The Eldritch Evola & Others

by James O'Meara

  D: FINALE

  Gilmore’s epilogue tells the dispiriting, but perhaps inevitable, tale of the “schisms” that have developed among those attempting to safeguard and extend Partch’s legacy. Ironically, most of them seem to revolve around interpretations of integrity: Ben Johnston having completed after Partch’s death the project for an integrated system of just and tempered notation that Partch had abandoned in 1933, should his music be published in that more user-friendly way, or in its “original” form? Should Partch’s filing cabinet of a lifetime’s writing and ephemera be edited or even censored, or published “as is”?

  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, much, if Partch’s particular instruments are preserved, or his music ever played again. Nor does it matter whether you, after following the links below, listen to Partch’s music and decide you “like” it, or not; or that it’s “better” than Wagner, or not, whatever those words could mean.

  What I’ve been suggesting in all this hoo-haw about tonality, has been that we need to stop idolizing Wagner, certainly stop imitating him, or anyone else, including Partch, but take Partch as a model and inspiration, far more relevant to our times than Wagner, and make our own Aryan music.

  Contra my critics, I have no need to lure our youth away from Wagner, or the classical tradition. The music is just fine, and the kids can make up their own minds. But using classical samples to 4/4 rock songs is not the way forward for our culture. The system of ET is our prison, both musically and culturally.

  Why not, then, admit the problem and look for a solution? Of course, slogans and programs are no good by themselves; they need, as Partch would say, corporeality; they need to be embodied in imitable figures. That is the function of mythology, or of the classical education given to the British Empire’s future servants. That, I suppose, is the function of Wagner, and why his figure is treated as taboo.

  As we’ve noted, Partch himself recognized Wagner as a forerunner, but he also recognized that Wagner failed; partly for his own idiosyncratic reasons, but also because of the system, ET, as well as the tradition of abstract music itself, both of which he expanded, to his credit, but failed to overcome.

  Let us choose for ourselves, and let us chose a different figure.273 A man of our time, and our nation. A man who, unlike Wagner, spurned the yoke of patronage, and like Siegfried, wandered in the wilderness until, like Siegfried, he returned to smash the system of ET as Siegfried broke Wotan’s spear.

  Writing about Robert Howard and his barbaric creation Conan, W. J. Guillaume has emphasized the strategic importance of that integrity of mind and body, art and science, that Partch called “corporeality”:

  Through his genius Howard has provided us with a medium for re-awakening and generously nourishing our inner-Aryan essence and re-infusing ourselves with the instincts and intuitions—the crucial personal qualities—which put us back in contact with ourselves individually and collectively. . . .

  Conan teaches the critical lesson that intelligence coupled with will is what brings victory and survival: only when mind operates with muscle, brain with bulk, will their possessors triumph. In today’s struggle the technician must be imbued with the ancient Aryan warrior spirit if he is to defeat the Jew and the colored swarms. He must become, in short, one of Nietzsche’s “new barbarians,” that superior stock of highly evolved White men who have blended their pure, natural instincts with the scientific outlook. Howard’s Conan is a valuable catalyst in this blending of essences.274

  Harry Partch: He’s like our Wagner, only better.

  RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  Bob Gilmore, Harry Partch: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

  Thomas McGeary, ed., Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos (Champaign, Il.: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

  Harry Partch, Genesis of a Music, second edition, enlarged (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974).

  Corporeal Meadows, http://www.corporeal.com/, is an extensive site devoted to Partch by Jonathan Szanto.

  RECOMMENDED LISTENING

  Enclosure Six: Delusion of the Fury (Innova, 1999).

  For sheer sonic magic, and incorporating all of Partch’s synthesis of music, drama, movement, and visual wonder, there couldn’t be a more potent introduction to the sound of Harry Partch. Written late in his life, with the largest ensemble of instruments available (and performed by arguable his best ensemble), it is hard to overstate the importance of this recording being available again. Especially if your ears lean towards instrumental music, this is the one to place in the player and turn it up to 11!275

  The Bewitched—A Dance Satire (Composers Recordings, 1997).

