For the first time we get what we have got from no Russian, neither Tolstoi nor Dostoievsky nor any of them, a real, positive view on life. It is as if the pagan Russian had wakened up in Rozanov, a kind of Rip van Winkle, and was just staggering at what he saw. His background is the vast old pagan background, the phallic. And in front of this, the tortured complexity of Christian civilization — what else can we call it? — is a kind of phantasmagoria to him.
He is the first Russian, as far as I am concerned, who has ever said anything to me. And his vision is full of passion, vivid, valid. He is the first to see that immortality is in the vividness of life, not in the loss of life. The butterfly becomes a whole revelation to him: and to us.
When Rozanov is wholly awake, and a new man, a risen man, the living and resurrected pagan, then he is a great man and a great seer, and perhaps, as he says himself, the first Russian to emerge. Speaking of Tolstoi and Leontiev and Dostoievsky, Rozanov says: “I speak straight out what they dared not even suspect. I speak because after all I am more of a thinker than they. That is all.” . . . “But the problem (in the case of Leontiev and Dostoievsky) is and was about anti-Christianity, about the victory over the very essence of Christianity, over that terrible avitalism. Whereas from him, from the phallus everything flows.”
When Rozanov is in this mood, and in this vision, he is not dual, nor divided against himself. He is one complete thing. His vision and his passion are positive, non-tragical.
Then again he starts to Russianize, and he comes in two. When he becomes aware of himself, and personal, he is often ridiculous, sometimes pathetic, sometimes a bore, and almost always “dual.” Oh, how they love to be dual, and divided against themselves, these Dostoievskian Russians! It is as good as a pose: always a Mary- Mary-quite-contrary business. “The great horror of the human soul consists in this, that while thinking of the Madonna it at the same time does not cease thinking of Sodom and of its sins; and the still greater horror is that even in the very midst of Sodom it does not forget the Madonna, it yearns for Sodom and the Madonna, and this at one and the same time, without any discord.”
The answer to that is, that Sodom and Madonna-ism are two halves of the same movement, the mere tick-tack of lust and asceticism, pietism and pornography. If you’re not pious, you won’t be pornographical, and vice versa. If there are no saints, there’ll be no sinners. If there were no ascetics, there’d be no lewd people. If you divide the human psyche into two halves, one half will be white, the other black. It’s the division itself which is pernicious. The swing to one extreme causes the swing to the other. The swing towards Immaculate Madonna-ism inevitably causes the swing back to the whore of prostitution, then back again to the Madonna, and so ad infinitum. But you can’t blame the soul for this. All you have to blame is the craven, cretin human intelligence, which is always seeking to get away from its own centre.
But Rozanov, when he isn’t Russianizing, is the first Russian really to see it, and to recover, if unstably, the old human wholeness.
So that this book is extremely interesting, and really important. We get impatient with the Russianizing. And yet, with Gollerbach’s Introduction and the letters at the end, we do get to know all we want to know about Rozanov, personally. It is not of vast importance, what he was personally. If he behaved perversely, he was never, like Dostoievsky, inwardly perverse, and when he says he was not “born rightly,” he is only yelping like a Dostoievsky pup.
It is the voice of the new man in him, not the Dostoievsky whelp, that means something. And it means a great deal. We shall wait for a full translation of The Apocalypse of Our Times, and of Oriental Motifs. Rozanov matters, for the future.
The Peep Show, by Walter Wilkinson
When I was a budding author, just before the war, I used to hear Ford Hueffer asserting that every man could write one novel, and hinting that he ought to be encouraged to do it. The novel, of course, would probably be only a human document. Nevertheless, it would be worth while, since every life is a life.
There was a subtle distinction drawn, in those halcyon days of talk “about” things, between literature and the human documents. The latter was the real thing, mind you, but it wasn’t art. The former was art, you must know, but — but — it wasn’t the raw beefsteak of life, it was the dubious steak-and-kidney pie. Now you must choose: the raw beefsteak of life, or the suspicious steak-and-kidney pie of the public restaurant of art.
