Literary Giants Literary Catholics (25 page)

     In havoc of hideous tyranny withstood,

     And terror of atomic doom foreseen;

     
Deliver us from ourselves
.

     Chained to the wheel of progress uncontrolled;

     World masterers with a foolish frightened face;

     Loud speakers, leaderless and sceptic-souled;

     Aeroplane angels, crashed from glory and grace;

     
Deliver us from ourselves
.

     In blood and bone contentiousness of nations,

     And commerce’s competitive re-start,

     Armed with our marvelous monkey innovations,

     And unregenerate still in head and heart;

     
Deliver us from ourselves
.

Unlike his previous poems of protest, this time the poem was also a prayer. The prayer was answered. Several years later, like Sitwell, Sassoon was received into the peaceful arms of Mother Church.

The final words should belong not to Sassoon, the war poet, but to Eliot, the poet of the wasteland. Significantly and appropriately, the words, published in 1944, are not words of protest but words of praise. Ultimately these writers, Sassoon, Sitwell, Lewis, Waugh and Eliot himself, emerged from the infernal wasteland of modernity into the purgatorial conversion to traditional Christianity, which carries with it the paradisal promise of eternal life. Eliot ends his
Four Quartets
, as Dante ends his
Divine Comedy
, with a vision of the eternal Home that awaits the faithful soul in this vale of tears, this land of exile, this wasteland:

     And all shall be well and

     All manner of thing shall be well

     When the tongues of flame are in-folded

     Into the crowned knot of fire

     And the fire and the rose are one.

21

____

Modernity and Tradition

E
DITH SITWELL WAS A SHOCK TROOPER
of the poetic avant-garde, a champion of modernity who reveled in the use of shock tactics to push the boundaries of poetry, angering traditionalists in the process. Perhaps, therefore, she would seem an unlikely convert to the creed and traditions of the Catholic Church. Yet, like her friend “the ultramodern novelist” Evelyn Waugh, she would come to realize that the liberating power of orthodoxy could transfuse tradition with the dynamism of truth.

Born into privilege, as the daughter of Sir George Sitwell and Lady Ida Sitwell of Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, and as the granddaughter of Lord Londesborough, Sitwell would also seem to be an unlikely revolutionary. Yet, from the appearance of her first published poem, “Drowned Suns”, in the
Daily Mirror
in 1913, she had sent tremors through the landscapes of literary convention. The tremors grew to seismic levels between the years of 1916 and 1921 with her editorship of
Wheels
, an annual anthology of new verse. The poetry selected by Sitwell for these anthologies was not only self-consciously modern in style but was superciliously contemptuous of the flaccid and idyllic quietism of the so-called Georgian poets.

In 1922 Sitwell published
Façade
, her most controversial poem to date, which, accompanied by the music of William Walton, was given a stormy public reading in London. In the same year, the publication of Eliot’s
The Waste Land
had polarized opinion still further between the “ancients” and the “moderns”. A reviewer in the
Manchester Guardian
called
The Waste Land
“a mad medley” and “so much waste paper”, whereas a more sympathetic review in the
Times Literary Supplement
spoke of Eliot’s “poetic personality” as being “extremely sophisticated” and his poem as being an “ambitious experiment”. Clearly, the battle lines were being drawn for a very uncivil war of words between the forces of modernity and those of tradition. Poetry was in commotion.

G. K. Chesterton was critical of some of the modern trends in poetry, and the young C. S. Lewis was hostile to what he referred to contemptuously as “Eliotic” verse. It was, however, in the person of Alfred Noyes, a respected poet of the old guard, that Sitwell and Eliot found their most formidable foe.

Noyes had found himself out of favor and out of fashion in the atmosphere created by the moderns, and Sitwell had dismissed his poetry as “cheap linoleum”. Unprepared to take such abuse lightly, Noyes came out fighting, throwing down the gauntlet of tradition in defiance of modern trends.

The first blows were struck at a public debate held at the London School of Economics, at which Noyes and Sitwell were to discuss “the comparative value in old poetry and the new”. Edmund Gosse, who had agreed to chair the discussion, asked Noyes not to be too hard on his opponent. “Do not, I beg of you, use a weaver’s beam on the head of poor Edith.” Noyes, for his part, believed that he might become the victim of Sitwell’s vociferous supporters and could “suddenly be attacked by a furious flock of strangely coloured birds, frantically trying to peck my nose”.