  Set in the mystical realm of the University of Illinois . . . Partch’s 10 vignettes satirize aspects of collegiate life but in the style of ancient ritual theater . . . (representative titles: “Visions Fill the Eyes of a Defeated Basketball Team in the Shower Room,” “The Cognoscenti Are Plunged into a Deep Descent While at Cocktails”).

  Musically, The Bewitched is a good introduction to Partch’s longer pieces. It is written for a combination of his originally created instruments and some traditional wind and stringed instruments. While this music is definitely experimental, what hits me most as I grow older, is how familiar and assessable it really is. . . . Partch is a great composer to listen to, especially if you are new to the avant-garde and want to listen to something that is both challenging but not too discordant. And The Bewitched is a great place to start listening to this wonderful American eccentric. (Amazon reviews)

  Harry Partch explains just intonation:

  http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/musicmavericks/talk_partch_explains_just_intonation

  Partch explains his version of just intonation, “monophonic”:

  http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/musicmavericks/talk_partch_monophonic_not_equal

  Partch compares tempered triads with true triads:

  http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/musicmavericks/talk_partch_true_vs_tempered

  Bitter Music in Natural Acoustics with Harry Partch (A Collection of YouTube videos, including Daphne of the Dunes):

  http://www.wilderutopia.com/performance/bitter-music-natural-acoustics-harry-partch/

  RALPH ADAMS CRAM:

  WILD BOY OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE

  “We all understand that intriguing tribal rites are acted out beyond the groomed exteriors and purple-tinged bow windows of Louisburg Square, but except for what some literary, chosen-few Bostonians have divulged, we don’t know what these coded rituals are, and never will.”

  —Truman Capote, “Hidden Gardens”276

  “Great cathedrals, such as colonial Spain built between Mexico City and Buenos Aires, have had little appeal to a people disparaging greatness and grandeur.”

  —Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right 277

  Robert Crunden’s The Superfluous Men: Conservative Critics of American Culture, 1900–1945

  278 is a valuable collection of representative works—essays, chapters, letters, reviews—by the usual suspects of the “Old Right”—Mencken, Nock, Santayana, Davidson, Tate. It’s a great second-hand bargain at Amazon, which makes up for the annoying little “introductions” Crunden contributes, which dismiss his, and his reader’s, supposed objects of interest in such terms as “emotional extremism masquerading as cultural analysis” or “hardly rates as good political science,” whatever that means; for someone with such PC contempt for those who dare to wade outside the “mainstream,” it’s puzzling why he felt the need to spend the time on this anthology—which was supposedly originally twice as large.

  One name was unfamiliar to me, at least, and even Crunden calls him “the most neglected” of his subjects: Ralph Adams Cram. And imagine my excitement when reading on and finding Cram described as: “[A]n Anglo-Saxon racist, an connoisseur of Oriental art forms, a decadent homosexual, an apostle of ‘anti-modernism,’ a hopeless political reactionary [hopele
ss? What other kind is there?] and the most gifted Gothic architect in [early XXth century America].” Sounds like Cram was one of the originals of what I’ve called, on my blog and in my book The Homo and the Negro, Wild Boys!

  Apparently, there’s only one “serious study” of Cram, a two volume work by Douglass Shand-Tucci279 who, as you can guess from his fancy name, has “a very trendy obsession with issue of sexuality,” although that’s just Crude Crunden sticking his nose up again.

  Since our first essay for Counter-Currents featured Noël Coward280 as an exemplar of the “Bohemian Tory” ideal promoted by Russell Kirk, it’s only appropriate that a far more positive review of the recently published second volume of Shand-Tucci’s biography can be found in Kirk’s journal The University Bookman.281

  According to the Amazon listing, Cram basically built America’s church and college landscape:

  Supervising architect at Princeton, consulting architect at Wellesley, and head of the MIT School of Architecture, he would also design most of New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the campus of Rice University, as well as important church and collegiate structures throughout the country. By the 1920s Cram had become a household name, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine.