Perhaps that state of mind and that delicate stomach for art has passed away. To me, literary talk was always like a rattle that literary men spun to draw attention to themselves. But The Peep Show reminds me of the old jargon. They would have called it “A charming human document,” and have descanted on the naive niceness of the unsophisticated author. It used to seem so delightful, to the latter-day litterateur, to discover a book that was not written by a writer. “Oh, he’s not a writer, you know! That’s what makes it so delightful!”
The Peep Show is a simple and unpretentious account of a young man who made his own puppets and went round for a few weeks in Somerset and Devon, two or three years ago, in the holiday season, giving puppet shows. It wasn’t Punch and Judy, because the showman, though not exactly a high-brow, was neither exactly a low-brow. He believed in the simple life: which means nuts, vegetables, no meat, tents, fresh air, nature, and niceness. Now this puppet showman was naturally vegetarian, and naturally nice, with the vices naturally left out: a nice modern young fellow, who had enjoyed William Morris’s News from Nowhere immensely, as a boy. One might say, a grandson of the William Morris stock, but a much plainer, more unpretentious fellow than his cultural forebears. And really “of the people.” And really penniless.
But he is not a high-brow: has hardly heard of Dostoievsky, much less read him: and the “Works of William Shakespeare, in one volume,” which accompanied the pupDet show for the first week, is just a standing joke to the showman. As if anybody ever did read Shakespeare, actuallyl That’s the farce of it. Bill Shakespeare! “Where’s the works of the immortal William? — Say, are you sitting on Big Bill in one vol.?”
The author has very little to do with culture, whether in the big sense or the little! But he is a simple lifer. And as a simple lifer he sets out, with much trepidation, to make his living by showing his “reformed” puppets: not so brutal, beery, and beefy, as Punch; more suitable to the young, in every way. Still, they actually are charming puppets.
The book is an absolutely simple and unaffected account of the two months’ or six-weeks’ tour, from the Cotswolds down through Ilfracombe to Bideford, then back inland, by Taunton and Wells. It was mostly a one-man show: the author trundled his “sticks” before him, on a pair of old bath-chair wheels.
And, curiously, the record of those six weeks makes a book. Call it a human document, call it literature, I don’t know the difference. The style is, in a sense, amateur: yet the whole attempt was amateur, that whole Morris aspect of life is amateur. And therefore the style is perfect: even, in the long run, poignant. The very banalities at last have the effect of the mot juste. “It is an exquisite pleasure to find oneself so suddenly in the sweet morning air, to tumble out of bed, to clamber over a stone wall and scramble across some rushy dunes down to the untrodden seashore, there to take one’s bath in the lively breakers.”
That is exactly how the cleverest youth writes, in an essay on the seaside, at night school. There is an inevitability about its banality, the “exquisite pleasure,” the “sweet morning air,” to “tumble out of bed” — which in actuality was carefully crawling out of a sleeping sack — ; the “clamber over a stone wall,” the “scramble across some rushy [sic] dunes” to the “untrodden shore,” the “bath” in the “lively breakers”: it is almost a masterpiece of cliches. It is the way thousands and thousands of the cleverest of the “ordinary” young fellows write, who have had just a touch more than our “ordinary” education, and who have a certain limpidity of character, and not much of the old Adam in them. It is what
the “ordinary” young man, who is “really nice,” does write. You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writer. It is the something vicious, old-adamish, incompatible to the “ordinary” world, inside a man, which gives an edge to his awareness, and makes it impossible for him to talk of a “bath” in “lively breakers.”
The puppet showman has not got this something vicious, so his perceptions lack fine edge. He can’t help being “nice.” And niceness is negative only too often. But, still, he is not too nice.