Noyes’ quip was an act of sartorial sarcasm aimed at Sitwell’s flamboyant taste in clothes. She arrived for the debate dressed in a purple robe and gold laurel wreath, contrasting clashingly with Noyes’ sober American-cut suit and horn-rimmed spectacles. The contrast was sublimely appropriate, the dress addressing the issue.

The debate began uneasily when Edith asked if her supporters might sit on the platform with her. Noyes agreed but took advantage of the situation by telling the audience that he wished he could bring his supporters along as well, naming Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante and others. The riposte was effective, if a trifle unfair. Sitwell had not renounced any of these poets, and T. S. Eliot, the other “ultramodern” poet, was steeped in poetic tradition and was deeply devoted to Dante. Nonetheless, the
coup de théâtre
had the desired effect, and Sitwell shamefacedly sat alone on the platform with Noyes and Gosse.

Paradoxically, the debate proceeded with Sitwell defending innovation from a singularly traditionalist perspective. “We are always being called mad”, she complained. “If we are mad . . . at least we are mad in company with most of our great predecessors . . . Schumann. . . Coleridge and Wordsworth were all mad in turn.” She might have added that the romanticism of Coleridge and Wordsworth, considered very “modern” and avant-garde in its day, spawned the reaction against the “progressive” scientism of the anti-Catholic Enlightenment and was influential in the resurrection of medievalism in England in the form of the Gothic revival and the Oxford movement.

Equally paradoxically, Noyes defended tradition from the perspective that it was always “up-to-date”, declaring with the great French literary critic Sainte-Beuve that “true poetry is a contemporary of all ages”. Thus, there was, it seemed, a unity in their apparent division that neither poet perceived at the time.

This higher reality, or true realism, was largely lost in the increasingly vitriolic war of words that followed the much-publicized debate. In the furious controversy that raged in the press throughout the 1920s, the prevailing bias was in favor of the moderns. Eliot and Sitwell were popularly perceived as marching “hand in hand . . . in the vanguard of progress”, whereas the ancients, as the agents of reaction, merely sought to turn back the tide. Tides turn on their own, of course, but it was true at the time that the waves of sympathy were flowing, for the most part, with the moderns.

“Certain things are accepted in a lump by all the Moderns”, Chesterton complained in a review of a book by Noyes, “mainly because they are supposed (often wrongly) to be rejected with horror by all the Ancients.” Taking the example of Edgar Allan Poe, Chesterton remarked that the moderns hijacked their favorite ancients, bestowing honorary modernity on them. Poe had been “set apart as a Modern before the Moderns”, whereas he was “something much more important than a Modern . . . he was a poet.”

Noyes wrote that Chesterton was one of the few who “completely understood my defence of literary traditions, as well as my criticism of them”. Perhaps so. Yet Noyes had singularly failed to perceive that Sitwell, like Eliot, was “something much more important than a Modern. . . she was a poet”.

In 1929 Sitwell published
Gold Coast Customs
, a vision of the horror and hollowness of contemporary life that not only echoed Eliot in its purgatorial passion but that served as an early indication that she was on the road to religious conversion. Her sublimely sorrowful “Still Falls the Rain”, depicting the bombing of London during the Blitz in 1940, resonated with the bitter imagery of Christ’s Crucifixion and humanity’s perennial culpability,

     Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails

     Upon the Cross.

Most memorable, perhaps, were her “three poems of the Atomic Age”, inspired darkly by eyewitness descriptions of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. “The Shadow of Cain”, the first of the poems, was about “the fission of the world into warring particles, destroying and self-destructive. It is about the gradual migration of mankind, after that Second Fall of Man . . . into the desert of the Cold, towards the final disaster, the first symbol of which fell on Hiroshima.” The poem’s imagery was, she explained, “partly a physical description of the highest degree of cold, partly a spiritual description of this”.

Sitwell’s desire, spiritually, to come in from the cold drew her, ever more surely, to the warm embrace of the Church.

