modernism: what is it?

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I got involved in a long conversation this morning about England’s perceived failure to produce convincing Modernist works – a perception I tried to counter, first with the statement that, although Pound and Eliot were American, England was the place where they were able to do their work. But the argument persisted – not a new argument either, as it happens – that England is prone to “mimsiness” and tininess, and that its Modernism – lacking conviction in its own identity – attempts to blend with a pastoral sensibility that it simply can’t fit. Further countering this with reflections on Ben Nicholson, Stanley Spencer (though I forgot his name, of course; this is the kind of thing that can happen when arguing a point over bourgeois coffee and sausages) et al, it seemed I had hit a wall, a wall of formalism. That is, a tendency of English modernist artists to become preoccupied with form over intellectual substance, which of course is in keeping with a kind of pastoral anti-intellectualism for which England remains so well-known even now.

I know: this all sounds very silly. (nb. Do, please, scroll all the way down that link… it’s all a bit post-modernist & intertextual, though I can’t promise any lines from “Oh My Darling Clementine”.)

But the more we went into the topic, the more European Modernism looked like an extreme position people were forced into by circumstances of world war, genocide, revolution – a degree of hardness only arrived at through extremes of heat and pressure – a dependence on intellect, perhaps, when all else has failed – or desperation for a plan in the face of catastrophe – or possibly simply the need to look forward when the past has been destroyed, which the mind will compensate for by rejecting the past.

The discussion ranged to America, which I said had benefited culturally, along with England, through its ability to take in refugees from Europe, who then continued their activities here, enriching the native soil incalculably. I posited that if Europe’s intellectual and artistic life had contracted during the War, those of England and America had correspondingly expanded, and that this was arguably the best thing that could have happened to America’s cultural life.

In the end the position we were arrived at was that it was largely the modernists, pace Eliot and Pound, who were the right-wingers, and that one reason Modernism as a movement could never really take off here was the inbuilt English dread of any kind of orthodoxy of thought: the contrariness of a nation of eccentrics whose motto is “A man’s home is his castle,” and who feel inclined to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously. Which basically, both the Modernists and the fascists did.

(Cue image of a load of toffs in the thirties, laughing uproariously at Oswald Mosley’s funny little ways and lack of a proper dinner jacket, or somesuch. And I know: in Cable Street they weren’t laughing. But ultimately, did this laughter help to prevent I Was the Son of a Cable Street?)

Of course, this was morning-coffee talk and exploratory to boot: so I don’t really want anyone telling me I’m anti-Modernist or whatever: I’ve read my Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport with the rest. Remarking on how strange the turns this conversation had taken, we were content to leave it there in favour of more coffee and the day itself. But imagine my interest later this evening on reading a comment by the “New Formalist” poet Mark Jarman, in reply to a post about the use of the term “New Formalism” on Alfred Corn’s weblog, that “the dirty secret of Modernism… was and is fascism.”

Now, it is clear to me that this post of Alfred’s raised some old Poetry War hackles and that – given the commenters and the disjointed nature of some of the rejoinders – there are possibly some personality issues at play here. However, as surprised as I was by the turn of my morning ruminations I was more surprised to see them said outright, like that, right there.

Is there something everyone else has figured out ages ago, except Ms Baroque? Or is this whole train of thought completely spurious? And is it really true that, as arrived at over the cafétiere this morning, we should be celebrating this particular pigheaded local obtuseness that insists on taking people down a peg or two instead of humouring all their intellectual conceits?

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