So the book is a book. It is not insipid. It is not banal. All takes place in the banal world: nature is banal, all the people are banal, save, perhaps, the very last “nobber”: and all the philosophy is banal. And yet it is all just. “If I were a philosopher expounding a new theory of living, inventing a new ‘ism,’ I should call myself a holidayist, for it seems to me that the one thing the world needs to put it right is a holiday. There is no doubt whatever about the sort of life nice people want to lead. Whenever they get the chance, what do they do but go away to the country or the seaside, take off their collars and ties and have a good time playing at childish games and contriving to eat some simple [sic] food very happily without all the encumbrances of chairs and tables. This world might be quite a nice place if only simple people would be content to be simple and be proud of it; if only they would turn their backs on these pompous politicians and ridiculous Captains of Industry who, when you come to examine them, turn out to be very stupid, ignorant people, who are simply suffering from an unhappy mania of greediness; who are possessed with perverse and horrible devils which make them stick up smoking factories in glorious Alpine valleys, or spoil some simple country by digging up and exploiting its decently buried mineral resources; or whose moral philosophy is so patently upside down when they attempt to persuade us that quarrelling, and fighting, and wars, or that these ridiculous accumulations of wealth are the most important, instead of the most undesirable things in life. If only simple people would ignore them and behave always in the jolly way they do on a seashore what a nice world we might have to live in.
“Luckily Nature has a way with her, and we may rest assured that this wretched machine age will be over in a few years’ time. It has grown up as quickly as a mushroom, and like a mushroom it has no stability. It will die.”
But this is just “philosophy,” and by the way. It is the apotheosis of ordinariness. The narrative part of the book is the succinct revelation of ordinariness, as seen from the puppet showman’s point of view. And, owing to the true limpidity and vicelessness of the author, ordinariness becomes almost vivid. The book is a book. It is not something to laugh at. It is so curiously true. And it has therefore its own touch of realization of the tragedy of human futility: the futility even of ordinariness. It contains the ordinary man’s queer little bitter disappointment in life, because life, the life of people, is more ordinary than even he had imagined. The puppet showman is a bit of a pure idealist, in a fairly ordinary sense. He really doesn’t want money. He really is not greedy. He really is shy of trespassing on anybody. He really is nice. He starts out by being too nice.
What is his experience? He struggles and labours, and is lucky if he can make five shillings in a day’s work. When it rains, when there’s no crowd, when it’s Sunday, when the police won’t allow you to show, when the local authorities won’t allow you to pitch the sticks — then there is nothing doing. Result — about fifteen shillings a week earnings. That is all the great and noble public will pay for a puppet show. And you can live on it.
It is enough to embitter any man, to see people gape at a show, then melt away when the hat comes around. Not even a penny that they’re not forced to pay. Even on their holidays. Yet they give shillings to go to the dirty kinema.
The puppet showman, however, refuses to be embittered. He remembers those who do pay, and pay heartily: sixpence the maximum. People are on the whole “nice” to him. Myself, I should want to spit on such niceness. The showman, however, accepts it. He is cheery by determination. When I was a boy among the miners, the question that would have been flung at the puppet showman would have been: “Lad, wheer’st keep thy ba’s?” For his unfailing forbearance and meekness! It is admirable, but . . . Anyhow, what’s the good of it? They just trod on him, all the same: all those masses of ordinary people more vulgar than he was; because there is a difference between vulgarity and ordinariness. Vulgarity is low and greedy. The puppet showman is never that. He is at least pure, in the ordinary sense of the word: never greedy nor base.
And if he is not embittered, the puppet showman is bitterly disappointed and chagrined. No, he has to decide that the world is not altogether a nice place to show puppets in. People are “nice,” but by jove, they are tight. They don’t want puppets. They don’t want anything but chars-a-bancs and kinemas, girlies and curlies and togs and a drink. Callous, vulgar, less than human the ordinary world looks, full of “nice” people, as one reads this book. And that holi- day region of Ilfracombe and Bideford, those country lanes of Devonshire reeling with chars-a-bancs and blurting blind dust and motor-horns, or mud and motor-horns, all August: that is hell! England my England! Who would be a holidayist? Oh, people are “nice”! But you’ve got to be vulgar, as well as ordinary, if you’re going to stand them.