  According to McCarthy’s review, his achievements extended far beyond architecture, however:

  He was a fine, and controversial, essayist; a novelist (Gothic, of course); a co-founder of Commonweal magazine, though Cram, a High Church Anglican, never became a Roman Catholic; also a co-founder in 1925 of the Medieval Academy of America and its journal, Speculum; and he was responsible for the first wide publication of Henry Adams’s Mont St. Michel and Chartres, which Adams had been reluctant to put into print.

  And all this, mind you, in addition to running what Shand-Tucci calls “a full-fledged homosexual monastery” at Caldey Abbey off the coast of Wales, while at the same time happily married to Elizabeth Read back in the USA. An architect’s Männerbund!

  And here’s a link to yet another alt-Right favorite: among Cram’s Gothic tales is “The Dead Valley,” of which no less than H. P. Lovecraft himself wrote, “the eminent architect and mediævalist Ralph Adams Cram achieves a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror through subtleties of atmosphere and description.”282

  It turns up most recently in the new Library of America volume American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps.283 I can attest to the effect of the story, but I was unaware of the Lovecraftian way the threads of Mr. Cram’s interests were circling around me.

  And speaking of popular writers with distinctive but critically abused prose styles, Cram apparently even influenced Ayn Rand!

  While her Howard Roark is usually taken to be based on Frank Lloyd Wright, Tucci points out that Roark’s contempt for modern pseudo-Gothic monstrosities (“buttresses supporting nothing” is Roark’s dismissive conclusion) is fully in line with Cram’s nuanced Medievalism, a kind of proto-archeofuturism, as expressed here: “Shall we restore a style? . . . Shall we recreate an amorphous medievalism and live listlessly in that fool’s paradise? On the contrary . . . We are retracing our steps to the great Christian Middle Ages, not that we may remain, but that we may achieve an adequate point of departure: what follows must take care of itself.”284

  Rather than futilely boasting “I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition,” as Roark does, Cram, as McCarthy says, wanted his architecture, “to be traditionalist without being antiquarian, to be modern without being rootless.”285

  Even the neo-con fuddy-duddies over at the First Things blog recently found some good in Cram:

  It’s not, of course, that we shouldn’t sometimes be frightened by full-throated architectural rhetoric. Far from it. It’s just that I can think of those more deserving of our fears than Cram. In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand created the architect Howard Roark (modeled after Wright), whose Wynand Building was to be “a gesture against the whole world . . . the last achievement of man on earth before mankind destroys itself.” In comparison to that, Cram was a kitten.286

  Kitten, eh?287 Let’s see how “cute” our Wild Boy becomes when the subject of politics come up.

  Like Lovecraft, Cram also came to approve of FDR’s New Deal; like most “Old Rightists,” he recognized the resemblance to Mussolini—but unlike these “old liberals,” he approved! “Anglo-Democracy . . . [would] be a democracy of status and of diversified function, under an hierarchical, not an egalitarian system of organization. In a word, it will be conditioned not by the quantitative standard but by the qualitative standard.”288

  “Anglo-Democracy” sounds a lot like Spengler’s “Prussian Socialism” or Yockey’s “Ethical Socialism,” and as advocated from time to time on this blog.289 It’s interesting, terminologically, that Cram’s “Anglo” qualifier picks out exactly what Spengler and Yockey would dissociate their ideas from; for them, England and the Anglo-Saxons were the veritable “nation of shopkeepers” promoting the money-centric idea of equality.

