Tea at Trianon: Wyndham Lewis and the Bohemian Lie

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, March 6, 2023

Wyndham Lewis and the Bohemian Lie

From Compact:

Then there is the political economy of bohemia. According to its romantic mythology, living the bohemian existence is, somehow, a respite from the alienation that otherwise characterizes free-market societies. To be in bohemia, in this telling (which persists to this day), is to be free of the grind. The wage. The boss. Lewis knew this to be untrue. He knew that there was no escape from modernity. In The Art of Being Ruled, he archly reminded so-called bohemian artists that they were living off the patronage of the industrialist class, and therefore were in no meaningful way outside the larger social processes around them. Bourgeois art, he said, conforms to the tastes of those shaped by the pressure of capital on the individual psyche. Lewis understood earlier than most that liberal democracy rules and controls through the media and mass hypnosis, prefiguring McLuhan’s insights. In other words, Lewis discerned that modernity was all “one thing”: capital, labor, war, and even bohemia were all arms of the same body.
Yet despite his noted contempt for liberal democracy and its subtle tactics of repression, Lewis was no revolutionary. He called revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and the revolutionary mind “the dullest thing on Earth.” It shouldn’t be too surprising, then, that Lewis was seduced by the early ideological formations of fascism and, indeed, wrote an early text on Hitler and Nazism in 1931, covering both more or less favorably. The Nazis seemed to Lewis to address the totalities of contradictions of liberal democracy with a grounded realism that was far more interesting than what he viewed as the moral vanity of the German Communist Party.
Lewis even believed Hitler to be a “man of peace” and thought his brand of nationalism to be an improvement in terms of its scope, legibility, and sophistication over other nationalisms, such as the French monarchist variety, which Lewis had denounced as blindly conservative and “erratically ineffective” in his text on Hitler. He entirely changed his tune later, however, when he witnessed firsthand the extent of the Nazis’ venomous anti-Semitism, after which he denounced the Nazi Party. (Read more.)