To me, a book like The Peep Show reveals England better than twenty novels by clever young ladies and gentlemen. Be absolutely decent in the ordinary sense of the word, be a “holidayist” and a firm believer in niceness; and then set out into the world of all those nice people, putting yourself more or less at their mercy. Put yourself at the mercy of the nice holiday-making crowd. Then come home, absolutely refusing to have your tail between your legs, but — “singing songs in praise of camping and tramping and the stirring life we jolly showmen lead.” Because absolutely nobody has been really nasty to you. They’ve all been quite nice. Oh, quite! Even though you are out of pocket on the trip.
All the reader can say, at the end of this songful, cheerful book is: God save me from the nice, ordinary people, and from ever having to make a living out of them. God save me from being “nice.”
The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow
Dr. Trigant Burrow is well known as an independent psychologist through the essays and addresses he has published in pamphlet form from time to time. These have invariably shown the spark of original thought and discovery. The gist of all these essays now fuses into this important book, the latest addition to the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method.
Dr. Burrow is that rare thing among psychiatrists, a humanly honest man. Not that practitioners are usually dishonest. They are intellectually honest, professionally honest: all that. But that other simple thing, human honesty, does not enter in, because it is primarily subjective; and subjective honesty, which means that a man is honest about his own inward experiences, is perhaps the rarest thing, especially among professionals. Chiefly, of course, because men, and especially men with a theory, don’t know anything about their own inward experiences.
Here Dr. Burrow is a rare and shining example. He set out, years ago, as an enthusiastic psychoanalyst and follower of Freud, working according to the Freudian method, in America. And gradually the sense that something was wrong, vitally wrong, in the theory and in the practice of psychoanalysis both, invaded him. Like any truly honest man, he turned and asked himself what it was that was wrong, with himself, with his methods, and with the theory according to which he was working.
This book is the answer, a book for every man interested in the human consciousness to read carefully. Because Dr. Burrow’s conclusions, sincere, almost naive in their startled emotion, are far- reaching, and vital.
First, in the criticism of the Freudian method, Dr. Burrow found, in his clinical experiences, that he was always applying a theory. Patients came to be analysed, and the analyst was there to examine with open mind. But the mind could not be open, because the patient’s neuros
is, all the patient’s experience, had to be fitted to the Freudian theory of the inevitable incest-motive.
And gradually Dr. Burrow realized that to fit life every time to a theory is in itself a mechanistic process, a process of unconscious repression, a process of image-substitution. All theory that has to be applied to life proves at last just another of these unconscious images which the repressed psyche uses as a substitute for life, and against which the psychoanalyst is fighting. The analyst wants to break all this image business, so that life can flow freely. But it is useless to try to do so by replacing in the unconscious another image — this time, the image, the fixed motive of the incest-complex.
Theory as theory is all right. But the moment you apply it to life, especially to the subjective life, the theory becomes mechanistic, a substitute for life, a factor in the vicious unconscious. So that while the Freudian theory of the unconscious and of the incest-motive is valuable as a description of our psychological condition, the moment you begin to apply it, and make it master of the living situation, you have begun to substitute one mechanistic or unconscious illusion for another.
In short, the analyst is just as much fixed in his vicious unconscious as is his neurotic patient, and the will to apply a mechanical incest-theory to every neurotic experience is just as sure an evidence of neurosis, in Freud or in the practitioner, as any psychologist could ask.
So much for the criticism of the psychoanalytic method.
If, then, Dr. Burrow asks himself, it is not sex-repression which is at the root of the neurosis of modern life, what is it? For certainly, according to his finding, sex-repression is not the root of the evil.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1036