Another, more personal, influence on her slow progress toward Christianity was her admiration for the convert-poet Roy Campbell. She looked upon Campbell not only as a friend but as one of the few people who would defend her from her critics. “Roy Campbell represented a great deal to her”, recalled Elizabeth Salter in her memoir of Sitwell. “Not only was he a poet whom she greatly admired, but he was that rare thing in her life, a champion . . . and she responded to Roy Campbell’s championship with an entirely feminine gratitude.” The fact that her knight in shining armor also happened to be a vocal champion of the Church Militant had not gone unnoticed.

Edith Sitwell was finally received into the Catholic Church in August 1955. She asked Evelyn Waugh to be her godfather, and he recorded in his diary how she had appeared on the day of her reception “swathed in black like a sixteenth-century infanta”. Another guest, the actor Alec Guinness, who was soon to be received into the Church himself, remembered “her tall figure, swathed in black, looking like some strange, eccentric bird . . . She seemed like an ageing princess come home from exile.”

The happiest irony of all resided in the fact that Alfred Noyes, her bitterest enemy, had also been received into the Church many years earlier. In their reconciliation in the same spiritual communion, they had, symbolically and poetically, united modernity and tradition—the unity of ancient and modern in something greater than both.

22

_____

Bombast and Fire

R
OY CAMPBELL WAS CONSIDERED
by many of his peers, most notably T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell, as one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. Why then, one wonders, is he not as well known today as many lesser poets? The answer lies in his robust defense of unfashionable causes, both religious and political, but also, and more regrettably, in his unfortunate predilection for making powerful enemies. Seldom has a life been more fiery, more controversial and more full of friendship and enmity than that of this most mercurial of men.

Born in South Africa in 1901, Campbell learned to speak Zulu almost as soon as he had learned to speak English. “The Zulus are a highly intellectual people”, Campbell recorded in his first volume of autobiography “They have a very beautiful language, a little on the bombastic side and highly adorned. Its effect on me can be seen in
The Flaming Terrapin
. . . They take an enormous delight in conversation, analysing with the greatest subtlety and brilliance.”

It seems that Campbell’s own conversation conveyed more than a hint of this Zulu influence. Following his arrival at Oxford in 1919, his contemporaries were both bemused and beguiled by his tales, “a little on the bombastic side and highly adorned”, of the African bush. He soon earned himself the nickname of “Zulu”, and his reputation as a wild colonial boy was immortalized by his friend Percy Wyndham Lewis, who modeled the character of Zulu Blades in his novel
The Apes of God
on Campbell’s image at Oxford.

The African influence was also to the fore in the long, vibrant and colorful poem that established Campbell’s reputation.
The Flaming Terrapin
, published in 1924, was, according to one critic, “like a breath of new youth, like a love-affair to a lady in her fifties”.

“Among a crowd of poets writing delicate verses he moves like a mastodon with shaggy sides pushing through a herd of lightfoot antelopes”, wrote George Russell in the
Irish Statesman
. “No poet I have read for many years excites me to more speculation about his future, for I do not know of any new poet who has such a savage splendour of epithet or who can marry the wild word so fittingly to the wild thought.”

Commenting on the “energy and flamboyance” of
The Flaming Terrapin
, the poet David Wright remarked that “its verve and extravagance burst like a bomb in the middle of the faded prettiness of the ‘Georgian’ poetry then in vogue”. Campbell’s “flamboyant imagery, drawn from his memories . . . of his native Africa, exploded with an almost surrealist proliferation of exoticism.”

Almost overnight, Roy Campbell, still only twenty-two years old, was rocketed into the ranks of the
illustrissimi
of English letters, his work being discussed in the same breath, and with the same reverence, as that of T. S. Eliot. The comparison between Campbell and Eliot, whose hugely influential
The Waste Land
had been published eighteen months prior to the appearance of
The Flaming Terrapin
, is singularly appropriate. Both poets, and both poems, were displaying an embryonic rebellion against the prevailing cynicism, born out of postwar angst, which afflicted the younger generation in the years following the carnage of the First World War. Eventually both poets would reject the superficiality and shifting sands of modern cynicism for the sure foundation of traditional Christianity.