  We can get a better idea of Cram’s ideas on equality and elitism in one of the essays that Crunden reprints, which had decisively formed Albert J. Nock’s “misanthropic” social philosophy. As McCarthy reports, Nock’s “view of mass man’s lowly level was crystallized by Cram’s 1932 American Mercury essay, “Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings.”

  “We do not behave like human beings because most of us do not fall within that classification,” Cram concluded, noting that only a handful of historically exceptional individuals haven risen above the mass of mediocrity and savagery. “What kinship is there between St. Francis and John Calvin; the Earl of Strafford and Thomas Cromwell; Robert E. Lee and Trotsky; Edison and Capone? None except their human form. They of the great list behave like our idea of the human being; they of the ignominious sub-stratum do not—because they are not.” Cram’s doctrine was not as misanthropic as it might seem: He valued the herd of humanity as both precious in the eyes of God and as the seedbed from which the truly human few could arise. But he rejected egalitarianism, presentism, and the thesis of evolutionary progress; civilization’s “standard of today is no whit higher than that which obtained in the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, Periclean Athens, the Byzantium of Justinian or the Europe of St. Louis,” he averred.

  Again, the credo of the Bohemian Tory, who loves the masses—at least, his own people, such as Cram’s Anglo-Saxon race—as a necessary seedbed for creating the great men that other races will never be able to equal or surpass; rather than as raw material for some impossible utopia of equality after suitable . . . re-educating.

  Is it any surprise that such a towering figure of the American spirit is unknown today?

  Admit it, you’ve never heard of him before. And why should you have, since our “disseminators of culture” are doing all they can to hide him in plain sight—so much more effective than a ban, which might make him interesting.

  The recently published (2010) Penguin Classic edition of Book of Tea for example, provides a bare handful of notes, unlike the usual massive armature, one of which refers the reader to a contemporaneous but reversed appreciation, West to East, in a work by another Boston aesthete, identified as “Ralph N. Cram”—admittedly, the author’s original error, but apparently not worthy of correction by the famous Penguin editors.

  Meanwhile, 2010 also brought us the Tuttle reissue of the work referred to, Impressions of Japanese Architecture and the Allied Arts, which, while at least getting the author’s name right, is shorn of its subtitle, as well as its first chapter. No explanation of the first change is given, but the editor, one Mira Locher, informs us that

  Although in many ways Ralph Adams Cram was a radical thinker for his time, he was still a product of an era in which the “Oriental” race was understood as essentially different from and incomprehensible to Westerners. . . . Hence the publisher has chosen omit [sic] the chapter and . . . [his] musings on race.290

  Radical good, but not too radical.
Yes, the little academic harridan, herself or her publisher unable to compose a grammatical sentence in English, dares to fiddle with the prose of a master certified by Lovecraft himself! One wonders why if, as implied, Cram thought the Japanese to be “incomprehensible,” he would bother to write about them at all. Why not discuss the language of whales instead?

  Here, then, is the conclusion of the chapter from whose Lovecraftian horror Ms. Locher has shielded your innocent eyes (thanks to the folks at archive.org):

  I do not mean to imply by what I have said above that it is impossible to judge it by western standards: in so far as these are universal and neither local nor special, Japanese art stands the test as well as that of our own race. Indeed, I am not sure that it may not possess a distinct value in enabling us to discriminate between those standards universally accepted, which are fixed and for all time, and those others, equally accepted, but arbitrary, ephemeral, unsound. All art meets and is judged on one common and indestructible basis: but each manifestation possesses numberless other qualities, many of them of almost equal value, but peculiar, intimate, and personal. These must be judged by other standards, and it is here that I think we shall fail in our estimate of Japanese art, since the two races are at present absolutely unable to think in the same terms. If, failing to apprehend these minor qualities, we can separate them, and lay them, for the time, to one side, so revealing the kernel which contains the very essence of all, we shall be able, if not to judge Japanese art justly, at least to realize the position it takes in the body of art that belongs to mankind as Man. (pp. 23–24)