyo-Rome, February 1942. Quoted in Ferguson, Enigma, p. 365.
[238] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 359.
[239] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 369–70.
[240] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 374–75.
[241] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 383.
[242] Knut Hamsun, “Adolf Hitler,” Aftenposten, May 7, 1945, p. 1. Quoted in Ferguson, Enigma, p. 386.
[243] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 387.
[244] Hewins, Quisling, pp. 357–58. Hewins notes that these thousands of Norwegians were jailed for years often without charge or trial, interrogated for eight hours a time, subjected to “eeling” (being dragged back and forth across broken stones), and a starvation diet of 800 calories a day. “Many prisoners died of malnutrition or starvation, and limbs swollen from privation were a commonplace. Hundreds, if not thousands, died of dysentery and tuberculosis epidemics. Hundreds more bear the scars of kicking, beating, and brutality of their guards” (Quisling, pp. 357–58).
[245] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 387–88.
[246] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 389–90.
[247] Knut Hamsun, On Overgrown Paths (1949) (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968).
[248] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 407.
[249] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 408.
[250] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 409.
[251] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 410.
[252] On Overgrown Paths was also published simultaneously in German and Swedish editions (Ferguson, Enigma, p. 416).
[253] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 421.
[254] Anonymous, “Knut Hamsun: Saved by Stalin?,” trans, Greg Johnson, Counter-Currents/North American New Right, http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/knut-hamsun-saved-by-stalin/. The title of the article refers to Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister Wyacheslav Molotov’s intervention in favor of Hamsun in 1945, stating: “it would be regrettable to see Norway condemning this great writer to the gallows.”
[255] Ezra Pound, Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization, ed. Noel Stock (Chicago: Regnery, 1960), p. 209.
[256] Who’s Who in America, 1969–1970.
[257] Noel Stock, Poet in Exile: Ezra Pound (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1964), p. 10.
[258] Stock, Poet in Exile, p. 30.
[259] Eliot, like most of the individuals considered in this book, was concerned that industrialism molded “bodies of men and women—of all classes—detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words a mob.” Eliot advocated an organic society based on the maintenance and invigoration of classes, including the aristocratic, each with its own valuable social function. T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1948), p. 48. He was not however an advocate of Fascism for Britain but believed in “Toryism,” founded on religion and monarchism (Eliot, The Criterion, October 1931, p. 71).
[260] Stock, Poet in Exile, p. 55.
[261] Giovanni Cianci, “Pound and Futurism,” Blast 3 (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), p. 63. Blast 3 is a 1984 compilation of Vorticist articles by admirers of Wyndham Lewis.
[262] Eliot wrote that Pound had perhaps done more than anyone to keep Futurism out of England, and had objected to it as being “incompatible with any principle of form.” Eliot, “Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry,” 1917, reprinted in To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), pp. 174–75.
[263] Cianci, “Pound and Futurism,” Blast 3, p. 66.
[264] Blast 3, “Ezra Pound, Radio Speech #30,” April 26, 1942, p. 60.
[266] John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 25.
[267] Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, p. 25.